Mathematics and pedagogy: Professional mathematicians and American educational reform, 1893-1923.

摘要

This dissertation examines how American college and university mathematicians involved themselves with pedagogical questions and educational reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a period during which educational practices and institutions which had prevailed through much of the nineteenth century were challenged both ideologically and demographically: new subjects, notably the natural sciences, were pressing for parity with the classical curriculum of Greek, Latin, and mathematics; the justification of education on the basis of mental discipline was being contested; the proper relationship between the secondary schools and the colleges was being debated; and the student population was increasing markedly, especially in the secondary schools. Coincident with such developments there was emerging in the United States a national community devoted to the promotion of mathematical research, a community dominated by pure mathematicians. The dissertation investigates how the mathematicians responded to the ongoing educational ferment.;The nineteenth-century period is analyzed through the careers and views of educators associated with the Committee of Ten Report of 1893, the first major national study of secondary school curricula in the United States. The pedagogical proposals of mathematical astronomer Simon Newcomb (1835-1909), chairman of the mathematics sub-committee, are given special attention. The central figure in the early twentieth-century period is E. H. Moore (1862-1932) of the University of Chicago. Moore, an intellectual and organizational leader in the emerging community of pure mathematicians, advocated a pedagogical program for both secondary schools and colleges which would orient mathematics toward applications in science and engineering. In part this was a natural extension of the position of Newcomb, but Moore displayed greater awareness of the vulnerability of mathematics to jurisdictional challenges from outside the profession.;Appealing to sociological theories of professionalization, the dissertation explores how vigorous efforts by Moore and other mathematicians nevertheless failed to reorient mathematics education. His program was at odds both with the desire of many mathematicians to cultivate the abstract core of their subject, unconstrained by problems of pedagogy, and with the increasing demands that the secondary schools be organized primarily for purposes of "social efficiency.".