Abolish column divisions in primary school? Discussed in Germany

Abolish column divisions in primary schools? They asked themselves this question in Germany and more specifically in the state of Lower Saxony. And here the answer was partly positive. While the other three written operations continue to be part of the primary school curriculum, division will continue to be taught, but will be practised for longer than in the past, with less complex tasks, through mental and semi-scripted calculations. Lower Saxony's Education Minister Julia Willie Hamburg was so overwhelmed by controversy that she issued a press release to clarify that division will not be abolished from the school curriculum.

For years, Germany has been trying to counteract the significant decline in the skills possessed by its young people precisely in the scientific disciplines and in mathematics in particular. Actually, according to current scientific research, Lower Saxony's plan is not wrong: the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung has tried to put things in order. Indeed, in purely written procedures, students work with algorithms, systematically following clear and unambiguous rules. They do not need to understand and question the algorithm itself and the individual steps.

Semi-scripted calculation, on the other hand, is more akin to mental calculation: children learn to break down tasks into smaller calculation steps in a more flexible way, to take note of intermediate steps and to find new solutions independently. Timo Leuders, Professor of Mathematics at the Freiburg University of Education, for example, is convinced of this. Of the same opinion is Susanne Prediger, who teaches mathematics didactics at the Technical University of Dortmund, according to whom 'if you have to repeat arithmetic operations over and over again without understanding how they work, this really contributes to the fear of mathematics'. The German daily recalls how the education ministers of all 16 Bundeslaender had already agreed on this in 2022 in the 'Guidelines for mathematics in primary school' and that some have already introduced this innovation.