A hidden thread: Ideas and proposals on children's mathematics education in the Late Modern Age

Access to numeracy in childhood for some dates back to Antiquity. In modern Europe, the training tradition from the abaco schools transmitted by means of printed arithmetics regarded both the younger and the older, including self-teaching adults. Yet an attention to the specificity of children, including eventually girls, as to forms of learning and teaching methods, developed at a slow pace, as part of the growing “sentiment de l'enfant”. An influx of the market can be possibly traced since the late 18th century, and an intensification is clearly observed around 1900, in the age of progressive education or modern school. Several contributions and proposals, including some from women scholars, shared the ambition to introduce mathematics as a sphere of knowledge, far beyond numeration and operation written skills; and most authors had in mind the extension of mathematics “to the many”.