Saturday 13 March 2021

The original sin

- Jerm

Friday 12 March 2021

Escape from Egypt🐪🗻 moment on The Coconut Whisperer: German police fear the wurst as legal snag scuppers sausage DNA burglary breakthrough

German police fear the wurst as legal snag scuppers sausage DNA burglary breakthrough

The statute of limitations on the burglary has expired, so the suspect is unlikely to be extradited to Germany if arrested.

Sky News, Thursday March 11, 2021

https://news.sky.com/story/german-police-fear-the-wurst-as-legal-snag-scuppers-sausage-dna-burglary-breakthrough-12243003

Image: The burglary has been solved - but the legal process has hit a snag (file pic)

Image: The burglary has been solved - but the legal process has hit a snag (file pic)

Translator of Biden’s inauguration poem says he was kicked off project because he’s not black & female

12 Mar, 2021 07:04 / Updated 4 hours ago

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Translator of Biden’s inauguration poem says he was kicked off project because he’s not black & female

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A Catalan translator says his translation of a poem recited at the President Joe Biden’s inauguration was shelved after he was told that, being a white male, he had the wrong ‘profile’ to translate a black female poet.

Víctor Obiols, a renowned English-Catalan translator, said his Spanish publisher refused to use his already completed translation of Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘The Hill We Climb’, ostensibly because his skin color and gender were not appropriate for the task.

Barcelona-based publisher Univers said they commissioned the translation to Obiols because they considered him to be the best qualified. Obiols is well-known for translating the works of Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde into Catalan.

However, after the translation was already finished, Univers was contacted by Gorman’s US publisher, Viking Books, and asked to find a translator who is a woman and an activist, preferably of African American origin, instead.

“They did not question my abilities, but they were looking for a different profile, which had to be a woman, young, activist and preferably Black,” Obiols told AFP.

According to Spanish media, Univers editor Ester Pujol said the US publisher has every right to put any conditions in place, describing the demand as “perfectly acceptable.”

Pujol noted that, although his translation would not see the light of the day, Obiols would be compensated for his work. Univers is currently looking for a suitable candidate to replace Obiols.

Obiols said he was flabbergasted by the US publisher’s stance.

“If I cannot translate a poet because she is a woman, young, Black, an American of the 21st century, neither can I translate Homer because I am not a Greek of the eighth century BC. Or could not have translated Shakespeare because I am not a 16th-century Englishman,” he told the media.

Shortly after being given the boot, the translator posted several tweets, calling himself the “victim of a new inquisition.” He later deleted the posts because he didn’t want them to be misinterpreted, he told the media.

Obiols is not the first Gorman translator who has lost the job due to issues of identity. Last month, Dutch poet Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was forced to turn down an assignment to translate the poem into Dutch as the result of a public campaign spearheaded by black culture activist Janice Deul, who argued that Rijneveld (who became the youngest writer to win the International Booker Prize last year and identifies as non-binary) is ill-suited for the job because they are white – even though Amanda Gorman selected Rijneveld herself.

Deul said she is not against white people translating the works of black people, but only “this specific poem of this specific orator in this Black Lives Matter area.”

Gorman, 23, made waves in January after becoming the youngest poet ever to recite at a presidential inauguration. Her poem, which was influenced by the Capitol riot and referred to the fragility of American democracy, drew praise from President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama. She described herself as a “skinny Black girl, descended from slaves and raised by a single mother” in the six-minute piece.

https:rt.com/usa/517891-gorman-translator-black-poem/

Students attempt to tear down ‘colonial statue’ during Wits protests

South Africa: Students attempt to tear down ‘colonial statue’ during Wits (University of the Witwatersrand) protests

The Wits protests are taking a controversial turn, after a group of students attempted to tear down a gold mining statue on Friday afternoon.

Students taking part in the Wits protests set their sights on a statue near the university campus in Johannesburg on Friday. A group of youngsters gathered to tear down The Miners’ Monument at the top of de Korte street, with demonstrators telling the press that this act of destruction was a symbolic gesture to ‘decolonise education’.

WHAT STATUE WAS TARGETED BY THE WITS PROTESTS?

There was also an attempt to set the statue on fire, as ropes were placed around the necks of the men immortalised by the monument. The statue was initially erected to tribute to the gold mining community, who worked in horrendous conditions during the time of colonial rule. The students, however, were unable to knock down the structure.

