I'd like to first point out the rather interesting mention of I.Q. when discussing the intelligence of a child in the text. For me this emphasized just how long ago this text was written. As, to my knowledge, I.Q. tests as a significant/holistic representation of intelligence has not been a common stance of educators since before I was born. Despite this, it is somewhat depressing that much of the instrumental teaching that is mentioned in this text I experienced in my own education.
While, I tend to agree with Richard Skemp on the value of relational learning in mathematics, the devils advocate section certainly caught my eye. I think the point about instrumental learning being the fastest way to get correct answers on a page is interesting when brought into the adjacent field of computer science. In particular, Computer Science is a vast and fragmented field of study even more so than math in my experience. When dealing with a particular implementation of a user interface, or a sorting algorithm, or a file storage system there is value both in understanding it at a surface level as well as knowing every part of it. Furthermore, when there are many different implementations of every tool, you have to make decisions on what is valuable to learn and what isn't.
The last point which grabbed my attention was the point that skills may be needed in other classes before it is feasible to teach students to a full relational understanding of the topic. I think it is a fascinating challenge to try and flatten the interconnected topics of math into a linear learning process. I know that in my experience there were at least two occasions where topics didn't "sink in" until months or years later when other pieces of information completed my understanding of the topic.
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