The segment of the educational establishment that is promoting this very corrupted 'woke learning' is literally creating two classes of students; there will be the students who will suffer under 'woke education' and who will never be able to keep up with the second (and growing) class of students who will be attending 'unwoke' or traditional private & charter schools and/ or seeking other alternative ways of learning the tried-and-true methods of understanding math. It's goes without saying that Russia & China are laughing at us and loving this totally stupid period in our history. It is criminal. Bill and Melinda Gates should be shunned - they are living proof that too much money rots the heart & soul. But I'm guessing that what really is happening, is that very few math teachers today can really understand math or teach well....methinks this ludicrous turn of events is to mask their own inadequacies.
Power corrupts. Bill and Melinda Gates, and many, many others, are just the latest iteration of that truism. I can guarantee you that the people pushing this woke education are sending their own children to schools that actually teach objective skills. That way, their children will have a competitive advantage.
Correct! Did you catch the story yesterday of the President of the Berkley (CA) Teacher's Union dropping his daughter off at private school - while insisting that schools should remain closed for others? This malfeasance & dishonesty has to be called out and stopped....
Going into a field based on empiricism, I hope Bill Gates’ daughter isn’t using much subjectivity in her med school classes. Bill Gates also recently boasted that we’ll need tons of engineers in the future to advance green energy...if those engineers are taught using ethnomathematics, then we’re screwed. But of course, as others point out, the kids who were taught this garbage won’t be the ones who become engineers.
Unreal. The woke movement really excels at the soft bigotry of low expectations. Why engage in the hard work of coalition building required to actually fix schools and expand economic opportunity when you can either dupe or shame people into accepting shoddy education as anti-racism work? I've seen documents being pushed in my own workplace that describe everything from science, reason, time, math, and punctuality as white supremacy culture. It's runaway Lysenkoism.
I once almost leapt through the screen on the professional social media site that everyone uses when I saw JPL putting out some "women in STEM" bullshit that advertised that they had lots of careers for people who suck at math!
Which will of course solve the problem of massive pipeline leakage of women in STEM!
Cuz chicks can't do math, y'see.
Let's leave the existence of massive misogyny in STEM fields unremarked upon, and just reassure those silly girls that you can be stupid and still work at JPL.
It still cranks my blood pressure to think about it.
The idea that there is ‘massive misogyny’ in tech, is just PC nonsense. If you doubt this try reading “Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/). The presence or absence of women in tech is a function of interest, not discrimination. Here is a good quote from Scott Alexander.
“And if your answer is just going to be that apparently the negative stereotypes in engineering were stronger than the negative stereotypes about everything else, why would that be? Put yourself in the shoes of our Victorian sexist, trying to maintain his male privilege. He thinks to himself “Well, I suppose I could tolerate women doctors saving my life. And if I had to, I would accept women going into law and determining who goes free and who goes to jail. I’m even sort of okay with women going into journalism and crafting the narratives that shape our world. But women building bridges? NO MERE FEMALE COULD EVER DO SUCH A THING!” Really? This is the best explanation the world can come up with? Doesn’t anyone have at least a little bit of curiosity about this?”
Read it all. Women don’t go into engineering (notably software engineering) because they don’t want to (not interested), not because of ‘massive misogyny’. There is actually a funny quote about this.
"The question of why more women don't choose careers in engineering has a rather obvious answer," she says: "Because they don't want to.""Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks," said Hausman at the April symposium, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering. "Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works."
Peter Schaeffer: "Women don’t go into engineering (notably software engineering) because they don’t want to (not interested), not because of ‘massive misogyny’. There is actually a funny quote about this."
Agree. That's what the science says (and we don't want to be science deniers, do we :-). )
The Scandanavian experiences in egalitarian upbringing of children - where boys and girls are treated as much alike as possible in order to ensure that females are empowered to enter fields traditionally considered to be male fields (STEM) - shows just the opposite: the differences between male and female career selection is (counterintuitively) greater than in societies in which no special effort is made. (That was quite a surprise.)
Those results have been replicated many times across cultures.
(The assumption was that within the total human population the "biology of preference" is identical in males and females and any differences in occupation/career choices are due to cultural influences. This was an erroneous assumption.)
While the "bell curves" of male and female preferences ("things" at one end and "people" at the other) overlap hugely, it turns out that males are more interested in "things" and females in "people" irrespective of culture. Also, males are more physically aggressive while females tend to be more verbally aggressive.
These differences are the product of evolution.
These preference differences matter especially at the extremes of the overlapping bell-shaped curves: males, as a population (and accross cultures), being more interested in "things" means they are more likely to enter STEM fields, while females are more likely to enter fields that are more people-oriented.
Similarly, males being more physically aggressive means they are more likely to end up in the slammer for acts of violence than females.
Young girls are encouraged to play with dolls and look nice. Boys get building toys and fun machines that move. That's enough to explain the differences later in life.
PT, Sadly, you aren't keeping up with the current research on this subject. A few notes.
1. Newborns children (1 day old) show rather typical male/female interest patterns. The boys are already more interested in things and the girls are more interested in people. This fits rather well with a genetic model of sex-related interests and blows up the “cultural discrimination” model.
2, The juvenile forms of other primates behave much like human children. Male juvenile primates play with trucks. Female juvenile primates play with dolls.
3. In countries with less sex discrimination, children’s toys are just as sex differentiated as anywhere else. The nurture model suggests that children are socialized into specific sexual roles. Toy choices presumably reflect the nurture patterns of each society and culture. As such, it would be reasonable to expect that toys in countries with less sex discrimination would be less sex specific than societies with more sex discrimination. However, this turns out not to be the case.
Since 2000, American (and Western) society have moved radically to the “left” (the identity politics left, not the economic left). Cultural explanations of sex differences have become ever more commonplace and the associated ideology has been ever more rigidly enforced. Conversely, the scientific community has moved the other way. The volume of scientific data showing large, genetic differences has relentlessly grown to the point that anyone even trivially familiar with the literature finds “cultural explanations” laughable.
Basically, the political system has dug in with “The Sun orbits the Earth and you will pay dearly for daring to disagree” while the scientific community has embraced “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”. Consider the Larry Summers imbroglio. The math and science faculties supported him. The Liberal Arts faculties wanted him out. You would think that the accuracy of his comments might be relevant to a school with Veritas on its seal. You would be wrong.
I forgot to mention one other piece of salient data. That would be the tragic story of David Reimer. David Reimer was raised as a girl, but always felt he was a boy (which he was). For better or worse, sexual identity is deeply ingrained. It goes way beyond giving trucks to boys and dolls to girls. Of course, the David Reimer story is just an anecdote. However, there are many, many similar stories.
Sorry, but facts are facts, even if they are not PC, even if you don't like them. A few quotes may help you understand this.
Orwell - “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows”
John Adams - “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence”
Philip Dick - “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away”
Did none of them see “Hidden Figures?” I’m sure the astronauts were grateful for the correct equations those women mathematicians did that got them home safely.
This seeming demand that everyone is exactly the same and is capable or desirous of the exact same things denies each of us our uniqueness, and hence snuffs out whatever undiscovered things that could flower from that uniqueness. It’s beyond great that those ladies were so inclined to accomplish what they did in that situation, but that doesn’t mean that all women are exactly similarly capable or inclined. If you are saying keep that space wide open for the women that are capable of such accomplishments, then I’m all in. But there is this implication that all women deserve that space at all times, unrestrictedly regardless of their limitations or capacities and without having to prove anything. Which is quite the opposite of what those women did.
Scott Alexander addresses this point directly. Computers were one of the first fields open to women. When other fields opened up, women went else. The decline in female employment in computers, was a consequence of better opportunities elsewhere and a female preference for working with people rather than things. See “Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/)
I just finished a first tead of this long blog post, Prof Grant’s responses, and Scott’s responses to those answers. Whew! I will read again more thoroughly. Some really interesting studies cited, some really interesting ideas and conclusions, some of which I think are more correct than others, some of which I have questions about and some of which I think show more enthusiasm than accuracy. But it’s a blog, not a peer reviewed journal article so I can live with that.
It’s nice to hear/read some good and civil, gracious debate. What interests me the most is what the research isn’t finding yet, what we are missing. Both writers seem to agree that there is more to the issue than we see, that the theories and the current data are incomplete. I agree. But that’s because I am suspicious of either/or explanations and tend to think more things are both/and more often than we realize. I think it was Neils Bohr who said that the opposite of a deep truth was another deep truth.
