Religion is a Mental Illness

Opinion | California’s Weapons of Math Destruction

The state’s new teaching framework tries to ‘combat inequities’ and pushes ‘social justice work.’

WSJ

The California State Board of Education issued on July 12 a new framework for teaching math based on what it calls “updated principles of focus, coherence, and rigor.” The word “updated” is certainly accurate. Not so much “principles,” “focus,” “coherence” or “rigor.” California’s new approach to math is as unfair as it is unserious.

The framework is voluntary, but it will heavily influence school districts and teachers around the Golden State. Developed over the past four years, it runs nearly 1,000 pages. Among the titles of its 14 chapters are “Teaching for Equity and Engagement,” “Structuring School Experiences for Equity and Engagement” and “Supporting Educators in Offering Equitable and Engaging Mathematics Instruction.” The guidelines demand that math teachers be “committed to social justice work” to “equip students with a toolkit and mindset to identify and combat inequities with mathematics”—not with the ability to do math. Far more important is teaching students that “mathematics plays a role in the power structures and privileges that exist within our society.”

California’s education bureaucrats are seeking to reinvent math as a grievance study. “Big ideas are central to the learning of mathematics,” the framework insists, but the only big idea the document promotes is that unequal outcomes in math performance are proof of a racist society.

To achieve equal outcomes, the framework favors the elimination of “tracking,” by which it means the practice of identifying students with the potential to do well. This supposedly damages the mental health of low-achieving students. The problem is that some students simply are better at math than others. To close the gap, the authors of the new framework have decided essentially to eliminate calculus—and to hold talented students back.

The framework recommends that Algebra I not be taught in middle school, which would force the course to be taught in high school. But if the students all take algebra as freshmen, there won’t be time to fit calculus into a four-year high-school program. And that’s the point: The gap between the best and worst math students will become less visible.

As written, the framework appears to violate the California Mathematics Placement Act of 2015, which requires proper courses for advanced students. A petition signed by roughly 6,000 parents and other concerned citizens may have spurred the drafters of the framework to add an amendment that reads, “Students may take Algebra 1 or Mathematics 1 in middle school.” But the completed document still pushes students not to take algebra in middle school. Instead, the framework recommends investigating whether the traditional five-year progression—Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Precalculus (including trigonometry) and Calculus—could be shortened so students would still be able to take calculus during senior year. As it stands now, students must either double up or enroll in a summer course to be able to take calculus—or go to a private school, which students from underprivileged backgrounds can’t afford to do.

A growing opposition from college professors should embarrass the Board of Education. More than 400 professors were incensed by a proposed data-science course as a math track that students might follow instead of Algebra II. “For students to be prepared for STEM and other quantitative majors in 4-year colleges . . . learning Algebra II in high school is essential,” they wrote in an open letter. “This cannot be replaced with a high-school statistics or data-science course, due to the cumulative nature of mathematics.”

Brian Conrad, a mathematics professor at Stanford, has created a website to debunk the framework. He writes that the California framework “selectively cites research to make points it wants to make,” and that it “contains false or misleading descriptions of many citations from the literature in neuroscience, acceleration, de-tracking, assessments, and more.” He gets so worked up that he calls a version of chapters 6 and 7 (which respectively cover kindergarten through fifth grade and sixth through eighth grades) an “embarrassment to professionalism.”

The jargon- and acronym-laden California framework, Mr. Conrad says, “promotes a cartoon view” of how students acquire “reliable mathematical skills.” It is equivalent, he says, to supporting that children need not “learn how to spell because there are spell-checkers and spelling is not part of analytical thinking.” The five-member writing team, supervised by a 20-member oversight team, didn’t collaborate with any recognized STEM experts in industry about what training graduates will need in the workplace, Mr. Conrad says.

“Those who claim to be champions of equity should put more effort and resources into helping all students to achieve real success in learning mathematics,” Mr. Conrad says, “rather than using illegal artificial barriers, misrepresented data and citations, or fake validations to create false optics of success.” California should stop trying to turn math into a social-science course.

Public Comments on the CMF

Background Introduction. High school students and parents deserve transparent, honest information about math skills required to earn degrees

sites.google.com

California’s War on Math

The new California Mathematics Framework promises to minimize racial inequity at the expense of mathematical excellence—and the promise of t

https://www.thefp.com/

“California is America, only sooner” was an optimistic phrase once used to describe my home state. The Golden State promised a spirit of freedom, innovation, and experimentation that would spread across the nation. And at the heart of the state’s flourishing was a four-letter word: math.

