Good lord, this sounds like it was practically designed to sabotage the prospects for minorities to excel in mathematics, by encouraging them to waste their efforts on nonsense and useless trivia.
This was kind of the thrust of my recent posts on the "black" issue. There's almost the built-in assumption that "they can't excel in math, so let's get them something that will at least keep them in the classroom."
Fuck that. Black folks can do just fine in math, and believe me I know. But as long as you keep watering down the cirriculum, all you'll get is more lumpen prolitariat cranked out.
Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to see the occasional history course in math and science pop up, and aware of Chinese and Arabic contributions to science and technology in particular. But let's not have another math-version of ebonics.
-TD
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