As to how it relates to this current post of Bari’s and Prof Klainerman’s, both writers and I am sure everyone here agrees that there is no white math any more than there is gender math.
Thanks for the link and for letting me know about the blog.
I agree with your statement "no white math any more than there is gender math". However, lots of people don't. The deeper idea is that competence counts and can be measured. For better or worse (worse clearly), the "woke" reject that idea. For better or worse (worse clearly), they regard that idea as a 'white' idea and are opposed to it.
Of course, they same idea exists in many places (China, Japan, Asia generally, etc.) and is not 'white' by any means. However, the "woke" view it as 'white' and oppose it correspondingly.
I should note that idea that competence is a primary virtue is actually a somewhat modern (enlightenment) idea. For most of human history, the social standing of your parents (hereditary class) was far more important then mere competence.
Of course, race was also considered to more important than competence for most of human history.
It is a said (but true) comment on the "woke" that they have adopted some of the worst ideas in human history and rejected some of the best.
Software used to be the absolute domain of women when it was seen as unworthy clerical work. Computer hardware was the more masculine money subject.
Of course, once it became obvious that software was a massive hotbed of innovation, women were forced out until now we have earnest idiots writing columns and books on how the "female brain" can't handle programming. (Thankfully, no one told Ada Lovelace that.)
And now, JPL and other STEM installations are busy advertising no-math-required careers to attract women ... it's enough to drive you bats.
Scott Alexander addresses this point directly. Computers were one of the first fields open to women. When other fields opened up, women went elsewhere. The decline in female employment in computers, was a consequence of better opportunities elsewhere and a female preference for working with people rather than things. See “Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/). Women were never 'forced out'.
If women supposedly prefer to interact with people, then what were those women doing in the discipline in the first place? Are you unable to accept the very real fact that there are such things as introverted women? Seriously, that's not uncommon by any means -- not even a minority. Good lord.
From the BBC, "where the truth goes to die". Let me quote (again) from Scott Alexander.
"Computer programming was originally considered sort of a natural outgrowth of being a secretary (remember, 77% of data entry specialists are still female today, probably because it’s also considered a natural outgrowth of being a secretary). Women had lots of opportunity in it, and a lot of women who couldn’t break into other professions naturally went into it. From a Smithsonian article on the topic, my emphases:
As late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
Then people let women become doctors and lawyers, so a bunch of the smart ones went off and did that instead."
Oh and Scott Alexander has some more up-to-date data on the UK.
"In Britain, where 8% of high school computer students are girls".
I guess the UK must be some hotbed of sexism. Scott Alexander (again).
"Why is this? It’s a very common and well-replicated finding that the more progressive and gender-equal a country, the larger gender differences in personality of the sort Hyde found become. I agree this is a very strange finding, but it’s definitely true. See eg Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sex Differences In Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures:
Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (n = 17,637).
In case you’re wondering, the countries with the highest gender differences in personality are France, Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. The countries with the lowest sex differences are Indonesia, Fiji, and the Congo."
I guess the UK must be far more sexist than Indonesia, Fiji, and the Congo.
"Why engage in the hard work of coalition building required to actually fix schools and expand economic opportunity when you can either dupe or shame people into accepting shoddy education as anti-racism work?"
AGH THIS HURT TO READ ... damn, this is dead on. And we say it's the right that refuses to invest in schools!
The left also hates standardized testing, which is all that allows a lot of underrepresented people to get into college. Instead of fixing schools and preparing those kids for the test and subsequently for college itself, best to get rid of the test.
Of course, once that happens, then it's back to money, connections, and who you know, which is pretty convenient for the trust-fund wokeists, innit?
Exactly. It's not as though industries won't figure out how to identify people with real skills. What rational person doesn't see that coming? Reason isn't white supremacy culture, it's a universal BS detector. That's why it has to go, right?
And in the absence of ways to identify people with real skills, they'll just fall back on what they did before: money and connections. And underprivileged people will be right back at square zero.
“Lysenkoism”. Nice. Just finished second volume of Stalin bio by Kaplan I believe. Amazing amount of destruction can be produced by belief in a mistaken ideology
As an ideology, it’s primary driver is obviously resentment. That road is always a dead end. Usually into a brick wall at whatever speed it’s adherents can work it up to until it crashes- even more severely damaging all of the people it was supposed to “help.”
I think the woke police hate math, science, and engineering precisely because it allows you to make an objective determination of what's right and what's wrong with no hard feelings (or fewer at least). And most often, all sides are proven a little of each. You put together a hypothesis, discuss and digest it a bit, and maybe even get in fights over it, but then you consult with the actual world to see how it goes. And the world will usually answer that question, so the people on different sides of the discussion can stop arguing and move on.
The woke police would rather the arguing continue for all eternity.
I've often found that the woke police are averse to the sort of hard work that it takes to master something like math. You can't just tack together a bunch of political slogans and pass it off as truth, and your feelings and personal experiences on the subject aren't terribly relevant.
I've said elsewhere that all authoritarians hate the sciences. It's just a matter of which ones they execute first. Righties execute astronomers first, and lefties execute biologists first. But be it a right-wing tyranny or a left-wing one, eventually all scientists are as unwelcome as Giordano Bruno.
I’m just a mom, but isn’t the whole point of showing your work to ensure that one understands the process of problem solving and individual statements of fact? Otherwise kids (like my son) would just copy the answer from the answer key and learn nothing. How is that “anti-racist”? So let’s encourage most kids not to actually learn? Bravo. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, propagated by a body of dunces who don’t under stand the real life necessity of mathematics in so many facets of modern life. As a mom, my children will be required to show their work FOREVER.
Showing your work also means you can explain it to someone else, and spread the knowledge around. It's also very, very helpful for kids like I was: a math prodigy for whom the correct answers would pop into my head with no clear explanation for how they got there and I honestly had a hard time explaining how I knew what the answer was. Without being made to explain WHY something was correct, I would have collapsed the second I ran into the one branch of mathematics I seem allergic to: statistics and probabilities. Even a gifted kid benefits from being compelled to show their work.
You aren’t “just” a mom. Clearly you are a person with critical thinking skills who is a great role model for your children and other people young and older. Clearly you are a person who cares about the future and sees the stupidity in this “woke” education agenda. And I think your line “My children will be required to show their work forever” is brilliant and could be a slogan and a rallying cry.
I think we need to grapple with the *fact* that there are some people that you can instruct on certain topics dozens of times and in dozens of different ways and they still cannot grasp them. And that inability to grasp concepts can be for a myriad of reasons. Some emotional, some intellectual, some medical, some personality disordered, etc., and often combinations of all of these factors. Yet the “woke” demand seems to be that we grind *everyone* down to this level of ineffectuality. Lowest common denominator as cure all for all of society’s ills.
Ok, that's it, who knows how to start a school?! We need a sane, normal, un-woke, non-ideological institution where our children of all ages are taught with rigor and integrity. If math isn't safe, what is?! For real. I've been inspired by the indomitable Bari Weiss, and various recent interviewees on the Megyn Kelly podcast such as Ben Shapiro, who have stated over and over again that creating new spaces (in whatever sphere: media, education) may just be the only answer. Who's in?
"Ok, that's it, who knows how to start a school?! We need a sane, normal, un-woke, non-ideological institution where our children of all ages are taught with rigor and integrity. If math isn't safe, what is?!" -- You can't see me, but I'm standing up, applauding. Also, we might have to start sending them all to schools in, I don't know, Andorra or someplace?
I read the document from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and much of what it recommends appears unexceptional, frankly. The politics arises by the authors’ seizing what they see as the zeitgeist by mindlessly characterizing every listed defect in current pedagogical practice that they address as “white supremacy”. In a way, what is again at play is the deplorable tendency to takes negative characteristics and ascribe them to entire groups as emblematic. The main target against which society-wide angst used to be projected was the Jews Now, it is the faceless social construct of “white supremacy” in which, it goes without saying, Jews are still given a large role.
However, if you ignore the rhetorical framing and look at the substance of the proposals, it seems to me that they are searching for a way to teach math to students they would find more compelling, less daunting and more friendly. It’s not at all on the order of “2+2= Whatever you feel is right”. Much of what they actually recommend is unexceptional, and one can argue about the specifics.
