Professor Chrystal's “Algebra”

Abstract

“THERE are few things where the want of an enlightened scientific public strikes an expert more than the matter of scientific text-books,” “For our teaching of algebra, I am afraid, we can claim neither the sanction of antiquity nor the light of modern times. Whether we look at the elementary, or at what is called the higher teaching of this subject, the result is unsatisfactory. … In the higher teaching, which interests me most, I have to complain of the utter neglect of the all-important notion of algebraic form.” “The logic of the subject, which, both educationally and scientifically speaking, is the most important part of it, is wholly neglected. The whole training consists in example-grinding. What should have been merely the help to attain the end has become the end itself. The result is that algebra, as we teach it, is neither an art nor a science, but an ill-digested farrago of rules, whose object is the solution of examination problems.” “The problem for the writer of a text-book has come now, in fact, to be this—to write a book so neatly trimmed and compacted that no coach, on looking through it, can mark a single passage which the candidate for a minimum pass can safely omit…. When our system sets such mean ends before the teacher, and encourages such unworthy conceptions of education, is it to be wondered at that the cry arises that pupils degenerate beneath even the contemptible standards of our examinations…. The cure for all this evil is simply to give effect to a higher ideal of education in general, and of scientific education in particular. Science cannot live among the people, and scientific education cannot be more than a wordy rehearsal of dead text-books, unless we have living contact with the working minds of living men.”

Algebra: an Elementary Text-Book for the Higher Classes of Secondary Schools and for Colleges.

By G. Chrystal Part I. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1886.)