Impoverished people on the verge of starving in third world countries have learned math without problems. Entire nations that ascribed to the entire crazy Marxist-Leninist dogma about oppression introduced free education to their entire populations and saw no problems with mathematics. As a matter of fact, math knowledge and understanding are incredibly high in countries using the Russian model, which was a Soviet model.
The Soviets taught people of all races, from all ethnic backgrounds, from all continents (other than Antarctica) and used rigorous math standards. No one had any problems with it.
Clearly, applying logic (another tool of oppression according to this half-educated idiot, I'm sure), mathematics is not the problem.
The real problem, something these Leftists are not expressing explicitly, but rather dancing around with twenty silly oppression theories, each more ridiculous than the other, is that the primary and secondary educational system in many public schools in the United States is fundamentally broken.
Teachers - often themselves not the best because hey, why would they be in those failing schools if they were good? - are given children who are being passed through the system despite failing by any objective standard. Some were born with disabilities (like fetal alcohol syndrome, or drug addiction), some are malnourished and sent hungry to school (which the school breakfast/lunch programs are designed to alleviate), many have no support at home for their studying, there are pressures to join gangs, pressures not to study because it isn't "cool", and many give up.
Charter schools are helping communities to separate the children who want to learn, and starting to make a difference for disadvantaged children. However, the ones that found someone else to blame are also told they should go to college, and then they fail when they get there because they weren't prepared to go in the first place. Hence we get all these idiotic theories - the SAT is racist, math is white supremacy, literacy is a tool of oppression, etc.
The bad news is that this hurts every effort to improve education. The good news is that this "effort" will fail in one way or another by the inexorable laws of mathematics, something they would know if they actually learned math properly.
ἡ δὲ κἀκ τριῶν τρυπημάτων ἐργαζομένη ἐνεκάλει τῇ φύσει, δυσφορουμένη, ὅτι δὴ μὴ καὶ τοὺς τιτθοὺς αὐτῇ εὐρύτερον ἢ νῦν εἰσι τρυπώη, ὅπως καὶ ἄλλην ἐνταῦθα μίξιν ἐπιτεχνᾶσθαι δυνατὴ εἴη. – Procopius
Ummaka qinnassa nīk!
*MySmiley*
