Reddit reviews A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form

Never. Please don't ever do that. ALWAYS strive for the "why". That desire to understand is the mathematics, not the algorithms that KA and textbooks would have you memorize and repeat.

EDIT: You should seriously consider reading this. http://www.amazon.com/Mathematicians-Lament-School-Fascinating-Imaginative/dp/1934137170

• “A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form,” by Paul Lockhart.
  
• “The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education,” by Grace Llewellyn.
  
• “The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition,” by Don Norman.
  
• “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder,” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
  
• “The Language Construction Kit,” by Mark Rosenfelder.

There is a myth about math that it is the way it is because of "discoveries" in mathematics. The truth is something quite different: we decided on the properties of math.

There are other systems of maths, ones in which 1+1 is equal to 0, and others beyond that.

Check out A Mathematician's Lament for a quick overview, Lockheart goes on for a short time about a formal system of mathematics in which 1+1=0 (book can be read in two hours). Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty is a much deeper take on the status of mathematics, Kline goes on in significant detail about how mathematics went from a system of eternal truths to a system of complete uncertainty (both the philosophy and proofs that brought us to such a state).

Your focus on detention is arbitrary. It's like saying it's unfair that hostages don't have access to pizza. Maybe, but the whole state of being-a-hostage is unfair. Instead of obsessing about their lack of pepperoni and mushrooms, why not, instead, focus on the actual problem?

• We force children to go to school.
  
• We force children to study specific subjects at school.
  
• We force children to do homework after school.
  
• We stigmatize them if they fail at school.
  
• We use school grades as one metric of mental health.
  
• In most schools, we force children to be subject to archaic. pedagogical methods--once that have been proven to be ineffective.
  
• And, yes, we force children who have (in my view) naturally bucked against this system, to stay in school longer than kids who accept it.
  
• In most schools, children learn very little, especially given the amount of time the spend there.
  
• In many cases (e.g. when forced to read Shakespeare), they often develop a lifelong hatred of the subject.
  
• Many children spend years in school being bullied, mocked, and ostracized.
  
• Throughout this time, they're repeatedly told all this is "good for them," and, in the end, like serial abusers, they inflict in on their own kids, telling them it's good for them.
  
  All of this stuff has been studied for decades. We know that most schools are run horribly, according to unsound educational principals. But that never changes.
  
  When psychologists or neuroscientists discover something about learning or education, it takes years or decades to affect classroom practices, if it ever does.
  
  Schools aren't generally affected by Science. Instead, they are buffeted by politics and held fast by tradition.
  
  See
  
  
• Wounded By School
  
  
• Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes
  
  
• The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing
  
  
• video: The 3 Most Basic Needs of Children & Why Schools Fail
  
  
• Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood
  
  
• [A Mathematician's Lament (PDF)] (https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf); longer book version: A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
  
  
• Ken Robinson's TED talk: Do Schools kill creativity?
  
  
• How Children Fail
  
  
• Unschooling
  
  
• Why do we get frustrated when learning something? (written by me)
  
  I am skeptical that I will CYV, even though I believe that this is the best argument against it--not your view that detention is wrong, but that it's not even worth talking about. Sure, detention is a bad thing--but not the worst thing--about a horrible, corrupt, abusive system.
  
  I'm skeptical, because the system is so deeply entrenched in our culture. And the most people can do is argue about small tweaks: whether we should use this textbook or that, the length of Summer break, the size of classrooms, etc.
  
  The debate about Creationism vs Evolution in schools is a good example. If the Evolution folks (or the Creationist folks) win, they will pat themselves on the back and walk away happy, never glancing back and noticing that the same shoddy educational methods are being used now as before--with just one correction.
  
  Yes, Dominoes is bad pizza. It won't suddenly become good pizza if you put it in a less-ugly box. I agree that the box is ugly, but why focus on it? It's not the core problem.

I used to hate math too. Then I had a teacher that told me math class sucked because it was taught terribly, and real math was actually interesting.

Here’s his free original essay, which he expanded into the book

Here’s his book. It’s a criticism of the American school system but it may be relevant to you.

Apropos of Lockhart (and this year he published an expanded version of that essay), I've just finished reading The Art of Mathematics, by Jerry P. King, in which he tries very specifically to bring to the humanities/layperson the sense of beauty that pure mathematicians are referring to. It's a bit slow going, but even if you just found it in the library and read the first chapter or two, you'd have a closer sense of the issue. Also, his latest, Mathematics in 10 Lessons: The Grand Tour, is his attempt to use specific foundational math to explain this beauty, step-by-step. Again, it was just published this year - I'd love to hear some redditor reviews of the book.

FYI the above linked essay was later turned into a book by Lockhart (don't compare the 25 page count of the essay with the 140 page count of the book – each page in the book contains much less text than a page in the essay).

If you really like Lockhart's article you can do what I did and buy the book version... I reread parts often, usually when I'm feeling extremely burnt out on teaching ;-)

Happy you liked it! The author actually developed this essay into a book. I haven't read that one but you might like it.