Stream: SJWs Coming For Mathematics

Great news! For those kids who will be taught math by teachers graduating from Texas State University’s Math Education program, life just got easier.

This is bound to be confusing, so keep this fact in mind. Universities hire Math Education professors, whose job is to train primary and secondary education math teachers. Have it?

According to the not-unusual official want-ad, Texas State University is looking for math education professorial candidates

… who share our commitment to educational equity, to social justice, and to the recruitment and high-quality education of students from historically underserved and systemically marginalized communities. We are especially interested in applicants whose scholarly interests and work include attention to the concerns of race, ethnicity, multilingualism, immigrant, social class, gender, and diversity, broadly defined.

∫ ex dx = white privilege

Social-Justice-Warrior-minded professors whose job is to train future math teachers will thus be hired.

Instead of prospective math teachers learning from these professors the best ways to impart that the indefinite integral of the tangent of x with respect to x equals the negative log of the absolute value of the cosine of x, plus a constant, they might instead be taught that Leibniz and Newton, the inventors of the calculus, were white Christian men. And were therefore probability racist and sexist and can be ignored.

That’s only partly a joke.

Inequality ≠ injustice

Why are SJWs coming for math? Because just as everybody cannot be a professional basketball player, it turns out not everybody can learn math equally well. But SJWs insist that everybody must, and that any “disparities” in learning must be caused by social injustice.

Yet just as everybody cannot be over fix feet tall, not everybody has the same facility with math. Some are better at it, some worse. Some are better because of innate talent and industriousness, and some are better because circumstance allows them to use their talents.

But there is no evidence except desire that everybody can learn math equally well, even under identical circumstances. Equity is desired, as the ad says, but it will never be reached.

Sometimes ∑ males > ∑ females

Math class, as Barbie rightly said, is tough. That toughness is why official groups of math education specialists fret that “mathematics achievement…measured by standardized tests, has been used as a gatekeeping tool to sort and rank students”.

This ranking often shows “disparities” in “race, class, and gender”. And that is politically unacceptable.

There are only two things that can be done to remove these “disparities”. The first is obvious: have under-performing students study harder whilst improving their studying circumstances. Much money and effort were spent applying this praiseworthy method. Yet certain “disparities” persisted, and some became especially glaring at advanced levels.

Mathematics ∉ my culture

This lead to the second erasure method: redefine what mathematics means.

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