As Americans cheered the latest shuttle flight liftoff on July 23rd with its extraordinary scientific payload, few knew how much mathematics and physics knowledge was involved to achieve this latest mastery of outer space. Few know that, in 1997, the latest year for which statistics are available, only 3,826 bachelor's degrees in physics were awarded, the lowest figure in forty years. Fully half the students entering graduate student classes in 1998 were foreign born. Today, however, math classes simply ignore math and talk about something else.
Any real problem solving is performed on a calculator.
Those who promote the new teaching method believe memorization is bad. Students, they say, learn to multiply over several years by 'thinking about math' and therefore retain it longer. If that were true we could all build bridges by simply thinking about it or fly airplanes by thinking about it or write novels by just thinking about it. The very notion is absurd because all skills require a knowledge of the fundamentals and, at the core of all scientific and even artistic endeavors, is the education that children should receive beginning at the elementary schools level. In the end, the acquisition of fundamental math skills is lost in an unstructured hodge-podge of projects from which a child emerges with no specific knowledge of mathematics.