WATCH: STUDENTS AT WITS PROTESTS FAIL TO REMOVE A STATUE

THE ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST…

The removal of statues has become a very thorny subject across the globe. Protests in the US and UK have recently seen problematic figures toppled from their plinths. The argument against these acts of civil disobedience is that they are essentially ‘trying to whitewash history’, whereas those involved believe some monuments ‘are glorifying injustice’.

The unsuccessful targeting of The Miners’ Monument is likely to raise questions, however. The statue is a tribute to the miners and their perseverance. However – whatever side of the fence you’re on – one thing that is not up for debate, is that these students involved in the Wits protests are hellbent on securing meaningful change.

A leading student union has sent a list of demands to Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande, giving him a deadline of 17:00 to agree with the proposals. A failure to do so, they warn, will result in a ‘national university shutdown’ on Monday.

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/watch-wits-protests-tear-down-statue-where-which-gold-mining-video/

A Race to the Bottom in Language Standards

In a society of victims, knowledge and facts and reason no longer apply.

Fri Mar 12, 2021

Richard L. Cravatts

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews.

When the prescient George Orwell observed that “There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language” he may not have been anticipating what is taking place with educators who have allowed their obsession with racial justice to influence how they maintain standards in their teaching methods and pedagogy.

Last July, for example, as the country was embroiled in race-motivated riots and social unrest over the death of George Floyd and others, The Conference on College Composition and Communication (an affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English) released a set of demands to achieve what they termed “Black Linguistic Justice.” The document had the curious name “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” but the message was clear: that the purported violence against Black people by police on the streets of America reflected the same alleged racist situation in schools. “As language and literacy researchers and educators,” the demand document read, “we acknowledge that the same anti-Black violence toward Black people in the streets across the United States mirrors the anti-Black violence that is going down in these academic streets.”

Not content to have a single standard by which the English language is taught, these social justice charlatans demanded, first, that “teachers stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm . . . .” Why is that? Because standard English, something that should be and is color blind, in the minds of these activist educators “reflects White Mainstream English!,” presumably a situation that is untenable. Black students should not have to choose between Black linguistics and standard English usage, they contend, something they refer to as “code-switching,” because “this is linguistically violent to the humanity and spirit of Black Language speakers.” Instead of having all students learn one standard of English usage, these activists wish Black students to think of conforming to standards as something that is inherently racist, and the educators demand that Black students be constantly reminded of their victim status, that “we must teach Black students about anti-Black linguistic racism and white linguistic supremacy!”

Educators, in their view, must “develop and teach Black Linguistic Consciousness that works to decolonize the mind (and/or) language, unlearn white supremacy, and unravel anti-Black linguistic racism!,” decolonizing the mind presumably meaning abandoning any semblance of consistency in language use—use that is the culmination of generations of accepted learning, traditions, and standards for all students—not just white ones.

Not coincidentally, the 2019 chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication was Asao B. Inoue (pictured above), who directs the University of Washington-Tacoma’s Writing Center. At a 2019 presentation held at Ball State University, “Freeing Our Minds and Innovating Our Pedagogy from White Language Supremacy,” Inoue, a champion of Black linguistic justice, suggested that “We are all implicated in white supremacy.” “This is because white supremacist systems like all systems reproduce themselves as a matter of course,” he said. “This includes reproduction of dominant, white, middle-class, monolingual standards for literacy and communication.”

And it is not only standards of language use that should be abandoned, according to Inoue and other social justice activists. Grading itself—in other words, assessing performance of students—is inherently racist and should be eliminated. During the presentation, for example, Inoue asserted that, far from being a way to measure the performance of all students in a way that is consistent and equitable, “grading is a great way to protect the white property of literacy in schools and maintain the white supremacist status quo without ever being white supremacist or mentioning race.”

Since, as Inoue and his fellow travelers fervently believe, racism is endemic and systemic, Black students’ work should not be graded by the same standards as other students. “We must rethink how we assess writing, if we want to address the racism,” Inoue absurdly suggested in his 2015 book, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future.

Discussing this same notion in a paper, “A Grade-less Writing Course that Focuses on Labor and Assessing,” Inoue outrageously suggested that a student’s work—if he or she is Black—should be based on the effort put into the writing process, not on the quality of the writing itself and that teachers should “calculate course grades by labor completed and dispense almost completely with judgments of quality when producing course grades.”

