News

Think 2 + 2 Just = 4?

Think Again; Ethnomathematics

By Alice Linahan 03/04/2021

Math Suffers from White Supremacy, according to a Bill Gates-funded course, as reported here in this News week article.

An effort to portray traditional styles of teaching math as being non-inclusive is gaining steam, in part, courtesy of the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft— a mockery of the effort.

The latest example of the latter is a screenshot of the Equitable Math curriculum that is supported with a $1 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to The Education Trust Inc.

As Diana Anderson pointed out, this is their justification for eliminating the scope and sequence of math instruction. Ethnomathematics will be one substitute. Math instruction will concentrate on small and large numbers, probability, statistics. . . those concepts that will be sufficient to study environmental and social science issues.

As noted here– Not only is ethnomathematics insane; it could not be more blatantly racist. I have been warning for years this was coming. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

The “fundamental transformation” in education is changing from a transmission of knowledge, that parents still expect from our schools to an emphasis on altering the student’s world-views, values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.


When education is focused on how students perceive the world, that is known as critical theory or Cultural Marxism. Nationalism is destroyed. Globalism is in place.

Ethnomathematics – Putting Social Justice into Equations

By Diana Anderson

Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers is an anathema, not only to traditional education, it is blatantly brainwashing minds with politically correct calculations. From coast to coast, classrooms are prepping children for community activism.

      From the Northwest Teachers for Social Justice (http://nwtsj.org/) to New York City’s El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice (http://insideschools.org/high/browse/school/657), a mission in formulating a unique standard in teaching mathematics is rapidly being reinforced in our schools. ‘Social justice’ epithets are pervasive in education reform, resonating a compassion for the under privileged and seeking to change the inequities in communities. Radical educators are not satisfied however with using the Social Sciences to waken minds to the injustices of the world. The new equation is adding critical theory to mathematics instruction. One only needs to read the table of contents of the above to foresee the bar graph of oppressed minority children rise, due to lack of an academic education; Driving While Black or Brown, Sweatshop Accounting, Justice for Janitors, Chicanos Have Math in Their Blood, steer a course in “teaching mathematics for Racial Justice.

     Ethnocmathematics combines math with anthropology, and proponents seek to even relegate it to a relativistic philosophy for the future. Since Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy for the Oppressed was published in 1970, a Critical Pedagogy developed for exploration in linking the classroom to sociopolitical issues. For the present, we need look no deeper than the various web vendors selling peace, and prosperity. Teachingforchange.org markets ‘Putting the Movement Back in Civil Rights Teaching’ a resource digressing to the sixties. It is listed in Rethinking Mathematics and is underscored by a raving review given by Linda Darling-Hammond, a member of the Validation Team for the Common Core.

     Lessons on learning statistics and probability as early as the 2nd grade is a prerequisite for gathering and interpreting data and creating graphs for a comparison of a host of local and global environmental problems. Advocates for teaching math for social justice (SJM) take advantage of the American Statics Association’s work on the skills related to this branch of mathematics. Contributors creating the “Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education” (GAISE) have issued a report on recommendations for statistics education for grades K-12. GAISE examples cited for data gathering are non-sociopolitical. Ethnomathematics, however, would propose controversial topics inclusive of racial profiling, environmental racism, pollution, poverty, conflict and economic disparities. Lessons in this resource perfectly fit with the social, economic and environmental strands in the ‘sustainable standards’ posted at the US Partnership. (http://s3.amazonaws.com/usp_site_uploads/resources/123/USP_EFS_standards_V3_10_09.pdf)

     Corporations and ‘social justice’ advocates make strange bedfellows, but that is the mix for communitarianism. The ‘City Journal’ reported on a three-day conference held in New York City, “Creating Balance in an Unjust World: Math Education and Social Justice”. Jonathan Osler, a math teacher at EL Puente Academy won a grant from the Zone Teacher Inquiry Grants Program funded by the NYC’s Department of Education to host the event. An article, in the City Journal, added the Mayor’s tolerance of ‘leftist politics in the classroom’, which contrast with his support of corporate led changes in restructuring schools. “El Puente was founded with funding from uber-capitalist Bill Gate’s education foundation”.  http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-03-19ss.html)  There’s the social injustice, the elite helping the underclass underachieve.

     Sheila Fitzpatrick confirms any true blooded communist regarded pure knowledge and pure science with suspicion. “The intelligentsia were enemies of the people. There were no ‘neutral’ facts to be learned in the social sciences; and there was no ‘pure’ literature to be appreciated solely on its own terms.” James Milgram, the only mathematics academic on the Common Core Validation Team, chose not to endorse the standards. “We’ve added data analysis, statistics, and aspects of the “new math” including problem solving, Euclidian transformations and simple combinatorics since I was young. And our outcomes keep getting worse”.  Milgram warns Americans that technical jobs in the future require a thorough ground in mathematics from an early age. His articles are most revealing on knowing the difference between teaching numbers on the value they represent, rather than an exercise in vocabulary. http://math.stanford.edu/~milgram/education-index.html

     Ethnomathematics, aka critical mathematics, is a pointless effort without critical thinking skills. Critical pedagogy is dialogical and dialectical materialism is the science of Marxism, seeking social justice through the collective. Ethnomathematics targets ethnic groups and justifies a victim mentality in children. It segregates ethnic minorities from traditional sequential mathematic instruction needed in post-secondary opportunities. SJM is a radical, racially biased method of unlearning pure academics. Teaching math for social justice is not a ‘fuzzy math’ trend. It’s not going to be erased easily.

 Mukhopadhyay, S., & Greer, B. (2002). Mathematics for socio-political criticism: The issue of gun violence. In S. C. Agarkar & V. D. Lale (Eds.), Proceedings of the CASTME-UNESCO-HBCSE International Conference on Science, Technology and Mathematics Education for Human Development (Goa, India, February, 2001), Vol. 2 (pp. 195-199). Mumbai, India: Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education/ Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

Greer, B., & Mukhopadhyay, S. (2002). Democratizing mathematics education. In S. C. Agarkar & V. D. Lale (Eds.), Proceedings of the CASTME-UNESCO-HBCSE International Conference on Science, Technology and Mathematics Education for Human Development (Goa, India, February 2001), Vol. 2 (pp. 191-194). Mumbai, India: Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education/ Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

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