Inhaltszusammenfassung

The Meran Reform of 1905 is often credited with bringing infinitesimal calculus to the Prussian gymnasia and also to the secondary schools preparing for technical studies. Evidence for this comes from comparing the document on the final examination of the gymnasium from 1788 and the description of the curricula for secondary schools from 1882. A closer study shows, however, that the story is not that simple and that interesting things happened during the almost century between these years: Th...The Meran Reform of 1905 is often credited with bringing infinitesimal calculus to the Prussian gymnasia and also to the secondary schools preparing for technical studies. Evidence for this comes from comparing the document on the final examination of the gymnasium from 1788 and the description of the curricula for secondary schools from 1882. A closer study shows, however, that the story is not that simple and that interesting things happened during the almost century between these years: The Humboldtian reform in the first decades of the 19th c. raised mathematics to the status of a main subject of the Prussian gymnasia. During the following years, however, other school subjects like Latin claimed their supremacy. In particular, in 1829 the Prussian authorities issued an order banning infinitesimal calculus from the gymnasia since it was considered too difficult for the pupils – which implies that it had been taught at some schools before! Furthermore, many teachers did not want to abandon the tasks dealing with the determination of local extrema and tried to get around the ban. The most prominent example was the Berlin mathematics educator Karl Heinrich Schellbach (1804–1892) who published a method that avoided the open use of infinitesimal ideas. Both Schellbach’s and others’ texts, even official documents, from this time also show that the term ‘function’ was standard for Prussian mathematics teachers in the mid-19th c.» weiterlesen» einklappen

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