The Education Trust in Oakland has published a teaching recommendation that teachers can use to expose their own “unconscious racism”. One of the methods suggested is that teachers should avoid asking students for the right solution to math problems in class.
The initiative titled “Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction” is funded through a $1M grant from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. An instruction book which is part of the course, called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, is already being used by school districts in Georgia, Ohio, California and Oregon, according to one source.
The reason is that correct solutions strengthen “white supremacy”, that is, racism. In other words: Black students in particular should be prevented from solving math problems correctly, because otherwise they would be discriminated against.
In the past it has repeatedly been found that more white than black students solve arithmetic problems correctly. This creates a racist imbalance. The black students are evidently disadvantaged. So, if teachers do not want to be denounced as racists, they should no longer give their students any arithmetic problems – even in mathematics classes, based on “Critical Race Theory”.
This theory assumes that the racism that arose during the colonial era is anchored in every aspect of life, however banal. Therefore, it is argued that mathematics is not “objective” – because it was created by white colonial rulers. The workbook’s manual claims: “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity’.”
After President Joe Biden sanctioned the inclusion of the theory in US school curriculum, critics pointed out that children from a very early age are now either a victim or an oppressor. “Identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views,” the workbook urged teachers.
Rachel Ruffalo, director of educator engagement at the group that created the workbook, explained the gist of the workbook: “Math enjoyed this notion that it was somehow above the influence of the cultural and political issues of our time.” And an introduction to the book reads: “We live in a toxic culture that affects us all; one dynamic of the culture is that we are discouraged from seeing it. One of our tasks is to learn to see our culture and how it teaches us to make normal that which is not and should never be normal.”
Bantu languages in Africa, for example, have never developed their own numeric system. They only distinguish between “many” and “few” at best. This has led to cargo cults, an indigenist belief system in which adherents perform rituals which they believe will cause a more technologically advanced society to deliver goods. This appears to be the solution that Critical Race theorists are after.
But who will walk over the first bridge constructed by “woke activists”? There have been no examples in Africa yet.