Why Johnny can't add

What Hacker News says

1. kletonDec 2024
   Common core was rammed through to prod without proper a/b testing or canarying. All the criticisms of the "New Math" of the 1960s are just as applicable to it today. See Morris Kline's «Why Johnny Can't Add» on archive.org.
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2. TrusteandoOct 2026
   Four forces: 1) Books like "Why Johnny Can't Read" (1955) and "Why Johnny Can't Add" (1973), 2) emotional intelligence, like in Goleman, 3) kids creating new social structures, a little further than Postman World Makers, 4) letting kids learn at different paces.

   I think the people in HN are like in such a school, they will to live in a world in which entry levels are not required but you need to learn the basic to understand where the complexity is, and at the same time, there is the need to exploit all the power that automation provides but without imagination other will, in the long term, take the lead.

   I don't know whether kids will have the possibility to adapt or if they will just live accepting whatever the dynamic of the AI imposes on them, but perhaps we have a small window to suggest some useful ideas for our schools, so how are we going to rethink schools?

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3. btillyApr 2023
   I'm a big fan of Singapore math. The countries that score top in the world on primary math education use it. In basically every research study that has been done, it works. 3/4 of my children were lucky enough to go to a school that taught it, and it worked well for them.

   Unfortunately the US approach has been to throw out every research study suggesting it might work, while failing to fund better studies. See https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/InterventionReports/wwc_sin.... Behind this is that fact that the educational establishment makes a ton of money off of rewriting textbooks and retraining teachers for each reform wave. The hasty changes are guaranteed to lead to disaster, which motivates the NEXT reform wave, which they then also profit on. My mother became a school teacher in the 1950s, and this cycle was ALREADY in progress back then. (Think Sputnik leads to New Math leads to Why Johnny Can't Add, etc.)

   Switching to already existing books for an approach that actually will work would be a disaster for the education establishment. And so we'll never do it. No matter how embarrassing our regular (but profitable for the education establishment) disasters are.

   I complain about this occasionally. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822577 for a more general complaint, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for a rant about the Common Core disaster specificially.

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4. rramadassFeb 2022
   Not Quite.

   Your are confusing the current status-quo which is a cumulative development and a standardization for ease of teaching, with the Original Discoverer's process of arriving at his results. They are very different.

   From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math : In his book, Why Johnny Can't Add: The Failure of the New Math, Morris Kline says that certain advocates of the new topics "ignored completely the fact that mathematics is a cumulative development and that it is practically impossible to learn the newer creations, if one does not know the older ones." Furthermore, noting the trend to abstraction in New Math, Kline says "abstraction is not the first stage, but the last stage, in a mathematical development."

   What is being taught today is merely a statement of results and algorithms to mindlessly apply them. Hence the failure of "Mathematical Education" (eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician%27s_Lament). By following the Original Discoverer's writings, even if it is outdated (in the light of later discoveries) you understand the What and the Why being explained Organically and Coherently by a single Mind towards one particular set of "Results". This is the crux of "Understanding". Once this is grasped, it becomes easier to follow later developments on the evolution of the same set of "Results" to current-day standards.

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5. btillyMar 2017
   I agree that homework is only a symptom, not the key problem.

   The key problem is that Common Core is an ambitious set of ideas that requires everything to be done differently than it had been before. While there are a lot of good ideas in there, there are going to be inevitable mistakes and a shaking out period while the challenges get figured out and people learn best practices for how to make it work. In the meantime our children are guinea pigs with widely differing experiences. My son's experience being on the bad side.

   However we have seen this picture before. Everything that I just said about Common Core could have been said 50 years ago about New Math. The result was Why Johnny Can't Add, and the "Back to Basics" movement. Want to bet on whether something like this happens again with Common Core?

   And so I predict that our educational system won't figure out how to do Common Core right. Instead we'll have another reform movement, which will likewise have good intentions, good rhetoric, and in the end will likewise fail. As has been happening to us in math since the launch of Sputnik convinced us that the US is behind and needs to catch up.

   If your awareness of reform efforts starts with Common Core, then there is a lot of history that you're missing. Every reform movement convinces people that it is working. And they will continue believing that it would have worked until long after it is dead.

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