Perhaps the authors chose to clothe their observations in the language of critical ethnic studies because they felt using the in vogue academic jargon was necessary to be heard. If so, they did themselves a disservice by jumping into the culture wars. But the substance of their report bears consideration.
To give one example, the discussion of grades mixes serious insight (teaching to the test rather than understanding the concept taught) with a questionable premise (what grades show) to make a rather simple point (once able to wield the concept, the correct answer will follow).
“Grades are traditionally indicative of what students can’t do rather than what they can do, reinforcing perfectionism. In addition, math teachers also focus grades on what is more easily measurable, rather than the knowledge that we want students to have, reinforcing quantity over quality and often evaluating procedural or skills-based knowledge rather than conceptual knowledge.”
You've made a useful distinction: there's woke veneer, and genuine woke. The Gates Foundation document sounds like an application of 'woke veneer,' which pretty much has to be applied to anything written by anyone working in a woke environment these days--if you know what's good for you. Then there's genuine woke; those are the people who will come for you if you cross them. So apply that woke veneer liberally!
EB, Go to the websites in question. This is just Gates funded bigotry. Take a look at https://equitablemath.org/. The very first webpage talks about "Dismantling Racism in Math Instruction".
Yeah, I've tried collaborating with them, hoping that the grown ups in the room could steer things in a useful direction, but at some point, you have to make hard choices, as it's a genuinely totalitarian ideology. I'm done with any attempts at collaboration, now actively organizing resistance.
CK, I will try to be nice, but you aren't troubling yourself with the truth. Over at https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf you will find a PDF that is titled "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction". Over at https://equitablemath.org/ you will find "We also wish to thank the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for their generous financial support of this project". The sad truth is that Gates is financing bigotry.
Thank you for your civil response. The point I was trying to make, which EB was able to restate better, is that I read the document you cited as representing more form than substance. The form is, I agree, objectionable for the reasons I mentioned in my comment. The proposal’s characterization of all that is bad in the way math is currently taught as “white supremacy” seems to me simply an unnecessary bow to current trends in academia - and that is the target audience apparently. But as to the specifics of the teaching methodology proposed, it seems to me properly focused on how to make the subject more appealing to all students.
You may still disagree with my view or feel that it is not worth the risk to change how math is currently taught, but I find it hard to believe that the surface political framing of the document would seep into the classroom itself. In fact, I could think of no better way to discredit this so-called Critical Race/Ethnic approach while at the same time confusing students than by explaining to them that what is supposedly discredited as “white supremacy” is then in the next breath presented as acceptable.
It’s math, after all, so the concepts themselves do not change. Were we discussing teaching history, for instance, my response would be different.
First, let's be honest: it's probably the case that Bill and Melinda are now kinda prisoners to the wokesters that increasingly run the shop. It's a big operation and they're probably not focused on this level of detail. It's a cushy imprisonment. Also here on Common Sense, we're really running this stuff through the ontological and epistemological mill. The wheels are grinding mighty damn fine! And, yes, Bill and Melinda do bear some responsibility for allowing this stuff to propagate. Which leads to my next point.
I think there's merit to both perspectives here. Yeah, maybe this document is just paying lip service to critical race theory. But it's never that simple. Ultimately, woke veneer is the camel's nose under the tent (OMG, did he really just say that? Isn't that racist?). Whenever one applies woke veneer, one is either well on the rode to being a true believer, or just marking time until the purge removes the faithless. Even woke veneer is propaganda with the potential to influence people. The sheer ubiquity of this stuff is having a considerable effect on people. Woke veneer is never innocent.
Woke veneer is being slapped on everything. This stuff has crept into so many corners of the non-profit world that it can't be avoided. The only question is the level of cynicism of the individual spreading it.
I have a lot of sympathy for people trapped in this nightmare (I was, errr, am one). People don't want to be racists, but they don't realize that they've gotten on the train to totalitarianism. Maybe they're somewhat uncomfortable with the extreme positions taken by some colleagues, but who wants to be a racist? The wokesters mean well, maybe we can work with them? They're just a bit naive, right? And, at least superficially, the woke goals sound laudable--let's dismantle racism and white supremacy! So, you lead with empathy, try to ignore the most ridiculous nonsense, and put some woke veneer on the funding proposal or curriculum guide you're working on and forge ahead. Only too late do you realize what's really going on.
I've learned the hard way that woke veneer is really just capitulating to totalitarian ideology. Bari Weiss has nailed it: the hour is late. Now is the time for courage. Read your Orwell! Figure out who your allies are, and who your enemies are. Organize! Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. All the Machiavellian things. To the battlements! And whatever you do, don't forget to look under your bed for a pod before going to sleep!
Thanks for that. You may be right that this is the camel’s sticking his nose in the tent (which I see as an allusion to the Gospels and so not racist in the least). I view this “woke” phenomenon as a passing fad that will eventually collapse from its own internal contradictions (to use Marxist-style rhetoric) and will do so if we focus our fire on its shaky intellectual foundations.
Whose prediction will come to pass is anyone’s guess at this point, but we shouldn’t give up our right to challenge the rhetorical framing of things.
I sometimes wonder what I would have done had I been in Europe with the clouds of WWII gathering. Looking back, we know all about the Shoah but in real time it was inconceivable that such a monumental tragedy could happen in the world’s most (at the risk of sounding exceptionalism) cultured and advanced countries. Would I have stayed because I decided this was a passing storm like those many the Jewish people had weathered or would I have fled having recognized the unique evil of this onrushing event. Being an optimist, I suspect I would have stayed - leaving the unanswerable question, would I have survived?
That said, I don’t see this “woke” phenomenon as at all comparable to the Nazis but that is not to say that the social and intellectual damage it might cause will not be substantial. I look at it this way: the pedagogic substance of the proposal makes sense, the packaging needs to be dispensed with - and that can be achieved by forcing its proponents to examine their assumptions. For starters, what is “white” about how math is taught today and what is “non-white” when the substance remains unchanged?
“Woke” is the self-righteous emperor without clothes. It’s lack of intellectually rigorous underpinning makes its eventual collapse inevitable. But I could be wrong.
I downloaded and read the document. The word 'racist' appears 151 times. The word 'racism' appears no less than 98 times. The phrase 'white supremacy' appears 47 times. Given that 'white' only appears 50 times, 47 of the uses of 'white' are followed by 'supremacy'. This is a hard-code racist screen, funded by the Gates foundation of course. This is not 'woke veneer' to say the least.
Of course, the authors don't provide any evidence that 'racism' is a material influence on math instruction. Nor do they provide any evidence that 'white supremacy' is actually real. Indeed, they indirectly admit that these things are a matter of religious faith, not facts. Quote.
"We live in a toxic culture that affects us all; one dynamic of the culture is that we are discouraged from seeing it"
Of course, we should all 'see' something that does not exist.
I downloaded and read the document. The word 'racist' appears 151 times. The word 'racism' appears no less than 98 times. The phrase 'white supremacy' appears 47 times. Given that 'white' only appears 50 times, 47 of the uses of 'white' are followed by 'supremacy'. This is a hard-code racist screen, funded by the Gates foundation of course. This is not 'woke veneer' to say the least.
Of course, the authors don't provide any evidence that 'racism' is a material influence on math instruction. Nor do they provide any evidence that 'white supremacy' is actually real. Indeed, they indirectly admit that these things are a matter of religious faith, not facts. Quote.
"We live in a toxic culture that affects us all; one dynamic of the culture is that we are discouraged from seeing it"
Of course, we should all 'see' something that does not exist.
My point is that, to me, the sections to which you refer are logically disconnected from the suggested “new” way of teaching the material. The “new” way amounts to little more than trying to make it relevant by using examples that might better resonate with the particular student body and make math more relevant to their daily life.
The framing of “racism” and “white supremacy” is not only a distraction but will end as a joke. You know how students of that age react to authority. It’s usually not with obeisance.
And, in the end, if everything is racist and white supremacist, if these things are everywhere you turn including in your math class, then the words will have been drained of their meaning and become hollowed out rhetoric that no one believes in.
As I said, I could be wrong or unduly optimistic, but that where I am on this issue.
I did some research into this. The words 'racist' and 'racism' and the phrase 'white supremacy' are rather uniformly distributed throughout the document. I can provide screen shots to show this. There is no separation between the crass (and very explicit) racism of the authors and the supposed 'new' way of teaching math.
