Old-school vs new maths

The silence over the decades-long fall in our school education results from near the top of the OECD to near the bottom is deafening. This is despite the publication of clear statistics on students’ poor results, as in the recent ex-president of the NZ Principals’ Federation, Perry Rush’s opinion (NZ Herald, October 27). I’d have thought good schooling is all the more important in this more sophisticated and technically advanced world, but it seems that the opposite is acceptable. Silly me, maths and statistics are “old school”, for decades now we’ve had the “new maths” that Rush exposed the weaknesses of. And in sciences and languages they’ve switched to self-directed learning (Google).