CHAPTER 17 WRITING + MATH = OPPORTUNITY

摘要

One of the attractions of a symposium like Mathematics and its Connections to the Arts and Sciences (MACAS3) is that its collaborative spirit works in opposition to a long-standing educational problem: the problem of disciplinary isolation. Educators have long worried that dividing knowledge up into separate disciplinary units causes students to miss seeing the larger learning picture. As early as 1916 the American educational philosopher John Dewey criticized schooling that was structured around individualized disciplinary units: The counterpart of the isolation of mind from activities dealing with objects to accomplish ends is isolation of the subject matter to be learned. In the traditional schemes of education, subject matter means so much'material to be studied. Various branches of study represent so many independent branches, each having its principles of arrangement complete within itself. History is one such group of facts; algebra another; geography another, and. so on till we have run through the entire curriculum. Having a ready-made existence on their own account, their relation to mind is exhausted in what they furnish it to acquire. This idea corresponds to the conventional practice in which the program of school work, for the day, month, and successive years, consists of "studies" all marked off from one another, and each supposed to be complete by itself--or educational purposes at least. (pp. 157-158)