This document reads like 'Mein Kamp' with Jew replaced by white. It is racist to the core.
Unless the pernicious ideology described so well in this piece is taken out back of the barn and shot, I give our country about 50 years or so--perhaps less. Thomas Sowell's quote (within) is so on target as to be frightening.
Our institutions are crumbling before our eyes. Who trusts our government, our press, the academy? They are all failing us. Protect yourself and your family as much as you can. Be shrewd. Be brave. Be honest.
I don’t know if I’m right, but I’m going to suggest a hypothesis, which is that the woke “educators” promulgating this hare-brained parody of math pedagogy know exactly what they’re doing. We’re incredulously pointing out how ridiculous it is, on the assumption that said educators are too stupid or ideological to realize that they’re consigning their students to lifelong innumeracy and unemployability. But I don’t think so. I think the point of this looking-glass approach to education is to deliberately create a generation of incompetent, self-entitled leeches who will milk victimhood for all it’s worth while demanding that other people do life’s heavy lifting for them. They will be the new nobility class. If they never learn to figure out the right answer to a problem that has only one right answer, what else will they be good for besides giving orders?
I'm not sure it's that consciously cynical, these people genuinely believe this stuff. These ideas are being formulated and promulgated by true believers, who also happen to be people who simply don't have to worry about such things as machines not working and crops not growing if their concepts are faulty. Much as under Stalin and Mao, the true price will not be borne by the people spreading this rot!
Thank you for a breath of fresh air. This American Cultural Revolution is just sad - and what's the favorite expression of ideological academics everywhere - derivative. Math pun intended. I would have thought our totalitarians would be a little more original with their suffocating attempts to control us all.
This is interesting that this arrived in my mailbox today because I started doing a great course on algebra review, so that I can overtime learn the math I didn’t take in school like trigonometry and calculus. I am 61 years old, a white woman, & I grew up in Texas at a time when advanced math wasn’t required. I have never been math phobic, Neither particularly talented but I’ve always been interested in it and no time like the present to learn something brand new. I also wanted to have some thing to concentrate on that didn’t have a lot of emotional crap with it. Or so I thought until I read this. Geez.
What bothers me so much is how infantilizing and condescending this kind of “woke “ attitude is, and that in itself is a kind of softer, more nuanced but no less destructive racism. It’s like if I were told as a girl that math would be too hard or was for boys only or that I didn’t have to show my work or get the right answer because of gender bias. AAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHH!
{beats head against wall}
I am especially disturbed that this came out of the Gates foundation. I expected better. But like others, I have also been naïve in assuming that STEM could somewhat escape, particularly the areas of math and hard-core science.
It seems to me that eventually universities will start losing future endowments or other donations if they keep buckling under. Not to mention students.
"It’s like if I were told as a girl that math would be too hard or was for boys only ... "
I DID get told that -- from the opposite side of the spectrum. Now it's the supposed feminists and progressives telling girls and women that. Horseshoe theory indeed.
Me too. And now the woke culture seems to be telling everybody that no matter who you are. I truly don’t get what the payoff is for any of this. Who wins, and what are they winning? What’s the benefit?
I think that, like with the right-wing, it's mostly the wealthy who run the left wing now. And no matter what side of the fence they're on, they benefit from keeping things exactly as they are. The right wing says that if you're a girl, you can't do math. The left wing now says that if you can do math, you aren't a girl(!). The old-school racists say that Black people can't do science, and now the new wokeists say that Black students shouldn't be expected to master it.
In the end, what they win is that science and technology will stay white and male.
As awful as this is, the fact that it's funded by The Gates Foundation makes it even worse.
So when Bill isn't trying to save the world from Climate Change or drive the world batshit crazy about Covid he's spending his money on racist initiatives that undermine the development of poor kids in underserved areas.
It's stuff like this that makes me think all is lost in America.
It’s like he grasps on to every absurd latest craze of the intellectual left just to prove once and for all that he didn’t really need that college degree and his success was a result of really, really, real true genius. We are all rosebud now.
The numbers that are used in math came from India, a non-white region. Today's math would not be possible without these numbers. So math is hardly a mechanism for "white supremacy".
The Roman numbers (I, V, X, ... ) are not suitable for math, but they did in their current form come from Italy, usually considered a "white, Caucasian" country.
Italy's considered white when convenient, and nonwhite when convenient, usually by splitting it right across the middle. But that's a whole `nother topic, how whiteness shifts and changes depending on which side needs someone to crap on ...
There's a gap between the twin cliffs of race and color in the US, and more than a few people fall into that gap. Jews, Italians, Turks, Greeks, etc. But both extremes of the political spectrum, right and left, depend for their bread and butter on convincing people that they are one and the same.
About 70% of all lynchings in this country were carried out against Black American. The remainder were mostly carried out against Jews, Chinese, Native Americans, Mexicans, and Italians. The largest mass lynching in the history of the country was carried out against Sicilian Americans in 1895 in New Orleans. The 1924 Immigration Act was written specifically for the purpose of excluding southern Italians and Jews, and was catastrophic for Jews in the 1930s who were desperate to get out of Europe.
Don't mention that to a wokeist, though. They don't want to confront the reality that whiteness is defined as a matter of political convenience, even as they are currently whitewashing East Asians who get inconveniently good grades.
The ultimate irony is that the first person to point out the way whiteness shifts and changes depending on political convenience was bell hooks. Who I can guarantee the wokeists know of but haven't read.
Good points. However, Jewish people from Europe did get admitted into the U.S. in the 1930s. My parents came here legally in 1935 and 1937, and became permanent residents and later citizens.
But Roosevelt stopped legal immigration in 1939, and prevented Jewish people from entering from that point on.
I'd still be interested in seeing the numbers of how many Jews wanted to get into the country versus how many were let in, before the Act passed and after.
Roman numbers can be used for math. It is hard, to say the least. There were real reasons that Arab numerals (really Indian numerals) replaced the Roman system. Note that we still use letters based on Roman letters (which were based on earlier systems). We still speak Indo-European languages (of which classical Latin was one). However, Roman number are long gone.
Thanks for your comment. Here in K.C. we are well aware of that, having been involved (successfully!) in Super Bowl LIV, and also (not so successfully) in Super Bowl LV.
You are, of course, correct. When I wrote 'Roman number are long gone', I was making two mistakes. I should have said 'numbers', not 'number'. Of course, Roman numbers are still used to a limited extent, typically in a very formal way. If I had written 'Roman numbers for day-to-day math are long gone', that would have been correct. Note that in Japan, Kanji is used in a somewhat similar way. Ordinary writing is done in Hiragana and Katakana. However, chapter titles (in a book) are sometimes done in Kanji.
Hi Bari - new (paid!) subscriber here. Just wanted to drop you a note thanking you for embarking on this project. I hope it is wildly successful... and that you are too! Thanks also to Professor Klainerman for his sharp perspective. Looking forward to more in the series.
Wow. I cannot believe the woke movement has become so arrogant as to try and topple any subject that's grounded in the principles of human reason and rationality by labeling them racist. These principled have been cherished since the Age of Enlightenment. That historical period ultimately led to the separation of church and state. Perhaps we now need a legally binding separation of politics from education and the workplace.
I'm not a racist, and I refuse to say I am just to be popular. Keep up the good work Bari, it is a pleasure to pay to see real anti-racist content like this.
I just dislike the way it's a condemnation of the person, down to the marrow. I do think we all engage in dumb racist behavior, mostly knee-jerk stuff done without thinking, from time to time. But that's a far cry from saying we ARE racists. There's a huge gap between doing wrong and BEING inherently wrong. Only the former allows for redemption.
It also prevents things from getting better because once you immediately electrocute people for every transgression no matter how minor, people will not do the self-examination needed to unlearn what's behind unthinking knee-jerk behaviors. You need openness, lack of judgment, and calm to talk about this stuff, and wokeism is the opposite of that.
The segment of the educational establishment that is promoting this very corrupted 'woke learning' is literally creating two classes of students; there will be the students who will suffer under 'woke education' and who will never be able to keep up with the second (and growing) class of students who will be attending 'unwoke' or traditional private & charter schools and/ or seeking other alternative ways of learning the tried-and-true methods of understanding math. It's goes without saying that Russia & China are laughing at us and loving this totally stupid period in our history. It is criminal. Bill and Melinda Gates should be shunned - they are living proof that too much money rots the heart & soul. But I'm guessing that what really is happening, is that very few math teachers today can really understand math or teach well....methinks this ludicrous turn of events is to mask their own inadequacies.
