Impressions of School Mathematics in the United States

Extract

I Suppose that most of us have some interest in the teaching of mathematics in other countries. I have recently returned from a year spent in the United States as visiting instructor in mathematics in a large preparatory school, a boarding school of seven hundred boys with a staff of about eighty-five men, twelve of whom form the mathematical department. (The term preparatory school as applied to an American school is roughly equivalent to our public school, the word preparatory being used in the sense that the school prepares its pupils for college.)