Upvoted because it’s a good intro discussion to a problem that I am personally involved with (as a maths teacher). But my personal experience is that what makes a good maths curriculum is much more complicated than that. In particular I’m pretty certain now that different students have such wildly different needs that any attempt at (universal) standardisation is doomed to fail (of course some curriculum are still better than others...).
I think this is a key point. Even the best possible curriculum, if it has to work for all students at the same rate, is not going to work well. What I really want (both for my past-self as a student, and my present self as a teacher of university mathematics) is to be able to tailor the learning rate to individual students and individual topics (for student me, this would have meant ‘go very fast for geometry and rather slowly for combinatorics’). And while we’re at it, can we also customise the learning styles (some students like to read, some like to sit in class, some to work in groups, etc)?
This is technologically more feasible than it was a decade ago, but seems far from common.
Upvoted because it’s a good intro discussion to a problem that I am personally involved with (as a maths teacher). But my personal experience is that what makes a good maths curriculum is much more complicated than that. In particular I’m pretty certain now that different students have such wildly different needs that any attempt at (universal) standardisation is doomed to fail (of course some curriculum are still better than others...).
I think this is a key point. Even the best possible curriculum, if it has to work for all students at the same rate, is not going to work well. What I really want (both for my past-self as a student, and my present self as a teacher of university mathematics) is to be able to tailor the learning rate to individual students and individual topics (for student me, this would have meant ‘go very fast for geometry and rather slowly for combinatorics’). And while we’re at it, can we also customise the learning styles (some students like to read, some like to sit in class, some to work in groups, etc)?
This is technologically more feasible than it was a decade ago, but seems far from common.