Power corrupts. Bill and Melinda Gates, and many, many others, are just the latest iteration of that truism. I can guarantee you that the people pushing this woke education are sending their own children to schools that actually teach objective skills. That way, their children will have a competitive advantage.
Correct! Did you catch the story yesterday of the President of the Berkley (CA) Teacher's Union dropping his daughter off at private school - while insisting that schools should remain closed for others? This malfeasance & dishonesty has to be called out and stopped....
Going into a field based on empiricism, I hope Bill Gates’ daughter isn’t using much subjectivity in her med school classes. Bill Gates also recently boasted that we’ll need tons of engineers in the future to advance green energy...if those engineers are taught using ethnomathematics, then we’re screwed. But of course, as others point out, the kids who were taught this garbage won’t be the ones who become engineers.
Bingo
Unreal. The woke movement really excels at the soft bigotry of low expectations. Why engage in the hard work of coalition building required to actually fix schools and expand economic opportunity when you can either dupe or shame people into accepting shoddy education as anti-racism work? I've seen documents being pushed in my own workplace that describe everything from science, reason, time, math, and punctuality as white supremacy culture. It's runaway Lysenkoism.
I once almost leapt through the screen on the professional social media site that everyone uses when I saw JPL putting out some "women in STEM" bullshit that advertised that they had lots of careers for people who suck at math!
Which will of course solve the problem of massive pipeline leakage of women in STEM!
Cuz chicks can't do math, y'see.
Let's leave the existence of massive misogyny in STEM fields unremarked upon, and just reassure those silly girls that you can be stupid and still work at JPL.
It still cranks my blood pressure to think about it.
The idea that there is ‘massive misogyny’ in tech, is just PC nonsense. If you doubt this try reading “Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/). The presence or absence of women in tech is a function of interest, not discrimination. Here is a good quote from Scott Alexander.
“And if your answer is just going to be that apparently the negative stereotypes in engineering were stronger than the negative stereotypes about everything else, why would that be? Put yourself in the shoes of our Victorian sexist, trying to maintain his male privilege. He thinks to himself “Well, I suppose I could tolerate women doctors saving my life. And if I had to, I would accept women going into law and determining who goes free and who goes to jail. I’m even sort of okay with women going into journalism and crafting the narratives that shape our world. But women building bridges? NO MERE FEMALE COULD EVER DO SUCH A THING!” Really? This is the best explanation the world can come up with? Doesn’t anyone have at least a little bit of curiosity about this?”
Read it all. Women don’t go into engineering (notably software engineering) because they don’t want to (not interested), not because of ‘massive misogyny’. There is actually a funny quote about this.
"The question of why more women don't choose careers in engineering has a rather obvious answer," she says: "Because they don't want to.""Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks," said Hausman at the April symposium, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering. "Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works."
Peter Schaeffer: "Women don’t go into engineering (notably software engineering) because they don’t want to (not interested), not because of ‘massive misogyny’. There is actually a funny quote about this."
Agree. That's what the science says (and we don't want to be science deniers, do we :-). )
The Scandanavian experiences in egalitarian upbringing of children - where boys and girls are treated as much alike as possible in order to ensure that females are empowered to enter fields traditionally considered to be male fields (STEM) - shows just the opposite: the differences between male and female career selection is (counterintuitively) greater than in societies in which no special effort is made. (That was quite a surprise.)
Those results have been replicated many times across cultures.
(The assumption was that within the total human population the "biology of preference" is identical in males and females and any differences in occupation/career choices are due to cultural influences. This was an erroneous assumption.)
While the "bell curves" of male and female preferences ("things" at one end and "people" at the other) overlap hugely, it turns out that males are more interested in "things" and females in "people" irrespective of culture. Also, males are more physically aggressive while females tend to be more verbally aggressive.
These differences are the product of evolution.
These preference differences matter especially at the extremes of the overlapping bell-shaped curves: males, as a population (and accross cultures), being more interested in "things" means they are more likely to enter STEM fields, while females are more likely to enter fields that are more people-oriented.
Similarly, males being more physically aggressive means they are more likely to end up in the slammer for acts of violence than females.
JFWIW.
Young girls are encouraged to play with dolls and look nice. Boys get building toys and fun machines that move. That's enough to explain the differences later in life.
PT, Sadly, you aren't keeping up with the current research on this subject. A few notes.
1. Newborns children (1 day old) show rather typical male/female interest patterns. The boys are already more interested in things and the girls are more interested in people. This fits rather well with a genetic model of sex-related interests and blows up the “cultural discrimination” model.
2, The juvenile forms of other primates behave much like human children. Male juvenile primates play with trucks. Female juvenile primates play with dolls.
3. In countries with less sex discrimination, children’s toys are just as sex differentiated as anywhere else. The nurture model suggests that children are socialized into specific sexual roles. Toy choices presumably reflect the nurture patterns of each society and culture. As such, it would be reasonable to expect that toys in countries with less sex discrimination would be less sex specific than societies with more sex discrimination. However, this turns out not to be the case.
Since 2000, American (and Western) society have moved radically to the “left” (the identity politics left, not the economic left). Cultural explanations of sex differences have become ever more commonplace and the associated ideology has been ever more rigidly enforced. Conversely, the scientific community has moved the other way. The volume of scientific data showing large, genetic differences has relentlessly grown to the point that anyone even trivially familiar with the literature finds “cultural explanations” laughable.
Basically, the political system has dug in with “The Sun orbits the Earth and you will pay dearly for daring to disagree” while the scientific community has embraced “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”. Consider the Larry Summers imbroglio. The math and science faculties supported him. The Liberal Arts faculties wanted him out. You would think that the accuracy of his comments might be relevant to a school with Veritas on its seal. You would be wrong.
I forgot to mention one other piece of salient data. That would be the tragic story of David Reimer. David Reimer was raised as a girl, but always felt he was a boy (which he was). For better or worse, sexual identity is deeply ingrained. It goes way beyond giving trucks to boys and dolls to girls. Of course, the David Reimer story is just an anecdote. However, there are many, many similar stories.
You have GOT to be kidding me.
Sorry, but facts are facts, even if they are not PC, even if you don't like them. A few quotes may help you understand this.
Orwell - “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows”
John Adams - “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence”
Philip Dick - “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away”
I left one important quote out.
Earl Landgrebe - "Don't confuse me with the facts."
Did none of them see “Hidden Figures?” I’m sure the astronauts were grateful for the correct equations those women mathematicians did that got them home safely.
This seeming demand that everyone is exactly the same and is capable or desirous of the exact same things denies each of us our uniqueness, and hence snuffs out whatever undiscovered things that could flower from that uniqueness. It’s beyond great that those ladies were so inclined to accomplish what they did in that situation, but that doesn’t mean that all women are exactly similarly capable or inclined. If you are saying keep that space wide open for the women that are capable of such accomplishments, then I’m all in. But there is this implication that all women deserve that space at all times, unrestrictedly regardless of their limitations or capacities and without having to prove anything. Which is quite the opposite of what those women did.
Scott Alexander addresses this point directly. Computers were one of the first fields open to women. When other fields opened up, women went else. The decline in female employment in computers, was a consequence of better opportunities elsewhere and a female preference for working with people rather than things. See “Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/)
I just finished a first tead of this long blog post, Prof Grant’s responses, and Scott’s responses to those answers. Whew! I will read again more thoroughly. Some really interesting studies cited, some really interesting ideas and conclusions, some of which I think are more correct than others, some of which I have questions about and some of which I think show more enthusiasm than accuracy. But it’s a blog, not a peer reviewed journal article so I can live with that.
It’s nice to hear/read some good and civil, gracious debate. What interests me the most is what the research isn’t finding yet, what we are missing. Both writers seem to agree that there is more to the issue than we see, that the theories and the current data are incomplete. I agree. But that’s because I am suspicious of either/or explanations and tend to think more things are both/and more often than we realize. I think it was Neils Bohr who said that the opposite of a deep truth was another deep truth.
As to how it relates to this current post of Bari’s and Prof Klainerman’s, both writers and I am sure everyone here agrees that there is no white math any more than there is gender math.
Thanks for the link and for letting me know about the blog.
