Abstract
The 1776 Declaration of Independence announced the dawn of a new day, for North America and, indeed, for the world. But did it herald new a new day for school mathematics? After describing how the term “school” was used in 1776 it is pointed out that at that time only a small proportion of North American adults had studied arithmetic beyond the four operations. The chapter examines the views of Thomas Jefferson on school education, in general, and on school mathematics, in particular. It is argued that it was within Thomas Jefferson’s genius that a key to transforming school mathematics in the United States of America would be found.
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Notes
- 1.
Expert examination of the hornbook shown in Figure 1.2 led to the conclusion that it is “very old” and was constructed from American white pine. The last owner of the hornbook said that it had previously been owned by a woman who, after serving as a missionary/teacher to indigenous Americans for many years, was given the hornbook as a parting gift. The hornbook could have been used by early missionaries in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. According to George Littlefield (1904), often Puritan missionaries, such as John Eliot (see Cogley, 1999), deliberately omitted the cross when constructing hornbooks, for they did not want to expose Native American children to “forms of idolatry.”
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Clements, M.A.(., Ellerton, N.F. (2015). 1776: Dawn of a New Day in School Mathematics in North America. In: Thomas Jefferson and his Decimals 1775–1810: Neglected Years in the History of U.S. School Mathematics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02505-6_1
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