Paul Lockhart, a Columbia math PhD, former Brown professor, and K-12 math teacher, writes in the influential essay A Mathematician’s Lament of a nightmare world where children are not allowed to listen to or play music until they have spent over a decade mastering music notation and theory, spending classes transposing sheet music into a different key. In art class, students study colors and applicators, but aren’t allowed to actually paint until college. Sound absurd? This is how math is taught–we require students to spend years doing rote memorization, and learning dry, disconnected “fundamentals” that we claim will pay off later, long after most of them quit the subject.
— ❐ Providing a Good Education in Deep Learning – fast.ai
- sounds a little polemic:
- problem-based learning exists, even in my 4th grade math education
- ...and renaissance painters did famously do nothing but mix paints for a couple of years (master the fundamentals)