George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 25 October 2017.  A slightly edited version of this appeared as an op-ed in the 4nov17 Union (here). gjr]

In these commentaries we have chronicled the long decline of America’s K-12 education, a decline that has now been joined by our very politicized higher education system.  The race toward the bottom continues, and is very apparent from the aggregate performance of our local public schools.  Today we have major news outlets confirming that “Internationally, US Students are Failing”, prominent technocrats like Bill Gates tell all that “schools are failing America’s kids”, and the government’s own National Center for Educational Statistics states flatly that “everything is just going down.”

Where America is most in trouble is in the critical science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, subjects which provide students the necessary expertise to ultimately enter the workforce into careers ranging from researcher, through electrician and carpenter, to assembler in our new roboticized factories.  The underlying rot in the system exists at several levels, but today I want to highlight some new and unbelievable insanity from our universities that recently came to my attention.  But first, let’s review some background that provides context and perspective for what you are about to hear.

When all is said and done, America has been the world’s leading high-tech nation, providing our citizens an enviable quality of life through our ability to develop, consume, and export products, all of which depend on a constant stream of advances in STEM.  In recent years other developed nations have been catching up and even surpassing us in certain fields, while our schools have “stagnated” and are now “just going down”.  Internationally, American students are “outperformed by their counterparts in 36 countries in math; 18 countries in science, and 14 countries in reading.”  In all categories we rank below developed country averages.  Some startling statistics include 30% of military applicants failing their entrance exams because of poor STEM preparation, and that 2/3 of our 8^th graders already perform below grade level in math.

The language basic to all fields of science, technology, and engineering is mathematics.  And while education at all levels has come under attack by ideologues with agendas that have successfully already politicized almost every subject taught in schools, in recent years these have come to include classes in engineering and the sciences.  Mathematics has remained the last redoubt – untainted, until now.  Today math instruction is also under assault by academics from university schools of education seeking to de-emphasize and dumb down the subject in order to provide social justice for some minorities and students in general who, for a variety of reasons, have difficulty with math.  To put a face on it, let’s take a look at an academic who is a prominent leader of this destructive assault.

Professor Rochelle Gutierrez (pictured here) at the University of Illinois School of Education is a Latina educator with a resume as long as your arm, albeit one which gives no evidence that she understands, let alone claims proficiency in mathematics.  Yet she is on a tear with her publications, presented papers, and speeches decrying today’s already deficient math instruction as being racist, and part of a continuing conspiracy to promote white supremacy to the detriment of the nation’s Hispanic and black students with a lamentable record in scholastics overall, and especially in mathematics.

Time prevents my citing the numerous atrocious claims about math education made by Dr Gutierrez, so let me leave you with just a couple.  She says, “mathematics itself operates as Whiteness” because whites get credit for developing mathematics, are more capable in math, and form the bigger part of the math community.  And that “the importance of math skills in the real world also places what she calls an ‘unearned privilege’ for those who are good at it.”  Most importantly, “minorities have experienced microaggressions from participating in math classrooms… (where people are) judged by whether they can reason abstractly.”

And her solution? it is to revamp the teaching of mathematics by evicting its overwhelming European heritage, and present it with “a sense of political knowledge for teaching.”  Because “all knowledge is relative and ‘things cannot be known objectively; they must be known subjectively.’”  Really?

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is expanded and posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  Let me continue reporting Dr Gutierrez’s assault by first sharing some of her more remarkable and preposterous tenets about the subject at hand.  She believes “algebra and geometry perpetuate white privilege because Greek terms give Caucasians unearned credit for the subject. … (and) evaluations for math proficiency perpetuate discrimination against minority students if they perform poorly.”  In the end she asks, “Are we really that smart just because we do mathematics?”

What the education professor totally misses is the key teaching of Sapir-Whorf (q.v.) that a person’s available thoughts are circumscribed by the language(s) he knows.  This does not also imply that simply because you know a specific language, you can then think all thoughts that that language supports – that takes another dimension of cognition/intellect.  It does mean, however, that if none of your languages support a given thought or domain of thought, those thoughts are not accessible to you as you go about your daily round, reason about your experiences, and otherwise interrogate and/or expand your ontology.

The closest the good professor comes to such notions is in the enigmatic and potentially disputable tagline that decorates her website – “We act ourselves into new ways of thinking, not the reverse.”

Mathematics is possibly the most profound, dynamic, and powerful language (lingua franca) that Man has developed, and which continues to expand for its own sake as a discipline of intellectual beauty, but most importantly as an empirical tool that allows us to understand, explain, and utilize the universe in which we find ourselves.  It has become the bedrock foundation of all domains of human knowledge; things become universally useful when they can finally be expressed as and manipulated in terms of mathematical forms – in short, things then become computable.

Those who have acquired some useful body of mathematical language (knowledge) can not only think thoughts that the pre/sans-math people cannot, but they also know and can readily demonstrate for themselves and other mathematically versed people that this indeed is the case.  It is like the proverbial Eskimo, studying a bleak frozen field of sea ice, who sees a wealth of detail in the broken and piled crags, to which I, looking at the same scene, am blind.  Why? Because his language is rich in labels for the different types of ice, their piled configurations, the processes that generated them, their likely future evolution, … , and it permits their recall and manipulation to support planning and control.

And considering evolution into possible futures, mathematics is the only language which opens up new domains of knowledge, and even allows us to precisely predict what will most likely happen by ‘simply’ manipulating symbols of its syntax and grammar with a pencil on a blank sheet of paper.  None of this is possible for persons who can claim no mathematical accomplishments.  As the era of super-intelligent machines approaches, those who cannot even traverse the foothills of the magnificent mathematical mountain range, will also not be able to understand the important workings of their environment, the society which surrounds them, and the issues that face us as a planet, a nation, or even our local community.

Finally, mathematics is a cosmic language.  It is the same for the sapients who live in a galaxy a billion light-years distant as it is for us.  Mathematics is not dependent on the race, or culture, or ethnicity, (remember Jaime Escalante?) or sexual orientation, or … of the sorry little species of H. Sapiens that has crawled out of the muck of this obscure planet.  Mathematics is already out there; it came into being in the first explosion that coagulated into our marvelous expanding universe.  But looking inward, from here on, mathematics education has become fundamental for an informed citizenry, and doubly so for people who want to become smart enough to remain free, at least free enough to keep reaching for the stars.

Coda:  It is not a far-fetched future in which, due to the power of ideas it grants receptive minds, mathematics may someday become a tightly state-regulated discipline approved for study only to those of a suitable political pedigree.  For more reading about the Ilk of Gutierrez – their ideas and current initiatives – here are some links that will get you started. 

• http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/10/24/white-privilege-bolstered-by-teaching-math-university-professor-says.html
• http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/23/professor-claims-math-algebra-and-geometry-promote-white-privilege/
• https://education.illinois.edu/faculty/rg1
• https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-american-students-need-chinese-schools-1504882481
• https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-stop-the-drop-in-american-education-1378422168
• http://mashable.com/2017/10/20/bill-gates-public-education-investment/#zeTyOig2ZPqE
• https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2016-12-06/math-a-concern-for-us-teens-science-reading-flat-on-test