ABSTRACT
In the UK, the education of adolescents proceeds in largely the same manner as for younger students. This seems an odd situation, given what we know, developmentally, about changes taking place at that time of life. Dick Tahta (1989: 28) challenges us in strident terms to think differently:
It is not good enough to offer adolescents merely more of the same experience they have had when they were younger. It is not good enough to use something as important and pervasive as geometry merely as a convenient medium for public examination and the selection of suitable candidates for higher education. Nor is it good enough always to algebracise geometrical experience, or to do so prematurely. What we do need to do, is to think in terms of the concerns of students themselves at this stage . . . their intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual needs. Of course, this is easier said than done. These are complex needs . . . In some ways, adults have to choose certain simplifications of them in order to survive, in order to be able to act in the world, however imperfectly. But it is the right of adolescents to explore complexity; and it is the duty of teachers to help them maintain it.
