The schools in Ontario, Canada, are offering a huge helping of “anti-racist education” along with the usual stuff such as variables and quadratic equations, and the important stuff such as multiplication and division.
Released last year, the ninth-grade plan includes “anti-racist” four times in just a few paragraphs.
Math, it avers, is quite subjective because Western man created it and it demands just one correct answer to a problem. In other words, math is subjective because it’s objective. “Mathematical knowledges” are also racist and “Eurocentric.”
“Inclusivity” in Math
A section of the curriculum titled “Human Rights, Equity, and Inclusive Education in Mathematics” says teachers must impart lessons about human rights along with the basics.
“In mathematics classrooms, teachers also provide opportunities for cross-curricular learning and for teaching about human rights,” the curriculum says:
To create anti-racist, anti-discriminatory learning environments, all educators must be committed to equity and inclusion and to upholding and promoting the human rights of every learner.
As well, “high-quality instruction that emphasizes deep mathematical thinking and cultural and linguistic knowledge and that addresses issues of power and social justice in mathematics education is the foundation of culturally responsive and relevant pedagogy (CRRP) in mathematics,” the curriculum continues. “In CRRP classrooms, teachers reflect on their own identities and pay attention to how those identities affect their teaching, their ideas, and their biases.”
“Anti-racist” surfaces again in this nonsense:
In an anti-racist and anti-discriminatory environment, teachers know that there is more than one way to develop a solution, and students are exposed to multiple ways of knowing and encouraged to explore multiple ways of finding answers.
All that’s bad enough. Instead of teaching math, instructors will obsess about “anti-racism” and creating an “anti-discriminatory environment.”
But then comes the truly frightening claim: “An equitable mathematics curriculum recognizes that mathematics can be subjective,” the curriculum says, even though “mathematics is often positioned as an objective and pure discipline.”
Positioned?
The curriculum continues:
However, the content and the context in which it is taught, the mathematicians who are celebrated, and the importance that is placed upon mathematics by society are subjective. Mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges, and a decolonial, anti-racist approach to mathematics education makes visible its historical roots and social constructions. The Ontario Grade 9 mathematics curriculum emphasizes the need to recognize and challenge systems of power and privilege, both inside and outside the classroom, in order to eliminate systemic barriers and to serve students belonging to groups that have been historically disadvantaged and underserved in mathematics education.’’
The schools released a typically anodyne statement to the Toronto Sun.
“The world has changed, the economy has changed and so should the curriculum that inspires and informs our students and leaders of tomorrow,” a spokeswoman said:
That’s why our government was proud to launch a new curriculum that is focused on the job market, gives young people skills they can apply to their lives, to their households, to their personal budgeting, with an emphasis on financial literacy.
We are taking action to ensure all children, especially those facing barriers to success, have meaningful pathways to quality learning, graduation, access to post-secondary education and good-paying jobs.
Seattle Insanity
Ontario is, apparently, two years behind the curve. In 2019, the schools in Seattle, Washington, decided that math is an instrument of “power and oppression.” Students there, the schools decreed, would learn “the ways in which individuals and groups define mathematical knowledge so as to see ‘Western’ mathematics as the only legitimate expression of mathematical identity and intelligence.”
That “definition of legitimacy is then used to disenfranchise people and communities of color. This erases the historical contributions of people and communities of color.”
That curricular achievement asks students to ponder these questions: “How important is it to be Right? What is Right? Says Who?”
In August 2020, a math teacher tweeted that “the idea that math is objective or neutral IS A MYTH.” As well, “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy.”
In late 2020, a nutty professor at the University of Rhode Island declared that “science, statistics, and technology are all inherently racist because they are developed by racists who live in a racist society, whether they identify as racists or not.”
That claim inspired this rejoinder: “And therefore racism is responsible for all meaningful advancements in our society.”
One day, the math-impaired students victimized by these leftist curricula will build bridges and buildings. Or toil at pharmaceutical companies. Or go to medical school. Regardless of the deaths they cause, at least they will have learned that being “right” is a matter of “power and oppression” and “white supremacist patriarchy.”
H/T: Legal Insurrection
