I'm just starting up the academic year (yes, it starts in February here in the Southern Hemisphere) teaching a 2nd-year Introduction to Pure Mathematics class.
For general background, I would like to explain the general concept of axioms and the role of axiomatisation in Pure Mathematics, and refer them to a suitable reasonably-accessible essay for more information.
Googling has led me to an oldish paper by De Villiers (mzone.mweb.co.za/residents/profmd/axiom.pdf) which is quite interesting. In particular he distinguishes between "constructive axiomatisation" in which (essentially) the axioms come first and then logical deduction creates new mathematics and "descriptive axiomatisation", where new mathematics that has arisen in an untidy, organic, uncontrolled way is reorganised and systematised with the benefit of hindsight (in other words, which ideas led somewhere, which didn't).
In particular, he mentions criticisms of the "axiomatic-deductive" method in TEACHING (i.e. Lecture 1 gives the axioms for a vector space and proves that 0 is unique, etc etc) because it conveys - inaccurately - to students that mathematics is just the dry mechanical manipulation of statements starting from some "god-given" or "magic" axioms that are simply presented as a fait-accompli, rather than a creative, iterative, untidy process.
But I can't just give the students this link, because it assumes that the reader already KNOWS examples of descriptive and/or constructive axiomatisation, and it also uses language that I predict my students would not enjoy. (Example: Freudenthal (1973, 451) refers to this dramatic change in style of thinking, as the "cutting of the ontological bonds.")
To a large degree, time constraints will force me to continue teaching essentially used the axiomatic-deductive method, but I would really like to alert the students to the fact that this is just one side of the coin.
Anyway, it seems to me that this topic is something that surely has faced many many teachers of Pure Mathematics before, and that there should be an essay somewhere that is aimed at beginning students, rather than their professors.
So my question is: Is there an essay, aimed at beginning students, that explains in simple terms the role of axioms and axiomatisation in mathematics?