Math made California prosper.

It’s most obvious in top universities like Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, and UCLA. Those schools funneled great minds into California STEM enterprises like Silicon Valley, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and aeronautical engineering. Both the Central Valley and Hollywood—America’s main providers of food and fodder, respectively—rely upon engineering to mechanize production and optimize output. 

All of this has made California’s GDP $3.6 trillion—making it the fifth largest economy in the world as of last year.

But now “California is America, only sooner” is a warning, and not just because of the exodus of people and jobs and the decay of our major cities, but because of the state’s abandonment of math—which is to say its abandonment of excellence and, in a way, reality itself. 

Perhaps you’ve read the headlines about kooky San Francisco discarding algebra in the name of anti-racism. Now imagine that worldview adopted by the entire state.

On July 12, that’s what happened when California’s Board of Education, composed of eleven teachers, bureaucrats, professors—and a student—decided to approve the California Mathematics Framework. 

Technically, the CMF is just a series of recommendations. As a practical matter, it’s the new reality. School districts and textbook manufacturers are already adapting to the new standards.

Here are some of them:

• Most students won’t learn algebra until high school. In the past, when that was expected of middle schoolers, the CMF tells us, “success for many students was undermined.” 
• This means calculus will mostly be verboten, because students can’t take calculus “unless they have taken a high school algebra course or Mathematics I in middle school.”
• “Detracking” (ending advanced courses) will be the law of the land until high school; students will be urged to “take the same rich mathematics courses in kindergarten through eighth grade.”
• Lessons will foreground “equity” at the expense of teaching math basics like addition and subtraction. “Under the framework, the range of student backgrounds, learning differences, and perspectives, taken collectively, are seen as an instructional asset that can be used to launch and support all students in a deep and shared exploration of the same context and open task,” the CMF continues. It adds that “learning is not just a matter of gaining new knowledge—it is also about growth and identity development.”
• Letter grades will be discouraged in favor of “standards-based assessments.” (It’s unclear what those are.) 

Never mind that before California lowered its standards, the United States already ranked far behind the best-performing countries in math—places like Singapore, China, Estonia, and Slovenia. All those countries teach high school students calculus and, in some cases, more advanced linear algebra. (If we’re really in the midst of a cold war with China, we sure aren’t acting like it.)

The California Board of Education thinks the CMF is exactly what’s needed. That’s because the board has a fundamentally different approach to education—and it’s important that all Californians, indeed, all Americans, understand that. 

The board’s overriding concern is not education or mathematical excellence, but minimizing racial inequity. Since a disproportionate number of white and Asian kids perform at the high end of the mathematics spectrum, and a disproportionate number of black and Latino children are at the bottom end, the board was left with two options: pull the bottom performers up, or push the top performers down. They did the easier thing.

In case anyone is wondering whether this works, whether it actually achieves greater racial equity, we need only look to San Francisco, which adopted CMF proposals like detracking before the CMF formally did. 

“I want to be very clear on one fact that is based in our data: our current approach to math in SFUSD is not working,” San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Matt Wayne said. “That is a tragedy, because we want to do right by our students. And we’re not meeting our goals around math. And particularly our students, especially black and brown students, are not benefiting from the current way we do math in the district.”

I emailed Jo Boaler, a Stanford education professor, one of the CMF’s authors, and a co-founder of youcubed, a center at Stanford that has pioneered ideas about equity and math education that figure prominently in the plan. I wanted to know what I was missing. What Matt Wayne was missing. 

Boaler replied that she didn’t have much to say about the CMF and that she was a “small cog in the system that produced the framework.”

When I pressed her to see if she could offer any thoughts about the ideas behind the CMF—ideas she’s well versed in—she suggested I speak with “lead writer” Brian Lindaman, a math education professor at Chico State. Lindaman did not reply to my email.

Eventually, I did manage to speak with Kyndall Brown, the executive director of UCLA’s California Mathematics Project, which is charged with implementing the CMF.

I started by saying the CMF is clearly focused on racial inequity—noting, for example, that Chapter 2 is all about equity and that it’s shot through with mentions of racial “disparities” and “gaps” when it comes to “student outcomes.”

Brown, who, like other CMF supporters, believes those disparities are largely, if not entirely, the fault of racially or culturally insensitive teaching methods, replied simply: “Do you know how racist that sounds?”

When I asked him what, exactly, was racist about that, he replied: “What mathematicians of color did you learn about as a student? What female mathematicians did you learn about?” (He appeared to be alluding to medieval Arab contributions to the fields of algebra and number theory—which are fascinating and important when studying the history of ideas, but not obviously germane when teaching ninth graders about quadratic equations.)

