I am out of the loop, but surely this would be politicized math education? Which is absolutely different from mathematics research and not related to reproducibility.
What happens is social scientists look at certain outcomes like people who go to Harvard are the top economic winners and people that take advanced courses go to Harvard. So the reasoning is if we can get people of an arbitrary group into Harvard we will “even out” outcomes.
But what this logic fails to consider is that people who graduate from Harvard aren’t successful simply because they went to Harvard. Their success comes from many attributes like their intelligence, etc that advanced courses are designed to separate the cream.
So then they organize and legitimize their power (removing merit and replacing with lotto or affirmation quotas) by claiming the existing system is racist. When you ask for specific examples they respond that it’s “systemic” and although no one can detect it, it’s imbued in everything. The solution is “anti-racism” which means to make up for past discrimination by systematizing present and future discrimination. This is why your HR department probably has a commissar on it now. They might call it DEI Officer or sone other bullshit job title.
This is what social sciences have contributed the last 40 years.
By proposing a math curriculum that requires teaching all students the same material, regardless of their ability, with the aim of increasing social equality.
I'm OK with that aim; but I know from my own experience that trying to teach calculus to someone that's not ready for it isn't just a waste of effort, it's disastrously counter-productive (I totally fell out of love with maths when I was taught integration, failed to "get" it, and my well-regarded teacher didn't get why I didn't get it).
My understanding is that nowadays in UK state schools, maths is largely student-paced, using worksheets; they've given up on trying to get a whole class of students to all understand the same stuff. That's partly because a set of worksheets is much easier to come by than a good maths teacher, of course.
I'm not a maths teacher, and I don't know enough about the California curriculum arguments to have a view.
shreyshnaccount|3 years ago
nemo44x|3 years ago
But what this logic fails to consider is that people who graduate from Harvard aren’t successful simply because they went to Harvard. Their success comes from many attributes like their intelligence, etc that advanced courses are designed to separate the cream.
So then they organize and legitimize their power (removing merit and replacing with lotto or affirmation quotas) by claiming the existing system is racist. When you ask for specific examples they respond that it’s “systemic” and although no one can detect it, it’s imbued in everything. The solution is “anti-racism” which means to make up for past discrimination by systematizing present and future discrimination. This is why your HR department probably has a commissar on it now. They might call it DEI Officer or sone other bullshit job title.
This is what social sciences have contributed the last 40 years.
denton-scratch|3 years ago
By proposing a math curriculum that requires teaching all students the same material, regardless of their ability, with the aim of increasing social equality.
I'm OK with that aim; but I know from my own experience that trying to teach calculus to someone that's not ready for it isn't just a waste of effort, it's disastrously counter-productive (I totally fell out of love with maths when I was taught integration, failed to "get" it, and my well-regarded teacher didn't get why I didn't get it).
My understanding is that nowadays in UK state schools, maths is largely student-paced, using worksheets; they've given up on trying to get a whole class of students to all understand the same stuff. That's partly because a set of worksheets is much easier to come by than a good maths teacher, of course.
I'm not a maths teacher, and I don't know enough about the California curriculum arguments to have a view.