At the Intersection of Math and Politics

There's terrifying piece at Quillette about the intersection of math and leftism by Greg Ashman: "Decolonising Math is Rooted in a Decades-old Conflict." It is, if you like, the argument between people that want to teach kids to understand math, and "those who assert the importance of explicit teaching, practice, and memorization." And never mind what it means.

Now, of course, the "understanding" crowd are saying that forcing kids to memorize and practice is, as my cousin says, "colonizing the curriculum," and marginalizing the human way of learning, especially the non-western approach to knowledge.

The point is that, if things like learning to talk can be achieved without explicit teaching and rote memorization, why not math? Ashman:

Humans have been speaking to each other for a long time and long enough for evolution to act on the process of children learning their mother tongue. In contrast, writing and symbolic math are only a few thousand years old at best and for much of that time have been the preserve of only a tiny proportion of the human population. There simply has not been sufficient time for us to evolve natural ways to learn to read or do math through immersion.

In other words, little babies are programmed to learn to speak; they are not yet programmed to learn math. 

The article made me think about things we learn where explicit teaching and practice are required and just accepted. Let me count the ways:

1. Learning a musical instrument. You have to practice to make perfect. Unless you are Mozart.
2. Learning to dance. It takes about two years to learn Argentine Tango so you can just lead it unconsciously. And you practice it till it becomes second nature. Then you can wow all the girls.
3. Learning to fly. Pilots are taught to practice emergencies, because you do not have time to think when something goes wrong.
4. Boot camp. Soldiers need all kinds of skills to be second nature. To stay alive.
5. Acting in a play. You need to learn your cues, your lines, your blocking, and it needs to become second nature.
6. Mental arithmetic. It helps to know that "1 minus 4 is 7 carry one" -- instinctively, never mind why. Much faster than counting on your fingers.

Need I go on?

Maybe this explains "white privilege." Whites -- i.e. everyone except Africans -- have been doing writing and math rather longer than Blacks from West Africa. And it shows. No fair!

Note, by the way, that Brahmins from India and the Chinese seem to have no problem in the math department. In fact, I'd say that the Chinese people are probably better at math than your average pimply white soyboy. And I explain that by a couple thousand years of Mandarin examinations.

Or, as a guy from Taiwan explained to me, on the subject of teaching literacy in the East Asian character system: the way they teach literacy is that each student has to learn 20 characters a day. Or they get beaten.

What I wonder is what will happen, One Fine Day, when the clients of the liberals wake up to the fact that lefty politics is all about lefty educated gentry feeling good about themselves. Lefty politics has almost nothing to do with helping minorities and "oppressed peoples."

Do you think they will descend into a rage that outdoes the Viking "beserker" rage? Or just say: "much as I hate to say it, my liberal patrons just aren't as caring and compassionate as they like to think."