Most of us here present today have been involved (facing one way or the other in the class-room) in one of the most far-reaching and important revolutions in teaching theory and practice that any national system of education has ever known. The first step was Rawdon Levett’s famous letter to Nature in 1870, though it was thirty years before any solid progress could be claimed. Another twenty years of steady endeavour, in which some well-known members of this Association took a leading part, was necessary before the first of our major reports (that on Geometry) was published. Yet another twenty years, in which time four more reports were issued, bring us to the greatest change of all: the Jeffery Report and the acceptance by the schools and the Examining Authorities of the Alternative Syllabus. So far as can be judged after ten years’ experience this revolution, far-reaching in its effect on the mathematical work in schools, has been entirely bloodless—for Euclid, if deposed, is neither exiled nor ostracised.

It is just on twenty years since I was first permitted to air in public some of my views on school algebra. That talk, in 1937, was officially part of a British Association discussion, but since the other speakers were yourself, Mr. President, Professor Broadbent and Mr. G. L. Parsons, with Professor Neville in the chair, it was quite a Mathematical Association family party. That was also the occasion of my becoming well acquainted with Alan Robson, who during the intervening years did so much, by his splendid text-books and by the influence of his pupils, to bring new ideas into school mathematics, and particularly into school algebra. It was a great pleasure to meet and correspond with him after so long an interval, during the years in which the Report that we are to discuss to-day was in preparation. His sudden death at the very time when the Report was first presented to the Teaching Committee of the Association was a most sad and unexpected blow. His thoughts had been occupied a great deal with it after his retirement, and it owes to him not only the chapters for which he was mainly responsible, but innumerable improvements at all the points that his sharp critical eye had lighted upon.