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The sinister attempts to ‘decolonise’ mathematics
Mathematicians in British universities are now being asked to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum. This autumn, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) – an independent charity which reviews university courses – launched a consultation that urged universities to teach a ‘decolonised view’ of mathematics.
It is easy when you work at a university to roll your eyes at this sort of thing and play along. But as a mathematics academic, I felt it was my duty to challenge this unscientific proposal. This week I published an open letter to the QAA criticising their consultation and was delighted that a number of high-profile professors and mathematicians from minority groups agreed to add their signatures.
The fact is that colonialism is irrelevant to the validity mathematics. The Mayan civilisation was doing sophisticated mathematics in the Americas long before Christopher Colombus arrived on the continent.
The irony is that this statement seems itself to be racist. There is nothing particularly European about rational knowledge. Maths has always been an astonishingly international pursuit. The digits 0123456789 we use today were first written in India and inspired by Chinese mathematics. They were popularised by Persian and Arab mathematicians and then made their way to Europe via the Moors’ conquest of Southern Spain. Admittedly the Moors’ conquest of Spain was a form of colonialism, but apparently not the type of colonialism we are meant to be interested in.
Those who adhere to decoloniality don’t think they’re being racist. This is because, strange as it may seem, they don’t believe rational knowledge is superior to other kinds of knowledge. In this world view it is not insulting to suggest non-Europeans prefer ‘other ways of knowing’ to rationality and science.
The QAA themselves don’t explain what decolonising means. That’s presumably because they imagine it is just a buzzword that means being anti-racist and are unaware of its philosophical baggage. They do give one example of how we should decolonise mathematics, saying:
‘Students should be made aware of problematic issues in the development of the [maths] content they are being taught, for example some pioneers of statistics supported eugenics, or some mathematicians had connections to the slave trade, racism or Nazism.’
The issue is that they don’t ask us to focus on any other aspect of the history of mathematics. What about the German mathematician Emmy Noether, who was persecuted by the Nazis, or Alan Turing’s role in their defeat? The QAA’s guidance would lead to a skewed perspective on history seen entirely through the lens of decoloniality. The history of mathematics is not an essential part of a mathematics degree, but if we are going to teach it, it should be taught properly. That would mean teaching our students how to think like historians and how to critique theories such as decoloniality rather than simply accepting them as fact.
Doubtless the QAA is asking us to embrace the theory of decolonisation with the best intentions. There are genuine issues around race that mathematics needs to address. For example, we don’t have as many black maths lecturers as we should. But I haven’t seen a shred of evidence that this is because we don’t talk about Nazi mathematicians often enough.
Embedding decolonisation into mathematics is the most objectionable feature of the new proposals, but it is symptomatic of a more general trend by the QAA to centrally dictate what we should teach.The QAA’s benchmark document that defines the common mathematics curriculum has grown in length by 50 per cent in just three years, but not because of any radical shift in the nature of the mathematics. Instead there has been a been a decision to introduce teaching on diversity, sustainable education and entrepreneurship into every university course. But by requiring that all subject areas include these topics, the QAA is homogenising university teaching and diminishing true diversity of thought.
This top-down approach is antithetical to the academically led approach that should be the hallmark of higher education. We have brilliant researchers eager to teach students who are passionate about the subject. It is a wasted opportunity to have brilliant mathematicians teach racial politics, a subject far from their areas of expertise and interest. In practice, the QAA’s proposals will most likely lead to universities developing one-size-fits-all courses to be used across all disciplines. Since such courses must cater to all possible students this is likely to lead to a dumbing down of education.
Some universities have already rolled out such centrally-designed diversity courses and this has revealed an additional risk. These courses make attractive targets for activists who wish to embed their views in the curriculum. As one example, one such diversity course at Kent university requires all students to affirm that ‘sex is, in fact, a diverse, multi-expressive form of identity and a full spectrum.’
We can no longer assume that maths, science and statistics will be immune from such activism. In New Zealand the school chemistry and biology syllabus has been decolonised and now invokes the concept of mauri, or life force, to give the atomic theory a new spiritual dimension. This is because of a central diktat that Maori knowledge must be given equal status to other forms of knowledge, including science. Activists also have statistics in their sights. One academic review of school statistics textbooks ‘with a theoretical framework of queer theory and critical mathematics’ notes disapprovingly that ‘pregnancy was used frequently in problems involving females/women.’ The UK Office for National Statistics has already succumbed to such ideas, proposing that respondents should be allowed to self-identify their sex in the 2021 census.
The solution to this is surely to return to the basic principles of academic freedom and governance that have historically defined our notion of the university. The curriculum should not be dictated by governments or quangos. Nor should it be controlled by student activists or by university managers. It should be determined by academics based on their research experience and intellectual expertise. The science curriculum should be scientifically led, the philosophy curriculum should continue to question the nature of knowledge, and mathematicians should be allowed to teach mathematics free from political interference.
Source: The Spectator
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