At least since Sputnik (1957), if not before, the nation's most influential mathematics educators have argued over who should learn what ... why ... and how. The best have agreed on the need for a scientifically reliable theory of mathematics instruction. But their research focus on the instruction of classes of students has made the challenge much too complicated for initiating a science of instruction. Also, their opinionated disputes over "shoulds" likewise have made it impossible to germinate a science of curricular mathematics instruction.

In 1980, the MALEI Institute ... ["male'i" is Hawaiian for "toward enlightenment"] ... was created to advance mankind's scientific knowledge about how to improve mathematics learning and instruction ... by forgoing the curricular perspective to directly focus, instead, on human needs for personal mathematical intelligence. Personal intelligence is a psychological component of every human's working mind. From outside the curricular setting, it is possible to scientifically detect who,needs to know what mathematical intelligence ... and then to determine how best to guide them to acquire it. That outside perspective also sheds much light on what is happening (and on what should be happening) in the core-curricular mathematics courses provided by American schools and colleges.

The Institute's scientific mission is based on the fact that every functional human internally owns and uses its own actual developmental present state of functional personal intelligence ... and presently operates within an environment in which effective personal management requires a certain needed state of such intelligence. The comparison and contrast between an individually person's actual developmental state ... and that persons's needed developmental state ... is wide open to scientific clinical investigation.

In very much the same way that the sciences of medical health and of mental health focus on how the human's needed state of well-being contrasts with its actual state, the managerial sciences attend the healthiness of corporations, industries, economies, and nations. Likewise, the science of personal mathematical health is all about well the human mind's present needs for personal mathematical intelligence are covered by its actual state of personal development. While personal mathematical health depends on one's present situation, personal mathematical fitness is more broadly relative to particular situations ... present, imminent, probable, or preferred.

The "Intelligence Quotient" is a measure of how fast a person now learns ... not of what he or she already knows or could learn in the future. Current scientific knowledge holds that when a potentially functional human is born, its personal potential for achieving personal mathematical intelligence is (for all practical purposes) unlimited ... because no human actually uses more than a very meager part of that potential. It means that science can explore the human mind's mathematical growth with regard for its history and needs, with minimum concerns about supposed inborn limitations.

The Institute's MALEI Mathematical Learning Clinic is a mathematics instructional service for enabling learners to achieve the functional personal mathematical intelligence that they might need or already need. Following the mode of clinical research in the fields of medical and mental health, the MALEI Clinic also studies the casework transactions for new insights into how humans most naturally advance their mathematical intelligence ... and why they have difficulties learning specific mathematical items or topics from others. In that mode, the MALEI Clinic is both an instructional service and a research clinic.

Moreover, the Clinic's research findings progressively generate a continuing flow of advances for professional instructional practices ... not only for continually developing the Clinic's own service program, but even as professional contributions to the field of education. In that mode, MALEI's is also a service, research, and development (R&D) clinic. To whatever extent those R&D achievements contribute toward advancing the science of personal mathematical health, the MALEI Clinic even is an instructional service and a scientific R&D clinic.

A long-range flow of math-distressed adults and youth into the MALEI Clinic began in 1978, immediately after its opening to the general public. That was very shortly after publication of the first book on math-distress, "Overcoming Math Anxiety ." That book quickly became a best-seller ... thus confirming that math-distress abounds throughout the nation. The "anxiety" state is only a mid-stage. More advanced states include math-depression, math-fear, and even severe math-phobia.

Ever since the the 20th century advent of compulsory schooling, generations math-distressed students became math-distressed adults. As commonplace jobs and ever improving technologies progressively increased their demands on the ever growing population ... for functional personal mathematical intelligence ... America's ranks of math-distressed youth and adults continued to swell. In an ever-encroaching epidemic, math-distress has been passed on from each generation to the next. The situation continues to worsen, as schools and students are subjected to ever more demanding "requirements" for mathematical fitness.

Math-distress begins only during studenthood ... as a learning-distress due to students' difficulties in making personal common sense of mathematics curricula. It actually is a progressively worsen (MLD) syndrome of Mathematics-Learning Distress. When a mathematical gap occurs ... between what the mind now knows, and what it presently needs to know ... learning-stress presses the learner toward a closing of that gap. When the stress is strong, and the gap does not close, learning-stress becomes learning-distress. If the gap continues to worsen, the learning-distress escalates.

