Mathematics education is one of the most publicized and contested fields of endeavour in the area of education more generally. The entrails of international comparative mathematics achievement surveys are pored over by the media, politicians and educators alike; and, while for the last fifty years at least it has been assumed by most everyone in modern societies that mathematics should be a compulsory subject in all schools, parents and scholars alike argue furiously about whether traditional teaching and rote practising of mathematical skills is better or worse for pupils than conceptual teaching based on children’s own constructed ideas.  Meer

Mathematics is in the unenviable position of being simultaneously one of the most important school subjects for today's children to study and one of the least well understood.  Meer