Abolish Mathematical Slavery

Why are we tolerating a broken system?

I want to share one of the most surprising and disturbing experiences I’ve had in my life.

As a child, it was clear to me that the educational system was doing its best to convince students that math was a crushingly boring torture — memorizing meaningless formulas in drab colors of gray. Starting in 2nd grade I saw my friends being whipped into mathematical submission, and I made it my mission to tend to their wounds.

Fortunately, I knew better. My biweekly trips to the library, which played the same role that the internet does now, revealed the wondrous world of mathematical puzzles, mathematical history, and mathematical art. The Mathematica exhibit at the local Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry celebrated “a world of numbers…and beyond”. And the Time-Life series book Mathematics confirmed this. So I knew that what was being taught in school was a pale imitation of what mathematics really was.

But that left a big question in my mind. What the hell was going on? Where was the beauty and joy in math class? In high school, as president of the math club, I started to take matters into my own hands. I wanted my math clubmates to enjoy playing with math. So I asked “where are all the mathematical models, toys and manipulatives”?

I was pointed to a closet in a classroom full of polyhedral building toys — sticks of various lengths, and flexibly rubber starfish with 6 sleeves that attached to the ends of the sticks. We happily spent hours exploring what shapes we could make.

So why weren’t these models available to all students? Because the teachers didn’t know what to do with them. They weren’t part of the curriculum, so they were left to rot in a closet. Weird. I chalked it up to ignorance. Perhaps the teachers didn’t know better.

The clincher came several years later when I was in college, and attended my first math teacher conference — the NCTM regional conference for Northern California, held at the beautiful Asilomar conference center in Monterey.

Here, in the homey wooded paradise designed by famed bay area architect Julia Morgan, 2000+ teachers gathered to hear lectures and workshops about the joys of origami, conversations about problem solving, and patterns in numbers.

I had found my people. It wasn’t the mathematics department at Stanford, but the K-12 math teachers, who still had a twinkle in their eye.

But that’s when it hit me. The teachers, or at least these teachers, knew what was going on. They knew exactly how to present mathematics in a creative, welcoming, playful manner. But yet the math education system was still an institutionalized form of slavery, imprisoning children’s minds and sense of self-worth.

Now I was pissed. Why weren’t these people overthrowing a system they know is wrong? They have the knowledge. Why aren’t they acting?

I tried to understand. Elementary school teachers are largely women, and that double whammy of being female and a teacher in America meant you were beaten into a state of learned helplessness — shut up, follow orders, and and keep a smile on your face.

And yes, overthrowing the system would be hard. It would be easier to go along with business as usual, and channel your more radical thoughts to decorating your classroom with a few math art posters and having a corner of puzzles for students to enjoy.

But here’s the thing. We, collectively, are tolerating an institution that causes great damage to the human spirit every day. It’s not just that it deprives kids of being enriched with mathematical truth and beauty. It hammers them with the message that they are stupid and worthless. Even before I became a parent I feared that would happen to my own children, and yes, my worst fears have come true.

Tolerating our math education practices is like saying to kids that they should learn to accept being whipped and starved.

We need to stand up, united, and declare that enough is enough.

We need to abolish slavery. And imagine a better world.

And as John Lennon said, I’m not the only one.

Vocal math teacher turned education critic Sunil Singh recently unleashed a tirade on his Medium blog, attacking the lack of beauty in math education.

The pointed manifesto “A Mathematician’s Lament”, by Paul Lockhart, succinctly pinpoints what’s wrong with math education.

I’m part of a larger community of math educators and institutions, start with the Museum of Math in New York City, who are actively creating better mathematical experiences.

So yes, we need to abolish slavery.

The practical reality is of course much messier. Abolishing slavery in the US caused civil war, left deep wounds that are still driving politics, and did not put an end to racial injustice. And people have extremely varied ideas of how to do mathematics education better.

But if you believe it is worth fighting for just causes, that’s the challenge in front of us.

Let’s join hands and get to work.