Normally, MLD worsens only during studenthood ... making it a curricular learning disease. However, when MLD becomes strong enough, the affliction can metastasize, to become math-distress ... anxiety or fear or phobia about all encounters that even remind the victim of curricular mathematics. Even at its milder levels, MLD commonly has strongly adverse effects on adult life ... if only by causing the victim to follow life-paths of lesser quality than might have been.

The MLD syndrome is very much an aspect of mental health ... and is potentially a very unhealthy mental condition. Personal intelligence grows through educational experiences of all kinds ... good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, intentional or otherwise, and mostly outside curricular settings. From that viewpoint, the human learner's personal educational health is a special aspect of mental health ... pertaining to how well the learner's actual state of personal intelligence compares with its presently needed state. Real-world mathematics actually is an art of learning, by personal reasoning ... so personal educational health in mathematics equates with personal mathematical health.

The Clinic's immediate encounters with MLD re-oriented its clinical instructional services ... to focus on the clients' personal mathematical health, rather than on their curricular achievements. That transition was strongly prompted by the severe needs of out-of-school victims of MLD. The new, mathematical-health perspective led to the 1980 creation of the NPO chartered MALEI Institute ... the American Institute for the Improvement of MAthematics LEarning and Instruction.

The Clinic's departure from the curricular pursuits of nebulous, disputable, ever vacillating objectives for students' progress ... to focus, instead, on the personal mathematical health of all humans ... opened the way for bringing science directly to bear on the challenge of improving educational practices. The MALEI Clinic followed "the medical model" of scientific clinical research and development ... insofar as its resources permitted.

Significant findings have continued to flow, rapidly. Clinical casework with victims of serious MLD, quickly disclosed that the culprit behind nationwide MLD is the poor design of the American core-curriculum in mathematics. For students, their immediate mathematical needs are imposed partly by the demands of curricular programs ... and partly by their out-of-school lives. But MLD stems only from curricular demands ... though often from students' curriculum-related experiences with tutors, family members or peers.The nationwide prevalence of MLD stands as very strong evidence that the curriculum, itself is largely unhealthy ... because of the damage that it does to students. Clinical research discloses how to improve the healthiness of the American core-curriculum in mathematics.

MLD happens because the student's personal mathematical intelligence has not been developed to a state that enables the student to continually digest its curriculum's mathematical syllabus into personal common sense. The usual cause is that the curriculum, itself, is developmentally discontinuous. Personal mathematical comprehension is not actually the reading/listening comprehension about correctly interpreting words and directions. Rather, it is a matter of "getting the picture" of what the mathematics, itself, is talking about.

When the student's mathematical comprehension of the curricular mathematical syllabus does not grow as fast as the curricular course progresses, the mathematical comprehension gap worsens ... paving the way for escalation of MLD. When a student's mathematical condition is unhealthy, it normally is because the actual state of personal mathematical comprehension does not adequately cover whatever mathematics is presented by the curriculum ... a deficiency resulting from the inadequacy of earlier encountered curriculum.

The Clinic early found that MLD was reduced and often cured when clients are guided to naturally re-construct, through their own reasoning, the same curricular topics that earlier had been incomprehensible to them. That process of eductive clinical instruction avoids telling mathematical information to the learner. Instead, it guides learners to think their own way through it ... much as how clinical psychologists proceed. The clients's successes in "discovering" items which they earlier could not be "taught" alerts them that their earlier difficulties were due to earlier encounters with a poor curriculum, rather to their own mental weaknesses.

The positive effects on the self-image, potentials, and aspirations can be profound. The MALEI Clinic is unique in so providing comprehension therapy for MLD. It is far more therapeutic than counseling about attitudes ... and even has been called "academic psychotherapy" ... although the Clinic does not tout such a service.

The function of any science is to develop and to confirm a reliable theory about the kinds of things being studied. In the MALEI Clinic, the clinical casework provides a data base for nurturing the development of a scientific theory about how instruction functions to guide (or misguide) the learner's personal mathematical evolution. For MALEI, the instructional guidance of mathematics learning proceeds though the context of personal mathematical health.

So far, meager resources have dictated that only a few small fragments of MALEI's scientific theory of mathematics instructology have been disseminated to the profession. Nonetheless, its theory of the State-Transition Analysis and Guidance of Mathematical Learning is very much a scientific theory of mathematics learning and instruction... and its physical laboratory consists of the Clinic's case-studies. To the best of the Institute's knowledge, MALEI has the country's only service of clinical mathematics instruction that relies on scientific R&D for purposes of enhancing personal mathematical health.