The thing is, the CMF will exacerbate racial inequities. I went to a private school in Los Angeles filled with white and Asian students, and I know exactly how those kids—and definitely their parents—would react if they were told they could no longer take advanced math. They would enroll in rigorous programs outside school, like the Russian School of Mathematics, that would push them way beyond wherever their peers are. By the time college applications came along, the racial gap would be more like a yawning chasm.

I turned to Alan Schoenfeld, a Berkeley education professor who advised members of the Board of Education on the CMF, to see what he thought about this, and he said the same thing opponents of affirmative action have—that lower-performing students might perform better and develop greater confidence if they’re in a less rigorous environment. “Now some of them are going to turn out to enjoy mathematics, and they’re going to pursue mathematical careers,” Schoenfeld told me.

Ian Rowe, a CMF critic best known for founding several independent schools in the Bronx, said of the plan’s supporters: “They’ve embraced this ideology of oppressor-oppressed framework, where it’s assumed that black kids are these marginalized, oppressed human beings, and white kids are somehow the privileged oppressors. You see this all across the country, where expectations are being lowered in the name of equity by teachers and principals to somehow level the playing field.”

Let’s be clear: the CMF is racism pretending to be progressive, and all the fancy ed speak—about “frameworks” and “detracking” and “identity development”—can’t obscure as much. Indeed, the ideological gap is basically nonexistent between CMF supporters and reactionaries who once thought black and Latino kids were cognitively or culturally incapable of advanced mathematics. 

We should be blaring this from the rooftops and on our social media feeds, over and over—lest we lose the California Dream, a.k.a. the American Dream, which once made this place so special.

"Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes." -- Rob Henderson

"There cannot be a language more universal and more simple, more free from errors and obscurities… more worthy to express the invariable relations of all natural things [than mathematics]. [It interprets] all phenomena by the same language, as if to attest the unity and simplicity of the plan of the universe, and to make still more evident that unchangeable order which presides over all natural causes."

-- Joseph Fourier, "The Analytical Theory of Heat"

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science’, ‘Jewish science’ etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs – and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.

-- George Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943)

"One of the key contributions of critical theorists concerns the production of knowledge. Given that the transmission of knowledge is an integral activity in schools, critical scholars in the field of education have been especially concerned with how knowledge is produced. These scholars argue that a key element of social injustice involves the claim that particular knowledge is objective, neutral, and universal. An approach based on critical theory calls into question the idea that objectivity is desirable or even possible. The term used to describe this way of thinking about knowledge is that knowledge is socially constructed. When we refer to knowledge as socially constructed we mean that knowledge is reflective of the values and interests of those who produce it."

-- Ozlem Sensoy/Robin DiAngelo, "Is Everyone Really Equal?"

We are too scared to challenge 'decolonisation' of maths curriculum, top professors warn

Top academics to tell Government that new guidance 'risks politicising the subject of mathematics' in universities

The Telegraph

Maths professors at top UK universities will warn ministers on Thursday that academics are too scared to challenge damaging attempts to “decolonise” the curriculum.

A dozen leading academics have written to Claire Coutinho, the Education Minister, calling for more protections for free speech at universities, where many professors fear it is too “personally risky” to challenge the decolonisation agenda.

For maths degrees, professors are being pressured to explain how they are presenting a “multicultural and decolonised view” of the subject. In a recent consultation, the Quality Assurance Agency, which advises universities on course standards, said maths professors need to “present the work of a diverse group” of mathematicians, and ensure students are aware if they had “connections to the slave trade, racism or Nazism.”

A group of professors will warn on Thursday that such guidance “risks politicising the subject of mathematics and presenting a skewed perspective on its history.”

'Personally risky'

They said in a joint letter, seen by The Telegraph, that it also “infringes on the academic freedom of mathematicians to teach their subject according to their best professional judgement”. However, they warned that academics “who challenge orthodoxies on topics such as gender identification and diversity face physical intimidation from student activists”.  

“Many mathematicians see it as personally risky to suggest that 'decolonising the curriculum' might not be the best way to encourage more Black and minority ethnic people to take up mathematics,” they added.

Signatories of the letter include Prof Alan Sokal of University College London, Prof Abhishek Saha of Queen Mary University of London, Prof Jane Hutton, a medical statistician who works at the University of Warwick, and Dr Yuri Bazlov from the University of Manchester.

