As the parent of a child about to enter college, and a college instructor myself, I am horrified to read the latest from Diane Ravitch, education historian, on the politicization of mathematics. Granted, the humanities have long been in the wasteland of the politically correct and left-indoctrinating University faculties. With the partial exception of economics, the social sciences are generally devoid of thinking, reasoning faculties as well, leaving the hard sciences and math as the last bastions of logic and clarity in the university. No more.

In her Wall Street Journal “Ethnomathematics,” Ravitch discusses how mathematics is fast becoming a tool of the mind-twisting social programmers who want your kids not to think, but to think the thoughts they put in their heads. Doing this with math, a discipline that almost everyone would presume is pure and objective, is a perfect and completely dishonest way to accomplish this, and it’s in your schools and playing with your child’s head now.

Beyond “innocent dumbing-down,” the new, new, new,?,mathematics is aggressively anti-West, anti-capitalist, and pro-multicultural socialist. Mathematics professors are promoting themselves as “critical theorists,” advocating learning and using mathematics as ‘traditional ancestors’ used it, and recasting the curriculum as tool for measuring social justice and injustice. The “critical theorists” assert that students “will learn math best if taught in ways that relate to their ancestral culture.”

This approach would have us believe that we are all imprinted pre-birth with some ancestral inclinations in the area of math. If we want to be successful in life (why should this be limited to just math?) we have to observe those inclinations in our teaching and methods with students. And I thought imprinting was nature’s way of insuring that non-reasoning animals’ offspring don’t wander from the nest, lest they come to believe that a U.S. Postal truck is their mother.

Should one doubt that the new direction in math is turning toward a divisive, ethnocentric feeding frenzy on Western culture and accomplishments, here are some of the items Ravitch mentions: a text titled “Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice By the Numbers,” which includes chapters called “Sweatshop Accounting,” “Chicanos Have Math in Their Blood,” “Home Buying While Brown or Black,” and others in this strait-jacket, anti-white, anti-market mindset. These are in use, not wild pipe dreams, and they will grow in use. Even a superficial look at the number and breadth of social tasks with which the schools have charged themselves guarantees this. Teachers are already using the ‘unit studies’?integrated teaching of all subjects in a teaching plan that revolves around a general topic area?approach to try to cover the vast amount of social and cultural material they are charged with. It’s but a small step to make the topic of that unit “Western Oppression of Other Cultures,” in spirit, if not in name. Now multicultural racists will “prove” it, with numbers. (Ravitch calls this racism ‘particularism,’ to contrast it with the use of the populist buzzword ‘pluralism.’)

I myself have attended parochial schools as well as public school in the K12 years; I’ve been a home school parent and a private school parent. I would not under any circumstances, excepting destitute poverty and welfare, place my child in a public K12 school at this point. I could not in good conscience sign my child’s mind over to the state. There are a few wonderful teachers out there, and many public schools fabulously equipped, but it’s not enough, not by a long stretch, in a system that is deliberately promoting mindlessness.

As my own child, who achieved a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement test in Composition, and won one of three writing portfolio awards in a very tough writing curriculum, noted after looking over the titles of course selections for college freshmen in English, “I could never be an English or a History major at this school.” She was audibly distraught, as this is one of the most prestigious universities in North Carolina. I told her that I agreed, and that she’s lucky that she is planning a career in the sciences. Now I’m not so confident.

Social and economic engineering–we’ve seen this before, with horrifying results.

Addendum: I’ve also taught in the public schools, which doesn’t alter my assessment here in any way.