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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mathematics education is the study of practices and methods of both the teaching and learning of mathematics. Mathematics educators are concerned with the development of tools that facilitate practice and/or the study of practice.
Elementary mathematics was part of the education system in most ancient civilisations, including Ancient Greece, the Roman empire, Vedic society and ancient Egypt. Typically, a formal education only was available to male children of high status, wealth or caste.
In Plato's division of the liberal arts into the trivium and the quadrivium, the quadrivium included the mathematical fields of arithmetic and geometry. This structure was continued in the classical education of medieval Europe. In the Renaissance the academic status of mathematics declined, because of its strong association with trade and commerce. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' industrial revolution led to new public education systems, where mathematics became a central part of the curriculum from an early age. By the twentieth century mathematics was part of the core curriculum in all developed countries.