They are urging the Government to fight to pass the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill in its original form, despite opposition in the House of Lords. Clause 4 of the bill would give academics and students the power to sue universities if their freedom of speech rights are breached. The Government tabled amendments to the bill which would mean academics could only use those powers as a “last resort”, after first pursuing complaints through the procedures of the relevant university and the higher education regulator.

Personal cost of raising complaints 'far too high'

However, responding to the amendments, the mathematicians said: “We do not think this would give us the protection that we need. Universities have vast resources and power compared to individual academics. If academics are required to exhaust all internal processes…and then spend up to 12 months taking their complaint through the Office for Students before they can begin the lengthy process of going to the courts, we believe that the personal cost of raising any complaints would be far too high, rendering the system ineffective.” Ms Coutinho has previously said that the Government remains “resolute in our commitment that academics and speakers will have the right to go to court where this fundamental right has been denied.”

A spokesperson for Universities UK said: “Universities work hard to create the right conditions to protect and promote free speech and academic freedom across their campuses, and there are already significant legal duties placed on universities to uphold freedom of speech. The Government’s proposed changes to the Freedom of Speech Bill are helpful in making the new legal tort more targeted in scope, reducing the risk of university resources being wasted defending frivolous or vexatious claims.”

We are too scared to challenge 'decolonisation' of maths curriculum, top professors warn

Top academics to tell Government that new guidance 'risks politicising the subject of mathematics' in universities

www.telegraph.co.uk

Maths professors at top UK universities will warn ministers on Thursday that academics are too scared to challenge damaging attempts to “decolonise” the curriculum.

A dozen leading academics have written to Claire Coutinho, the Education Minister, calling for more protections for free speech at universities, where many professors fear it is too “personally risky” to challenge the decolonisation agenda.

For maths degrees, professors are being pressured to explain how they are presenting a “multicultural and decolonised view” of the subject. In a recent consultation, the Quality Assurance Agency, which advises universities on course standards, said maths professors need to “present the work of a diverse group” of mathematicians, and ensure students are aware if they had “connections to the slave trade, racism or Nazism.”

A group of professors will warn on Thursday that such guidance “risks politicising the subject of mathematics and presenting a skewed perspective on its history.”

'Personally risky'

They said in a joint letter, seen by The Telegraph, that it also “infringes on the academic freedom of mathematicians to teach their subject according to their best professional judgement”. However, they warned that academics “who challenge orthodoxies on topics such as gender identification and diversity face physical intimidation from student activists”.  

“Many mathematicians see it as personally risky to suggest that 'decolonising the curriculum' might not be the best way to encourage more Black and minority ethnic people to take up mathematics,” they added.

Signatories of the letter include Prof Alan Sokal of University College London, Prof Abhishek Saha of Queen Mary University of London, Prof Jane Hutton, a medical statistician who works at the University of Warwick, and Dr Yuri Bazlov from the University of Manchester.

They are urging the Government to fight to pass the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill in its original form, despite opposition in the House of Lords. Clause 4 of the bill would give academics and students the power to sue universities if their freedom of speech rights are breached. The Government tabled amendments to the bill which would mean academics could only use those powers as a “last resort”, after first pursuing complaints through the procedures of the relevant university and the higher education regulator.

Personal cost of raising complaints 'far too high'

However, responding to the amendments, the mathematicians said: “We do not think this would give us the protection that we need. Universities have vast resources and power compared to individual academics. If academics are required to exhaust all internal processes…and then spend up to 12 months taking their complaint through the Office for Students before they can begin the lengthy process of going to the courts, we believe that the personal cost of raising any complaints would be far too high, rendering the system ineffective.” Ms Coutinho has previously said that the Government remains “resolute in our commitment that academics and speakers will have the right to go to court where this fundamental right has been denied.”

A spokesperson for Universities UK said: “Universities work hard to create the right conditions to protect and promote free speech and academic freedom across their campuses, and there are already significant legal duties placed on universities to uphold freedom of speech. The Government’s proposed changes to the Freedom of Speech Bill are helpful in making the new legal tort more targeted in scope, reducing the risk of university resources being wasted defending frivolous or vexatious claims.”

“You don’t evaluate mathematics by the standards of poetry, or poetry by the standards of mathematics.“

-- Professor Jane Hutton

Andrew: Top academics have warned the government that new guidance for Universities risks "politicising" the subject of mathematics. For maths degrees, professors have to explain how they are presenting a "multicultural and decolonised" view of the subject. The academics sent a joint letter, seen by GBNews, that such guidance risks politicising the subject of mathematics and presenting a skewed perspective on its history, and infringes on the academic freedom of mathematicians to teach their subject according to their best professional judgement.

