[Maths-Education] Being outdated

[Peter Cave]

Surely the important question is, in what way are the data, arguments, etc
in the writing in question significant in relation to the current problem?
Data may, of course, be out of date.  But the study as a whole may well be
one that provides a theory or a way of understanding an issue that remains
useful well beyond its original year, month, week, day, hour, minute or
second of production.  (You would think that was common sense, wouldn't
you?)  It's nothing to do with maths, but I remember some time ago reading
Colin Lacey's study, Hightown Grammar, and being most impressed by the ideas
and the careful way data were collected and analysed.

In recent years I guess we have become much more sensitive to the historical
and socio-cultural situatedness of studies, so that we will probably want to
think with care about exactly how a study done, say, in certain schools in
Birmingham in 1970 (totally random choice there, BTW) may have significance
today.  When historical and social/economic/cultural/intellectual contexts
have changed, we have to be careful about how we apply the findings of a
study.

A few years ago I went to a day conference on 'How to get published in
anthropology', when a certain speaker said frankly that very little said by
academics was new, the trick was to make it sound new.  In fact, from a
sociological point of view, it is clear that in our present historical era
in which 'originality' is (over-) valued, scholars actually have a vested
interest in devaluing their predecessors and actively making sure they are
forgotten as quickly as possible.  This is a disgraceful state of affairs,
of course, which has nothing to do with the advancement of learning (an
out-of-date phrase by some old Jacobean fogey, hopefully soon to be
forgotten for good so that someone else can be credited with the phrase in
the future).

Peter Cave
M.A., M.Phil., D.Phil. (Oxon)
Assistant Professor
Department of Japanese Studies
The University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 2859-2879
Fax: (852) 2548-7399
petercav@hkucc.hku.hk