Math And Marxism By SOL STERN March 20, 2007 http://www.nypost.com/seven/03202007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/math_and_marxism_opedcolumnists_sol_stern.htm
THERE'S a fifth column in New York City's public schools - radical teachers who openly undermine Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's curriculum mandates and use their classrooms to indoctrinate students in left-wing, anti-American ideology. One center for this movement is El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Brooklyn, the city's first "social justice" high school. The school's lead math teacher, Jonathan Osler, is using El Puente as a base from which to organize a three-day conference in April on "Math Education and Social Justice." Osler offers this urgent reason for the conference: "The systemic and structural oppression of low income and people of color continues to worsen. The number of people in prison continues to grow, as does our unemployment rate . . . However, in math classes around the country, perhaps the best places to study many of these issues, we continue to use curricula and models that lack any real-world - let alone socially relevant - contexts." Among the speakers slated for the conference is Eric Gutstein, a mathematics-education professor at the University of Illinois and a former Chicago public-school math teacher. Gutstein's book, "Reading and Writing the World with Mathematics: Toward a Pedagogy for Social Justice," combines Marxist pedagogy with real live math lessons. In it, Gutstein recounts how, on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, he was able to convince his 7th-grade mathematics class that the United States was wrong to go to war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. "I told students that none of the hijackers were thought to be Afghan," Gutstein writes. He also announced to the students that he would not "fight against Iraq or Afghanistan . . . because I did not believe in going to war for oil, power and control." Another of the math conference's "experts" is Cathy Wilkerson, an adjunct professor at the Bank Street College of Education. Her only other credential mentioned in the program is that she was a "member of the Weather Underground of the 60s." Some credential, indeed. On March 6, 1970, she was in a Manhattan townhouse helping to construct a powerful bomb to be planted at a dance attended by civilians on the Fort Dix, N.J., army base. The bomb went off prematurely, destroying the townhouse and instantly killing three of the bomb makers. Wilkerson escaped unharmed. After resurfacing years later and serving a year in prison, she became a high-school math teacher and, presumably, developed expertise on how to bring the revolution into the classroom. ======================= Bank Street College of Education: Bill Ayers' alma-mater. Tom Ayers, his father, was Chairman of the BOD of Banks at one time. In 1998, Banks was the recipient of a $738M grant for "study of Chicago small schools" from the Joyce Foundation of Chicago. Barack Obama was a member of the board of the Joyce Foundation in 1998. Bill Ayers started the Small Schools Workshop in Chicago in 1992. John Ayers, Bill's brother was president of Leadership for Quality Education(LQE), a corporate group that administers the umbrella Small Schools Coalition in 1998. The SSW was a major recipient of CAC grants while Barack Obama was Chairman and member of the BOD. Round and round....on and on. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
