Cold War Mathematics Education

Many ideals were vehemently put forward and clashed during the Cold War era. Mathematics education was at the core of this idealism: it was both revised, as culturally one of the foundations of that revision, visible in "systems thinking" and the rise of psychometrics as a management tool in education. Moreover, it was supposed to be universal and a unifying subject, while at the same time it also became one of the core subjects of competition in the arms race and the space race. We intend to look at several instances were these values in mathematics education stand out, ranging over topics such as didactics, mathematics olympiads, as well as the introduction of computers or programming in the classroom.