Posted on 07/10/2023 7:40:40 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Few subjects seem less political than math. There is little room for subjective judgment because its truths are universal. No matter what you look like or where you’re from or how you feel about it, two plus two will always equal four, and the area of a circle will always be π r². Math is so objective, in fact, some scientists have theorized that prime numbers could offer the basis of communication with supposed intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos.
However, even if aliens know that math has no racial or gender bias, some educators on Earth seem to think otherwise. Even amid plummeting math scores in the latest Nation’s Report Card data, a growing chorus of progressive voices insists that racism and sexism are the biggest problems we face in how to teach math.
A couple years ago, in an article in the Scientific American, Rachel Crowell complained about the racial and gender disparities among those who make a career out of mathematics. She pointed out, for instance, that “fewer than 1% of doctorates in math are awarded to African Americans” and that only 29.1% “were awarded to women.” More mathematicians, she writes, have been pushing to discuss these issues and “force the field to confront the racism, sexism and other harmful bias it sometimes harbors.”
Though, undoubtedly, examples of identity-group bias in all fields exist, Crowell chose to root her complaint in intangibles: Math doctorates are not “earned” or “received” or “completed;” they are “awarded,” a word choice that not so subtly reinforces her conclusion that something about math education is racist.
Writing at Newsweek, Jason Rantz cited examples of public schools teaching students that math itself, and the way it has always been taught, is oppressive. In Seattle, recently introduced guidelines for K-12 math teachers in several pilot schools claim that “mathematical knowledge has been appropriated by Western culture” and that “math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color.”
In 2021, Oregon’s Department of Education introduced a new toolkit called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, created by what Rantz calls “a coalition of left-wing educators.” The toolkit promises “an integrated approach to mathematics that centers Black, Latinx, and [m]ultilingual students in grades 6-8.” It also warns teachers that “[t]he concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” and that “[u]pholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”
This ideological trend in which everything is read through lenses of oppression and victimhood is not isolated in extreme, left-wing enclaves but has become widespread in education. Given the “Critical Theory mood” inflicting Western culture today, it is only likely to grow in the coming years.
One of the many problems with this obsession with racism and oppression in math is that it inevitably leaves students worse at math. In the case of the Seattle pilot schools, for example, performance among black students in the state math exam plummeted after implementing the woke curriculum. Bad ideas with good intentions are still bad ideas. In an effort to empower students, they are instead radically disempowered.
The wonder of mathematics lies precisely in its objectivity, as Melissa Cain Travis describes in Thinking God’s Thoughts, in the miraculous way that math corresponds to and describes the world around us. In her book, Travis chronicles how the beauty and objectivity of numbers led 16th century German astronomer Johannes Kepler to discover the three laws of planetary motion and to correctly describe the structure of our solar system. Kepler, as much a student of God as he was a scientist, believed that the truths of numbers were eternal, existing eternally in the mind of God and structuring all of reality. Our minds — as beings made in God’s image — are uniquely suited to unlock those mysteries.
Students who are taught that answers to algebra problems depend on the color of their skin and that calculus professors are oppressors are not only not going to unlock the mysteries of the universe, but they will also believe what is not true about who they are and the world in which they live. Woke educators may hope to liberate students. But by depriving them of objective truths they are subjugating them to bad ideas. It’s a tragically ironic and disastrous miscalculation.
Originally published at BreakPoint.
John Stonestreet serves as president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He’s a sought-after author and speaker on areas of faith and culture, theology, worldview, education and apologetics.
Shane Morris is a senior writer at the Colson Center, where he has been the resident Calvinist and millennial, home-school grad since 2010, and an intern under Chuck Colson. He writes BreakPoint commentaries and columns. Shane has also written for The Federalist, The Christian Post, and Summit Ministries, and he blogs regularly for Patheos Evangelical as Troubler of Israel.
White folks do not have a monopoly on brains....they just work harder to use them to their benefit.
That's a feature, not a bug.
What happens when you teach a minority they are victims for 60 years?......THIS for one thing.
Why, because it requires them to study? This is yet another one of the left's fantasy "barriers".
Trying to make claims about individual worth in any way based on skin color is racist. Period. The Democrats need racism as a political cudgel ,and so stoke the embers of racism into fires.
That said, once you get over all the above, it is like an obstacle course that makes you stronger and more sure-footed intellectually.
And, once you get accustomed to its difficult nature, it is even fun.
How do you "appropriate" math?
And exactly how is it being used to "oppress and marginalize" POCs?
Let's have some specific examples.
These entirely reasonable and appropriate questions are never asked by journalists.
You either "get" math or you don't - and lefties want to tell us math is "racist" b/c not everyone understands it.
And pay them, too. The Fed Gov pay about $2 billion every year to the tribes...and that’s excluding the side stuff they get locally.
Everything is racist. That includes exhaling carbon dioxide.
“how is it being used to “oppress and marginalize” POCs?”
Answer: Low IQ folks can’t figure it out...
If everyone was stupid then we could have the real “equity” the leftists desire.
Our numbering system is based on the fact we have ten fingers. If some races had six on each hand for a total of 12, then they could cry “RACIST!” but we don’t.
Black ink on white paper is racist.
There are 10 kinds of people, those who know binary, and those who don’t.
I’ve always wondered if those monks who labored through various Taylor Series to make the math tables enjoyed their work.
The lack of blacks in the field is proof enough. /sarc
But yes, specific examples of how the same test given to black and white students is somehow unfair to the black student but not the white student.
What no one cares to admit that public schools that black students tend to be in are bad schools (and Democrat run) and that American black culture as a whole does NOT value education because that would be "acting white."
Things are not inherently racist.
But people who see racism in EVERYTHING are.
If this isn’t the soft bigotry of low expectations nothing is.
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