Math education in the United States has serious problems, well known and progressing since the 1950s. Math disfunctionality, including innumeracy, math anxiety, and the math avoidance reflex, have become a national disgrace. The resulting rigid standards and tests have only made things worse, and this downward spiral is now spreading to Europe and Asia as well. In this essay we propose a program in which math problems may be avoided by adherence to an historical approach (following a chronological order based on world cultural history), the use of multiple modes (especially, multimedia and computation), and a return to Euclid (geometry before algebra)….

Our proposed program is based on ideas of Rupert Sheldrake, William Irwin Thompson, Court- ney Sale Ross, and myself. As mathematics is the universal language of space-time patterns, and the common modeling strategy of all academic disciplines, math skills give us enormous advantage in our conceptual integration of historical data, and in our understanding of the gigantic complex system in which we live. For this reason, math skills and the concepts of chaos theory have a special emphasis throughout our program. The mathematics element of our curriculum proposal is based on several assumptions. First and foremost is the conviction that we are now in a major social transformation, or bifurcation , which we may understand best in the context of earlier shifts in world cultural history. The system of cultural bifurcations we use has evolved from the scheme presented by William Irwin Thompson in Pacific Shift in 1986, and the one I presented in Chaos, Gaia, Eros , in 1994. Second in importance to me is the Sheldrake principle, which is basic to my whole historical approach to the curriculum. Third comes my theory of math anxiety, which provides the strongest motivation for the historical approach to mathematics. Finally, we present our view of Euclid’s geometry, and justify our faith in it as an approach to math education for the future. Besides all its traditional virtues, we now see it as an essential prerequisite for chaos theory…

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