Teaching Mathematics in Tomorrow’s Society: A Case for an Oncoming Counter Paradigm

Abstract

The historical analysis of mathematics teaching at secondary level shows the succession in time of different school paradigms. The present paper describes and tries to analyse a new didactic paradigm, still at an early age, the paradigm “of questioning the world”, which relies heavily on four interrelated concepts, that of inquiry and of being “Herbartian”, “procognitive”, and “exoteric”. It is the author’s ambition to show, however succinctly, how the present crisis in mathematics education could hopefully be solved along these lines, which preclude recurring to strategies seeking only to patch up the old, still dominant paradigm “of visiting works”.