Simplifying Education in the Pursuit of Decolonization

It’s not every day that a ribbon-cutting ceremony in the Democratic Republic of Congo attracts international media attention. Normally, Congo flies under the radar, even though it’s actually one of the biggest countries in the world — it’s bigger than Mexico, believe it or not. But a couple of years ago, this incredible footage from the capital of Congo was picked up by the Western media. It’s from the grand opening of a footbridge that was apparently a big deal for the locals. Here’s how it went:

It’s a little like the collapse of that bridge in Baltimore, except in this case, a barge didn’t need to hit anything. All they had to do was cut the ribbon and stand on the bridge, and the whole thing came crashing down on them. Fortunately, no one was hurt in that incident. It got a few laughs on social media and everyone moved on.

In retrospect, however, the collapse of that footbridge in Congo’s capital was more than just a meme on the internet. It was a practical manifestation of something that Western academics now want to import into this country. There is a concerted effort underway in universities all over the world to “decolonize” mathematics, engineering, and science in general. It’s been generations since Congo was under Belgian rule, so presumably that footbridge is a great example of decolonized engineering. And now the West wants to emulate it.

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I first noticed this trend when I came across a recent article from Australian National University, which according to Wikipedia, is supposedly an impressive institution. The gist is that a professor in Australia named Rowena Ball is trying to get the concept of “Indigenous Mathematics” off the ground because Aboriginal people struggle with European mathematics, otherwise known as real mathematics. The article includes this remarkable line:

Numbers and arithmetic and accounting often are of secondary importance in Indigenous mathematics.

That seems to make as much sense as saying that words are of secondary importance in linguistics. Or that maps or of secondary importance in the science of cartography. How can you have mathematics without numbers and arithmetic, exactly? Read on, and Professor Ball will tell you:

Mathematics is primarily the science of patterns … and recognising and classifying those patterns. … One interesting example that we are currently investigating is the use of chiral symmetry to engineer a long-distance smoke signalling technology in real time. If you light an incense stick you will see the twin counter-rotating vortices that emanate − these are a chiral pair, meaning they are non-superimposable mirror images of each other.

The article goes on to explain:

A memoir by Alice Duncan Kemp, who grew up on a cattle station … in the early 1900s, vividly describes the signalling procedure, in which husband-and-wife expert team Bogie and Mary-Anne selected and pulsed the smoke waves with a left to right curl, to signal ‘white men’, instead of the more usual right to left spiral. … To create and understand these signals, you have to be a skilled practical mathematician, Professor Ball says.

It’s not hard to see what’s been conflated here. Yes, it’s possible to argue that the act of lighting the incense stick and producing “counter-rotating vortices” does, in a way, implicate mathematics and particularly geometry. As does literally everything that happens in the physical world. It’s like saying LeBron James is a skilled mathematician because his three-pointers make nice parabolas. He’s not thinking in his head about the parabolic equation when he’s playing. He probably doesn’t even know what a parabolic equation is.

In the case that Professor Ball is talking about, there’s nothing really “mathematical” in any traditional sense about generating smoke signals, and frankly, depending on the size of the vocabulary of the signaling system, it’s probably something you could train apes to do — even though they have no understanding of language, much less math. It’s like saying a child successfully flying a kite is doing math. It’s nonsense. You might as well say that simply by walking across the room you are engaged in mathematics.

These are very simple phenomena we’re talking about. Throwing a basketball and lighting an incense stick is not rocket science. Your brain is doing “complex calculations” when you shoot a basketball, sure. Or even when you walk across the room. And because our mathematics is so sophisticated and precise, we can describe the physical phenomenon to a great degree of sophistication and precision. But that’s only because our mathematics can penetrate reality to that degree.

You don’t have to wonder how precise African folk math or whatever can get in describing that stuff — to say nothing of the math and mathematical physics required to build stuff like nuclear reactors, rocket engines, computers, et cetera. That stuff absolutely requires not just numbers, but advanced and highly abstract theories.

But highly abstract theories are out of style now — and not just in Australia. Braindead oversimplification is the name of the game. Here for example is a recent TedX talk delivered by a woman who teaches mathematics in Canada. She’s also a vice principal in the Ottawa school district. Listen to her understanding of what mathematics is all about:

Well, I guess there’s some good news here. I must be a genius mathematician myself because I made coffee and picked out my own clothes this morning. This will come as news to all of my grade school math teachers, who graded my math exams in a manner that conveyed a certain lack of faith in my mathematical prowess. But if only they’d known that I already passed the math test just by getting dressed before I came to school. If only I’d been as brain damaged as academic elites are today. Then maybe I would have thought to make that argument myself.

Anyway, a little over a year ago there was an in-depth column in The Spectator about this movement to discredit and undermine serious academic disciplines, especially math. It was written by John Armstrong, who teaches at King’s College London and previously taught at Oxford. He’s an actual mathematician with actual credentials. And he summed up the problem with this whole push to “decolonize” math pretty simply.

