Monday, July 29, 2013

New book shows radical teachers how to mix traditional mathematics with ‘social justice’ political lessons

MILWAUKEE – It’s said that misery loves company.

Rethinking MathmaticsPerhaps that’s one reason a group of gloomy, radical teachers is trying so hard to poison the minds of the nation’s K-12 students with their anti-American, anti-free market ideas.
They’re miserable living in “the land of the free,” and want others to share their pain.
The educators are part of Rethinking Schools, an organization that’s been sneaking left-wing “social justice” lessons into America’s K-12 classrooms for nearly three decades.
The group’s latest effort to indoctrinate the nation’s youth is a 286-page book aimed at teachers, titled “Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers.” The book is a mix of math lesson plans and essays from activist educators who explain how they’ve used their classrooms to advance a progressive political philosophy.
Two main themes emerge from the pages of “Rethinking Mathematics.”
The first is that the U.S. is a hopelessly racist country that routinely oppresses “people of color.”
This message is conveyed through lessons and essays about racial profiling, environmental racism, unfair mortgage lending practices of Big Banks, the “overabundance of liquor stores” in minority communities, and slave-owning U.S. presidents.
The book’s other major theme is that capitalism’s unequal distribution of wealth is the root cause of the world’s suffering. Students learn to despise free market economics in lessons about third-world sweatshops, “living wage” laws, the earnings of fast food workers and restaurant CEOs, and the “hidden” costs of meat production.
All of this sounds like material from a college sociology textbook. What could it possibly have to do with mathematics?
As the “Rethinking” teachers demonstrate, the math concepts of ratios, averages, percentages, bar graphs, density and geometric formulas are very useful when training kids to see the world in their preferred categories of “haves” and “have nots.”

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