Australian School Mathematics and “Colonial Echo” Influences, 1901–1975

Abstract

Australia’s physical isolation from Europe and North America during the second half of the twentieth century meant that the main “New Mathematics” messages which emerged from the Royaumont Seminar of 1959 were slow to reach its shores. Nevertheless, in the 1950s and 1960s, primary school teachers in Australian schools were challenged to make greater use of structured aids such as Cuisenaire rods and Multibase arithmetic blocks, and the leaders of that movement were two European reformers—Caleb Gattegno and Zoltán Dienes—who both established groups of followers in some of the Australian states. At that same time, the ideas of Jean Piaget also became better known. But a lack of national organization and participation in international forums meant that any changes tended to be local, and a long-established “colonial echo” of British traditions continued to hold sway. The chapter closes with an outline of the work of the School Mathematics Research Foundation (SMRF) in Victoria, which, in keeping with the Royaumont themes, emphasized the importance of the language of sets, of structure, and of functions in upper-secondary school mathematics. Another change was the move away from the canonical school mathematics curriculum, with its separate “subjects” of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus, toward more unified intended and implemented curricula.