No longer are schools expected to serve as social and economic sorting machines. Instead, schools must become empowering machines. No longer simply perpetuators of the bell curve, where only some survive and even fewer truly thrive, schools and their mathematics programs must instill understanding and confidence in all. But none of these larger societal issues is as compelling as what we know about the sense of failure and the pain unnecessarily imposed on hundreds of thousands of students in the name of mastering these obsolete procedures. A few short years ago we could even justify the pain and frustration we witnessed in our classes as necessary parts of learning what were then important skills.
Today there are alternatives and there is no honest way to justify the psychic toll it takes.
We need to admit that drill and practice of computational algorithms devour an incredibly large proportion of instructional time, precluding any real chance for actually applying mathematics and developing the conceptual understanding that underlies mathematical literacy. It's formulating questions about change and taxes and it's figuring out how many could be bought. The core of mathematical power is explaining why you think six Big Macs is a reasonable estimate. It's interpreting the 6.2893082 on the calculator display, or it's presenting alternative approaches using repetitive addition or repetitive subtraction or trial and error with the multiplication key. We also know that the more we continue to focus on the bath water of the mathematics curriculum, the less chance we have for really saving the baby.