Glasgow, 1901. We are at the British Association for the Advancement of Science conference. One session is devoted to mathematics education. Many distinguished teachers are there, along with a few women, including Charlotte Angas Scott (see the article "Bryn Mawr: a revolution in America"), a certain Mrs Smith, and Mary Everest Boole (1832–1916). The question of mathematics education for girls comes up.
Thanks to the tenacity of women such as Charlotte Angas Scott, some English universities were finally beginning, albeit tentatively, to open their doors to women. Mrs Smith noted that the prevailing assumption was that girls would become neither engineers nor mathematicians, and wondered whether they should therefore receive a mathematics education designed specifically for them. The three women mentioned above quickly dismissed the idea. Their discussions and proposals concerning teaching methods and content implicitly embraced both girls and boys.
Charlotte pointed out that she could offer only limited thoughts on pre-university mathematics education, since she had lived in the United States for sixteen years and taught at university level. Her only experience was what she had encountered at a girls' boarding school thirty years earlier. Nevertheless, she quoted Descartes—in French, a language she spoke perfectly—on "the analysis of the ancients and the algebra of the moderns".
Descartes had indeed written: "The former is always so tied to the consideration of figures that it cannot exercise the understanding without greatly taxing the imagination; while the latter has become so bound by certain rules and symbols that it has been turned into a confused and obscure art that hampers the mind, rather than a science that cultivates it."
Here she echoed everything Mary Everest Boole had said: "The great controversy stirred up by questions of detail concerning the best methods of teaching and the best books to use prevents us from seeing the real issue, namely: should our children learn science as the classics were once learned, with the permission of a privileged caste of men and books who monopolize it and know everything about it? Or should they learn it because they are the children of Nature, heirs to her kingdom and at home in her house, and therefore entitled to use her tools and toys, her methods and forces, subject only to the restrictions she herself has imposed on them? Let us settle this question first, and the details of which books to use and how to teach one thing or another will fall into place of their own accord." Note that French uses the masculine pronoun "ils" for children, whereas English uses they, which much more clearly includes both boys and girls.
