Tom Slater
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‘Decolonisation’ has been a hot topic on British campuses since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. It amounts to ridding various subjects of their alleged ‘Eurocentrism’ and championing alternative, non-western thinkers and ‘forms of knowledge’. Once a fringe academic tendency, ‘decolonisation’ activists now have the ear of our most esteemed institutions of learning. In June 2020, Oxford University announced plans to ‘decolonise’ its maths and science degrees.
Many top universities have tried to have their cake and eat it here – to indulge the ‘decolonisers’ while not becoming complete relativists. ‘The maths curriculum our students learn remains the same’, said a Durham spokesman in response to the Telegraph story. ‘But we also encourage students to be more aware of the global and diverse origins of the subject, and the range of cultural settings that have shaped it. Two plus two will always equal four.’
But the Durham guide still urges staff to essentially racialise maths, to treat race as a key consideration when compiling course materials and teaching students. This politicised approach to mathematics not only undermines what should be an objective discipline, it also patronises ethnic-minority students. They are presumed to be incapable of appreciating this subject unless it is presented to them with a more ‘diverse’ face.
Elsewhere, as we saw in California last year, the attempts to introduce racial politics into maths is bred of a more clear-cut contempt for ethnic-minority people. Luckily, the state-education panel rejected the genuinely racist notion that expecting black children to get the right answer was itself racist. But across the US ‘gifted and talented’ programmes for high-flyers in various subjects are now on the way out, over claims that black children can’t possibly benefit from them.
These attempts to rid maths of its alleged white supremacy make two things crystal clear. First, that identity politics in education is no longer confined to the arts and humanities – even maths and the hard sciences aren’t safe from such relativism. Second, for all their talk of ‘decolonisation’, it is woke activists who think of ethnic minorities as lesser beings, incapable of mastering ‘western’ subjects unless those subjects are completely rewired beforehand.
Is maths racist? Of course not. But the woke assault on maths most definitely is.
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