Breaking away from Euclid for the teaching of geometry. A convergence of teaching practices at time of changes in the American school (1800-1840)
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2019
- ISIDORE Id: 10670/1.c24b47...
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Thomas Preveraud, « Breaking away from Euclid for the teaching of geometry. A convergence of teaching practices at time of changes in the American school (1800-1840) », Histoire de l’éducation, ID : 10670/1.c24b47...
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At the end of the 1820s, Massachusetts schoolteacher Timothy Walker published a geometry textbook whose presentation aimed at departing from the classical Euclidean teaching. The Greek book and its recent British versions had been in use in most of the American colleges since Independence, and the separation had modestly started in 1819 with the translation at Harvard of Legendre’s Éléments de géométrie. While teachers, authors and educators wondered whether Legendre hadn’t gone too far away from Euclid, Walker asked the opposite question: what if Legendre hadn’t been radical enough? In his textbook, the use and convergence of teaching practices from very different perspectives resonated with the changes of the American teaching in all the sectors of education that were beginning even then.
