ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a new solution to an old problem. Whitehead’s famous formulation of the problem of inert knowledge in his 1929 collection, The Aims of Education, is well known, but Whitehead actually developed the idea quite a bit earlier in a talk to British mathematicians and mathematics educators in 1916. The concern hung around for Whitehead for at least 13 years and it is still hanging around today.
In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call “inert ideas”—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations… Except at rare intervals of intellectual ferment, education in the past has been radically infected with inert ideas. (Whitehead, 1929, p. 1)
