29: Reflections On Where Mathematics Education Now Stands and On Where It May Be Going

The author gratefully acknowledges the helpful comments provided by James Fey, University of Maryland, and Douglas B. McLeod, San Diego State University.

One might hope, at this point, for a final chapter that would predict the future, but the fact is that prediction does not work. Who would have predicted the current importance of personal computers? Not the presidents of two of the largest computer manufacturers, who ruled against corporate efforts in this direction so that it was left to two young men, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, to develop the idea and to build the company that introduced the microcomputer. Who would have predicted high school geometry courses based on chaos and fractals? Yet three separate research and development teams have created three such courses (for one of these, see Goldenberg, 1989; the two other teams are directed by Wallace Feurzeig, at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and by Eugene Stanley, at Boston University). Who would have predicted our present unemployment situation: that the national unemployment rate of 5.3% would be “misleading” because “definitions of the work force excluded a growing number of Americans,” and that, by the summer of 1988, 45.3% of New York City residents over the age of 16 could not be counted as labor force participants because they were “either unemployed or unemployable” and were in fact lost to the system of counting (Phillips, 1990, p.20). Almost half of the people of New York City unemployed. Who predicted that?