Commentary: The Seventies

In the interest of full disclosure, we should begin by declaring that—as children of the 1980s and the 1990s, respectively—we are in no way associated with, endorsed, or sponsored by the 1970s. Our perspective is certainly limited by this fact, in that we are not able to rely on firsthand experience to compare the teaching climate of the 1970s with that of the present; the benefit, perhaps, is that we are not bound by an instinctive nostalgia or sentimentality for the “good old times gone by.” What we are familiar with are the status of mathematics education in Saskatchewan today, and in our reading of this selection of SMTS journal articles, we were drawn to make certain comparisons between the present and the past.