Opinion: Math education is enriched when it’s contextualized, when students learn of the social and political milieu in which math has been practised.

Math is enriched when it’s contextualized, when students learn of the social and political milieu in which math has been practised. Photo by Leah Hennel /Calgary Herald

“These math books, they were doing woke math. … Two plus two equals four, right? Not two plus two equals, well how do you feel about that, is that an injustice?”

Ha, ha, ha. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis talks math, it’s always a laugh a minute.

Despite the humour, though, DeSantis’s attacks on the math curriculum are deadly serious. Presumably prompted by concern over the introduction of “social-emotional” learning concepts, the governor’s comments suggest that even math won’t escape the educational black hole he is creating in the sunshine state.

That said, he is hardly the first to have doubts about adding a social justice element to the math curriculum. In fact, Canadians across the country expressed similar concerns before DeSantis even took up residence in Tallahassee.

In 2021, Ontario Premier Doug Ford took issue with the proposed math curriculum, saying, “In math, let’s stick with math. Other social issues, let’s talk about it, there’s no doubt, but let’s not talk about it in math. Let’s get back to the core competency of having kids understand … what is seven times seven.”

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At issue were several passages in the proposed curriculum, including this one: “Mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization … a decolonial, anti-racist approach to mathematics education makes visible its historical roots and social constructions.”

That language was eventually removed, and that seemed the end of the matter. But the Fraser Institute decided to revive it with a recent op-ed stating “infusing mathematics with such collateral issues (like colonialism) inescapably detracts from the learning of real mathematics.”

Echoing DeSantis, the op-ed concludes that “the sum of two and two is not changed by whether people are oppressed or not,” and “schools should just teach numbers.”

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Despite the superficial appeal of such statements, they rest on a deeply flawed assumption: that math is just about numbers, that it’s pure, pristine, free from the messiness of human life — and, most of all, free from human values.

Yet while pure mathematics might indeed lay claim to value neutrality — although even that is disputed — there is no question that the application of math to the world is, and always has been, permeated by values.

Indeed, in The Emergence of Probability and The Taming of Chance, Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking explains how statistical thinking transformed the modern world. Before the emergence of statistics and probability theory, people believed that the world was determined, that the past would always dictate the future.

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But when statistical thinking gained hold in the popular consciousness, people realized that the world wasn’t determined, that they could change it, control it. And whom exactly do you think those in power wanted to control? Why those they colonized, of course.

So the application of mathematics leads us directly to colonialism, as the history of the census demonstrates.

In the early modern period, Hacking notes, the “census was more an affair of the colonies than of the homelands.” So Spain conducted a census of Peru in the mid-16th century, and England carried out a census of Ireland in the 17th century.

Canada (Quebec and Nova Scotia) was first subject to census in 1660, under orders from France. And Spain, England and France all ensured careful counting of the populations and exports of their sugar-producing islands in the Caribbean.

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As the Caribbean example suggests, all this surveying was not necessarily carried out for the benefit of the colonies. And there are worse examples: England, for example, surveyed Ireland’s “land, buildings, people and cattle under the directorship of William Petty, in order to facilitate the rape of that nation,” wrote Hacking. Indeed, the colonizers naturally surveyed their colonies for their own benefit.

When it came to surveying their own people, the rulers also asked questions that benefited them, rather than the people. In the 18th century, Prussia’s census included “a completely separate and regular enumeration of all Jewish households.” No other minority group was treated similarly. And France, concerned as it was with a declining birthrate, became obsessed with “degeneracy” — crime and mental illness — among its people.

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The census is just one example of how mathematics has been used to colonize and control, to subjugate and oppress. Mathematics education is none the poorer for pointing that out — on the contrary, math is enriched when it’s contextualized, when students learn of the social and political milieu in which math has been practised.

Math is, after all, a human activity which, like anything else, can be used for good or ill. Presenting it as above the fray, as some ethereal subject too delicate for human life — as “just about numbers” — renders it merely academic, and impoverishes both mathematics and mathematics education.

It also impoverishes students, since a value-free mathematics is one with which you can do no wrong. A value-free education might tell students that two plus two equals four, but must always remain silent on what they use that equation for.

And when the equation is powerful enough to carry them to the stars — or to the depths of depravity — we owe students, and the world, a lot more than just numbers.