I’m midway through Douglas Murray’s book The War on the West. It’s a masterful, if somewhat depressing, summary of the woke idiocracy that is currently raging like a real pandemic through the West. He dismantles it all (deconstructs it?) with his typical understated wit and savage humour. If you want a good laugh (and a good cry) coupled with impressive erudition, then I’d highly recommend it.
He mentions a term I hadn’t heard of; equitable maths. With typical Jungian synchronicity, this term also popped into my ‘reading’ inbox this week in the form of Sergiu Klainerman who is a Professor of Maths at Princeton1.
This refers to an initiative to change the teaching of maths in a very specific way. The organisation behind it is funded by our friends Bill and Melinda and you can download their suggested program from their website.
Newsweek covered this back in 2021, but the organisation have obviously changed their website since then because the statements quoted below are no longer up front.
The screenshot making the rounds on Twitter is an image of the EquitableMath.org website that begins with: "White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when... The focus is on getting the 'right' answer."
That's followed by a paragraph that reads: "The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict." (Newsweek, 2021)
Apart from their clumsy wording here (teaching it, according to the above wording, is much less unequivocally false2) we can all, I think, see what’s behind all of this.
Apparently, it would seem, POAH (people of alternative hue) are rendered utterly incapable of learning maths properly by the all-pervasive influence of white culture and white supremacist thinking.
Seems a bit of a racist thing to say to me, to imply a certain incapability based on skin colour, but like every other thing these days that might traditionally have been seen as a failing for which some degree of personal responsibility is called for, it has to be blamed on some external factor.
The statement that “the concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false” is, itself, unequivocally false.
There are no white answers, but there are right answers, just as there are no Wong answers, but there are wrong answers.
And just to feel less guilty for using a racial stereotype here, I did some penance by musing on the delightful English name of Cockburn3.
One thing I used to do with my students was to ask the following question and take a vote
Is 0.999 . . . less than 1?
The three dots here mean “recurring” - so it means to sit down and write a zero, then a point, and then write nines. Forever.
0.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 (and keep going)
There is no white answer to this question - only a right one.
The majority vote (by a large margin) of any class where I asked this was that it is less than 1. It’s actually equal to 1. Unequivocally. There are many ways to prove this.
Here’s one way
Now multiply both sides by 3
A slightly more sophisticated way is to write x = 0.999 . . .
Doing the algebra we have
Which, of course, gives us x = 1 and so 0.999 . . . = 1.
There’s no different “way of knowing” this result. There are different ways of proving this result.
And the proof itself is either right or wrong4.
It’s an interesting mathematical question in itself, but my purpose in asking the question was to begin the process of thinking about limits which are important for thinking about things like continuity and differentiability.
I have literally no idea at all who first came up with the proof of this, or what the proof was, or whether the prover possessed a penis, or whether the prover liked doing things with other people who also possessed a penis, or whether the prover had a different skin hue than mine.
The personal characteristics of the prover, their foibles and flaws, are a matter of supreme indifference to me when it comes to the proof and the result itself.
It’s possible that the prover’s next door neighbour’s pet groomer’s cousin once said something in support of slavery and so we should strike the prover off the historically ‘acceptable’ people list5, but I just don’t know.
The whole thesis is the usual CRT claptrap - that whiteness and white supremacy have infused literally everything about the ‘West’. Every institution, every structure, every system, our very thought processes themselves - all ‘steeped’ in this nasty, nasty, white shit. It all has to be dismantled to achieve, erm, something. Not quite sure what that something is, but it sounds jolly good if I claim it will all lead to racial justice.
This, curiously, is taken to be an objective fact. It’s unquestionable, unequivocal, and there’s only one “way” of knowing about it6.
So :
Mathematics - not objective
CRT - objective as fuck. It’s real, man, I tell ya.
Apparently we’ve been teaching maths all wrong (perhaps we should have been teaching it Wong, because Asians are stereotypically assumed to be good at maths?). In order to get it right (or not white) we have to do it differently.
How are we to do it differently? Look no further. The Equitable Math project has all the answers (one hopes they are the “right” answers - or would that be too white of a thing for me to say?)
The document linked above is the first in a 5 step program of enlightenment (or, more accurately, dewhite-enment). Each step is called a ‘stride’ because reasons. You can peruse the document at your leisure, but I wanted to highlight a few things.
On page 32, for example, they attempt to explain things
White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when...
Oh, do tell me, I’m simply dying to know
It shows up when . . .
“Good” math teaching is considered an antidote for mathematical inequity for Black, Latinx, multilingual students.
"Best practices" for math pedagogy often exclude the unique needs of Black, Latinx and multilingual or migrant students7. This reinforces either/or thinking by reinforcing stereotypes about the type of mathematical education that certain groups of students receive. It allows the defensiveness of Western mathematics to prevail, without addressing underlying causes of why certain groups of students are “underperforming,” a characterization that should also be interrogated. It also presupposes that “good” math teaching is about a Eurocentric type of mathematics, devoid of cultural ways of being.
