Help is on the way! Thanks to the blessings of the DOE and concerned and caring Mayors such as Bloomberg, we present the new and exciting Radical Math!
It's also known as "teaching math for social justice," and one of the leading lights of the genre is Eric Gutstein, a Marxist colleague of Bill Ayers’s at the University of Illinois and also a full-time Chicago public school math teacher.
But the brilliant idea is sweeping the country, as Sol Stern reported about an April 2007 conference in NY City:
Late last month, over 400 high school math teachers and education professors gathered in Brooklyn for a three-day conference, titled “Creating Balance in an Unjust World: Math Education and Social Justice.” Prominently displayed on the official program’s first page was a passage from Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Marxist educator and icon of the teaching-for-social-justice movement: “There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to . . . bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of our world.”
The conference’s organizers left nothing to the imagination about their leftist agenda. At many of the conference’s 28 workshops, math teachers proudly demonstrated how they used classroom projects to train students in seeing social problems from a radical anticapitalist perspective. At a plenary session, Professor Marilyn Frankenstein of the University of Massachusetts’ math education department proclaimed that elementary school teachers should not use traditional math lessons, in which students calculate, say, the cost of food. Rather, the teachers should make clear that in a truly “just society,” food would “be as free as breathing the air.”.....
But suppose you’re a parent with children in the public schools and you happen to believe in the old fashioned, anti-Freirian view that public education in a democracy must be politically neutral, and that teachers have an ethical and professional responsibility to keep their politics, left-wing or right-wing, out of the classroom. What if you want your child to learn, not Sweat Shop Math, but rather the traditional algebra, trigonometry, and calculus—part of a curriculum that throughout the twentieth century helped millions of Gotham public school students from poor immigrant families graduate and pursue productive careers?
Unfortunately, you’re probably not going to get much help from the DOE. A few days before the conference, I provided schools chancellor Joel Klein with details on the city teachers and schools that were participating. His response: “This is a private conference, at which a range of views will be expressed. It seems that many of these views are hardly ‘radical’. . . . In any case, the people who are speaking at this conference are participating in their personal capacity, not as representatives of the Department of Education. We are committed to making sure that all of our teachers teach math to our high standards—and we are working hard to build on our students’ recent substantial gains.”
How odd that the NY Times article doesn't mention this wonderful innovation and "students' recent substantial gains." After all, it's "hardly radical." /sarc
The Marxists understand that education is **NEVER** religiously, politically, or culturally neutral. It is **IMPOSSIBLE**!!!!
So?....Why hasn't the Supreme Court of the United States declared all government schools in violation of the First Amendment for promoting a government religious worldview?
Also....Why are conservatives and Christians soooooooo incredible stupid for not demanding that government schools be shut down for violating the First Amendment?
( Yes, I am shouting. I am exasperated with my STOOOOOOPID conservative and Christian friends.)