From Toni Airaksinen at Campus Reform:
A math education professor at Brooklyn College contends in a recent academic article that “meritocracy” in math classes is a “tool of whiteness.”
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To mediate this, Rubel recommends that math teachers incorporate more social justice issues into math lessons, but warns that even “teaching for social justice” can be a “tool of whiteness” if teachers are not sufficiently attuned to the experiences of minority students.
This is because even social justice-minded professors may inadvertently hold the “belief that effort is always rewarded, [which corresponds] to various tools of whiteness, like the myths of meritocracy and colorblindness,” Rubel writes. More.
It certainly sounds like a roundabout way of saying that getting the right answer is not as important to a math student as parroting the Correct opinion. The students who don’t have anyone at home who can tutor them in math or pay someone else to do so are just out of luck, it seems. The worst part is, they will be made to believe that they know the math if they agree with the teacher’s opinions. But once they hit the workplace, they will discover that what they needed to know was the math.
This problem isn’t a core focus of our site so just this for now: There are enough of these intellectual termites out there that they cannot be treated as lone cranks. Second, the surprising silence of Big Science is likely due to the fact that the termites’ emergence is an unavoidable outcome of post-modern naturalism.
Big Science, committed to naturalism, is willing to go down quietly with the post-modern ship.
See also: The rigor mortis of science: The war on measurement itself has commenced
Algebra is not racist!
Nature: Stuck with a battle it dare not fight, even for the soul of science. Excuse me guys but, as in so many looming strategic disasters, the guns are facing the wrong way.
and
Can science survive long in a post-modern world? It’s not clear.