Excerpt from The Teaching of Arithmetic
The teaching of arithmetic has, like the teaching of other things, improved during the last forty years. The improvement has been a steady growth due almost entirely to the teachers themselves. It is not the residuum of a series of fashionable innovations hastily adopted and quietly discarded, nor is it the kind of evolution which has left, in turn, our Handwork, Drawing, Language Teaching and Infant School Method in a state of chaos, waiting reverently for a pronouncement from some distinguished native or foreign dogmatist.
Briefly stated, the teacher of arithmetic to-day wishes his pupils to be able to do everything that he himself did at school and to do it equally well, omitting only those units, measures and processes that he has never found useful; he insists from the earliest stage that the problems his pupils solve should be such as actually occur from day to day in an ordinary man"s life, or better still, in the life of a boy or girl; and that with this in view, many exercises should be based on the current geography, or geometry, or handwork of his class.
Tables of weights and measures of merely historical interest are left embalmed in dictionaries and encyclopaedias, and are now history, not arithmetic; and in spite of the copious and capable treatment of the metric system encouraged in this book, I am bound to declare my feeling that there is something wrong in attempting for forty years (some of the older teachers will remember the early "charts") to teach children a foreign system of weights and measures which the adults of the country have never had any intention of adopting for general purposes.
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