The transmission of numeracy

With the introduction of arithmetic as a compulsory part of the elementary school curriculum in late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century Germany, textbooks and pedagogical methods were wanted. Relying on the traditions of the Rechenbücher and informed by the demand for method found in Wolffian style advanced textbooks, the first generation of elementary school reformers (1770–1800) rewrote and re‐ordered these texts to that end. In the second wave of reforms (1800–1815), these re‐orderings became more extreme, though better adapted to the existing school situation. Through textbook analyses not only does this evolution become apparent, but also many contextual factors as well as a major shift in dispositives, namely the concept of arithmetic (as opposed to utilitarian reckoning) as a general discipline for training the mind. Studying these discursive variations in textbooks and their communicative embedding in the classroom contributes to our understanding of the role, origin and function of numeracy, the culturally specific practices of recording and manipulating numbers, in modern history

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