Why do most (maths) education reforms fail?

Trendy or not, they all lack substance

It’s no news that basically everywhere most students hate maths, and of course this usually makes them pretty bad at it. At the same time, most people seem to really want them to excel in maths. This of course leads to reforms over reforms in maths education. But, as anyone can notice, the situation above doesn’t really seem to change, at least positively.

We can conclude that most of these reforms fail. But why is that?

By looking myself, as a maths enthusiast, at some of these reforms, I have arrived at a very simple answer: most reforms do not go deep enough, preferring superficial makeovers over substantial changes in how maths it’s taught.

Let me explain this by an example. Most students complain about how maths is so boring. At the same time, they have to work through endless worksheets containing essentially the same exercise over and over, slightly modified each time. But when a reform tries to address this boredom problem, it comes up with some way of colouring, gamifying and digitalising such worksheets to make them “fun”, while keeping the mathematical content essentially the same. But this will at best make students think the maths class is fun, not that maths is fun, and most probably in reality will have no substantial effect. It’s like spraying your bathroom with perfume while your toilet is clogged instead of unclogging it!

The only way to make a real change is to try to find the best content and way of approaching said content that conveys to students what a mathematician actually means when he says that he had fun working on a problem, or that some mathematical idea is beautiful. And if one manages to do that, he could probably teach everything by writing with sticks on sand and it will make little difference...

Note. All this more-or-less applies to any other subject, I just choose maths because it’s the subject I understand best.