It’s getting harder all the time to believe that these people even try to delude themselves that they have children’s best interests at heart:
The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages “ethnomathematics” and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.
Sam Dorman, “Oregon promotes teacher program that seeks to undo ‘racism in mathematics’” at Fox News
Not everyone is buying it:
Liberals believe that scientific and mathematical talent are distributed unequally among the races, with Asians being well-endowed in those areas, and blacks below average. Therefore, it is appropriate to discriminate against Asians and to lower standards for blacks–e.g., by pretending that it is unimportant to get the right answer to a math problem.
Are they right? I doubt it. Shelby Steele made the opposite case in an interview in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.
John Hinderaker, “Why Math Is Racist” at PowerLine
Commentator Shelby Steele’s comments at Wall Street Journal are paywalled but here’s the part quoted:
[Steele] points to affirmative action and diversity—“the whole movement designed to compensate for the fact that blacks were behind”—and says that blacks today have worse indices relative to whites in education, income levels, marriage and divorce, or “any socioeconomic measure that you want to look at” than they did 60 years ago.
“It’s inconceivable,” says Mr. Steele, “that blacks are competitive in universities today.” In the 1950s, by contrast, they matriculated with slightly lower grade-point averages than whites and graduated with GPAs slightly higher than whites. “Nobody gave them anything,” Mr. Steele affirms. “They didn’t want them in universities then. We would never put our race on an application, because it would be used against us. The minute we started to get all these handouts from guilty America in the civil-rights era, we entered this uninterrupted decline.”
Tunku Varadarajan, “How Equality Lost to ‘Equity’” at Wall Street Journal
Hinderaker adds, “I suppose it would be possible to come up with a better plan to destroy black academic performance than by telling black students not to worry about getting the right answer to a math problem, but I can’t think what it would be.”
Wethinks that the big winners are teachers who can’t teach, protected by unions. The big losers are kids who leave school innumerate and must cope with a workplace that no longer needs innumerate people. We have machines now.
See also: Why can’t Winston count?