Freedom of Science

From Dreams of Calculus - Perspectives on Mathematics Education:¹

Classical Greek or Latin formed an important part of secondary education only 50 years ago, with motivations similar to those currently used for mathematics: studies in these subjects would help develop logical thinking and problem solving skills. Today, very few students take Greek and Latin with the motivation that such studies are both difficult and of questionable usefulness for the effort invested.

Why is it that Calculus is compulsory for the majority of students most of whom will never use what they are taught? Because Doctors of Philosophy control mathematics education in the name of the bureaucracy they work for.

Calculus is the teaching vehicle of a giant bureaucracy

Professional Doctors make their living by teaching. The more there is to teach, the more complicated it is and the more hidden it is, there will be more jobs available for everyone. This is the major reason mathematics education exists in the ugly state it is taught today.

Once a habit forms in a bureaucracy it cannot be removed. If so how come Calculus replaced Greek and Latin? Well, thanks to Newton.

The scholastic corporation is the bureaucracy who owns both Calculus and physics and Newton is the founder of both.

But the habit of sustaining doctoral monopoly on theoretical knowledge by designing, hiding and teaching a complex and proprietary language is a constant of history; its content may change but the habit will remain. This pro-unhuman system is perpetuated by universities who employ the Doctors and they take all the profit while doctors earn authority for accepting to work for substandard wages.

Newton’s calculus becomes the new Latin

Mathematics as a discipline was starting to infiltrate the curriculum in Cambridge a few years before Newton started there. The main instigator was Newton’s teacher Isaac Barrow.

Newton made good use of this emerging field by writing a book that put for the first time in scholastic history the traditional polemical philosophy and geometry under the cover of the same book. Newton named his new language Natural Philosophy or simply Science. Today this old branch of scholasticism is called physics.

Newton defined rival Doctors of Theology to be ugly scholastic Doctors who taught two dead languages while up and coming Newtonian natural philosophers studied the new sciences of rational mechanics and calculus. Rational mechanics was the string theory of its day.

When Doctors of Philosophy became all powerful in the academia and Newtonism spread to the continent they started to teach their own habit, the Calculus.

Modern mathematics

Euclid’s Elementa, with its axioms, theorems and the ruler and compasses as tools, was the canon of mathematics education for many centuries into the mid 20th century, until it quite suddenly disappeared from the curriculum along with Greek and Latin. Not because geometry ceased to be of importance, but because Euclid’s geometry was replaced by computational geometry with the tools being Descartes analytical geometry in modern computational form.

Calculus will disappear the same way. This doesn’t mean that mathematics will cease to be of importance but that Calculus of the classroom will be replaced with a whole new mathematics curriculum based on computer science concepts developed since Newton’s time. There is no room for the ugly bureaucratic code called Calculus in the post-Newtonian world.

Commentary

The point is that the content of human science, in this case Calculus, has been corrupted by unhuman organisms for teir own profit. The corruption is even worse in academic physics. The content of the science of physics has been corrupted to serve the purposes of unhuman organisms. This means that all physics concepts are fused with cultural elements that need to be eliminated to recover the scientific content.

1. Thanks to Misha for bringing this wonderful book to my attention. [↩]

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