I agree with your statement "no white math any more than there is gender math". However, lots of people don't. The deeper idea is that competence counts and can be measured. For better or worse (worse clearly), the "woke" reject that idea. For better or worse (worse clearly), they regard that idea as a 'white' idea and are opposed to it.
Of course, they same idea exists in many places (China, Japan, Asia generally, etc.) and is not 'white' by any means. However, the "woke" view it as 'white' and oppose it correspondingly.
I should note that idea that competence is a primary virtue is actually a somewhat modern (enlightenment) idea. For most of human history, the social standing of your parents (hereditary class) was far more important then mere competence.
Of course, race was also considered to more important than competence for most of human history.
It is a said (but true) comment on the "woke" that they have adopted some of the worst ideas in human history and rejected some of the best.
Software used to be the absolute domain of women when it was seen as unworthy clerical work. Computer hardware was the more masculine money subject.
Of course, once it became obvious that software was a massive hotbed of innovation, women were forced out until now we have earnest idiots writing columns and books on how the "female brain" can't handle programming. (Thankfully, no one told Ada Lovelace that.)
And now, JPL and other STEM installations are busy advertising no-math-required careers to attract women ... it's enough to drive you bats.
Scott Alexander addresses this point directly. Computers were one of the first fields open to women. When other fields opened up, women went elsewhere. The decline in female employment in computers, was a consequence of better opportunities elsewhere and a female preference for working with people rather than things. See “Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/). Women were never 'forced out'.
Sorry, but women were forced out.
https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/the-changing-role-of-women-in-british-computing/
If women supposedly prefer to interact with people, then what were those women doing in the discipline in the first place? Are you unable to accept the very real fact that there are such things as introverted women? Seriously, that's not uncommon by any means -- not even a minority. Good lord.
From the BBC, "where the truth goes to die". Let me quote (again) from Scott Alexander.
"Computer programming was originally considered sort of a natural outgrowth of being a secretary (remember, 77% of data entry specialists are still female today, probably because it’s also considered a natural outgrowth of being a secretary). Women had lots of opportunity in it, and a lot of women who couldn’t break into other professions naturally went into it. From a Smithsonian article on the topic, my emphases:
As late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
Then people let women become doctors and lawyers, so a bunch of the smart ones went off and did that instead."
Oh and Scott Alexander has some more up-to-date data on the UK.
"In Britain, where 8% of high school computer students are girls".
I guess the UK must be some hotbed of sexism. Scott Alexander (again).
"Why is this? It’s a very common and well-replicated finding that the more progressive and gender-equal a country, the larger gender differences in personality of the sort Hyde found become. I agree this is a very strange finding, but it’s definitely true. See eg Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sex Differences In Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures:
Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (n = 17,637).
In case you’re wondering, the countries with the highest gender differences in personality are France, Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. The countries with the lowest sex differences are Indonesia, Fiji, and the Congo."
I guess the UK must be far more sexist than Indonesia, Fiji, and the Congo.
Oh, please.
"Why engage in the hard work of coalition building required to actually fix schools and expand economic opportunity when you can either dupe or shame people into accepting shoddy education as anti-racism work?"
AGH THIS HURT TO READ ... damn, this is dead on. And we say it's the right that refuses to invest in schools!
The left also hates standardized testing, which is all that allows a lot of underrepresented people to get into college. Instead of fixing schools and preparing those kids for the test and subsequently for college itself, best to get rid of the test.
Of course, once that happens, then it's back to money, connections, and who you know, which is pretty convenient for the trust-fund wokeists, innit?
Exactly. It's not as though industries won't figure out how to identify people with real skills. What rational person doesn't see that coming? Reason isn't white supremacy culture, it's a universal BS detector. That's why it has to go, right?
And in the absence of ways to identify people with real skills, they'll just fall back on what they did before: money and connections. And underprivileged people will be right back at square zero.
Eliminating legacy admissions is such obvious low hanging fruit.
“Lysenkoism”. Nice. Just finished second volume of Stalin bio by Kaplan I believe. Amazing amount of destruction can be produced by belief in a mistaken ideology
As an ideology, it’s primary driver is obviously resentment. That road is always a dead end. Usually into a brick wall at whatever speed it’s adherents can work it up to until it crashes- even more severely damaging all of the people it was supposed to “help.”
Well said.
I think the woke police hate math, science, and engineering precisely because it allows you to make an objective determination of what's right and what's wrong with no hard feelings (or fewer at least). And most often, all sides are proven a little of each. You put together a hypothesis, discuss and digest it a bit, and maybe even get in fights over it, but then you consult with the actual world to see how it goes. And the world will usually answer that question, so the people on different sides of the discussion can stop arguing and move on.
The woke police would rather the arguing continue for all eternity.
I've often found that the woke police are averse to the sort of hard work that it takes to master something like math. You can't just tack together a bunch of political slogans and pass it off as truth, and your feelings and personal experiences on the subject aren't terribly relevant.
I've said elsewhere that all authoritarians hate the sciences. It's just a matter of which ones they execute first. Righties execute astronomers first, and lefties execute biologists first. But be it a right-wing tyranny or a left-wing one, eventually all scientists are as unwelcome as Giordano Bruno.
I’m just a mom, but isn’t the whole point of showing your work to ensure that one understands the process of problem solving and individual statements of fact? Otherwise kids (like my son) would just copy the answer from the answer key and learn nothing. How is that “anti-racist”? So let’s encourage most kids not to actually learn? Bravo. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, propagated by a body of dunces who don’t under stand the real life necessity of mathematics in so many facets of modern life. As a mom, my children will be required to show their work FOREVER.
Showing your work also means you can explain it to someone else, and spread the knowledge around. It's also very, very helpful for kids like I was: a math prodigy for whom the correct answers would pop into my head with no clear explanation for how they got there and I honestly had a hard time explaining how I knew what the answer was. Without being made to explain WHY something was correct, I would have collapsed the second I ran into the one branch of mathematics I seem allergic to: statistics and probabilities. Even a gifted kid benefits from being compelled to show their work.
You aren’t “just” a mom. Clearly you are a person with critical thinking skills who is a great role model for your children and other people young and older. Clearly you are a person who cares about the future and sees the stupidity in this “woke” education agenda. And I think your line “My children will be required to show their work forever” is brilliant and could be a slogan and a rallying cry.
I think we need to grapple with the *fact* that there are some people that you can instruct on certain topics dozens of times and in dozens of different ways and they still cannot grasp them. And that inability to grasp concepts can be for a myriad of reasons. Some emotional, some intellectual, some medical, some personality disordered, etc., and often combinations of all of these factors. Yet the “woke” demand seems to be that we grind *everyone* down to this level of ineffectuality. Lowest common denominator as cure all for all of society’s ills.
Ok, that's it, who knows how to start a school?! We need a sane, normal, un-woke, non-ideological institution where our children of all ages are taught with rigor and integrity. If math isn't safe, what is?! For real. I've been inspired by the indomitable Bari Weiss, and various recent interviewees on the Megyn Kelly podcast such as Ben Shapiro, who have stated over and over again that creating new spaces (in whatever sphere: media, education) may just be the only answer. Who's in?
"Ok, that's it, who knows how to start a school?! We need a sane, normal, un-woke, non-ideological institution where our children of all ages are taught with rigor and integrity. If math isn't safe, what is?!" -- You can't see me, but I'm standing up, applauding. Also, we might have to start sending them all to schools in, I don't know, Andorra or someplace?
I read the document from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and much of what it recommends appears unexceptional, frankly. The politics arises by the authors’ seizing what they see as the zeitgeist by mindlessly characterizing every listed defect in current pedagogical practice that they address as “white supremacy”. In a way, what is again at play is the deplorable tendency to takes negative characteristics and ascribe them to entire groups as emblematic. The main target against which society-wide angst used to be projected was the Jews Now, it is the faceless social construct of “white supremacy” in which, it goes without saying, Jews are still given a large role.
However, if you ignore the rhetorical framing and look at the substance of the proposals, it seems to me that they are searching for a way to teach math to students they would find more compelling, less daunting and more friendly. It’s not at all on the order of “2+2= Whatever you feel is right”. Much of what they actually recommend is unexceptional, and one can argue about the specifics.
Perhaps the authors chose to clothe their observations in the language of critical ethnic studies because they felt using the in vogue academic jargon was necessary to be heard. If so, they did themselves a disservice by jumping into the culture wars. But the substance of their report bears consideration.
