I discovered an article by a Harvey Bluedorn entitled “Research on the Teaching of Math - Formal Arithmetic at Age Ten, Hurried or Delayed?“; it touches on a topic brought up on an earlier post about when would be considered a suitable age to learn mathematics. It appears that until the advent of Johann H. Pestolozzi, a Swiss reformer, very few students had any formal training in mathematics, and virtually none in elementary school. Pestolozzi’s pioneering work in the Castle of Yverdon, in which he ran a school with a curriculum to teach geometry to students as young as four, appears to be the first serious attempt to teach mathematics at the beginning of a formal1 schooling. The rest of article provides evidence for the author’s point of view that learning math the moment one begins formal schooling is too early, and that delaying a formal study to the age of ten isn’t as ludicrous as it may initially seem.

On an unrelated note, I found this excerpted quote fascinating (emphasis mine):

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, fresh statutes were given, excluding all mathematics from the course of undergraduates, presumably because this study pertained to practical life, and could, therefore, have no claim to attention in a university…

The dramatic irony of comparing the pragmatic art of arithmetic that constituted virtually all of mathematics back in the 16th century to the esoterica of modern mathematics2 is mindboggling.
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Footnotes
  1. The cited reference doesn’t mean formal as in axiomatic, but rather in the sense of an official curriculum.↩
  2. Consider, for example, such concepts as fifth-order mock theta functions, functors or de Rham cohomologies.↩