Re: math for reproduction and domination

["Peg Griffin" <Peg.Griffin@worldnet.att.net>]

Thanks, Michael.
In some ways it has become worse, hasn't it?  Sort of bad mathematics has a
patina of bad social situations plastered on it here and there.
Lots of thinking about what would be good mathematics brings you to what
Nancy said about fairness:

Mathematics is a socio-cultural tool that, through measurement, augments
perception and, through, operations addresses equality.  That's the core,
root, germ cell, genetically primary bit that a good mathematics education
can bring to a good interdisciplinary educated citizen.

Peg

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Glassman" <MGlassman@hec.ohio-state.edu>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 10:14 AM
Subject: RE: math for reproduction and domination


Bill,

This was a battle that occurred in this country long before Bowles and
Gintis started talking about it.  It was basically how do you teach social
studies, as a separate subject (as a matter of fact as one of a number of
defined subjects) or as part of an overall strategy (where mathematics is
integrated through application in socially relevant situations).
Interestingly enough in the early presidential boards that met to discuss
the direction that public education would take there was emphasis on the
latter, at least that were the plans for actions that emanated from these
boards (I'm talking back in the 1920s here).  Unfortunately even though
those who wanted social relationship integrated throughout the curriculum
won the battle but lost the war.  Interestingly enough the person who
championed the formed, a separate social studies because he believed in a
quantitative social sciences, later came to regret this (at least his
biographer said so).  In spite of these early presidential boards
disciplines came to be narrowly defined and carefully circumscribed so that
mathematics is taught completely separately from social studies.  There are
some who argue that the reason for this was primarily economic, that it was
simply more efficient to go in this direction.  While this is certainly true
it is way too easy and gives too much of a pass to too many people
(including many of the "heroes" of our field - you'll notice that
disciplines in academia have become more narrowly defined and
circumscribed - and I would argue in the case of social issues for no good
pragmatic reason).  There were a lot of conservative politics driving this,
including the eugenics movement which wanted to be able to measure specific
capabilities devoid of any type of transactional analysis.  We are still
dealing with this with the No Child Left Behind disaster (all right,
personal opinion).

The creation of separate disciplines has become so dominant we don't even
remember that the other side commanded the field in U.S. public education
policy (for a very short while), and we have to tell people to go take a
course in Marxism economics at UMass.  Too bad for us.

Michael

________________________________

From: Bill Barowy [mailto:xmcageek@comcast.net]
Sent: Thu 11/11/2004 10:43 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: math for reproduction and domination



On Thursday 11 November 2004 10:22 am, Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:

> I was struck that in the entire discussion, there was no cultural
> historical analysis of the situation in which children do these
> mathematical things not because they are (considered) useful and its
> outcomes have any relevance to anything but to the reproduction of a
> society, where, as in the US, 15 to 20 percent of the population live
> in poverty, and where education is used to systematically exclude parts
> of the population to share in the wealth that is collectively produced.

I don't think such an analysis is necessay, Michael.  I think it's obvious
and
publications from such people as Bowles and Gintis hammer that point home.
In first grade, this kind of thinking is a long ways off.  I'm not even sure
it's something one could do consistently in high school.  But if a student
takes a course in marxist economics at Umass Amherst, or any other
univeristy
for that matter, that point will be well addressed.


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bb