In the year 2021, everything can and will be politicized. Numerous people enjoy mathematics because it is a predictable formula that makes sense. In 2019, before the pandemic completely disrupted education, the US ranked #30 for math scores among countries in the OECD, while China ranked #1 in science and mathematics.
California plans to promote a new way for children to learn math by implementing “woke” culture.
The academics observe California’s proposed K-12 framework:
- Promotes fringe teaching methods such as “trauma-informed pedagogy.”
- Distracts from actual mathematics by having teachers insert “environmental and social justice” into the math curriculum.
- Distracts from actual mathematics by assigning students—as schoolwork—tasks it says will solve “problems that result in social inequalities.”
- Urges teachers to take a “justice-oriented perspective at any grade level, K–12” and explicitly rejects the idea that mathematics itself is a “neutral discipline.”
- “Reject[s] ideas of natural gifts and talents” and discourages accelerating talented mathematics students.
Over 1,200 California academics have signed an open letter claiming the above would poeticize “k-12 math in a potentially disastrous way.” If Johnny has three apples and his friend has one, does this make Johnny part of the bourgeoisie?
America’s delusions of grandeur to become the social justice warrior of the world is destroying education. The academics fighting against this new curriculum stated why the East is dominating education and will raise the next generation of great minds:
“The claim that math is not accessible is an insult to the millennia of non-Western mathematicians and erases the contributions of cultures around the world to mathematics as we now know it. Large numbers of students in developing countries are currently succeeding in advanced mathematics, and American industries have been put in the position of having to encourage them to come to the United States to work.”
