Lectures on the Logic of Arithmetic

by Mary Everest Boole

Mrs. Boole's lectures will help many a young teacher if he is fortunate enough to see it before he has hardened his heart against all innovations. Writers of text-books, totally ignorant of the simplest facts of psychical life, tumble their stodgy books into the classrooms, and the old-fashioned teacher works through them with the conviction that somehow or other the children will pick up sufficient arithmetic if you only keep them long enough at it. Against this tyranny and ignorance Mrs. Boole protests. Arithmetic is a subject which must be taught intelligently, an impossible task for those who do not add to their knowledge of mathematics a knowledge of child-life. Indeed, were we to sum up in a sentence the gist of the lectures, we should say: the arithmetician qua arithmetician is of all people the least fitted for teaching arithmetic.
-The Academy and Literature, Vol. 66

146 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1903

About the author

Mary Everest Boole (11 March 1832 in Wickwar, Gloucestershire – 17 May 1916 in Middlesex, England) was a self-taught mathematician who is best known as an author of didactic works on mathematics, such as Philosophy and Fun of Algebra, and as the wife of fellow mathematician George Boole. Her progressive ideas on education, as expounded in The Preparation of the Child for Science, included encouraging children to explore mathematics through playful activities such as curve stitching. Her life is of interest to feminists as an example of how women made careers in an academic system that did not welcome them.