Maths is history
Every language has disruptors that make you think.
It seems a great oversight to me, that the history of maths is rarely taught in schools.
For one thing, learning the history of maths would help to humanise the subject, to show it's more than just calculations.
The history of maths bridges philosophy and religion, that the divinity of numbers helped shape thought and belief, and to divide them.
There have always been giants of Maths, sitting on the shoulders of those before them, long before Newton popularised it.
In 2002, Stephen Hawking wrote a book about these giants, not just the famous mathematicians, but the observationists like Tyco Brahe.
Without Brahe's meticulous astronomical data written over decades, the likes of Kepler would have had little data to make his calculations and discoveries.
Without Kepler, his laws or planetary motions would have been unavailable to Newton for his laws of gravitation.
There's dozens, perhaps hundreds of these relationships that bond maths and science, experiment to theory.
The laws and proofs of nature, that predate the scientific method itself, have rested upon data and its collection.
Schools provide the environment to incubate and foster the interest of data and its gathering within curious minds.
Maths provides the tool sets to make sense of or to gain insight into other topics, from History to Physical Education.
It has been a stable subject in schools since they were inaugerated, with a unique characteristic.
Maths requires nothing but itself, data to function and for modern applications: computation.
For practical applications, it could be disbanded as a subject and its teaching distributed across the Sciences and Arts.
This would truly see Maths in action.
From historical analysis, to calculus in sports measuring velocities and throwing angles, maths can serve all other subjects.
Maths teachers would be transformed into consultants, guiding the application of Maths in other subjects.
Children would learn maths through practical use rather than for its own sake.
Such a transformation would bring computation into all subjects too.
From the creative side of creating graphics and project websites, to analysing data gathered by students.
This is teaching made for the twenty-first century, for work and for the curious minds of children.