The fact is that colonialism is irrelevant to the validity of mathematics. The Mayan civilization was doing sophisticated mathematics in the Americas long before Christopher Colombus arrived on the continent. … The digits 0123456789 we use today were first written in India and inspired by Chinese mathematics. They were popularised by Persian and Arab mathematicians and then made their way to Europe via the Moors’ conquest of Southern Spain. Admittedly the Moors’ conquest of Spain was a form of colonialism, but apparently not the type of colonialism we are meant to be interested in.

So what do these activists mean when they say they want to “decolonize” math, given that the entire idea of de-colonizing math is completely incoherent? The Arabs were colonizers, too. And why are Australians, of all people, so interested in promoting this idea?

One possibility is that by some estimates, as the Twitter account I/o points out, aboriginal Australians happen to have, on average, the second lowest IQ out of any demographic group on the planet. That’s the sort of thing that’s supposed to be unsayable, but it’s impossible to talk about certain groups struggling academically without bringing up the intellectual elephant in the room. There might be a reason why there aren’t many Aboriginals working at NASA. It’s an important point because it means that decolonization, practically speaking, entails dumbing down these subjects or destroying them altogether.

Mainly we see with the “decolonization” agenda the embarrassment that liberal Westerners feel about the fact that their ancestors were far more advanced — in just about every way, and by every available measure — than the native people they conquered. The liberal Westerner is constantly looking for ways to even out the score. And we’re seeing that more and more in this country as well.

The once-respected Nature magazine, for example, recently published an editorial (with no byline) that reads: “Why we have nothing to fear from the decolonization of mathematics.”

What’s amazing is that, if you read the whole editorial, you won’t actually find a definition of what “decolonization” means in this context. You won’t find anything close to a definition, actually. The most you’ll discover is that according to Nature, decolonization:

…shows that the roots of discovery and invention are shared between many world cultures, which can be particularly empowering for people from historically marginalized groups. Decolonizing science is the antidote to exceptionalism, the idea that any single culture or civilization possessed special abilities in advancing science.

But as we just established, some cultures and civilizations did, indeed, advance science and mathematics more than others. Some of them were colonizers, and some of those colonizers were not white. And regardless, none of this has anything to do with mathematics. Maybe you can argue this belongs in some elective history course somewhere. But it has no place affecting courses on the fundamentals of mathematics, which is exactly what’s happening in this country.

Pittsburgh Public Schools, for example, recently announced a plan to make mathematics instruction more “equitable.” What does that mean? Watch:

It’s not about getting the right answer anymore in Pittsburgh’s math classes. It’s about the “journey.” The next time your bridge collapses, remember that. Your death isn’t what’s important. What matters is that the incompetent engineer who built the bridge had high self esteem. Yes, you might be lying on the ground, mangled and dying, with a giant metal beam spearing you through your stomach, but as you lay there expiring, just think about the “journey” that those bridge engineers were on. That should give you comfort.

It’s the same thing the Canadian teacher said in her TEDx talk. The goal is for everyone to feel like a mathematician, regardless of ability. None of this has anything to do with actually teaching math, of course, which is the point. Students can fail math courses — and they’ve been doing a lot of that in Pittsburgh. But it’s harder to fail a course that begins with the assumption that every student is gifted in mathematics, no matter what their test scores or actual mathematical aptitude might say.

The other underlying factor that drives all of this superficial decolonization rhetoric and activism is a deep insecurity about actual knowledge on the part of those circulating this garbage. And it’s very well-founded insecurity, especially when it comes to ignorance regarding history.

Everything is a cartoon with these people: cartoon history, cartoon philosophy, etc. It’s barely high-school debate talking points stuff — it’s more elementary school level thinking — which does make it easier to incorporate into lower education, incidentally.

But to be clear, this isn’t just happening in Pittsburgh. It’s easy to pick on Pittsburgh, for a lot of reasons. As I’ve said before, the city is falling apart. But this effort to “decolonize” math has serious financial backers, and schools everywhere are adopting similar approaches.

In 2018, Bill Gates’ foundation created something called the “Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,” intended for use in grades 6 through 8. The “pathway” trains teachers who:

In order to embody antiracist math education, teachers must engage in critical praxis that interrogates the ways in which they perpetuate white supremacy culture in their own classrooms, and develop a plan toward antiracist math education to address issues of equity for Black, Latinx, and multilingual students.

Why would Bill Gates want to promote nonsense like this? It’s hard to say. No one appears to have asked him. But we do know that, in the years since 2018, math literacy in this country has plummeted. In 2018, something called the “Program for International Student Assessment” measured the average 15-year-olds’ math aptitude in this country at a score of 478. By 2022, that score had dropped to 465. Meanwhile, data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that U.S. math and reading scores are at their lowest level in decades.

You can blame that on COVID and wonky gain-of-function research if you want (which Bill Gates also funded through the W.H.O., by the way). But there’s not a serious person alive who thinks that any of this decolonization propaganda is actually helping these scores move in the right direction. It’s doing the opposite, by design.

This is every bit as serious an attack on this country as the airport and bridge raids that I covered yesterday. This is an attack on our ability to build airports and bridges in the first place. And unless we want our bridges to function like Congo’s in the near future, it needs to end.