Everyone agrees that mathematics education in America today is in a deplorable state. The question is what went wrong. Mathematics education experts have been heard to blame everyone from individual students, to their teachers, to our society as a whole. In fact, the blame rests squarely on those mathematics experts themselves, and on the book companies that employ them and the mathematics hierarchies in the school systems that have encouraged them.
For the last twenty years, these experts have worked unwittingly to bring matters to a point where only the brilliant can learn mathematics. They have tried to teach advanced concepts and a general overview before the student has learned the basics. Inadequate attention is given to such topics as per-cent word problems and fractional-part-of-a-number problems; scientific notation is almost totally ignored. In an important sense, these authors are experts neither in mathematics nor in education. They do not know which mathematics topics must be mastered at which level and have almost no understanding of the capabilities of the average student. Their books are visible proof that they do not know how children learn and assimilate abstractions.
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