Apparently, Inoue has gained some disciples for his calls to abandon academic standards when assessing students’ writing. Two writing professors at St. Olaf College, Bridget Draxler and Diane LeBlanc, wrote an article in which they encouraged the notion of “labor-based grading,” which rewards the student just for trying to write something without judging the written work on its actual merits and quality.

“This approach to responding to student writing prioritizes students’ process and growth instead of a single standard of writing,” they naively wrote, believing that such a method would “decenter white, upper-middle class educational and social experiences” and help students feel coddled and included.

After all, on campuses in the thrall of inclusivity and diversity, all that matters is that students feel good about themselves, not that they achieve at expected levels of academic competence. Draxler and LeBlanc are not worried about the corrosion of standards as long as the students’ identity as victims is constantly reinforced. “We are heartened by the ways in which our colleagues are thoughtfully questioning feedback and grades that over-emphasize errors,” they wrote, “and affirming writing that represents students’ diverse identities, experiences, and voices.”

The willingness of educators to abandon standards when the students are Black was on full display this year in a more conspicuous way when the Central Connecticut State University Center for Public Policy and Social Research announced a writing and multimedia contest, “Reflect & Empower: What Black Lives Matter Means to Me,” for which students would write reflections on their relationship with and connection to the Black Lives Matter movement.

So as not to discourage those whose writing skills were sub-par, the contest website announced that while the essays had to be original work, the “submissions will not be judged on traditional literary or grammatical standards,” and that that the “priority of this project is the stories conveyed.” In other words, for a writing contest the quality of the writing was unimportant; it is the thought that counts.

This summer, as the country was still embroiled in rioting and racial unrest, a stunning letter written by Rebecca L. Walkowitz, the chair of Rutgers’ English Department, “Department actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter,” affirmed how deeply academia was in the thrall of racism hysteria, and particularly after the death of George Floyd under the knee of a brutal police officer in Minneapolis.

As part of its virtue-signaling tool kit, the Rutgers English department created something called the Committee on Bias Awareness and Prevention (CBAP), its purported purpose to be an “engine of workshops and forums related to anti-racist pedagogy, addressing bias in the classroom, and recognizing and eradicating bias in the workplace and academic profession.” Clearly, none of the professors in these classrooms will be expressing racist thought, given that they are now required to attend workshops on “how to have an anti-racist classroom.”

Most troubling, perhaps, was the stated intention in the letter that Rutgers will be “incorporating ‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy” as a way of accommodating, and excusing, a lower level of writing skills of minority students and “students from multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds.” The term critical grammar, of course, suggests that the rules of English usage are merely social constructs, that grammar and the appropriate and accepted use of written English can be ignored and replaced, at will, with other styles of communication.

In a society of victims, knowledge and facts and reason no longer apply. Instead of having to learn to write in a way that is articulate and grammatically correct, Rutgers students and other Black students at woke universities will now be encouraged “to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them w/ [sic] regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents.” Apparently, a professor who reads a composition by a student whose “written accent” is the language of the streets, or even the incomprehensible vernacular and fractured language of text messages, will be considered biased if he or she tries to apply academic standards to the essay; in other words, anything written by anybody, regardless of how inarticulate and grammatically incorrect it is, will henceforth meet the new standards of language standards and usage.

George W. Bush once spoke of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” and it seems that activist academics, in their ambition to vigorously address issues of racism and anti-Blackness, have fallen into the trap that elitists often do: instead of demanding the same achievement from all students, regardless of color, in their misguided attempt to achieve equity and social justice, they ask less of the very marginalized groups they try so assiduously to help.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/race-bottom-language-standards-richard-l-cravatts/

Cartoon of the day

Cagey president?

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cartoons-slideshow

2 Farm attacks, armed gang invade farms, 2 victims shot, Haakdoornboom

South Africa: 2 Farm attacks, armed gang invade farms, 2 victims shot, Haakdoornboom

Oorgrens veiligheid

March 12, 2021

2 Farm attacks, armed gang invade farms, 2 victims shot, Haakdoornboom

Two farm attacks took place between 22:00 on 10 March 2021 and and 04:00 on 11 March 2021 in Haakdoornboom, North of Pretoria, in the Gauteng province on South Africa. An unknown number of attackers made their way through the farming area during the night. The first shot was heard around 22:30 and it was broadcast on the local WhatsApp group.