One of the dozen professors who put their name to the letter is Professor Jane Hutton from the Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick, and she joins me now.

Can I ask you first and foremost about this notion of decolonisation? Because I understand that this came in largely through the Humanities, English Literature, that kind of subject, the Social Sciences. But surely, mathematics and sciences, these things should be immune to those other culture war concerns.

Hutton: Well, yes, that's interesting. I mean, this time next week I'll be in Cameroon in Africa, at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences with 60 students from all over Africa, my eleventh time of going out to volunteer to teach that. And when I was there in January 2022, I watched something about Critical Race Theory set up by North American liberals, and frankly, the Africans were appalled. They're not interested in becoming a colony, succumbing to cultural imperialism from North American liberals. They want to learn mathematics. And those of us who are mathematicians are well aware of how international the subject is.

Andrew: Can I ask you, to what extent do mathematicians in this country feel under pressure to accommodate these palpably ideological ideas within their subject?

Hutton: Very much so. I am willing to speak out, but very few of my colleagues are, and they will send me emails and thank me for speaking out, but they will not allow themselves to be identified. I'm talking about colleagues, senior managers, professors, IT staff, cleaners, gardeners. They know I'll speak out, but they're appalled by this behaviour, and other issues coming from this whole North American liberal imperialism.

Andrew: Professor Hutton, can I ask you what specificially are they asking you to do, exactly? I've seen, for instance, people say that in engineering, for instance, when you're teaching about Isaac Newton you should discuss his problematic views on race, as that was in any way relevant to the law of motion. What are they specifically asking mathematicians to do in these courses?

Hutton: Well, they're not even actually asking mathematicians to cover an intelligent and intellectual discussion. They're asking us to propagate their ideas. For example, they will have particular views on, say, [Kanakanahalli] Ramachandra, or in statistics one of the things we teach is the Rao–Blackwell theorem. C.R. Rao is an Indian, David Blackwell was an African-American. But we don't spend our time focussing on that, we focus on the mathematics. And there's a time and place for everything, as Aristotle pointed out, you don't evaluate mathematics by the standards of poetry, or poetry by the standards of mathematics.

And what surprises me, you know, I'm not a historian, I'm not a philosopher, but it's the sheer ignorance of so much of what these people propose, and the reluctance -- it's intellectually lazy. So, you can't ask a question like "how come Critical Race Theory says that being white is an absolutely dreadful thing, you can't say you don't have these prejudices, you are irredeemably white, but if you're a man, you can become a woman just by saying so. Why are these two completely, thoroughly, genetically physically-centred properties treated so differently?” But I know perfectly well that I am likely to get a whole lot of abuse for even raising the question.

Andrew: But of course, identity politics has very little to do with mathematics. Surely, in mathematics the answer is either right or wrong? I don't have any expertise in this area, but you can correct me if I'm wrong about that.

Hutton: Yes, and that makes mathematics very unpopular. I've had to deal with people trying to teach us that in teaching, we must never tell a student they’ve got the right answer or the wrong answer. To which I say, you're a parasitical hypocrite. We wouldn't be talking to one another, using the equipment we're using, without a lot of people getting things very, very precisely right, in engineering and mathematics.

Andrew: So, is this quite commonplace, the idea that students should not be told that they are wrong? How can they possibly improve?

Hutton: Yes, I acted both training PhD students as teachers, and junior colleagues as teachers, and that used to be the standard rhetoric from the social sciences. "The mature learner knows that there's no right answer."

Andrew: But does this not patronise students needlessly? Aren't the students annoyed at being patronised in this way?

Hutton: Yes. Yes. I put up an article saying debate on gender dysphoria is being silenced. The equality officer stirred up a manager to sound of outrage and said, "you put it on a noticeboard where students might see it!" So, I asked the PhD students [..] what they thought of this and they said "thank you very much for talking, we are appalled that at the University of Warwick," which is not particularly bad, we have a very good Vice Chancellor, "at the University of Warwick, to discuss the topic which is subject of a public consultation, we have to go into an office and lock the doors and whisper." Why is this what the University of Warwick is offering us?

Andrew: Professor, that is at least reassuring that some of the students themselves are not putting up with this.

“Another aspect of the construction of whiteness is the way certain groups have moved into or out of that race. For example, early in our history Irish, Jews, and Italians were considered nonwhite—that is, on a par with African Americans. Over time, they earned the prerogatives and social standing of whites by a process that included joining labor unions, swearing fealty to the Democratic Party, and acquiring wealth, sometimes by illegal or underground means. Whiteness, it turns out, is not only valuable; it is shifting and malleable.”

