I was referring to a specific movement to fuck up the math curriculum:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

As far as parent frustration, I have heard of Common Core taking a simple concept (“what is 7 * 8”) and making it confusing in some myopic but well-meaning attempt to generate intuition:

evaluate 7 * 8 using perfect squares

with the expectation that the student do something ludicrous like:

and I have heard parents complain about that. I have also heard individual people complain that they personally liked math until they got to algebra (the “it was fun until they introduced letters”). However, I am not familiar with any backlash against students being asked to learn more than just arithmetic.

As an aside, I want to state that arithmetic is mathematics and is important for students to learn. When we trivialize it, we end up with students who don’t have numeracy, and it is very hard to teach them more advanced concepts (for example, explaining the formal definition of a limit is impossible if a student struggles with “whenever x is within ẟ of a, then f(x) is within ε of L”) . Lockhart’s Lament is fine and all, but even he responds that the pendulum not belonging all the way on one end doesn’t mean we should swing it all the way to the other.

New response from scratch because I manically edited the shit out of my old one. Sorry for linking the wikipedia page there — you were clearly referring to the same thing I was and I didn’t take the appropriate time to understand your reply. I apologize.

The backlash I am familiar with is that students would learn how to identify the place value of something (“the 3 in 220134₅ has value 3 * 5¹”) but not be able to do actual arithmetic (3 * 5 = ?). Basically “why are my kids learning this abstract stuff about numerals or set theory when they can’t even remember their times tables?” That is my primary issue with it — it is not good pedagogy. Abstraction should come after a student has learned the foundational material. They aren’t professional mathematicians, and treating them as such (beginning with abstract definitions, as we do) is bad pedagogy.

I am sure there was some pushback in the form of “this is too hard”, but I don’t know how much of that kind of pushback occurred. I also would not necessarily blame it on the intelligence of parents. I can imagine a sort of shellshock when your 10 year old comes home with abstract mathematics that you never learned or only learned in high school or at the undergraduate level. And I can similarly understand the outrage when you expect your child to learn foundational skills in school, only for those to be skipped in favor of a high-minded appeal to “real understanding” (in my experience, this is a theme in US education — don’t memorize basic arithmetic because you can just consult your calculator; don’t memorize facts because you can just look them up).

I do not know what the curriculum was before new math, but I would be very surprised if they exclusively taught arithmetic in all of K-12 before the 1950s. I haven’t confirmed this, though.

I do think it is good pedagogy to pepper in motivations for abstract concepts early. Have a student evaluate 1723 * 16 via the standard algorithm and separately have them perform

1000 * 16
700 * 16
20 * 16
3 * 16
now add em up and think about why you get the same answer

tl;dr I think it was more “why are my kids learning this shit before they learn to multiply” than “I have no idea how to help my kid with their homework.” Anecdotally, the latter is not something I have experienced (when I taught K-12), even when the material was abstract and something the parents couldn’t help with.