Description

LAISANT (Charles-Ange), CAMESCASSE (Jacques) et FREINET (Lucien), L’initiateur mathématique, Saint-Paul, L’imprimerie de l’école, [circa 1933].

A rectangular wooden box (27x12x11cm) containing several hundred white and red cubes, dozens of iron rulers and its user manual (Notice sur l’initiateur mathématiques Camescasse) of 48 pages published by the editions of the printing of the school of Freinet (traces of rust on the rulers, soiled instructions and label on the top of the box with missing and soiled parts).

Rare reissue by the pedagogue Lucien Freinet, in 1933, of the mathematical game invented by Jacques Camescasse in 1910 and published at the time by Hachette based on the work on mathematical pedagogy by the Esperantist Charles-Ange Laisant who had published L’initiation mathématique in 1906.

It seems that this mathematical game did not have any longevity after Freinet’s reissue.

We find in the memoirs of Célestin Freinet’s daughter, a beautiful and touching evocation: “The Mathematical Initiator” invented by Jacques Camescasse , “games of small assembled cubes making it easy, in the family and at school, to put mathematical initiation into practice”, is the new tool of the Cooperative, on sale for 60 francs with explanatory notes. These are cubes of one centimeter on each side which is assembled on steel strips: the unit is represented by a cube, the ten by ten cubes, etc. as easy as pie. I remember, later, at school, the pleasure I had in arranging on their supports these small white and red cubes, made of smooth wood, pleasant to the touch. Everything was possible with the Camescasse, from the first stammerings to the square root…” (Madelaine Freinet, Élise and Célestin Freinet. Souvenirs de notre vie, Paris, Stock, 1997, p. 194).

Uncommon.