Well hello there you crazy FRians, Happy Monday! It’s been a while, but we have a post from Stephen! Thank you so much!!!
As any long time reader of this site is well aware, this writer is at heart firmly grounded in the philosophy of mathematics. Thus it strikes me with shock, horror, and dismay when idiots on the left sully, despoil, and politicize the purist of intellectual fields.
I have read it, so that you don’t have to. Learn now the detestable state of American education as being foisted upon a naive public by those who would tear down civilization itself:
“A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction” – https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf
While eighty-one pages long, most of it is empty space for repeated submissive exercises not to indoctrinate children but to indoctrinate the teachers who are supposed to then indoctrinate the children.
As with any proper brainwashing, it simply states the conclusions which are to be accepted by the “teachers” without explanation or reasoning, setting out an outline of steps which is then repeated again and again in the same words as a mantra demanding acceptance and compliance.
The first page is repeated word for word on page four as a “letter to reader”; repeating the claim of “racism” six times, “white supremacy” four times, and making certain to mention the magical words “toxic” and “equity”.
More crucially in the part addressed to “administrators” is a menacing directive that “they can hold teachers accountable for completing the activities in this workbook”. This is important because many of the exercises demand that the “teacher” accept, recognize, and internalize their responsibility and complicity in this supposedly “racist” system, and describe how they will correct the errors of their ways.
So what is the “supposed” reason for all of this? Was it some secret plot, a conspiracy? No, they are pretty up-front about their intentions in their “inspirational quote” kicking off their instructional exercise:
“We live in a toxic culture that affects us all; one dynamic of the culture is that we are discouraged from seeing it. One of our tasks is to learn to see our culture and how it teaches us to make normal that which is not and should never be normal.”
That is their stated goal, to tear apart or “dismantle” the very culture of America which they proclaim to be toxic or evil. They proudly declare themselves the enemy of America as they seek to teach American children. This is the very definition of a counter-culture which sociologists define as a sub-culture opposed to the values and mores of the main or parent culture.
To effect this destruction of what they label the “white supremacy culture” of mathematics, they propose a five step process as “outlined in the California Standards for the Teaching Profession”, couching their ideology in the proper terms of educational bureaucrats.
What is this dangerous “white supremacy culture”? Why the focus “on getting the ‘right’ answer” of course. This is backed up by demanding that the teachers accept idiotic, nonsense statements like “‘Real-world math’ is valued over math in the real world.” If you can interpret that into anything resembling English . . . then you are a liar.
The individual is to be dismissed in favor of teamwork and collaboration, just so that people who actually understand the math are chagrined for their “dominant ways of being” and pressured to repent.
I could go through the whole thing doing nothing but pointing out the endless meaningless words and phrases, such as “deconstruct”, “ethnomathematics”, “culturally sustaining math space”, “scaffolding”, and “mathematical ancestry”. All of that foolishness was just one lone paragraph, it drones on and on mindlessly, but to what purpose? To “prepare students of color to close the gap in access to stem fields”, of course.
If the student fails to understand math, it must be the system’s fault, can’t blame the teacher, can’t blame the student, it must be some vague error in the system somewhere. But they will fix it, because enough racial guilt will fix anything! Actually, they already stated that they did not want to fix anything, the very people in control of the system want to tear down the system because the system is evil.
They want to “identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalism, imperialism, and racist views.” Never mind that these three things are not in any manner or any stretch of reason remotely related, to each other or to math, but the teacher is to presume that they are because the authors make no bones about it, the purpose of calling mathematics racist is just so that they can preach Marxism to the students and threaten the teachers if they don’t build Marxist ideology into the state schools.
It is the communist revolution in American schools. They are not shy about it. The teachers need to “expose students to examples of people who have used math as resistance” to “provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance.”
But what if making good little Marxist zealots by providing such revolutionary examples fails to teach the little tykes proper mathematics and they still get the answers wrong? “Recognize mistakes as miscommunicated knowledge.” Teachers are to shift the blame upon themselves, that is the whole method. The teacher should be feeling guilty is their non-white students are failing.
“White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when expectations are not met. This is a classic example of either/or thinking. If parents don’t show the characteristics of what I think a good parent is, then that parent is bad. If students don’t show the characteristics of what I think is a good student, then that student is bad. This thinking creates meritocracy in the classroom. Students have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and if they fail it is their fault. It does not give room for the systemic reasons students fail which often lie in problematic expectations.”
If you expect the students to learn, meet goals and acquire skills, you are the problem pushing white supremacy. The inmates are supposed to run the academic asylum. How well a teacher teaches is not to be measured by what the students learn, but how the parents and students feel about the job the teacher is doing.
This foolishness just keeps getting further and further afield as the exercise for teachers continues, to the point where they are encouraging the teachers to “incorporate true culturally relevant pedagogy, practice, and curriculum.” What does this even mean? They give examples: “Verbal Example” What are some of your family traditions that you are proud of? Would you be okay if we brought some of those into the classroom?”
This is not math! This has nothing to do with math!
This is an insane pretense that logic, reason, and philosophy of all western civilization oppresses those who would rather use feelings, intuition, and collectivism because they simply can’t be expected to do the former.
I began this article wanting to critique the vulgar insertion of racial identity politics into mathematics, but I find that I really can’t. The people behind this did not insert racist politics into the study of mathematics. There is no mathematics involved in this at all. They have abandoned both the mathematical processes and rational evaluation of solutions.
In short, they have replaced mathematics in its entirety with pure Marxist indoctrination through the mechanism of instilling revolutionary racism against the prevailing culture of America. These people are too stupid to criticize, too ignorant to recognize their own failings, and too arrogant to ever admit that they are wrong no matter how clear the evidence. Mostly because they have declared that evidence that they are wrong is proof that the person providing such evidence is racist and therefore should be ignored.
There is nothing redeemable or repairable about an education system which would permit this foolishness, let alone advocate it.
