Chapter 8B: A New Learning In Math:

There is a new learning in math today. It isn’t a fad, and it won’t go away. Solidly anchored in the demands of the global information economy, this new learning is designed to make math reflective of the information technologies themselves.

For the US work force of the 21st Century, the choices will be high skill or low wage. As our nation awakens to the seriousness of this future, anxious parents and guardians are beginning to insist that this choice must be high skills for their children.

We are fortunate that the renewed emphasis on skills comes together with recent discoveries about learning. We now know every child can learn, and in particular, every child can learn math. We also recognize that gaining knowledge is a process more related to building a house than to pouring concrete. New knowledge is attached to, and integrated with, what is already there. Learning is not simply a matter of filling empty heads with facts and requiring students to instantly recall them.