As the articles in special issue 73 of Tangente (currently on newsstands) show, mathematical proficiency will be essential for a large proportion of the jobs available in the coming years. For all other jobs, another important aspect of mathematics education is equally indispensable: the ability to reason, even when advanced knowledge is not required. The place of mathematics in middle- and high-school education therefore needed to be reconsidered, with a twofold aim:
\- to improve most students’ feel for mathematics and their capacity for scientific reasoning, without requiring extensive knowledge;
\- to enable more and more young people to pursue scientific studies requiring more advanced mathematical knowledge, at the level expected in classes préparatoires (post-secondary preparatory classes), engineering schools or university programs.
The latest high-school reform therefore had an important role to play. Unfortunately, the outcome is pitiful and utterly divorced from reality, as disastrous decisions were made:
\- to allow a large proportion of students to drop mathematics as early as the penultimate year of high school;
\- to allow students who have chosen to pursue scientific studies to find themselves unable to take the mathematics specialization;
\- to discourage those who chose the “maths specialization” by creating a huge gap between the inadequate knowledge expected in earlier grades and the demands of the specialization curriculum, which all too quickly become unattainable.
