Educational Standards
Local standards usually define the educational methods and content included in the elementary level of instruction. In the United States and Canada, controversial subjects include the amount of calculator usage compared to manual computation and the broader debate between traditional mathematics and reform mathematics.
In the United States, the 1989 NCTM standards led to curricula which de-emphasized or omitted much of what was considered to be elementary arithmetic in elementary school, and replaced it with emphasis on topics traditionally studied in college such as algebra, statistics and problem solving, and non-standard computation methods unfamiliar to most adults.
Read more about this topic: Elementary Arithmetic
Famous quotes containing the words educational and/or standards:
“An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to say, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity.”
—Maria Montessori (1870–1952)
“With his brows knit, his mind made up, his will resolved and resistless, he advances, crashing his way through the host of weak, half-formed, dilettante opinions, honest and dishonest ways of thinking, with their standards raised, sentimentalities and conjectures, and tramples them all into dust. See how he prevails; you don’t even hear the groans of the wounded and dying.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)