Abstract
The decision in the early 1670s to create a specialist mathematics/navigation training program within a school whose buildings had been badly damaged by the Great Fire of London was both creative and brave. It was creative because it recognized that Christ’s Hospital could provide a steady source of boys for the kind of advanced training needed by apprentices in the Royal Navy or in the merchant marine. It was brave because such a scheme had never previously been tried anywhere in the world. This chapter tells of the teething troubles that Samuel Pepys, Jonas Moore, and others, experienced in developing the RMS curriculum and its associated teaching and learning program. It is argued that the program designed by Pepys and Moore was naïve in that the level of mathematics which it required of students was too high for 12- to 16-year-old boys who had virtually no formal education beyond elementary reading, writing, and cyphering.
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Ellerton, N.F., Clements, M.A.(. (2017). Years of Struggle for RMS 1673–1708. 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_4
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