Real Numbers in School: 1960s Experiments in France and Brazil

Abstract

The study of real numbers was introduced in the curriculum of lower-level secondary schools in a number of countries in the 1960s, under the influence of the modern mathematics movement and the guiding principle of bridging the gap between secondary school and higher education mathematics. Despite this common drive, the dynamics and the outcomes of this innovation were not the same everywhere. The cases of France and Brazil, in particular, deserve to be contrasted because, despite the similarities between the programs up to the early 1960s, the ways in which the two countries experimented with and implemented the teaching of real numbers were different. A brief comparison between the two reforms suggests that the international dimension of the movement itself had more effect on lending legitimacy to the realization of local experiments than on the format they took and their consequences.