Abstract
This final chapter answers the six research questions which were stated towards the end of the first chapter. Those questions were:
1. Why was RMS established in 1673?
2. What factors need to be taken into account when evaluating Samuel Pepys’s work with respect to RMS?
3. Were Isaac Newton’s efforts to establish a suitable RMS curriculum successful?
4. To what extent is it true that most of the RMS masters during the first 125 years of RMS’s existence were unsuccessful?
5. What was the role of cyphering in RMS’s implemented curriculum?
6. Is it true that RMS became a prototype for “Mathematics for the People”?
While carrying out the research for this book we came to recognize that authors of several general histories of Christ’s Hospital tended to assess the effectiveness of RMS on the basis of whether they thought it assisted, or impeded, the work of the Grammar School within the school. A consequence of viewing the history of RMS from that vantage point was that William Wales was glorified as the most successful RMS master. In this book, however, the quality of Wales’s work within RMS has been scrutinized, and it has been argued that James Hodgson, and not Wales, was the most successful of the RMS masters. Clifford Jones shares our view that, although Wales was an effective RMS master, the quality of his work at Christ’s Hospital seems to have been exaggerated. We have viewed RMS from a history-of-school-mathematics perspective, and from that vantage point have argued that it was the RMS adventure which showed the world that a school mathematics curriculum embracing logarithms, algebra, trigonometry, and practical, navigation-related, problem solving, could be offered, usefully, to teenage children. Hence, we have claimed that Christ’s Hospital, largely through Samuel Pepys, Jonas Moore, Isaac Newton, and James Hodgson, redefined and extended the concept of “school mathematics.” The chapter closes with a discussion of limitations of the research, and how a consideration of those limitations draws attention to various questions which need to be the subject of further research.
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Ellerton, N.F., Clements, M.A.(. (2017). The Importance of the Royal Mathematical School in the History of School Mathematics. In: Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton, James Hodgson, and the Beginnings of Secondary School Mathematics. History of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46657-6_10
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