Political Math Raises Its Ugly Head Again

Over at Campus Reform:

A professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago contributed a chapter to a new textbook arguing that math teachers "have a responsibility" to adopt "social justice pedagogies."

Eric Gutstein advocates "explicitly political" approaches to math education as a way of countering "climate catastrophe" and the "racist and sexist billionaire in the White House."

I'm not going to rebut this idiot now.  I already did--13 years ago.

Update, 6/21/18:  The left is really trying to impose itself in the real sciences now, as opposed to the social sciences:

According to a new textbook written by a professor at the University of Exeter, learning mathematics can cause “collateral damage” to society because it “provides a training in ethics-free thought.”

“Reasoning without meanings provides a training in ethics-free thought,” Paul Ernest writes in “The Ethics of Mathematics: Is Mathematics Harmful?” — a chapter of his book The Philosophy of Mathematics Education Today.

In an abstract for the book, Ernest claims that although he does “acknowledge that mathematics is a widespread force for good,” “there is significant collateral damage caused by learning mathematics"...

The article's author goes too easy on Ernest:

Some things in life are objective and rational, and that’s perfectly okay. The idea that learning about something that doesn’t involve emotions would somehow make people emotionless overall makes absolutely no sense. After all, there are plenty of things we learn as humans that are strictly practical. For example: I learned how to brush my teeth without any sort of discussion about ethics or feelings whatsoever, and I continue to brush my teeth without having any feelings about it to this day. Has that affected my ability to have feelings in other areas of my life? Absolutely not, and neither did learning about math. Students have all sorts of opportunities to study subjects that lend themselves to conversations about ethics and emotions, such as literature and social studies, and they learn even more about this part of life outside of the classroom. To actually suggest that learning a subject with “unfeelingness” is going to create “collateral damage” of any kind is certainly an absurd one — and I certainly don’t think that math is our enemy in any way.