-- ”Critical Race Theory (Third Edition)”, Delgado, Richard; Stefancic, Jean; Harris, Angela

“Yet while many Ashkenazic Jewish people may not feel fully white, if they are of European heritage they are perceived as white by the culture at large, and thus granted white privilege. In many ways the process of assimilation into whiteness for European Jewish immigrants was the same as that of other European immigrants (Brodkin, 1998). Under the current racial construction, while Ashkenazic Jews expe­rience anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism is in part based on perceptions of ethnicity, their race is white. In other words, Ashkenazic Jews can experi­ence anti-Semitism and also benefit from white privilege.”

-- ”What Does It Mean to be White?”, Robin DiAngelo

‘Decolonise’ maths by subtracting white male viewpoint, urges Durham University

A new guide says professors must question themselves if they are citing work from ‘mostly white or male’ mathematicians

The Telegraph

The mathematics curriculum at a leading university is being “decolonised”, with professors urged to write biographies of theorists, question if they are mostly white or male, and consider the cultural origins of numbers.

Durham University’s decolonisation campaign has swept up the department of mathematical sciences, where all staff are being urged to make the subject “more inclusive” and ensure “maths can be used to aid attempts to secure equality”.

Its new guide for academics says that “decolonising the mathematical curriculum means considering the cultural origins of the mathematical concepts, focusses, and notation we most commonly use”.

Scholars at the Russell Group university, ranked seventh in the UK for maths, have been urged to reconsider how “the power of 10, represented by the word ‘billion’, differs from country to country” and how Brahmagupta, the famed Indian mathematician, assigned a different meaning to the value of zero.

They are told that “the question of whether we have allowed Western mathematicians to dominate in our discipline is no less relevant than whether we have allowed western authors to dominate the field of literature”.

“It may even be more important, if only because mathematics is rather more central to the advancement of science than is literature,” the decolonising guide says. Staff are urged to consider giving short biographies of the mathematicians whose work they present in their modules and are encouraged to question themselves if they choose predominantly “white and/or male” figures.

If the mathematicians are “almost entirely (or even completely) white and/or male, ask yourself why this is,” the guide states.

‘Ditch the Titanic, use Maori jurists instead’

And when using real-world examples to illustrate mathematical puzzles, staff are encouraged to “consider whether you can present the context outside of a Western frame of reference”.

Giving an example for statistics modules, the guide says that Simpson’s paradox is often illustrated using survivors of the Titanic and enrolments in an American university, but an alternative that “decentres Europe” involves “the under-representation of Maori in New Zealand jury pools”.

On Friday, scholars questioned whether it was appropriate for the objective discipline of maths to be conflated with subjective approaches to the past.

Prof Doug Stokes, a social sciences expert at Exeter University, told The Telegraph: “The idea behind decolonising maths is that because everyone should be regarded as equal, the status of their beliefs must also be equal.

“This judgmental relativism is an inversion of science that is based on what is real rather than making everybody feel included. Science and reason are what has led humanity out of the darkness and we jettison their precious light at our peril.”

Durham’s new guide points scholars to “ethnomathematics”, a new discipline emerging on campuses of tying maths to culture, saying “mathematics and culture are not always disentangled”.

Examples given include the “American version won out” of 10^9, for power of ten represented by a billion, which was different to the British 10^12.

Highlighting the contributions of Indian mathematicians, the manual concludes that “it might then be inaccurate to suggest mathematics is a universal language” and scholars should ensure the discipline “genuinely is global, frankly assessing the discipline’s failures - past and present - to work toward that aim”.

Top historians have branded decolonising as “anti-intellectual”.

Last month, the Conservative Party chairman said in a speech on cancel culture that a West “confident in its values” would not be “obsessing over pronouns or indeed seeking to decolonise mathematics”.

Like most British universities, many departments at Durham have established decolonising panels. Durham University Business School has said that by 2022/23, no student will be able to complete a degree there “without significant exposure” to decolonisation issues.

A Durham University spokesman said: “Mathematical sciences at Durham are a rigorous and comprehensive discipline.

“The maths curriculum our students learn remains the same, but we also encourage students to be more aware of the global and diverse origins of the subject, and the range of cultural settings that have shaped it. Two plus two will always equal four.”

