summer reading
Jun. 27th, 2020 04:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eiriasMathematics for Human Flourishing, Francis Su
A few years back, a friend shared a link to an essay (really, a lecture) by a math professor that hit me where I lived, struggling through a program in statistics in which I wasn't sure I belonged. It's one of those pieces that have become part of my small personal collection of scripture, essentially. So I was excited to see a few weeks ago that Su now has a book out. It’s about what I expected — an argument for broadening who belongs in math — with a lot of unexpected side paths, including some puzzles, only one of which I’ve solved yet. It’s also an argument that virtue is developed by doing things for love and not for material reasons. Despite mentioning God nowhere but the acknowledgements, it manages to be a somewhat Christian book in its bones.
It’s interesting to think through what taking this philosophy seriously means from the perspective of gifted education. It’s consonant in the sense that certain virtues may only be developed in the presence of challenge; and the style of education in gifted programs, too, tends to promote the ways of thinking and playing that he advocates. But there’s obvious tension with his argument against tracking and his push to democratize mathematics... and the race imbalance in gifted programming is one of those very ugly elephants in every room. What makes this more poignant is that Su teaches at Harvey Mudd, itself a very expensive school for very smart and accomplished young people. Given the moral orientation of the book, I suspect this tension is one he lives with too, and I wonder if that’s what this stream of his writing and speaking is meant to salve.
After I finished the book this morning, the mister and I had a meandering conversation about what education is for. His opinion, which I like and am chewing on, is that it’s meant to satisfy a reproductive drive akin to sex, but for cultural transmission. We educate the children in society so that our values are preserved, and we fight to educate our own children in order to weave them as fully as possible into that society, for their own protection. By that thinking, educational attainment is I guess a sort of measure of cultural centrality. How close have you managed to get to mastery of what the dominant culture in your region sees as important to its identity? This both clarifies why educational access is a moral issue, and potentially complicates the specifics of that moral issue. I’m thinking now of the residential schools that Canada and the US had for Native children until embarrassingly recently. Giving people better access to the dominant culture at the expense of access to their own birth culture is not a clear win, ethically speaking.
But math would probably rule itself exempt to this dilemma, as a tool for thinking that transcends geography more readily than, say, philosophy or literature does. I can sort of buy this... but the subcultural issues of welcome, of who belongs and who is shut out, loom large with math, I think, compared to other disciplines. I wonder how this came to be?
A few years back, a friend shared a link to an essay (really, a lecture) by a math professor that hit me where I lived, struggling through a program in statistics in which I wasn't sure I belonged. It's one of those pieces that have become part of my small personal collection of scripture, essentially. So I was excited to see a few weeks ago that Su now has a book out. It’s about what I expected — an argument for broadening who belongs in math — with a lot of unexpected side paths, including some puzzles, only one of which I’ve solved yet. It’s also an argument that virtue is developed by doing things for love and not for material reasons. Despite mentioning God nowhere but the acknowledgements, it manages to be a somewhat Christian book in its bones.
It’s interesting to think through what taking this philosophy seriously means from the perspective of gifted education. It’s consonant in the sense that certain virtues may only be developed in the presence of challenge; and the style of education in gifted programs, too, tends to promote the ways of thinking and playing that he advocates. But there’s obvious tension with his argument against tracking and his push to democratize mathematics... and the race imbalance in gifted programming is one of those very ugly elephants in every room. What makes this more poignant is that Su teaches at Harvey Mudd, itself a very expensive school for very smart and accomplished young people. Given the moral orientation of the book, I suspect this tension is one he lives with too, and I wonder if that’s what this stream of his writing and speaking is meant to salve.
After I finished the book this morning, the mister and I had a meandering conversation about what education is for. His opinion, which I like and am chewing on, is that it’s meant to satisfy a reproductive drive akin to sex, but for cultural transmission. We educate the children in society so that our values are preserved, and we fight to educate our own children in order to weave them as fully as possible into that society, for their own protection. By that thinking, educational attainment is I guess a sort of measure of cultural centrality. How close have you managed to get to mastery of what the dominant culture in your region sees as important to its identity? This both clarifies why educational access is a moral issue, and potentially complicates the specifics of that moral issue. I’m thinking now of the residential schools that Canada and the US had for Native children until embarrassingly recently. Giving people better access to the dominant culture at the expense of access to their own birth culture is not a clear win, ethically speaking.
But math would probably rule itself exempt to this dilemma, as a tool for thinking that transcends geography more readily than, say, philosophy or literature does. I can sort of buy this... but the subcultural issues of welcome, of who belongs and who is shut out, loom large with math, I think, compared to other disciplines. I wonder how this came to be?
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-01 07:49 pm (UTC)On your very last point, I feel like this probably isn't anything innate to math but rather a convergence of cultural tendencies - math is a universal gateway to many prestigious technical fields which have been, both by cultural inertia and/or design, largely reserved for groups with the most cultural power (i.e. white men). This sort of thing was seen especially starkly and recently in computer science as the field moved from being seen as secretarial work (i.e. mainly data entry) and was dominated by women, to becoming a highly-paid technical field adjacent to math, whereupon it became male-dominated and was left with a legacy of gate-keeping that we're still working to undo.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-03 04:53 pm (UTC)*having just come off a semester of teaching the history of math, our conception of math and "pure" math is a very western one. A lot of non-western math was brushed off as "just" applied formulas for a long time.
*we're still at something like <3% of new math phds being black. There are ideas about elitism and structural failures that affect math just as much as everything else.
*as we become a society that's more invested in big data and technology more generally, not understanding math (in both a numeracy and a "pattern seeking problem solving" sense) creates segments of society that fundamentally don't understand each other.
*picturing math/algorithms/data as pure contributes *hugely* to the compounding of built in biases in data science projects a la Weapons of Math Destruction.
*the non-majors math class I've developed, that looks at graph theory, voting theory, and cryptography, is, in some ways, a much purer math class than pre-calculus or calculus is. And the students *regularly* talk about how much more useful it was than any other math class they've ever taken.