The gang made their way from farm to farm attacking the workers while they are sleeping.

There were 2 separate incidents, in the one attack a victim was shot in the head, he is still alive and receiving the necessary care and in the second attack a victim was shot in the hand.

These attacks happened on different premises.

The Police and other stakeholders joined forces and two suspects were caught and one firearm recovered. Some of the stolen items were also recovered.

The Pretoria North Police are investigating.

There is no other information available at this stage.

Read about more farm attacks here

Information supplied by Oorgrens veiligheid

https://southafricatoday.net/south-africa-news/gauteng/2-farm-attacks-armed-gang-invade-farms-2-victims-shot-haakdoornboom/

Gates should fight, not fund, ‘anti-racist math practice’

Ivo Vegter

Mar 12, 2021

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has funded a radical-left fringe group that believes mathematics, as it is presently taught, is racist. This is a preposterously anti-intellectual notion.

The foundation has pumped $1 million into an organisation that promotes A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, a resource kit that claims to ‘support Black, LatinX and Multilingual students to thrive in grades 6-8’.

The organisation ‘offers guidance and resources for educators to use now as they plan their curriculum, while also offering opportunities for ongoing self-reflection as they seek to develop an anti-racist math practice’.

One may wonder why one might need anti-racist math practice, and what kind of math practice is indeed racist. The resource kit answers that question by, and I quote, ‘visibilizing [sic] the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math’.

Again, one might wonder how white supremacy rears its ugly head in the mathematics classroom. It turns out it has nothing to do with racist teachers using racial epithets, or refusing to teach children who are not white.

‘White supremacy culture’

According to the Pathway, ‘White supremacy culture’ (with a capital ‘W’, like the Apartheid schools taught us) shows up in the maths classroom when the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer, and mistakes are characterised as ‘wrong’.

‘The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so,’ says the guide. ‘Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.’ (Their italics, used to indicate undesirable concepts.)

So the pursuit of objectivity is, ipso facto, undesirable, and the pursuit of open conflict is noble, according to these pedagogues. In their view, it’s okay to have different, inconsistent answers, and wishing to resolve them into right and wrong is racist.

In reality, mathematics is about as objective a study as one could possibly find. At school level, there are indeed always right and wrong answers. In higher level mathematics, it would be more accurate to distinguish between ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’, or even ‘useful’ and ‘useless’, but the principle is the same. The entire notion of a proof presupposes that mathematical statements can be shown, incontrovertibly, to be either correct or incorrect.

The Pathway authors, however, seem to think that the sum of two and two depends on what you look like, or how you feel.

Litany of oppression

As a solution to the conundrum that correct answers are racist, teachers are encouraged to ‘choose problems that have complex, competing or multiple answers’, and to ‘engage with true problem solving’. As a classroom activity, they recommend: ‘Using a set of data, analyze it in multiple ways to draw different conclusions.’

This sounds a lot like letting children come up with whatever answers they choose, and interpreting data to fit their preconceived ideas. The first is confusing, and the second is only useful in politics.

White supremacy, the Equitable Math Pathway insists, turns up when ‘teachers are teachers and learners are learners’, because ‘this reinforces the ideas of paternalism and powerhoarding’. The same is true for requiring students to raise their hands before asking a question. Presumably, one ought to permit chaotic indiscipline, lest one promote white supremacy.

We learn that perfectionism is a symptom of white supremacy. So is meritocracy. Teaching so-called ‘real-world mathematics’ is problematic because ‘this can result in using mathematics to uphold capitalist and imperialist ways of being and understandings of the world’.

And so we discern their political objective: tearing down capitalism.

‘Math teachers ask students to show work so that teachers know what students are thinking, but that’ – our woke maths pedagogues aver – ‘centers the teacher’s need to understand rather than student learning. It becomes a crutch for teachers seeking to understand what students are thinking and less of a tool for students in learning how to process. Thus, requiring students to show their work reinforces worship of the written word as well as paternalism.’

So when a student concludes that two plus two is five, you cannot call it wrong. And you cannot ask the student to show how they reached this conclusion either, in the hope of being able to help them correct their mistakes, because both calling it wrong and asking for an explanation is racist.

