TheQuartering [2/24/2021]
I don’t know how I can even get through this one… It’s time to homeschool your kids.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is bankrolling a group of activists who believe math is racist.
A group of fringe educators have compiled a six-part toolkit offering an “integrated approach” to developing an “anti-racist math practice” viewed through a social justice lens. It chides the “concept of mathematics being purely objective” as “unequivocally false.” It argues focusing on the “right answer” to math equations is an example of white supremacy.
The toolkit A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction is meant to help educators in grades 6-8. If your child’s educators subscribe to any of the beliefs in these texts, you should pull them immediately.
The toolkit focuses on the 2021 progressive buzzword of “equity” and claims white supremacy and mathematics go hand in hand.
The resources help educators rid their classrooms of the scourge of racist math by making their students dumber. For example, the lessons in Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction warn educators that “white supremacy culture” shows up in the classroom when teachers “treat mistakes as problems by equating them with wrongness” because it “reinforces the ideas of perfectionism (that students shouldn’t make mistakes) and paternalism (teachers or other experts can and should correct mistakes).”
It doesn’t explain why this is white supremacist culture. It just says that it is.
A quick way to dismantle the white supremacist culture, according to the text, is to eliminate order in the classroom. The text argues, “requiring students to raise their hand before speaking can reinforce paternalism and powerhoarding, in addition to breaking the process of thinking, learning, and communicating.”
Instead, it recommends you teach math via “storytelling circles, incorporating dance, music, song, call and response, and other cultural ways of communicating.”