In February 1942, a college dean stood before the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and said, calmly, what most curriculum documents today are careful never to say outright. Harl Douglass, director of the College of Education at the University of Colorado, Boulder, proposed that American high schools split their mathematics curriculum in two. One track for the students headed toward “engineering or scientific pursuit” would include algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. Arithmetic, “mathematics of business,” and “mathematics of home and consumer” were offered in a lesser track for everyone else. He called this second track “essentially a pre-vocational course.” He called the whole proposal “Mathematics for All.”
Douglass doesn’t think he’s building a gate. He thinks he’s fixing one. His evidence: in 1910, three-quarters of high school students took a math class; by 1940, fewer than one in three did. More students were enrolling in high school than ever before, and the old curriculum, built when high school was for a small, college-bound minority, no longer fit the students actually showing up. His solution sounds, on its face, like access: stop forcing arithmetic-poor farm kids through algebra they’ll never use and build them something useful instead.
But notice what “useful” already assumes — and who was already writing from inside the track Douglass hadn’t yet bothered to name.