To give one example, the discussion of grades mixes serious insight (teaching to the test rather than understanding the concept taught) with a questionable premise (what grades show) to make a rather simple point (once able to wield the concept, the correct answer will follow).
“Grades are traditionally indicative of what students can’t do rather than what they can do, reinforcing perfectionism. In addition, math teachers also focus grades on what is more easily measurable, rather than the knowledge that we want students to have, reinforcing quantity over quality and often evaluating procedural or skills-based knowledge rather than conceptual knowledge.”
You've made a useful distinction: there's woke veneer, and genuine woke. The Gates Foundation document sounds like an application of 'woke veneer,' which pretty much has to be applied to anything written by anyone working in a woke environment these days--if you know what's good for you. Then there's genuine woke; those are the people who will come for you if you cross them. So apply that woke veneer liberally!
EB, Go to the websites in question. This is just Gates funded bigotry. Take a look at https://equitablemath.org/. The very first webpage talks about "Dismantling Racism in Math Instruction".
Woke is a take over ideology. The veneer will simply be swallowed up.
Yeah, I've tried collaborating with them, hoping that the grown ups in the room could steer things in a useful direction, but at some point, you have to make hard choices, as it's a genuinely totalitarian ideology. I'm done with any attempts at collaboration, now actively organizing resistance.
CK, I will try to be nice, but you aren't troubling yourself with the truth. Over at https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf you will find a PDF that is titled "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction". Over at https://equitablemath.org/ you will find "We also wish to thank the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for their generous financial support of this project". The sad truth is that Gates is financing bigotry.
Thank you for your civil response. The point I was trying to make, which EB was able to restate better, is that I read the document you cited as representing more form than substance. The form is, I agree, objectionable for the reasons I mentioned in my comment. The proposal’s characterization of all that is bad in the way math is currently taught as “white supremacy” seems to me simply an unnecessary bow to current trends in academia - and that is the target audience apparently. But as to the specifics of the teaching methodology proposed, it seems to me properly focused on how to make the subject more appealing to all students.
You may still disagree with my view or feel that it is not worth the risk to change how math is currently taught, but I find it hard to believe that the surface political framing of the document would seep into the classroom itself. In fact, I could think of no better way to discredit this so-called Critical Race/Ethnic approach while at the same time confusing students than by explaining to them that what is supposedly discredited as “white supremacy” is then in the next breath presented as acceptable.
It’s math, after all, so the concepts themselves do not change. Were we discussing teaching history, for instance, my response would be different.
First, let's be honest: it's probably the case that Bill and Melinda are now kinda prisoners to the wokesters that increasingly run the shop. It's a big operation and they're probably not focused on this level of detail. It's a cushy imprisonment. Also here on Common Sense, we're really running this stuff through the ontological and epistemological mill. The wheels are grinding mighty damn fine! And, yes, Bill and Melinda do bear some responsibility for allowing this stuff to propagate. Which leads to my next point.
I think there's merit to both perspectives here. Yeah, maybe this document is just paying lip service to critical race theory. But it's never that simple. Ultimately, woke veneer is the camel's nose under the tent (OMG, did he really just say that? Isn't that racist?). Whenever one applies woke veneer, one is either well on the rode to being a true believer, or just marking time until the purge removes the faithless. Even woke veneer is propaganda with the potential to influence people. The sheer ubiquity of this stuff is having a considerable effect on people. Woke veneer is never innocent.
Woke veneer is being slapped on everything. This stuff has crept into so many corners of the non-profit world that it can't be avoided. The only question is the level of cynicism of the individual spreading it.
I have a lot of sympathy for people trapped in this nightmare (I was, errr, am one). People don't want to be racists, but they don't realize that they've gotten on the train to totalitarianism. Maybe they're somewhat uncomfortable with the extreme positions taken by some colleagues, but who wants to be a racist? The wokesters mean well, maybe we can work with them? They're just a bit naive, right? And, at least superficially, the woke goals sound laudable--let's dismantle racism and white supremacy! So, you lead with empathy, try to ignore the most ridiculous nonsense, and put some woke veneer on the funding proposal or curriculum guide you're working on and forge ahead. Only too late do you realize what's really going on.
I've learned the hard way that woke veneer is really just capitulating to totalitarian ideology. Bari Weiss has nailed it: the hour is late. Now is the time for courage. Read your Orwell! Figure out who your allies are, and who your enemies are. Organize! Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. All the Machiavellian things. To the battlements! And whatever you do, don't forget to look under your bed for a pod before going to sleep!
References to the "Camel's nose" are anti-Camel. Bigotry against Camels is just the first step towards universal bigotry.
My smile for the day!
Thanks for that. You may be right that this is the camel’s sticking his nose in the tent (which I see as an allusion to the Gospels and so not racist in the least). I view this “woke” phenomenon as a passing fad that will eventually collapse from its own internal contradictions (to use Marxist-style rhetoric) and will do so if we focus our fire on its shaky intellectual foundations.
Whose prediction will come to pass is anyone’s guess at this point, but we shouldn’t give up our right to challenge the rhetorical framing of things.
I sometimes wonder what I would have done had I been in Europe with the clouds of WWII gathering. Looking back, we know all about the Shoah but in real time it was inconceivable that such a monumental tragedy could happen in the world’s most (at the risk of sounding exceptionalism) cultured and advanced countries. Would I have stayed because I decided this was a passing storm like those many the Jewish people had weathered or would I have fled having recognized the unique evil of this onrushing event. Being an optimist, I suspect I would have stayed - leaving the unanswerable question, would I have survived?
That said, I don’t see this “woke” phenomenon as at all comparable to the Nazis but that is not to say that the social and intellectual damage it might cause will not be substantial. I look at it this way: the pedagogic substance of the proposal makes sense, the packaging needs to be dispensed with - and that can be achieved by forcing its proponents to examine their assumptions. For starters, what is “white” about how math is taught today and what is “non-white” when the substance remains unchanged?
“Woke” is the self-righteous emperor without clothes. It’s lack of intellectually rigorous underpinning makes its eventual collapse inevitable. But I could be wrong.
I downloaded and read the document. The word 'racist' appears 151 times. The word 'racism' appears no less than 98 times. The phrase 'white supremacy' appears 47 times. Given that 'white' only appears 50 times, 47 of the uses of 'white' are followed by 'supremacy'. This is a hard-code racist screen, funded by the Gates foundation of course. This is not 'woke veneer' to say the least.
Of course, the authors don't provide any evidence that 'racism' is a material influence on math instruction. Nor do they provide any evidence that 'white supremacy' is actually real. Indeed, they indirectly admit that these things are a matter of religious faith, not facts. Quote.
"We live in a toxic culture that affects us all; one dynamic of the culture is that we are discouraged from seeing it"
Of course, we should all 'see' something that does not exist.
I downloaded and read the document. The word 'racist' appears 151 times. The word 'racism' appears no less than 98 times. The phrase 'white supremacy' appears 47 times. Given that 'white' only appears 50 times, 47 of the uses of 'white' are followed by 'supremacy'. This is a hard-code racist screen, funded by the Gates foundation of course. This is not 'woke veneer' to say the least.
Of course, the authors don't provide any evidence that 'racism' is a material influence on math instruction. Nor do they provide any evidence that 'white supremacy' is actually real. Indeed, they indirectly admit that these things are a matter of religious faith, not facts. Quote.
"We live in a toxic culture that affects us all; one dynamic of the culture is that we are discouraged from seeing it"
Of course, we should all 'see' something that does not exist.
My point is that, to me, the sections to which you refer are logically disconnected from the suggested “new” way of teaching the material. The “new” way amounts to little more than trying to make it relevant by using examples that might better resonate with the particular student body and make math more relevant to their daily life.
The framing of “racism” and “white supremacy” is not only a distraction but will end as a joke. You know how students of that age react to authority. It’s usually not with obeisance.
And, in the end, if everything is racist and white supremacist, if these things are everywhere you turn including in your math class, then the words will have been drained of their meaning and become hollowed out rhetoric that no one believes in.
As I said, I could be wrong or unduly optimistic, but that where I am on this issue.
I did some research into this. The words 'racist' and 'racism' and the phrase 'white supremacy' are rather uniformly distributed throughout the document. I can provide screen shots to show this. There is no separation between the crass (and very explicit) racism of the authors and the supposed 'new' way of teaching math.