One solution to this problem, they claim, is to avoid answering mathematical problems with words or numbers, but to let students create TikTok videos instead. Seriously.

Dumbing down mathematics

They argue that grades are ‘traditionally indicative of what students can’t do rather than what they can do, reinforcing perfectionism’, and that is a bad thing.

It is better to focus on what students do know, than on what they don’t know. How they are to learn what they don’t know by being praised for what they do know, the Pathway leaves as an exercise for the reader.

And so the absurdity continues. In essence, the call is to dumb down mathematics so even the worst performers can earn a pass, because that will resolve the perceived problem that minorities struggle with mathematics. (Being blindly US-centric, the Equitable Math Pathway authors appear oblivious to the fact that white people are not everywhere in the majority.)

One might counter that any inequality in mathematics education outcomes could be addressed by improving the quality of mathematics education for non-white students, but that, too, won’t do: ‘This reinforces either/or thinking by reinforcing stereotypes about the type of mathematical education that certain groups of students receive. It allows the defensiveness of Western mathematics to prevail, without addressing underlying causes of why certain groups of students are “underperforming”, a characterization that should also be interrogated. It also presupposes that “good” math teaching is about a Eurocentric type of mathematics, devoid of cultural ways of being.’

Non-European roots

The first time I came across the notion that mathematics is racist was in 2017, when a professor at the Illinois College of Education, Rochelle Gutierrez, made the claim that mathematics subjects such as algebra and geometry perpetuate ‘unearned privilege’ among white people.

Her ‘scholarship’, if one can call it that, ‘focuses on issues of identity and power in mathematics education’.

Gutierrez frets that mathematicians have a disproportionately high status compared to social studies and English professors, which constitutes ‘unearned privilege’, and is therefore racist. Her position seems born of insecurity, not academic rigour.

She worries that ‘curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans’.

‘On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness,’ she argues. ‘Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White.’

There we have the racialist’s capital ‘W’ again.

Of course, these claims are quite baseless. Mathematics has its roots outside Europe. The very first notched tally bones, dating back 37 000 years, were found in Africa. Mathematics is first and foremost a human discipline. It doesn’t belong to any particular race, and is entirely agnostic to the identity of its students.

The very term ‘algebra’ comes from a 9th century treatise entitled al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa al-muqabala (‘the compendium on calculation by restoring and balancing’) by the Baghdadi mathematician Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. This is the mathematician to whose name we owe the term ‘algorithm’.

The Arabic numerals we use today originated with Indian mathematicians in about 500CE, and were later modified in North Africa into the forms that the Italian mathematician Fibonacci would eventually encounter and popularise in Europe.

The foundational developments in mathematics were Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Chinese and Indian, and happened long before the Greeks entered the picture in about 600BCE.

Pre-Greek mathematics included arithmetic, geometry, fractions, equations, and algebra. The ancients knew Pythagorian triples and had good approximations for numbers such as √2 and what we today know as π, a symbol that was only introduced in 1706 by Welsh mathematician William Jones.

Microaggressions

Gutierrez argues that not doing well in mathematics is a racial phenomenon, and non-white students ‘have experienced microaggressions from participating in math classrooms… [where people are] judged by whether they can reason abstractly’.

You should have seen the microaggressions directed at white students who were incapable of abstract reasoning in my mathematics classes at school and university! Many of them were unceremoniously booted out of the discipline, and told to take up social studies, commerce, farming or trades.

The Greeks did build a solid foundation in mathematics, at the height of their culture. Between the decline of the Greeks and Romans in the 4th century and the rise of European mathematics in the 15th and 16th centuries, mathematics was not dead, however. It was preserved and advanced by Persian, Arabic, Indian and Chinese mathematicians.

