Math and Social Justice Don’t Mix

Wouldn’t life be wonderful if you could combine your vocation with your avocation? Wouldn’t you like to get paid for doing what you really like to do?

Of course—but sometimes the avocation detracts from the vocation. That is the case when teachers try to combine their job of instructing students with their hobby of political zealotry.  If teachers, from kindergarten to grad school, want to do their utmost to save the world according to their own beliefs, fine, but that shouldn’t be mixed in with teaching their subjects.

What has me thinking about that is an excellent essay “The Propaganda in Our Ed Schools” by Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute. Stern’s particular focus was on the third annual Radical Math conference recently held in New York. The title of that conference tells the story: “Creating Balance in an Unjust World: Math Education and Social Justice.”

The conference took as its guiding light the works of Brazilian educational theorist Paolo Freire, who is beloved at many education schools in the U.S. (In this Pope Center paper, Professor George Cunningham pointed out that Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed is widely assigned in education schools. The Pope Center’s Jay Schalin has also written on Freire’s influence here and here.)

The conference program, Stern writes, was emblazoned with Freire’s most famous declaration: “There is no such thing as a neutral education process.” That is what unites the educational vocation with the political avocation of many teachers. It gives them a justification for commingling teaching with proselytizing.

It’s fairly easy to understand how teachers in a field such as political science or history might blend a large amount of their ideas on the supposed injustices of capitalism with some subject matter, but math teachers?

Meet University of Massachusetts–Boston professor Marilyn Frankenstein, who teaches in the mathematics education department. You can judge her place on the political spectrum from this statement: “In a just society, food would be as free as breathing the air.”

Don’t try telling her that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch! She insists that lunch, breakfast, dinner, and snacks can and should all be free. And they would be if only we’d properly teach students, in math classes and everywhere else, about the importance of achieving social justice and transforming the world. Frankenstein says on her web page that she stresses “how reasoning quantitatively about public and community issues is connected to using math work for justice and to work against injustice.”

In other words, she wants math teachers not to just teach algebra and trigonometry and calculus and so on in a straight-forward manner, but instead to concoct problems built around a host of socio-economic issues. Stern, in an earlier article, gives a good example: “At East Side Community High School, the math department showed off its ‘Sweat Shop Math’ project, in which students calculate the degree of wage exploitation in a sneaker factory in Nicaragua and then discuss the injustice of it all.”

You certainly can use math to calculate percentages, but when you start talking about calculating “exploitation,” you’re mixing oil and water.  When a teacher ties a math lesson into something as emotionally charged as purported exploitation of poor workers, the students are likely to focus more on the conditions of the workers than on learning the mathematical principles.

Building math problems for school kids around Freire’s framework that poor people are always the victims of oppression by greedy capitalists no doubt makes the class thrilling to teachers who are eager to change the world. The question, however, is whether it is appropriate to hijack a math course to get high school students riled up over things they know almost nothing about, such as producing shoes in Nicaragua. (College professors have also been known to do the same thing; here is one instance.)

I maintain that this practice is not appropriate. Math teachers should teach their students mathematics, not their theories about everything they think is wrong in the world with a math overlay. Same for teachers of English and history and science and everything else.

It is time to bury Freire’s idea that unless you are constantly hectoring students about the world’s injustices, you are actually helping to reinforce them. Labor conditions for workers in poor countries won’t improve because American teachers make up math problems about calculating exploitation; nor will they get worse if teachers just concentrate on math without going off on political tangents.

 If teachers who have a strong urge to change the world want to do so outside of class, they’re perfectly free to do so. That puts them into the wide world of ideas and arguments, where they don’t have a captive audience of impressionable students. Preaching your gospel to students is pretty easy. Making a case for change you want, like putting an end to capitalist exploitation, is vastly more difficult when there are knowledgeable adults who are apt to pose counter-arguments.

Professor Stanley Fish hit the nail on the head when he said to his fellow leftists, “Save the world on your own time.” (That’s the title of his latest book.)

Sadly, many education professors continue to tell their students—our future teachers—that it’s not only permissible to “teach for social justice,” but that they should do so; that they’re not doing their jobs unless they harangue students about oppression and exploitation and injustice and inequality and the environment and dozens of other worries at every opportunity.

Freire was simply wrong. Education can be neutral. Schools should make it plain to teachers that they expect it to be.