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In Seattle, mathematics is no longer a matter of addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, or integers, fractions, and variables.
A government-school document shows that students in Seattle will learn math in an “ethnic studies framework” that depicts the subject as oppressive, and that the right answer to a math question might be relative to a person’s ethnicity and culture.
Upshot of the course: Math is a racist tool the white man uses to oppress “people of color.”
Words are nearly insufficient to describe the insanity of the proposal, but words aren’t really necessary.
The curriculum itself does a pretty good job. It is self-evidently idiotic.
Three Parts
The “framework,” which radio talker Jason Rantz of 770KTTH reported as “preliminary,” comprises three parts: themes, learning targets, and essential questions.
The five themes define what students will learn in a few brief sentences. “Origins, Identity, and Agency” will teach students that “mathematical theory and application is rooted in the ancient histories of people and empires of color.”
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“Power and Oppression” will impart another dubious lesson: “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. This definition of legitimacy is then used to disenfranchise people and communities of color. This erases the historical contributions of people and communities of color.”
In other words, math is racist.
“Access to mathematical knowledge itself is an act of liberation” that will partly define the theme entitled “History of Resistance and Liberation.”
Some of the “Learning Targets” include these items:
• Analyze the ways in which ancient mathematical knowledge has been appropriated by Western culture.
• Identify how the development of mathematics has been erased from learning in school.
• Identify how math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color.
• Explain how math and technology and/or science are connected and how technology and/or science have been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color.
• Critique systems of power that deny access to mathematical knowledge to people and communities of color.
• Identify the inherent inequities of the standardized testing system used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color.
Is Any Answer Really “Right?”
Up next for the students are “essential questions” that aren’t essential to anyone but the eggheads and social justice warriors who concocted this cockamamie yet dangerous course.
The overall question of “what does it mean to do math” will impart the truth that one man’s “right” answer might not be another’s.
The insights in this subset of questions include these gems: “How important is it to be Right? What is Right? Says Who?”
Just “what does it mean to make a mistake? In the classroom? In my home? In my community?”
Questions under “Power and Oppression” and the “History of Resistance and Liberation” are even better: “Who holds power in a mathematical classroom,” and “who gets say if an answer is right?”
Presumably, not the teacher, especially if he or she is white, but anyway, students will be asked whether they can “recognize and name oppressive mathematical practices in your experience?”
That’s code for “did the teacher mark you answer wrong,” but anyway, other questions no one is asking except the SJWs and eggheads include these:
• How is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to persist?
• Who is doing the oppressing?
• Who does the oppression protect? Who does this oppression harm?
• How can math help us understand the impact of economic conditions and systems that contribute to poverty and slave labor?
Just “how has math been used to resist and liberate people and communities of color from oppression?” the framework asks, and “how can we use data to resist and liberate?”
Be Very Afraid
The students who ingest this mind-numbing moonshine will become doctors and pharmacists, chemists and physicists, and architects and engineers.
And having learned that the right answer might not be the “right” answer for the “oppressed” who need “liberation,” they will fill prescriptions and test, manufacture, and prescribe drugs, or design and build roads, highways, bridges, and skyscrapers. They will design airplanes and automobiles and rockets, missiles, and weapons.
And they will write the software for the computers they design and build to do all these things.
The proposal is, again, preliminary.
But if a bridge collapses, or a building falls, or 2,500 die after taking an improperly titrated drug, we’ll know to ask the person responsible where he learned math.
Image: Ridofranz via iStock / Getty Images Plus
