You really can’t make this stuff up. We now have “Critical Math,” with that
word “critical” understood as in “critical legal theory”–i.e. it means
“raving lefty.” Just been reviewing some stuff put out by a certain Marilyn
Frankenstien [I am not making this up, I swear] at the “Critical Math
Educator’s Group.” Sample:
In “Scenes from the Inferno”, Alexander Cockburn (1989) wrote about the
reality behind the so-called triumph of capitalism. One of his illustrations
is particularly relevant for a critical mathematics education: in Chile,
where in some Santiago neighborhoods, “the diet of 77 to 80 percent of the
people does not have sufficient calories and proteins… to sustain life”,
Pinochet’s regime measured malnutrition in relation to a person’s weight and
height, in contrast to the usual comparison of weight and age. “So a stunted
child is not counted as malnourished, and thus is not eligible for food
supplements”. (p. 510) This talk will explore the connections between
understanding the outrageousness of collecting such statistics, and acting
to change the outrageousness of such situations…
Note how desperately the Lefties still cling, 30 years later, to the fantasy
of an emerging “progressive” Chile nipped in the bud by the mega-evil
Pinochet and his CIA/capitalist enablers. To you and me the great political
monsters of the 20c were Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Kim Il
Sung, Castro & so on. To Lefties they were Pinochet, Pinochet, Pinochet,
Pinochet and Pinochet. Actually my impression of Pinochet’s Chile is that
it did rather well economically, & was no more politically repressive than
the average S. American nation–which is to say, around 0.01 per cent as
repressive as Cuba.