(2011-05-23) Kill Math

Kill Math is Bret Victor's umbrella project for techniques that enable people to model and solve meaningful problems of quantity using concrete representations and intuition-guided exploration. In the long term, I hope to develop a widely-usable, insight-generating alternative to symbolic math... This project is not about how to "teach math" more effectively. That would presuppose that anything in the math curriculum is worth learning. The issue of education (Educating Kids) is somewhat tangential to this project, but here's a tangential rant on that subject:

I recently watched "WaitingForSuperman", a documentary about the failure of public schools. It was a terrible movie, at least for me, because it took the content of education (the Curriculum) for granted, and focused only on the mechanism of education (the schools and teaching). It blindly assumed that learning twelve years of math (as determined by scoring well on a set of tests) equates to "success". It never questioned whether the "math" itself is actually beneficial in any way -- it only matters that the kids do the math. (There was even a cartoon scene of a teacher pouring a can of numbers into a student's head -- as if that represents Learning!)

(And I believe a subject can be "beneficial" without necessarily being directly usable or even relevant -- emotional inspiration, intellectual exercise, inspiring intellectual connections, and simple curiosity are all acceptable reasons to learn something. But school math is useless, kills inspiration and curiosity, is mind-numbingly tedious, makes no connections to anything, and is forgotten immediately after the test. It's all negative.)

(Of course, that's no different than other mandated subjects. School science is a mockery of real science; it's more faith-based than scientific, involves no actual thinking or exploring, etc.) (Math And Science, Simulation)

Nov'2011: John Bennett thinks we should stop teaching Math, and instead use games and puzzles as Thinking Tools.