We are a small group in Belgium thinking about our high school education system. Especially maths eductaion. As a 50 year old father I see the maths that my son (16) is getting at school is still the way It was thaught when I was his age. Why on earth this system is still in place? There is no school in Belgium with a decent maths level (dispite the PISA results). As Conrad Wolfram stated in one of his TED talks, teacher are mainly concerned about the calculation part of maths. I'm not a matematician and I even can see that it is completly wrong, why for god sake are we doing it then? So we are interested to take education to another level. I've been reading some books and an eye-opener for me was : "A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart". The great work by Jo Boaler : ''Mathematical Mindsets". These are people that can save us from the boring lessons our kids are thaught in school today. We would like to start a school of our own and we are seeking for advice, ideas. The way to fix this math education problem is not simple. I'm a software engineer and I was always thaught to break complex problems into manageable chuncks, to look for the simplest thing that can possibly work, etc. So I was thinking in the direction of a lean educational system, which to some extend could be something like sudbury valley school massachusetts. Maybe the children could help solving the problem? Nobody is asking their opinion, I find this very strange. I'm amazed how smart they are those kids today. A simple inquiry: 'What is your favourite class in school' ? I don't think a lot of kid will reply 'maths', do you? They love visual stuff, they love technology, they love to take initiative and to be creativ and what are they thaught in school? Exactly the opposite. They need to keep quite and study like monks in the middle ages, copying the work of the great without asking any questions. I thought that Clavius of Bamberg was dead? Okay enough, maybe I'm to politically incorrect.

If one looks at education planning generally speaking there is a lack of flexibility and a lack of planning for the future. One thing that CBM gives you is flexibility, so you could use it for economics one day and then use it for something else like blog writing the next day. To a large extent CBM incorporates planning for the future, as does anything that is truly flexible, but specifically one can point at communications with artificial intelligence (not just the potential future ones, but also the ones already in existence). It used to be that for STEM subjects, that if one had a good training in first year college courses in calculus, physics, chemistry then one could adapt throughout their career. Now that computing is a big part of the picture, this is no longer the case, and not surprisingly the education planners are struggling to keep up with the present, let alone plan for the future.

Pavlo, your suggestion of economics reminds me of Aristotle's argument for political science because all sciences rely on politics. From a pragmatic point of view, some children don't use money as much as adults do. I don't really advocate political science, but a nice mix of subjects.

UPDATE: We have two more confirmed speaker names to throw into the hat. These are:

Rachel Linney, Education Officer for the Irish National Council of Curriculum and Assessment. Expect big maths curriculum changes from Dublin soon enough!

Also on the speaker list is Kristian Smedlund of the Finnish National Board of Education. Computer-Based Maths has close links with Scandinavia, having run its pilot in Estonia and having also been adopted by the Fria Laroverken schools in Sweden.

(This post responds to a strategy for implementing CBM that RIchard posted earlier on the page)

That sounds like a good strategy. There would be three groups of students. Those who end up doing a STEM career would outnumber (by at least an order of magnitude) those who would benefit from a theoretical/abstract/philosophical approach. The third group are those not doing a STEM career (whose career path seems ignored by the traditional education). Presumably, the hope is at least, that that third group of students could actually continue doing math and science if they use modern tools (aka computers).

But education and school policies aren't set by the students (or there would be more vacation). Presumably the situation is different in different places, though some combination of government, parents, teacher's unions.

So concretely speaking, who needs to be convinced and what would need to happen?

It's true that there are probably a lot of school subjects that need fixing - I've yet to find a use for climbing up that rope in gym class!

Jokes aside, CBM is keeping its focus on math, although really that means a focus on STEM as a whole. I was discussing this with Conrad yesterday, in fact. The more 'relevant' or 'real-world' we try and make maths, the closer it gets to what we traditionally call 'engineering' or 'physics'. As that distinction blurs, maybe there is an argument that education systems should just ultimately have one subject called, for argument's sake, STEM. This would ideally make full use of computers, while at the same time bringing theoretical concepts closer to everyday, practical applications in a more integrated way through both its exercises and its assessment.

I'm really interested to see some of the things that come from this next CBM conference. Schools really do seem to be starting to embrace technology, so it's a great time to be revolutionizing other topics. I'd like to see more about how we can develop from Scratch to more advanced programming, it provides a great framework for students to code much more fluently. Having a large percentage of people that are taught programming principles from the start could really make a big difference in how technology advances.