"Whatever Happened to New Math?" Jeffrey W. Miller, in American Heritage (Dec. 1990), 60 5th Ave., New York, N.Y.
In the mid-1950s a radical new way of teaching math to America's reluctant stu- dents was born, and was soon hailed as the greatest advance since Pythagoras's the- ory. A little more than three decades later, however, the term "new math" is virtually a profanity.
New math was born after World War I1 as a modest attempt to improve math edu- cation. Math classes...