Editor's Introduction

Abstract

In the past, achievement in no other area of Soviet education has attracted as much attention, or prompted as great a response in the United States, as Soviet success in mathematics education. The Soviet capability to launch the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 and the scientific and technological advances of the Soviet Union in the international arms race during the Cold War were largely credited to the mathematics and physics training of highly skilled Soviet manpower, (1) During the late 1950s and early 1960s, American science and mathematics teaching was overhauled and updated as part of our international competition with the USSR, under the aegis of the National Science Foundation and other agencies. Paradoxically, once the American education system embarked upon a course of improving the content of its school mathematics teaching, the Soviet education system underwent a major curriculum reform at all levels of primary and secondary schooling, a reform that, for a time, seemed fated to undo the achievement of apparent superiority in school mathematics teaching.