Why this curriculum delays arithmetic

It asks you to teach less, later, than you were probably trained to. Here is where that comes from, what the evidence actually says, and what it does not say.

If you teach Primary 3 and this curriculum tells you to do no written arithmetic at all, you are entitled to know why before you follow it. The short answer is one superintendent’s experiment, carried out over four years, which he documented in detail and published. The longer answer is below, including the parts that weaken it.

What Benezet did

L. P. Benezet was superintendent of schools in Manchester, New Hampshire. In the autumn of 1929 he stopped teaching formal arithmetic in five classrooms — three third grades, one combined third and fourth, and one fifth grade — and put something else in its place.

In the fall of 1929 I made up my mind to try the experiment of abandoning all formal instruction in arithmetic below the seventh grade and concentrating on teaching the children to read, to reason, and to recite — my new Three R’s. And by reciting I did not mean giving back, verbatim, the words of the teacher or of the textbook. I meant speaking the English language.

Part I, November 1935

In those rooms the children did oral composition instead. They reported on books they had read, on things they had seen, on visits they had made; they retold films and invented stories on the spot. They estimated heights and areas and distances, and then measured to find out. That is the work this app leaves to you, and the reason Primary 1 to 4 has almost nothing on screen.

The pole in the pond

Before the test scores, the thing worth looking at is what the two groups actually said. In Part III, Benezet put the same problem to two advanced fifth grades in the same city, in the same week — one taught traditionally, one under the new curriculum. He drew a diagram and asked:

Here is a wooden pole that is stuck in the mud at the bottom of a pond. There is some water above the mud and part of the pole sticks up into the air. One-half of the pole is in the mud; 2/3 of the rest is in the water; and one foot is sticking out into the air. Now, how long is the pole?

Part III, January 1936

The traditionally taught class

  • “You multiply 1/2 by 2/3 and then you add one foot to that.”
  • “Add one foot and 2/3 and 1/2.”
  • “Add the 2/3 and 1/2 first and then add the one foot.”
  • “Add all of them and see how long the pole is.”

Benezet’s comment: not one child saw the essential point … Their only thought was to manipulate the numbers, hoping that somehow they would get the right answer. He gave them a broad hint, got six more wrong answers, and gave up.

The experimentally taught class

  • “You would have to find out how many feet there are in the mud.”
  • “How many feet in the water and add them together.”
  • “There are 3 feet in a yard. One yard is in the mud … the part in the water is twice the part in the air so that it must be 2 feet … it means that the pole is 6 feet or 72 inches long.”

These children had less drill in addition, multiplication and long division, and more practice in reasoning out loud. The problem was so easy to the last child that she converted the answer into inches and yards as well, because a six-foot answer seemed too simple to be what had been asked.

What the tests showed

Benezet compared his classes against traditionally taught ones on the ordinary arithmetic tests of the day. The experimental groups started behind, as you would expect of children who had not been drilled.

By the middle of April, however, all the classes were practically on a par and when the last test was given in June, it was one of the experimental groups that led the city. In other words these children, by avoiding the early drill on combinations, tables, and that sort of thing, had been able, in one year, to attain the level of accomplishment which the traditionally taught children had reached after three and one-half years of arithmetical drill.

Part I, November 1935

One year against three and a half. Alongside it he reported what the reclaimed time bought: more interest in reading, a better vocabulary, and more fluency in expression — which is the part a test of arithmetic was never going to catch.

What the experiment does not prove

This page is meant to help you decide, not to sell you something, so the weaknesses belong here too. They are visible in Benezet’s own account, which is a point in his favour.

Taken honestly, this is a careful, well-documented account by a practitioner who published his method and his transcripts so others could argue with them. That is a good reason to try it. It is not proof, and this curriculum does not rest on a claim that it is.

What follows for this app

If the finding is right, then arithmetic drill delivered early is not merely useless but costly — it consumes the hours that would otherwise go on reading, reasoning and speaking, and it teaches children to push numbers around instead of thinking about them. An app that drilled Primary 2 would therefore not be a neutral extra. It would work against the curriculum it claims to serve.

So the level gate here is structural rather than a preference. There is no screen work below Primary 5, and no setting changes that. What the app does offer is the narrow slice where a screen genuinely beats a worksheet: making a counting pattern visible on a hundred chart, showing why the nines fall the way they do, committing an estimate before measuring. The level map sets out what is offered at each level and what is deliberately withheld.

Read it yourself

It is three short instalments and repays the hour. We quote it here rather than hosting it: the articles were published in 1935 and 1936, and whether they are now in the public domain depends on whether their copyright was renewed — a question nobody involved in this project has settled. Quoting briefly with a full citation does not depend on the answer.

Every quotation on this page was checked against the text of the three instalments. Any error is ours, not his.