Mathematics education can be a place where students address oppression and exploitation taking place in communities and societies. It can be a place where political visions for the future become formulated, and where students’ aspirations, hopes, and dreams get articulated and find resources.
It can be a place where students at social risk come to understand the nature of the oppression to which they are subjected. These students might establish a basic political awareness for a critical citizenship. They might achieve new opportunities in life and get the means to move on in the educational system. They might come to see that further studies can also be for them.
It can be a place where students in comfortable social positions become aware of the many cases of social injustices that take place within the present social order. These students might come to acknowledge that individual welfare is different from social welfare, and that the economic dynamics that produce inequalities in society can be critically explored. Some of the students’ taken-for-granted assumptions and preconceptions might be challenged.
It can be a place where mathematics comes to be used to identify cases of social oppression, such as in terms of racism and sexism. This identification can be in terms of numbers revealing biases with respect to jobs and salaries. Numbers might also demonstrate ethnic biases with respect to poverty and wealth. It might show biases with respect to how the police treats different groups of people. Mathematics might help to uncover and identify a range of cases of social injustice.
It can be a place where students experience that the very rationality of mathematics can be questioned. The use of mathematics can be problematic, and conclusions based on calculations might be doubtful. The “divinity” of mathematics can be challenged. At all levels of the educational system—primary school, secondary school, university—mathematics can be critically addressed.
It can be a place where students with different abilities can come to work and learn together. Mathematics education might become inclusive. The very conceptions of being normal and not being normal can be put aside, and turn mathematics education into a place where no “normalisations” are in operation. Mathematics education can become a place for everybody.
It can be a place where students with different cultural, economic, social, religious and ethnic backgrounds can meet each other. People get moved around due to war, violence, poverty, hunger, displacements, immigration and deportation. This makes it important to create communication across differences and mathematics education might form such communicative bridges.
It can be a place where students and teachers engage in dialogue. Teaching and learning can turn into processes of exploration, where suggestions, hypotheses and reasoning guide what is taking place. Different landscapes can be investigated and students can experience what it could mean to reach an insight through self-guided activities.
It can be a place where students find possibilities for relaxing, playing and enjoying themselves. Mathematics education is not only composed of content-focused teaching-learning processes. This education is part of life. It can be part of both the students’ and the teachers’ lifeworlds. It can be a place where everybody would like to stay.
Could mathematics education be such a place?
Maybe not.
Maybe what I have presented is not realistic. Maybe it is a pedagogical illusion of the kind of place that mathematics education could be. All the same, the aspiration of critical mathematics education is to turn mathematics education into just such a place.
We are living in a world where the dynamics of globalisation incorporate the extensive formation of ghettos. Dominant economic structures cause social exclusion. The global market is not for everybody. An ever-growing group of people are disposable according to the capitalist order of things. The world will experience new tensions and maybe wars due to the scarcity of resources. Hunger problems haunt the world today and we can expect them to escalate. Pollution appears to be a direct consequence of the acceleration of production. Clean drinking water will be in short supply and the ocean is turning into a soup of plastic. The production of food reaches new degrees of technical efficiency, for instance due to genetic manipulation and the extensive use of pesticides. The long-term consequences of this efficiency will only appear later. We might come to experience new types of diseases and new patterns of epidemics.
The present state of global development brings us to new complexities of conflicts and crises. Like during the period between the First and the Second World Wars, we see a growth of undemocratic movements. However, contrary to previously, the political extreme right now works in combination with neoliberal economic priorities. This creates deep controversies in the way conflicts and crises are handled. We are living through a period of profound uncertainties.
The socio-political and economic situation makes it difficult for critical mathematics education to pursue its aspirations. In countries where the extreme right is in power, as in Brazil at the moment, an intense preoccupation with what takes place in education can be observed. What can be printed and not printed in textbooks is brought under government control. What the teachers are doing starts to be observed. Recommendations for denouncing teachers addressing “political” issues are brought into circulation. The extreme right tries to keep strict control of what is taking place in school. This means that critical mathematics education faces severe obstacles.
On the one hand, patterns of oppression, exploitation and social exclusion combined with the dominance of extreme right-wing political priorities tend to make it impossible to pursue the aspirations of critical mathematics education. On the other hand, the very patterns of oppression, exploitation, social exclusion and extreme right-wing dominance makes it necessary to pursue the aspirations of critical mathematics education.
How can we respond to such a dilemma?
One way of finding out if something is possible or not, is to try to do it. This book provides an important demonstration of the richness of initiatives that it is possible to take in critical mathematics education. It has been a great pleasure for me to read the chapters and experience the powerful dynamics emerging from educational practice. The examples show that critical mathematics education can make a difference for many students.
The book makes an important contribution to critical mathematics education. It brings about hopes, aspirations and imaginations in a period where social, political and economic crises form our lifeworlds.
Ole Skovsmose