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Wrong. It was a reaction against the utterly predictable failure of a contentless approach to instruction which started and ended with the rhetoric necessary to convince pseudo-intellectuals that supporting it demonstrated political discernment and moral virtue.

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Can you please elaborate on what you mean by "contentless"? I just checked out the wiki page on New Math and it seemed to have covered (with the exception of inequalities) a few topics that usually get covered in the first couple of chapters of an intro to abstract algebra book.

I was actually coming back to delete the original comment as it wasn't very well thought through. I mean, sure, of course there was "content". There were chapter headers as so on and so forth. It would be better to criticise the absense of thought put into having a theory of instruction beyond "Experts do this, therefore if we teach this, we'll create experts"

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