In December 2021, Durham was embroiled in a row over free speech following a student walk-out during an address by Rod Liddle, an associate editor of The Spectator, who students accused of making “transphobic, sexist, racist and classist remarks”.

The incident led to Professor Tim Luckhurst, founding Principal of the university's South College, calling students “pathetic”.

Prof Luckhurst later apologised for the remark.

“My anger reflected my sincere commitment to freedom of speech,” he wrote in an email to students. “However, I was wrong to describe the students' action as pathetic and I apologise unreservedly for doing so."

The Catholic Position

What is the Catholic position concerning belief or unbelief in evolution? The question may never be finally settled, but there are definite parameters to what is acceptable Catholic belief.

"...everyone must “confess the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, as regards their whole substance, have been produced by God from nothing”

“...if they did develop, then they did so under the impetus and guidance of God, and their ultimate creation must be ascribed to him.”

"...we are required to hold as a matter of Catholic faith that the human soul is specially created; it did not evolve, and it is not inherited from our parents, as our bodies are.”

"... it in no circumstances permits belief in atheistic evolution.”

ATTENTION TO DETAIL IS WHITE?

The roots of this notion polluting our schools that it's racist to make a black student actually answer the question.

johnmcwhorter.substack.com|John McWhorter

The organization 1776Unites, founded by my mentor and model Bob Woodson, has tweeted out a video where various black people decry a now fashionable idea that “whiteness” includes being smart. As in, precise, objective, fond of the written word, oriented towards dispassion, on time.

Those things are all manifestations of intelligence, vigilance, discipline. But according to our Elect folk, we black people are best off channeling our Crazy Badass Mothafucka. Because that’s more “authentic.” And, I get the feeling, fun to watch.

Because so many think that the battle that I and others are waging against Critical Race Theory’s transmogrification into education for children is an obsession with something that isn’t a real problem, I want to explore a bit. Someone I deeply respect not long ago surmised to me that the idea that black kids should be exempt from real standards is something being promulgated via mere paper “handouts,” and that the real problem is censorship from the right. I just don’t think so.

First, watch this, the 1776Unites video. Just a few minutes.

And now, as to what we are referring to, it starts actually before last summer. I knew something was really wrong when in 2019 at a conference in New York City for the city’s principals and superintendents, participants were presented with an idea that to teach with sensitivity to race issues meant keeping certain issues in mind.

These included ways of looking at things that are “white” rather than correct: namely, objectivity, individualism, and valuing the written word. Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza was fine with this, happily telling the media that it’s white people’s job to do the “work” of identifying the racist assumptions in how they go about their business.

So: to stand outside of matters and analyze them with one’s own private mind, and perhaps couch one’s conclusions with the considered artifice of writing rather than the spontaneity of speaking, is inauthentic for black and Latino people. It is racist to impose such things on black and Latino (and Native American?) kids. Or at best, brown kids should be taught this uptight “white” business only as a gloomy alternative to the realness of just hanging out sharing passing personal impressions via chatting.

And this goes even further back. I recall reading a black academic casually writing that “linear reasoning” is something somehow “other” for black students as far back as the 1990s. I even encountered him, as a grad student, in an elevator then. This was long before anybody not my friend knew who I was; I had written nothing. But I followed his writings, and asked him very genially what he meant. He very genially said he didn’t remember writing what I was referring to. Maybe he didn’t. It was, for the record – get this – my main inspiration Shelby Steele’s twin brother Claude, a psychologist.

But this Carranza business in NYC was not just an eccentric happening at one meeting in one city one year. It is now, well, epidemic.

The Voice and Speech Trainers Association has posted a “White Supremacy Culture Daily Self-Check-in” ushering members through exactly this kind of mantra, including “The belief that progress is bigger and more” and “Fear of open conflict” as “white” things to cleanse yourself of. In other words, one is supposed to distrust wanting to expand or increase, and one is to cherish people yelling at each other, which, I’m sorry, is a cute way of saying that America needs some ghetto authenticity in the way people talk to each other when they disagree.

If you find this stuff peculiar, talk to someone you know who has attended a school of education and you will likely find that they are quite familiar with the perspective. It is totemically put forth, for example, in a book by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun called Dismantling Racism: a Workbook for Social Change Groups. Note this codeword dismantling – the Elect idea that studiously abjuring, in some abstract sense, “whiteness” is a necessary prelude to a new world order.

This view of precision and detachment as white is a view about, more economically, reason. The idea is that to master close reasoning is suspect. It is exactly the roots of the “Math is Racist” notion, and if you want a whiff of how religiously people can glom on to such ideas, take a look at my Twitter feed in the week after I posted about that here.

