The Process of Education

Geoffrey Vickers advocated and illustrated the efficacy of informal education. Children and older students can and do learn within the contexts of tasks and questions that are meaningful to them. This article is about surprisingly successful learning in informal settings. Informal learning has often been encouraged because of the failure of more traditional approaches. Mathematics has been assumed to be certain and the model of describing truth. The certainty of mathematics and the formal mode of discussing mathematics are being reconsidered. Connections between mathematics and humanistic disciplines are the bases of a worldwide movement of mathematically minded scholars.