Nearly 40 years ago, in the wake of Sputnik's launch, New Math was supposed to save America-perhaps by implanting creative concepts into the minds of future rocket scientists and nuclear engineers. Giving short shrift to plain vanilla arithmetic, the National Science Foundation declared back then that New Math was the best way to bolster the mathematical ability of American youth, thereby leaving Soviet science in the dust. As New Math curricula spread across the country, elementary students became fluent in the abstract vocabulary of concepts like set theory, which uses representative collections of objects to explain how numerical families overlapped or combined. Yet as the years passed, test scores made it clear that students deft at creating Venn diagrams had trouble with simple addition and multiplication, never mind long division. By 1965 University of Illinois mathematician Max Beberman, who at one time promoted New Math, reportedly said, "We're in danger of raising a generation of kids who can't do computational arithmetic."
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