9
THE LOST TOOLS of MATH BY ETHAN DEMME PRESIDENT AND CEO, DEMME LEARNING
W
hen it comes to classical education, mathematics is often the Cinderella sister: she lives in the home along with her sisters Literature, Language, and History, but she’s not really considered part of the family. There are at least two main reasons for math’s odd position in classical education. First, for us moderns it can be hard to think classically about math as our worldview is often decidedly different from the ancients. Moreover, most of us do not approach math education like Abraham Lincoln who worked his way through Euclid’s Elements as a self-taught unschooler.1 And even if we did approach math education in this way, we recognize that innovation in mathematics didn’t end with Euclid and the Greeks, and there is a need to combine study in Euclidean geometry with 1 Drew R. McCoy, “An “Old-Fashioned” Nationalism: Lincoln, Jefferson, and the Classical Tradition,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 23, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 55-67, http://hdl.handle.net/2027 /spo.2629860.0023.104.
study in other fields of mathematics including algebra and calculus. The second reason math doesn’t fit neatly within classical education is because the classical education movement, while being rightfully skeptical about twentieth-century math education, has not been critical enough about the lack of emphasis on mastery in the twentieth-century models. As will be explored in more depth in this article, a trend in one particular strain within modern American Christian classical education, inspired by Dorothy Sayers’ essay The Lost Tools of Learning, is to divide math into grade levels that are thought to correspond with both the classical trivium and child development theory. In this model, elementary kids are grouped in the grammar stage and drilled in math, middle schoolers are put in the logic stage and taught the abstract symbolism in which mathematics is expressed, and high schoolers are placed in the rhetoric stage and taught the conceptual “whys” of math. One problem with this approach is that it isn’t faithful to the classical trivium
VOLUME FOUR
