On Reforming the School Mathematics Course

Abstract

1. In our day, when teachers and scholars of various countries are concerned with the reform of the school mathematics course, it is appropriate to recall the movement for reform which was led by F. Klein at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the positions maintained by Klein's movement retain their significance up to the present day. We refer to the wish to remove the partitions between the individual mathematical disciplines and to construct a single mathematics course, to infuse it with new content, having selected function and transformation as the most important concepts; the desire to include elements of analytic geometry and mathematical analysis as outstanding research instruments which were created as early as the 17th century and, for two and a half centuries, have continued to remain outside the boundaries of the school, and to show the applications of mathematics to physics. This movement was not without results: it led to an actual revision of school curriculums, syllabuses, textbooks...