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I was somewhat surprised to read (June 8) that the authors of the Abacus textbooks reacted to my interview reported earlier in this paper. A few years ago, I had written an article on The Sunday Times of Malta practically pointing out all the misgivings which I expressed in that interview. But the authors did not react to that article.

Also, round about the same time, I made a number of similar comments in an e-mail exchange with a noted UK specialist in maths education who is also an acquaintance of one of the Abacus authors. He forwarded my comments to her, expecting a reaction but, again, I heard nothing.

Would I be too cynical to presume that Jill Duffy and Ruth Merttens are reacting now only because of subsequent reports in this newspaper and elsewhere that Maltese primary schools might no longer be using their textbooks?

Some private primary schools have already decided to abandon Abacus. I can assure the authors that these schools took this decision not because they read or heard anything that I wrote or said but because of the unhappy experience which both teachers and parents of their pupils had had with the Abacus series.

I must congratulate the authors of Abacus for the “hundreds of thousands of pupils and teachers who have used it successfully over the past 20 years”. But I am more concerned with the numerous teachers and parents of children in Malta who have, for many years, been silently expressing anger and frustration with these textbooks.

I am also concerned when secondary school teachers report that many of their students still reach out for a calculator to find the value of something like 7x5 – so much for Abacus’ “four pillars” on which the mathematical confidence of these students was supposedly built while they were in primary school.