Those poor folk with their “unique” needs (don’t we all have those?). It’s such a shame that their “cultural ways of being” are not properly recognised and appreciated in the classroom.
The meaning of “underperforming” needs no interrogation. It means you got more shit wrong than someone else.
The reasons WHY someone might be underperforming are certainly worth paying attention to and (hopefully) resolving. Sometimes, and very sadly, it is simply that, as far as mathematics is concerned, the student is effectively brain-dead. Some people just can’t do it - no matter how many fancy words like pedagogy you use. It’s a depressing fact, and I’ve spent many, many hours8 with weaker students, one on one, trying to help them over their hurdles. Largely to no avail (although usually there was some modest improvement).
Does it mean these students are dumb? Not in the slightest. It just means that, for some reason, their brain isn’t wired to be able to do maths.
“Culture”, by and large, has fuck all to do with it.
There is another group of students who “underperform” because they’re lazy buggers and just don’t put in the necessary work to achieve an adequate understanding.
Understanding maths is hard work - especially if you’re not ‘gifted’ in the math department of your brain.
But things like hard work, personal responsibility, perseverance and patience9 are presumably all characteristic of white supremacist thinking.
On page 10 of the document we do get some hint about what’s really underneath all of this tedious pontificating about white supremacist thinking.
We have to centre something called “Ethnomathematics” which is some more made up woke bullshit.
It’s also good that homework ‘policies’ are designed around the lives of students of colour. If you’re white, who gives a shit - just suffer, you poor whitey student!
I suppose one wouldn’t be allowed to tailor questions that are relevant to student’s lives along certain lines. If I offer this meth on a buy 2 get 1 free deal how much profit would I make at the end of the month? Or how to analyse the crime statistics broken down by race.
What we really have here isn’t math education, it’s political education.
It’s all dressed up in a patina of care for, supposedly, ‘disadvantaged’ students - but it’s really about enforcing a particular worldview during a math class.
It’s a grotesque mistake which, if widely implemented, will ensure that the ‘West’ will never be able to properly compete with other countries that are not woke idiocracies.
But these woke lunatics just don’t care about any of that. In fact they want the ‘West’ to fail because they hate it.
They’re good at destroying shit - but they couldn’t create anything of lasting value or beauty (unlike those ‘white’ mathematicians they so despise).
And as a final example of this errant political posturing we see that it’s important to include examples of ‘queer’ mathematicians too10.
This woke crud simply has to stop. It’s dangerous and damaging. It will not end well, but I suspect those pushing it already know (and want) that.
He is appalled by the whole concept of “equitable math”
Presumably, the teaching of this is only equivocally false
Which is pronounced Co-burn, thankfully
In one of my (published) papers, embarrassingly, I solved an operator differential equation that represented a certain physical system. The result was correct (my answer was, indeed, a solution - as could be determined by checking it) - my ‘proof’, however, was a load of shite.
If you want to see a real racist in action then you should read some of the letters of Marx to Engels. It’s a bit odd that Marx hasn’t been cancelled by the screeching woke hordes. It’s a real conundrum that one, isn’t it? A total mystery.
Which, rather conveniently, happens to be their way
The Asian students are, presumably, not hampered by the all-pervasive white barriers because they don’t even merit a mention here
And trying every different teaching ‘methodology’ I could get my hands on
Time and patience, coupled with perseverance and practice, are absolutely necessary. If I’m trying to figure out some new bit of maths I need it’s inevitable that I won’t “get it” right away. I have to work through it, do problem after problem after problem (and usually get them wrong). I keep working. I persist. Gradually, understanding dawns and I start getting the problems right. Depending on the difficulty of the ‘new’ maths I’m trying to learn, this process can take weeks.
Leonhard Euler (pronounced ‘oiler’) was a brilliant, brilliant and astonishingly productive Swiss mathematician who practiced “Eurocentric” maths to great effect, creating many beautiful theorems and figuring out many fundamental (and objective) truths.
Beautifully written, as usual.
The big question is how do we stop the madness?
In the past, these people wouldn’t have been allowed to teach children or set education policy.
Some of them probably would have been in prison or in mental institutions.
Now they run everything.
This on its own is seemingly insane. However when taken as a part of a whole program to utterly suppress 95 percent of humanity, and take away their ability to reason, to think critically, to accumulate wealth, to have sovereignty etc, it makes total sense. In order to usher in total and utter control and create global communism and worse, the destruction of family, morals and the ability to think, are all being achieved. There is no Right thinking, only Left.
Hopefully I’ll have left long before the jackboot is stamping on the face of humanity for eternity. At the rate it’s happening I somehow think I might live to see my life has turned into a dystopian sci-fi movie that once looked impossible.
Thanks for the thoughtful post.