First, it was every child gets a participation trophy or ribbon. It didn’t matter what they did or did not accomplish, each participant was rewarded exactly the same. The MVP who hit the most home runs received the same award as the player who sat on the bench in uniform. And now this “everyone is equal” mentality is spreading to the school systems. In California, the “Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction” proposal would see students who excel in math being forced to take a backseat while others catch up.
Touted as a way to promote racial equality (because, you know, math is apparently racist), this new system would essentially punish students who love and excel in math, not allowing them to move on to more challenging equations. The 83-page booklet explains:
“All students deserve powerful mathematics; we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents. The belief that ‘I treat everyone the same’ is insufficient: Active efforts in mathematics teaching are required in order to counter the cultural forces that have led to and continue to perpetuate current inequities.
“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”
Something Doesn’t Add Up
So, two-plus-two shouldn’t always equal four? Math isn’t up to interpretation like modern art or sonnets. While we may argue about what Scottish poet Robert Burns actually meant in a particular poem, we can’t argue that when you add three apples to four bananas you end up with seven pieces of fruit.
Punishing students because they have natural abilities or interest in a subject is a dangerous path to forge. Not allowing them to challenge themselves and their intellect is a mistake, especially now when American education is already slipping behind other countries. What are these children to do while other students catch up to them? Sit in a corner and color? And what about the student who just aren’t grasping the mathematical concept? How will it help their self-esteem to know the entire class is waiting on them to hurry up and catch up so that they can move forward?
As Liberty Nation’s Pennel Bird, who is also a teacher, wrote:
“To believe that teachers are suddenly going to make up for having jettisoned accelerated math classes from the curriculum by challenging those high-achieving students now relegated to their rooms with differentiated materials is disingenuous on its face. It’s an institutional lie being work-horsed into selling the dubious and ascendant idea of equity.”
The woke left just doesn’t seem to be able to understand human nature. We are all created differently with diverse talents and interests. Instead of shaming or punishing kids for excelling in a subject, they should be encouraged to continue that interest and education. Individuality is being lost to the collective.
As supervillain Syndrome from Pixar’s The Incredibles said: “When everyone’s super – no one will be.” And, as LN Editor-at-Large James Fite sarcastically wrote: “Only when no one excels at anything can the idea of supremacy of any kind finally die.”
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Read more from Kelli Ballard.
