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Adrian Riskin 🇵🇸🍉The author conflates decolonialization with establishing racial equity, and then conflates racial equity in the mathematics classroom with teaching students that everyone, not just "dead white men," are able to do mathematics. She attributes the lack of diversity in mathematics to flawed teaching methods which perpetuate the false idea that success in math is due to talent rather than hard work. This, she says, teaches women and non-white people that math isn't for them.This is certainly correct as far as it goes, but she doesn't go nearly far enough. The solution she offers, and remember that this is supposedly a way to decolonialize mathematics, is to somehow teach all students that math is for them also, that they're capable of learning math if they only study hard enough. Her conclusion is worth quoting at length:"To transform mathematics teaching and learning in ways that empower students, universities need to give students the theoretical grounding they need to access the subject and support them to identify with it –- to want to learn it, to become the mathematicians of the future, to enjoy and critique mathematics and its applications."And she may well be right that if math teachers could come to believe this and to teach as if it were true, which it is, then university mathematics might become much, much more diverse. But that's not decolonialization, which means the elimination of colonialism's effects, both cultural and social. The very idea that everyone ought to learn mathematics, that anyone *needs* to learn mathematics, is an artifact of colonialism. Mathematics is interesting, fascinating, whatever, just like every other area of human knowledge, but it's treated very, very differently, as if it were essential to every human life. The reason it seems different, much more important than subjects universally understood to be electives, e.g. phenomenology or raku methods in ceramics, both of which are also taught in universities, is because colonial powers, among whom I include the contemporary U.S., require (a) techocrats to run their ongoing project of exploitation and (b) a lot of people who've failed to learn math and thereby have learned quite well that they don't have standing or knowledge to challenge the decrees of the technocrats. Nobody thinks that everybody should learn to appreciate the subtle beauty of raku theory or the ins and outs of phenomenology, only that they should have the opportunity to do so if they want. The universal study of subjects like these isn't important to the colonial project. We can begin to decolonialize mathematics by teaching ourselves to see it as nothing more than a special interest, no more important from the point of view of the curriculum than any other obscure elective subject. Anyone who doesn't interrogate the assumption that everyone needs to, or ought to, or would be better off learning mathematics isn't talking about decolonializing anything, they're talking about accommodating students to the needs of colonialists. <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Math" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Math</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Mathematics" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Mathematics</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Decolonial" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Decolonial</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Decolonization" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Decolonization</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/MathematicsEducation" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#MathematicsEducation</a><a href="https://theconversation.com/yes-mathematics-can-be-decolonised-heres-how-to-begin-65963" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no">https://theconversation.com/yes-mathematics-can-be-decolonised-heres-how-to-begin-65963</a>

Adrian Riskin 🇵🇸🍉The formal reasoning style associated with mathematics teaches ... that decontextualization and abstraction are the only valid routes to truth, that the only correct way to understand anything is by analyzing relationships between abstract concepts, because this is how mathematics is taught...For instance, the meaning of the slogan “Black lives matter” relies on its place in a deep and broad historical context involving chattel slavery, police violence, capitalism, racism, prisons, and on and on and on. Part of the context is the understanding that society already acts as if white lives matter without anyone having to say it out loud. Lacking that context, or mapped to a different context, the phrase means something very different. And once decontextualized it becomes conceptually equivalent rather than intentionally and implicitly contrasted to statements like “all lives matter” or “white lives matter.” Even wildly skewed transformations like “blue lives matter” move from absurdity to debatability, which is a win for capital’s stability.Victims of American mathematics education may be powerfully tempted to refute such nonsense on its own terms, i.e. abstractly rather than by screaming out the concrete truth that’s obvious to anyone who shares the context.<a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Capitalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Capitalism</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Anarchism" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Anarchism</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Mathematics" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Mathematics</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/MathEducation" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#MathEducation</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/MathematicsEducation" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#MathematicsEducation</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/PoliceViolence" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#PoliceViolence</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/ACAB" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#ACAB</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/PoliceAbolition" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#PoliceAbolition</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Abolition" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Abolition</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/BLM" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#BLM</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/BlackLivesMatter" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#BlackLivesMatter</a> <a href="https://chez-risk.in/2023/04/05/why-are-children-forced-to-study-mathematics-at-gunpoint" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no">https://chez-risk.in/2023/04/05/why-are-children-forced-to-study-mathematics-at-gunpoint</a>

Adrian Riskin 🇵🇸🍉In the United States children are required to study mathematics for most of the time they’re required to attend school and yet essentially everyone hates it. Not just students, but parents and teachers as well. Very few remember any of it once they’re done with school, which strongly suggests that all those years of mandatory mathematics education aren’t serving the students themselves. If they were it wouldn’t be necessary to criminalize nonattendance, to force children into schools to learn mathematics at the point of a policeman’s gun.<a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Capitalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Capitalism</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Anarchism" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Anarchism</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Mathematics" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Mathematics</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/MathEducation" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#MathEducation</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/MathematicsEducation" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#MathematicsEducation</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/PoliceViolence" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#PoliceViolence</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/ACAB" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#ACAB</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/PoliceAbolition" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#PoliceAbolition</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Abolition" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Abolition</a> <a href="https://chez-risk.in/2023/04/05/why-are-children-forced-to-study-mathematics-at-gunpoint/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no">https://chez-risk.in/2023/04/05/why-are-children-forced-to-study-mathematics-at-gunpoint/</a>

Adrian Riskin 🇵🇸🍉I wrote a thing on mandatory mathematics education and its value to capitalism.<a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Capitalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Capitalism</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Anarchism" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Anarchism</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Mathematics" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Mathematics</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/MathEducation" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#MathEducation</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/MathematicsEducation" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#MathematicsEducation</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/PoliceViolence" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#PoliceViolence</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/ACAB" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#ACAB</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/PoliceAbolition" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#PoliceAbolition</a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Abolition" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Abolition</a> <a href="https://chez-risk.in/2023/04/05/why-are-children-forced-to-study-mathematics-at-gunpoint/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no">https://chez-risk.in/2023/04/05/why-are-children-forced-to-study-mathematics-at-gunpoint/</a>

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