The Economics Of Education

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4 A Brief Sampling Of Some Of The Economies Of Education

visually, but may escape altogether when presented through words — but it also generates: 1

comprehension of what is supposed to be examined, and

2 several possible expansions of the visible contents which make explicit a hidden content. Thus, we produce mathematicians and not only students of mathematics. Other chapters of elementary mathematics such as trigonometry and the calculus, can be made into sources of joy and into mental instruments kept in reserve by everyone who meets them as expressions of human insights into inner dynamics rather than as part of a professional training needed by future mathematicians and users of special mathematics. In the form we gave them, they also require a small fraction of the time used today in conjunction with the various presentations now on the market — including their CAI computer format. As everybody learns to find mathematics in one’s mind — in the way music or art is found — one discovers that there is no obligation to develop that aptitude and use it professionally. *** Many people who cannot be moved by the economies of time and frustration in the study of mathematics sketched above, may be touched by either the new access to literacy we have been offering for a quarter century and which has been extended to the deaf and to the blind, or by the new approach to languages other than the mother tongue which we have been offering for almost thirty years and is now available for over a score of languages. ***

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