Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 34, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 December 1901 — An Objectionable Arithmetic. [ARTICLE]

An Objectionable Arithmetic.

The county school superintendent of Marion county has started a movemement against the arithmetic now in compulsory use in all public schools of this state. He says the arithmetic is altogether too bard, and that its “problems” are many of them more properly called puzzles, and that, to make matters still worse, a large proportion of the answers given are wrong. Others are following in the lead of the Marion superintendent and letters are pouring in to the Indianapolis papers, condemning the book. So far no one has felt inoved to def end it. These complaints are well fodfcded for the book is altogether too difficult and complicated, and as at present printed many answers are erronious. If this anti-arithmetic crusade could be kept up until not only the faults of this particular book are remedied, but until educators and the people in generally learn that vastly too much time and study is given to arthmetic in our public schools, it will be a great and good work. A fair working knowledge of the rudiments of arithmetic is a good thing to have around, but further than that, arithmetic, instead of being the most valuable from a practical point of view, is really the most valueless of studies; and yet most scholars do more hard study on arithmetic than on all their other common branches, combined. Whereas a good working knowledge of spelling, writing, and “English as she is spoke,” or ought to be, would be useful a thousand times, where a knowledge of partial payments, proportion, equated time and the extraction of cube root, would be used once, Five times less arithmetic and five times more spelling should be the beginning of wisdom, in this matter, and after that the time now wasted on arithmetic could be given to natural sciences, languages, and better still, where practicable, to manual training.