This document reads like 'Mein Kamp' with Jew replaced by white. It is racist to the core.
Unless the pernicious ideology described so well in this piece is taken out back of the barn and shot, I give our country about 50 years or so--perhaps less. Thomas Sowell's quote (within) is so on target as to be frightening.
Our institutions are crumbling before our eyes. Who trusts our government, our press, the academy? They are all failing us. Protect yourself and your family as much as you can. Be shrewd. Be brave. Be honest.
Perhaps ammunition will become a form of currency...
I don’t know if I’m right, but I’m going to suggest a hypothesis, which is that the woke “educators” promulgating this hare-brained parody of math pedagogy know exactly what they’re doing. We’re incredulously pointing out how ridiculous it is, on the assumption that said educators are too stupid or ideological to realize that they’re consigning their students to lifelong innumeracy and unemployability. But I don’t think so. I think the point of this looking-glass approach to education is to deliberately create a generation of incompetent, self-entitled leeches who will milk victimhood for all it’s worth while demanding that other people do life’s heavy lifting for them. They will be the new nobility class. If they never learn to figure out the right answer to a problem that has only one right answer, what else will they be good for besides giving orders?
I'm not sure it's that consciously cynical, these people genuinely believe this stuff. These ideas are being formulated and promulgated by true believers, who also happen to be people who simply don't have to worry about such things as machines not working and crops not growing if their concepts are faulty. Much as under Stalin and Mao, the true price will not be borne by the people spreading this rot!
Thank you for a breath of fresh air. This American Cultural Revolution is just sad - and what's the favorite expression of ideological academics everywhere - derivative. Math pun intended. I would have thought our totalitarians would be a little more original with their suffocating attempts to control us all.
This is interesting that this arrived in my mailbox today because I started doing a great course on algebra review, so that I can overtime learn the math I didn’t take in school like trigonometry and calculus. I am 61 years old, a white woman, & I grew up in Texas at a time when advanced math wasn’t required. I have never been math phobic, Neither particularly talented but I’ve always been interested in it and no time like the present to learn something brand new. I also wanted to have some thing to concentrate on that didn’t have a lot of emotional crap with it. Or so I thought until I read this. Geez.
What bothers me so much is how infantilizing and condescending this kind of “woke “ attitude is, and that in itself is a kind of softer, more nuanced but no less destructive racism. It’s like if I were told as a girl that math would be too hard or was for boys only or that I didn’t have to show my work or get the right answer because of gender bias. AAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHH!
{beats head against wall}
I am especially disturbed that this came out of the Gates foundation. I expected better. But like others, I have also been naïve in assuming that STEM could somewhat escape, particularly the areas of math and hard-core science.
It seems to me that eventually universities will start losing future endowments or other donations if they keep buckling under. Not to mention students.
"It’s like if I were told as a girl that math would be too hard or was for boys only ... "
I DID get told that -- from the opposite side of the spectrum. Now it's the supposed feminists and progressives telling girls and women that. Horseshoe theory indeed.
Me too. And now the woke culture seems to be telling everybody that no matter who you are. I truly don’t get what the payoff is for any of this. Who wins, and what are they winning? What’s the benefit?
I think that, like with the right-wing, it's mostly the wealthy who run the left wing now. And no matter what side of the fence they're on, they benefit from keeping things exactly as they are. The right wing says that if you're a girl, you can't do math. The left wing now says that if you can do math, you aren't a girl(!). The old-school racists say that Black people can't do science, and now the new wokeists say that Black students shouldn't be expected to master it.
In the end, what they win is that science and technology will stay white and male.
As awful as this is, the fact that it's funded by The Gates Foundation makes it even worse.
So when Bill isn't trying to save the world from Climate Change or drive the world batshit crazy about Covid he's spending his money on racist initiatives that undermine the development of poor kids in underserved areas.
It's stuff like this that makes me think all is lost in America.
It’s like he grasps on to every absurd latest craze of the intellectual left just to prove once and for all that he didn’t really need that college degree and his success was a result of really, really, real true genius. We are all rosebud now.
The numbers that are used in math came from India, a non-white region. Today's math would not be possible without these numbers. So math is hardly a mechanism for "white supremacy".
The Roman numbers (I, V, X, ... ) are not suitable for math, but they did in their current form come from Italy, usually considered a "white, Caucasian" country.
Italy's considered white when convenient, and nonwhite when convenient, usually by splitting it right across the middle. But that's a whole `nother topic, how whiteness shifts and changes depending on which side needs someone to crap on ...
Very good and relevant point.
There's a gap between the twin cliffs of race and color in the US, and more than a few people fall into that gap. Jews, Italians, Turks, Greeks, etc. But both extremes of the political spectrum, right and left, depend for their bread and butter on convincing people that they are one and the same.
About 70% of all lynchings in this country were carried out against Black American. The remainder were mostly carried out against Jews, Chinese, Native Americans, Mexicans, and Italians. The largest mass lynching in the history of the country was carried out against Sicilian Americans in 1895 in New Orleans. The 1924 Immigration Act was written specifically for the purpose of excluding southern Italians and Jews, and was catastrophic for Jews in the 1930s who were desperate to get out of Europe.
Don't mention that to a wokeist, though. They don't want to confront the reality that whiteness is defined as a matter of political convenience, even as they are currently whitewashing East Asians who get inconveniently good grades.
The ultimate irony is that the first person to point out the way whiteness shifts and changes depending on political convenience was bell hooks. Who I can guarantee the wokeists know of but haven't read.
Good points. However, Jewish people from Europe did get admitted into the U.S. in the 1930s. My parents came here legally in 1935 and 1937, and became permanent residents and later citizens.
But Roosevelt stopped legal immigration in 1939, and prevented Jewish people from entering from that point on.
https://www.history.com/news/wwii-jewish-refugee-ship-st-louis-1939
My 3 living grandparents were not able to come to the U.S. in 1939 despite the financial support they were guaranteed by my parents.
I'd still be interested in seeing the numbers of how many Jews wanted to get into the country versus how many were let in, before the Act passed and after.
What doesn’t shift and change depending on political convenience?
Perhaps using the original numbers from India is considered cultural appropriation now.
Hahaha
Roman numbers can be used for math. It is hard, to say the least. There were real reasons that Arab numerals (really Indian numerals) replaced the Roman system. Note that we still use letters based on Roman letters (which were based on earlier systems). We still speak Indo-European languages (of which classical Latin was one). However, Roman number are long gone.
Thanks for your comment. Here in K.C. we are well aware of that, having been involved (successfully!) in Super Bowl LIV, and also (not so successfully) in Super Bowl LV.
You are, of course, correct. When I wrote 'Roman number are long gone', I was making two mistakes. I should have said 'numbers', not 'number'. Of course, Roman numbers are still used to a limited extent, typically in a very formal way. If I had written 'Roman numbers for day-to-day math are long gone', that would have been correct. Note that in Japan, Kanji is used in a somewhat similar way. Ordinary writing is done in Hiragana and Katakana. However, chapter titles (in a book) are sometimes done in Kanji.
Hi Bari - new (paid!) subscriber here. Just wanted to drop you a note thanking you for embarking on this project. I hope it is wildly successful... and that you are too! Thanks also to Professor Klainerman for his sharp perspective. Looking forward to more in the series.
Wow. I cannot believe the woke movement has become so arrogant as to try and topple any subject that's grounded in the principles of human reason and rationality by labeling them racist. These principled have been cherished since the Age of Enlightenment. That historical period ultimately led to the separation of church and state. Perhaps we now need a legally binding separation of politics from education and the workplace.
I'm not a racist, and I refuse to say I am just to be popular. Keep up the good work Bari, it is a pleasure to pay to see real anti-racist content like this.
I just dislike the way it's a condemnation of the person, down to the marrow. I do think we all engage in dumb racist behavior, mostly knee-jerk stuff done without thinking, from time to time. But that's a far cry from saying we ARE racists. There's a huge gap between doing wrong and BEING inherently wrong. Only the former allows for redemption.
It also prevents things from getting better because once you immediately electrocute people for every transgression no matter how minor, people will not do the self-examination needed to unlearn what's behind unthinking knee-jerk behaviors. You need openness, lack of judgment, and calm to talk about this stuff, and wokeism is the opposite of that.
10/10 comment!