The future of knowledge at stake

 Oregon educators must immediately abandon their unenlightened position on “racist” mathematics.  Anti-intellectual persons making educational decisions for the State’s children should take heed: A high quality education includes high standards for all subjects and the public cannot be fooled into thinking otherwise. Knowledge and intelligence knows no race, and neither does hubris and ignorance.  

As someone who came of age in the Sputnik era, the devaluation of hard sciences and rejection of true critical thinking marks an unfathomable and tragic leap backwards. Any educator or policy-maker who succumbs to racist notions of intellectual excellence  has no business in the profession or in any capacity where they can affect children’s lives.  

Squaring Up to Defend Mathematics

Opinion: WSJ December 5, 2021

America’s top scientists warn about the political erosion of education standards.

The last few years have seen a pro­lif­er­a­tion of “open let­ters” by aca­d­e­mics in pol­i­tics and the hu­man­i­ties in fa­vor of pro­gres­sive causes. The hard sci­ences are dif­fer­ent, and when math­e­mati­cians, physi­cists and en­gi­neers speak up to de­fend the in­tegrity of their fields, Amer­i­cans should pay at­ten­tion.

The lat­est ex­am­ple is a new pub­lic state­ment from hun­dreds of the coun­try’s top quan­ti­ta­tive sci­en­tists warn­ing about the as­sault on math in schools. “We write to ex­press our alarm over re­cent trends in K-12 math­e­mat­ics ed­u­ca­tion in the United States,” the state­ment be­gins. The so­cial-jus­tice wave of 2020 ac­cel­er­ated ef­forts to elim­i­nate stan­dard­ized test­ing and lower stan­dards in math to give the ap­pear­ance that achieve­ment gaps don’t ex­ist.

The sci­en­tists del­i­cately de­scribe the politi­cized ero­sion of stan­dards as “well-in­ten­tioned ap­proaches to re­form math­e­mat­ics ed­u­ca­tion.” They zero in on the Cal­i­for­nia De­part­ment of Ed­u­ca­tion’s pro­posed new math framework, which en­cour­ages math teach­ers to take a “justice-ori­ented per­spec­tive.” The sig­na­to­ries say the course roadmap will re­duce the “avail­abil­ity of advanced math­e­mat­i­cal cour­ses to mid­dle school­ers and be­gin­ning high school­ers” and dis­cour­age stu­dents from tak­ing cal­cu­lus.

This is sup­posed to ad­vance “eq­uity.” But in ad­di­tion to dam­ag­ing Amer­i­ca’s global com­pet­i­tive­ness, the let­ter says, the de­cline of rig­or­ous math in pub­lic schools “may lead to a de facto pri­va­ti­za­tion” of top-tier in­struc­tion and “harm stu­dents with fewer re­sources.”

The grow­ing list of 471 sig­na­to­ries in­cludes four winners of the Fields Medal in math; two win­ners of the Tur­ing Award in com­put­ing; a No­bel lau­re­ate in physics and an­other in chem­istry; 25 mem­bers of the Na­tional Acad­emy of Sci­ences; and fac­ulty at Stan­ford, Berke­ley, Cal­Tech, MIT and every top U.S. uni­ver­sity for hard sci­ence.

No doubt many if not most in this group are po­lit­i­cally left of cen­ter. But they warn against the el­e­va­tion of “trendy but shal­low cour­ses over foun­da­tional skills” like al­ge­bra and cal­cu­lus. Those dis­ci­plines “are centuries old and some­times more,” the let­ter says, but “ar­guably even more crit­i­cal for to­day’s grand challenges than in the Sput­nik era.”

The debate over course content in history and social science has been the center of educational controversy, as progressives aim to rewrite the country’s civic contract. But the erosion of math and science education to accommodate identity politics is even more threatening to America’s prosperity and survival in a competitive world. Credit to the mathematicians for recognizing this threat, and squaring up in defense of their field.    

Signatories

Total: 1611 as of January 12, 2022