• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.381-405
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• 2015

The nature of school mathematics has not been asked from the epistemological perspective. In this paper, I compare two dominant perspectives of school mathematics: ethnomathematics and didactical transposition theory. Then, I show that there exist some examples from Old Babylonian (OB) mathematics, which is considered as the oldest school mathematics by the recent contextualized anthropological research, cannot be explained by above two perspectives. From this, I argue that the nature of school mathematics needs to be understand from new perspective and its meaning needs to be extended to include students' and teachers' products emergent from the process of teaching and learning. From my investigation about OB school mathematics, I assume that there exist an intrinsic function of school mathematics: Linking scholarly Mathematics(M) and everyday mathematics(m). Based on my assumption, I suggest the chain of ESMPR(Educational Setting for Mathematics Practice and Readiness) and ESMCE(Educational Setting For Mathematical Creativity and Errors) as a mechanism of the function of school mathematics.