There's a piece in today's
Times about
the Math Wars.
The battle over math education is often conceived as a referendum on progressive ideals, with those on the reform side as the clear winners. ... The staunchest supporters of reform math are math teachers and faculty at schools of education. While some of these individuals maintain that the standard algorithms are simply too hard for many students, most take the following, more plausible tack. They insist that the point of math classes should be to get children to reason independently, and in their own styles, about numbers and numerical concepts. The standard algorithms should be avoided because, reformists claim, mastering them is a merely mechanical exercise that threatens individual growth. The idea is that competence with algorithms can be substituted for by the use of calculators, and reformists often call for training students in the use of calculators as early as first or second grade.
It isn't clear to me how learning an addition method that works every time threatens growth, nor how using a calculator fosters growth.
