Meaningful Mathematics — an Enduring Educational Objective in the Digital Age
If a nation hopes to compete in the global economy by cultivating a techno-scientifically capable workforce, what fundamental principles and methods should guide its educational stakeholders? Specifically, as Generative AI is rapidly supplanting our civilization’s engineering and creative experts, what might we wish for our youth to know so as to remain relevant? What should they learn, and how should they learn it? Could we imagine a world in which citizens do not — need not — understand the very meaning of the arithmetic operation addition, as in “3+2=5”?
Building on the premise that digital machines should and will extend rather than eliminate human minds, and that, therefore, humans should develop deep understandings of mathematical concepts, I invite the audience on an interactive journey to experience and overcome tensions between, on the one hand, our evolutionary capacity to perform simple perceptual judgments, and, on the other hand, the cultural-historical forms our ancestors have devised to augment those innate intuitions. Using the infamously counterintuitive domain of basic probability, I will engage you in a simple exercise demonstrating the essential questions of constructivist pedagogy and, hopefully, some useful answers to those questions. Ultimately, I will be advocating for a dialogic education that fosters students’ meaningful appropriation of mathematical procedures.
The presentation will explain the motivation, rationale, development, and evaluation of an experimental activity designed for students to appreciate quantitative analysis as both resonating with and expanding their epistemic evolutionary endowment.
