Embracing Mathematics

On February 1st I posted a link in regards to the “culture of power”. I looked at what the culture of power is and how others are affected by it. What I would like to look at in greater detail is the historical denial of literacy by certain groups so that they can stay in the culture of power.

In Robert P Moses essay, “Algebra and Civil Rights?”, he looks at how by keeping African Americans illiterate, to keep them from gaining power during and after the civil rights movement, this has led to African Americans not gaining the literacy they need to be successful in today’s job field. Moses is not only saying that just African Americans are illiterate in math, but rather generalizes to say that our culture, as a whole, accepts illiteracy in math over illiteracy in reading and writing. He says, “Failure is tolerated in math but not in English” (9). As a future mathematics teacher I have seen this in the field. Students don’t see its relevance to their lives so they shut down. This relevance and the culture opposition to mathematics has even greater significance for African American students. To me it is shocking to read from Moses that:

Blacks make up perhaps 15 percent of this country’s population, yet in 1995 they earned 1.8 percent of the Ph.Ds in computer science, 2.1 percent of those in engineering, 1.5 percent in the physical sciences, and 0.6 percent in mathematics.

If educators want to prepare students for the future, than schools are truly under serving African American students. This becomes especially true since we have moved from a majority of jobs that required mechanical, mindless tasks, to jobs that require mathematical reasoning and a knowledge of computers. James Paul Gee also mentions, in his essay, “Teenagers in new times: A new literacy studies perspective”, how we are in now faced with a “new global, hypercompetitive, science-and-technology driven capitalism, products and services are created, perfected, and changed at ever faster rates” (414). Gee also mentions that we are not preparing students for this new economy. It can be concluded that if we are not preparing students as a whole for this economy, than we certainly are not reaching African American students.

Moses also brings urgency to the issue of illiteracy due to the overwhelming number of African American’s in the countries prison system. He states, “A young man born this year has a one in twenty chance of living some part of his life in jail...unless he is Black, this his chances jump to one in four” (11). What can we do for African American students so they don’t oppose math literacy, and they can not become part of that statistic? Often this misnomer is that students don’t care about learning and they are lazy. There are constant examples of why this is not the case, Moses believes that young people, “have the energy, the courage, the hope to devise means to change their condition”. It is up to the teacher to give the students the tools to change their own condition. By preparing students for the new economy we are giving them the ability to change their condition. Not only does this come from teaching them about mathematics, but also racism, and any other factor that may inhibit them from entering the culture of power.

Historically the contributers to mathematics, like other subjects, have been white males; those in the culture of power. We know that other cultures have contributed highly to mathematics. On the whole, mathematics is not taught from the “who did what perspective”, rather the material is taught as being most important. Perhaps if mathematics is taught from more of a historical perspective and showed how other cultures contributed to mathematics than perhaps their will be less opposition to the subject from African American students. To see some African American contributions to mathematics see the following video: