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Concept
Mathematics education
Summary
In contemporary education, mathematics education—known in Europe as the didactics or pedagogy of mathematics—is the practice of teaching, learning, and carrying out scholarly research into the transfer of mathematical knowledge.
Although research into mathematics education is primarily concerned with the tools, methods, and approaches that facilitate practice or the study of practice, it also covers an extensive field of study encompassing a variety of different concepts, theories and methods. National and international organisations regularly hold conferences and publish literature in order to improve mathematics education.
Elementary mathematics were a core part of education in many ancient civilisations, including ancient Egypt, ancient Babylonia, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and Vedic India. In most cases, formal education was only available to male children with sufficiently high status, wealth, or caste. The oldest known mathematics textbook is the Rhind papyrus, dated from circa 1650 BCE.
Historians of Mesopotamia have confirmed that use of the Pythagorean rule dates back to the Old Babylonian Empire (20th–16th centuries BC) and that it was being taught in scribal schools over one thousand years before the birth of Pythagoras.
In Plato's division of the liberal arts into the trivium and the quadrivium, the quadrivium included the mathematical fields of arithmetic and geometry. This structure was continued in the structure of classical education that was developed in medieval Europe. The teaching of geometry was almost universally based on Euclid's Elements. Apprentices to trades such as masons, merchants, and moneylenders could expect to learn such practical mathematics as was relevant to their profession.
In the Middle Ages, the academic status of mathematics declined, because it was strongly associated with trade and commerce, and considered somewhat un-Christian. Although it continued to be taught in European universities, it was seen as subservient to the study of natural, metaphysical, and moral philosophy.
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