Left-wing educators declare objective math a form of ‘white supremacy’

The woke prescriptions recommended in the article below guarantee failure and will certainly end up discriminating against its supposed beneficiaries. Thus do the determined culture-war and cancel-culture warriors proceed.

It is alarming and depressing that such bizarre ideas could actually take root and flourish among people who claim to be educators.

From the moment I entered the hallowed halls of my Scottish boarding school when I was 12 until I escaped when I was 18, I never sat an exam in Mathematics that I did not fail. Just imagine, if the new methods and standards recommended in this article had existed at the time, I might have been able to become a professor in Mathematics teaching my students to fail so regularly with the kind of mathematical certainty I was teaching them to shun.

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Scientists have a phrase for hypotheses that are so worthless they cannot even be used as a means of learning from one’s mistakes. The phrase is, “not even wrong.” This is the category into which the declarations of these woke academics fall.

Woke educators release letter declaring objective math a form of ‘white supremacy’

The COVID-19 school shutdowns have put parents back in charge of their children’s learning in ways that were unimaginable pre-pandemic, with many parents leaving their district schools in droves.

By Kerry McDonald, Alpha News, March 6, 2021:

(Foundation for Economic Education) — Mandatory teaching standards that focus on critical theory and identity politics to the detriment of liberalism and individualism are already working their way through state legislatures.

Now, math education itself has been deemed “racist.” A group of educators just released a document calling for a transformation of math education that focuses on “dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math.”

Among the educators’ recommendations, which officials in some states are promoting, are calls to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views,” “provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance,” and “encourage them to disrupt the disproportionate push-out of people of color in [STEM] fields.”

Beyond activism, these recommendations also argue that traditional approaches to math education promote racism and white supremacy, such as requiring students to show their work or prioritizing correct answers to math problems. The document claims that current math teaching is problematic because it focuses on “reinforcing objectivity and the idea that there is only one right way” while it “also reinforces paternalism.”

Prominent professors push back

This week, some prominent university professors spoke out against these new woke math education recommendations. Princeton mathematics professor Sergiu Klainerman wrote a guest post on the topic at journalist Bari Weiss’s website. He says: “Attempts to ‘deconstruct’ mathematics, deny its objectivity, accuse it of racial bias, and infuse it with political ideology have become more and more common — perhaps, even, at your child’s elementary school.”

Klainerman, who grew up in communist Romania, warns that this current classroom dogma is dangerous. He writes: “When it comes to education, I believe the woke ideology is even more harmful than old-fashioned communism.”

Columbia University English professor John McWhorter also chimed in against this math education document and its recommendations.

“This lovely pamphlet is teaching us that it is racist to expect black kids to master the precision of math,” he writes in a blog post. “To wit — its message, penned by people who consider themselves some of the most morally advanced souls in the history of the human species, is one that Strom Thurmond would have happily taken a swig of whiskey to.”

“This, folks, is the ‘Critical Race Theory’ that so many of us are resisting, not a simple program for ‘social justice,’” McWhorter later adds. “To distrust this document is not to be against social justice, but against racism.”

While the growing emphasis on critical theory in American classrooms has broader societal implications, including the devaluation of objectivity and individualism, the real victims of this educational approach are the students themselves. In one of his final articles before he died last December, economist Walter Williams decried the poor academic performance of students in large urban school districts.

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