Woke Math Is Coming to a Classroom Near You

T he British author Douglas Murray has lately argued that intersectional social justice represents the most serious ideological threat to the liberal order since the end of the Cold War. Even a few years ago, his thesis would have sounded overblown, but no longer. Events have conspired to vindicate him.

Take the phenomenon of woke math, for instance. As Catherine Gewertz laid out in a piece for Education Week late last year, more and more teachers in K–12 classrooms are introducing left-wing intersectional agitprop into math lessons. Progressive talking points on subjects like policing patterns and campaign-finance reform are being used to supply students with numerical data that is then used to teach multiplication, division, algebra, and the like. Gewertz describes one such initiative, developed in Seattle, as attempting to supply “a framework . . . that weaves questions of power and oppression into math instruction, along with explorations of ethnic identity.”

This infiltration of leftist dogma into education is troubling for several reasons. First of all, it shows just how seriously intersectional social justice takes itself as a comprehensive agenda for social change. Totalitarian ideologies work by supplying an intellectual filter through which all of life is sanitized and presented to people as something uncomplicated and easily understood. This is why the force and momentum of political ideologies is always centripetal, drafting every extraneous facet of social life into the service of the party agenda. The notion that something might be intelligible or worthwhile independent of how it fits into this agenda — that there might be metrics of measuring truth or beauty other than those prescribed by the regnant ideology — is therefore threatening. To combat the threat, ideologues tend to make war on everything that could be construed as apolitical or politically neutral. For example, this is how the Stalinist commissar N. V. Krylenko responded to chess players in the Soviet Union who wanted to keep politics out of the game:

We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula “chess for the sake of chess,” like the formula “art for art’s sake.” We must organize shock-brigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.

It’s not hard to imagine how someone like Krylenko might have wanted to replace the kings and bishops and rooks on the chessboard with general secretaries, commissars, and KGB henchmen. He could even have had little figurines of left-leaning Western intellectuals made, to be used as pawns.

But there’s nothing harder to politicize than mathematics. It’s stubbornly indifferent to all of our plans and agendas. That’s why it plays such a central and chilling role at the denouement of 1984. In a totalitarian society, math is the last refuge of irresistible reality. When we find thinking like Krylenko’s not only in our history and English classrooms (wherein ideology can be easily adapted to the subject material) but in math class as well, we have reason to recoil at just how far and how deep the rot of ideological militancy has spread throughout our educational establishment.

The most popular woke math textbook being used right now is High School Mathematics Lessons to Explore, Understand, and Respond to Social Injustice. Published by Corwin in tandem with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, it provides 22 lessons that draw on left-wing talking points. Chapter 6, on algebra and functions, includes lessons like “Children at the Border: Looking at the Numbers,” “Intersectionality and the Wage Gap,” and “What’s a Fair Living Wage?” In Chapter 7, meanwhile, we find a statistics and probability lesson about “Humanizing the Immigration Debate,” and in Chapter 8, gerrymandering is used to teach kids about geometry.

After the book was published, the editors received so many requests from K–8 teachers looking for something similar to suit lower grades that three new volumes are currently in the works, aimed at the youngest and most impressionable of school-aged children.

It would be comforting to think of this trend as something confined to a particular state or locality, but, unfortunately, it’s spreading across the country faster than Beatlemania did in the spring of ’64. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, 22 schools are currently working together on “equity focused math instruction.” A popular social justice math wiki was built and is administered by a teacher in Oregon. The Clayton County school district in Georgia is currently working to institute woke math across all grade levels. And on top of all this, EduColor, a nonprofit devoted to advancing “equity” in education, has a presence nationwide. It’s true that woke math is, for the most part, a feature of schools in blue enclaves right now. But as long as there exists a federal Department of Education, and as long as the Democratic Party remains a wholly owned subsidiary of the teachers’ unions, the danger that these practices will become policy on a national scale is very real.

During the Soviet era, it was normal for dissident parents in the Eastern bloc countries to shepherd their children into careers in the sciences. The STEM subjects, as we now call them, were thought to be the least political of all disciplines. One could get through life practicing such a career without having too much to do with party activism. Many American parents take a similar view today. They see the nakedly political radicalism that has corrupted the humanities faculties of many American universities and hope to steer their children clear of it by encouraging them to study the hard sciences. But the rise of woke math suggests there may be no escape. The cancer of indoctrination is spreading and, if left untreated by parents, teachers, and politicians, it could rob entire generations of their ability to think, judge, and act for themselves.