Let’s list a few:

Sun Tzu, of The Art of War fame, who gave us the first definitive statement of the Chinese Remainder Theorem;
Liu Hui, who calculated π to five decimal places, solved linear equations using matrices, and introduced early forms of differential and integral calculus;
Aryabhata, who defined trigonometric functions, solved simultaneous quadratic equations, and recognised that π is an irrational number;
Brahmagupta, who established basic rules for dealing with zero and negative numbers, including negative roots of quadratic equations and solutions of quadratic equations in two unknowns;
Bhaskara I, who was the first to write numbers in the Hindu-Arabic decimal system with a circle representing zero, and made a remarkably accurate approximation of the sine function;
The aforementioned Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi, who popularised Arabic numerals in the Islamic world, and created the foundations of modern algebra;
Ibrahim ibn Sinan, who advanced Archimedes’ understanding of geometric concepts such as areas, volumes, and tangents to a circle;
Muhammad Al-Karaji, who was the first to use the principle of mathematical induction, including to prove the Binomial Theorem;
Ibn al-Haytham, also known as Alhazen, who derived a formula for the sum of fourth powers (Alhazen’s Problem), and established the beginnings of a link between algebra and geometry;
Omar Khayyam, the astronomer-poet of Persia of Rubáiyát fame, who generalized Indian methods for extracting square and cube roots to include fourth, fifth and higher roots;
Bhaskara II, who established that dividing by zero yields infinity, found solutions to quadratic, cubic and quartic equations including negative and irrational solutions as well as to second order Diophantine equations, and introduced some preliminary concepts of calculus;
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, who developed the field of spherical trigonometry and formulated law of sines for plane triangles;
Qin Jiushao, who found solutions to quadratic, cubic and higher power equations using a method of repeated approximations;
Yang Hui, who invented Chinese ‘magic’ squares, circles and triangles and developed Yang Hui’s Triangle, which was an early version of Pascal’s Triangle of binomial coefficients;
Kamal al-Din al-Farisi, who applied the theory of conic sections to solve optical problems, explored amicable numbers, and investigated factorisation and combinatorial methods; and
Madhava, who used infinite series of fractions to give an exact formula for π, worked on the sine formula and other trigonometric functions, and contributed to the development of calculus.

None of their work was met with ‘microaggressions’, because it was sound work. The European mathematicians who followed them more often than not stood on their shoulders, not the shoulders of Ancient Greeks.

Although the rapid development of mathematics of the last few centuries happened to a large degree throughout Europe, that continent’s wide language and cultural differences, with treatises and papers being written in Latin, English, French, German and Russian, also demonstrates that mathematics is entirely independent of cultural differences.

Critical theory

Gutierrez says: ‘Things cannot be known objectively; they must be known subjectively,’ thereby neatly tying her views to the core principle and primary defect of critical race theory, namely that there is no such thing as objective knowledge, and everyone’s subjective experience is equally valid as an epistemological basis.

If this were true, the countries in which mathematics and science developed would not have outperformed the countries in which it did not. ‘Other ways of knowing’ would have had equally good outcomes for the development of engineering, manufacturing and finance in countries that rejected supposedly ‘Western’ science and mathematics.

Sadly, the Equitable Math Pathway has influence. According to Newsweek, the group names as partners the Association of California School Administrators, Monterey County Office of Education, the Sacramento County Office of Education, and the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley. The Oregon Department of Education has reportedly encouraged its teachers to register for the Equitable Math training, and a version of it is already functioning at schools in Seattle.

The overt support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gives the cancer of critical race theory even more room to metastasise into every nook and cranny of academia, corrupting the edifice of human knowledge and progress from within.

The beauty of mathematics

The teaching of mathematics can undoubtedly be improved. At school level, maths teaching too often prioritises rote learning and recipe-following over inculcating a deep understanding of mathematical concepts and methods. Too many students hate this, and drop the subject before they get a chance to encounter the true beauty and power of mathematics at university.

Changing this requires many things, but it certainly does not require nonsensical ‘anti-racist math practice’.

The beauty of mathematics is that it transcends petty human differences and follies. It cares not who we are, what we look like, or to which tribes we belong. It stands on its own. Its truths are universal.

It is characteristic of anti-intellectuals – who distrust and despise science, philosophy, art, literature and education – to view intellectual pursuits such as mathematics as elitist and exclusionary, and to portray themselves as noble champions of ordinary people.

The efforts of critical race theorists, who espy ‘white supremacist culture’ everywhere they look, are intended to drag mathematics and the other sciences down into a morass of subjective ignorance. They are not progressive. They are profoundly regressive.

Their purpose is not to ‘support Black, Latinx and multi-lingual students to thrive’. Their purpose is to drag everyone down in order to achieve equality of outcomes in a world where excellence is racist, right is wrong, war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

Gates should fight this, not fund it.

https://dailyfriend.co.za/2021/03/12/gates-should-fight-not-fund-anti-racist-math-practice/