Yet, seeing this educational philosophy laid out in the sunlight, The Elect cannot dismiss it as fringe “kookiness” -- unless they want to insult the curators of a national museum devoted to celebrating the very black people The Elect live to liberate. At the African-American History Museum in Washington, D.C., for a hot minute or two in 2020 you could see a variation on the Jones-Okun business, an expanded presentation of what we must reject as “white” evil. An educational poster was displayed that slammed not only objectivity, individualism, and writing, but linear thinking, quantitative reasoning, the Protestant work ethic, planning for the future, and being on time.

Yes, this was real – from people who surely bemoan the stereotype of black people as dumb and lazy! Again, only a mental override could explain why the people responsible for this display would allow that emblazonment of precisely the stereotypes lobbed at black people for centuries. Tarring whites as imposers of alien values felt more important than considering that the poster depicted black people as gorillas – and was created by a white woman!

And because this was enshrined at America’s flagship museum of black history, we can’t say that this sort of thing is just “woo-woo” sidebar nonsense. The museum yanked it down when the media got a sniff, but they had made a highly indicative statement in having hung it in the first place. Namely, they subordinated logic – that black people should not embrace being semiliterate, unanalytical and tardy – to the religious score of identifying racism regardless of logic (as in, here, the racism of whites expecting blacks to in any way be “like them”). Let us pray.

The Elect’s last stand will be that this was just a mistake made by a curator or two at that one museum. But the idea that it is unfair to expect quantitative reasoning from black people has taken quite a hold among many black academics.

I have heard a respected black American academic openly assert, to a mostly white audience cowed into allowing it as a valid perspective, that to require black scholars in the social sciences to crunch numbers is racist. The idea seems to be that mathematical reasoning is not “how we black people think” and that telling stories and expressing feelings is of equivalent empirical force to what numbers teach. But no one asks for an explanation as to how, because they know that the response would be their censure on social media as a moral pervert.

She was not the only black scholar I have heard making this kind of argument, and many academics reading this likely have heard it. So, now, have Mr. and Mrs. Reading-Person America. Ibram Kendi is an advocate of the idea that precision, and being able to demonstrate it, is to ask black kids to perform “inauthentically.” That there are ways of “knowing” beyond the kind that require rigorous training to master is behind passages such as his venturing in the Elect Biblical testament How to Be an Antiracist:

“What if we measured intelligence by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environments? What if we measured intellect by an individual’s desire to know?”

Anyone who sings of this book as prophecy is saying that a passage like that makes sense, despite it being a savage smack in the face on any black person in America. Translation: we should elevate that which students take in subconsciously without effort – e.g. street smarts, emotional empathy, and “spunk.” If a white man smilingly encouraged black people to be satisfied with this he would look like a bigot in a daguerrotype. Kendi thinks we should redefine braininess as just being “swell.” As opposed to the oh-so-benighted idea of helping black kids do better on tests – but no: to him that’s giving in to “whiteness.” But the world of decentered “whiteness” – i.e. that spunky, funky, holistic, intuitive world where everybody dances to hiphop and does what they feel like and, if they do science, focus on telling the older folks that they need to pay more attention to spunky, funky, holistic, intuitive, hip-hoppyness  -- would be one without electricity.

And in this Kendi is not a lone wolf, but a representative of a kind of thinking that has become “a thing” especially in the 2010s. Glenn Singleton is a black man and heads a diversity consultant firm. Asked how this notion of precision as whiteness will prepare brown kids for the world as we know it, he spoke of “a new world, a world, first and foremost, where we have elevated the consciousness, where we pay attention to the human being.” Note that first, this means nothing whatsoever. Note second that if it makes any kind of sense at all, it is as scripture. It sounds like something somewhere between Lost Horizon and The Ten Commandments, and has no more place in a modern educational philosophy than the Rigveda. The “diversity consultant” like Singleton is a priest.

Any white person who embraces the idea that precision is “white” is, quite simply, a bigot.

I pity them because what made them a bigot was infection by a virus idea.

There are worms which, as larvae, burrow into a grasshopper’s brain. (How does he know? I happen to like this kind of stuff – although I suppose it’s all a little precise for a black man …) The worms, as adults, are aquatic. They affect the grasshopper’s brain such that when the worms become adults, the grasshopper’s brain is transformed into driving the poor thing to seek water, dive into it, and drown – but allows the worms to be in water and thrive and reproduce.

Elect ideology makes good, smart white people drown themselves in nonsense.