Greek Geometry In Education

What is the purpose of math? This is an age old question asked by the majority of high school students. Math teachers throughout the years have been exhausting themselves with how to get their students interested in math. One way to get their pupils enthusiastic for math could be as simple as giving them a purpose of doing the math by teaching them the history of it. The Greek school system had this idea since the nineteenth century giving the American school system an idea that could possible work. The basis of Greek math education, in comparison with early American math education, shows the importance of incorporating the history of math and an emphasis on geometry in the Greek curriculum.
The Greek method of instruction differs from …show more content…
The 1830’s was the time period in which geometry became to have a large impact on high school math education (Gagatsis, Demetriadou 105). The Greek’s curriculum followed the Bavarian curriculum which focused 53.2% on literature and 19.2% on mathematics (Gagatsis, Demetriadou 105). The Greek syllabus in 1857 for mathematics included plane geometry (angles, lines, circles) and space geometry (solids, area, volume) (Gagatsis, Demetriadou 105). They also included analytic geometry which is “the study of conic sections (Panagiotou 80).” These pupils comprehended terms like “ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola (Panagiotou 80).” Those terms Greek professors expected their students to understand in order for them to grasp the rest of the topics they were going to discuss throughout the rest of their high school career. These students are taught classical (Euclidean) geometry for two years (from when they are fifteen to seventeen years old) and then they are taught vector geometry their final year of lyceum (when they are eighteen years old). Lyceum is “place of lecture” in Greek secondary school. As defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary, Lyceum is “a hall for public lectures or discussions”. Vector geometry is taught the student’s last year in school because on the entrance exams that get the students entrance into college, they are tested over mainly vector geometry in the mathematical section of the exam. That jump from classical thought and methodology in geometry to vector geometry was sometimes an awkward jump because sometimes pupils had “either deficient or false conceptions… in the field of geometry (Gagatsis, Demetriadou 106).” It was also difficult to jump from classical geometry to vector geometry because classical geometry required in-the-box thinking and vector geometry pushed high school students to