“Indeed, we might summarize all these points by saying that schoolchildren have been deprived of the opportunity of actually doing mathematics in any sense even thinly related to the working activity of mathematicians. Thus, it is not surprising that children resist, that they seldom carry over their training informal manipulation into less formal situations, and that they so often slip back into loose and uncontrolled thinking when faced with problems such as “word problems” in algebra that do not have obvious mechanical solutions.”
Feurzeig, W., Papert, S., & Lawler, R. (1969). Programming-Languages as a Conceptual Framework for Teaching Mathematics. Final Report on the First Fifteen Months of the LOGO Project. Bolt, Berenek, and Newman, Inc.
Thanks to Tracy Rudzitis for her contribution of this passage.
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