Critical Arithmetic Theory and other parental fallacies

by David Benjamin

“The digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 are Arabic numerals, developed in the 6th or 7th century in India and later introduced to Europe through the writings of Middle Eastern mathematicians, most notably Al-Khwarizmi and Al-Kindi, in the 12th century. These numerals paved the way for complex math systems, like algebra, which replaced archaic counting methods like the abacus.”

— Colleen Killingsworth, FOX 10 Phoenix

MADISON, Wis. — About three years ago, an outfit called CivicScience conducted a survey asking American parents whether “Arabic numerals” should be part of their kids’ school curriculum. Fifty-six percent said “no way, José.” Only 29 percent favored a numeric system they had all used since kindergarten. Evidently, very few of these xenophobic moms and dads were aware that “Arabic numerals” have been the basis of Western mathematics for thousand years.

This disturbing result, as noted by the survey’s author, CivicScience CEO John Dick, might be deemed a popular backlash against “Critical Arithmetic Theory” (CAT?), except for the fact that schools still seem determined to keep teaching the dread concept of 2+2 — rather than II+II or δύο+δύο.

By contrast, the current-day panic over critical race theory (CRT) is ephemeral. Like Macavity the Mystery Cat, CRT isn’t there. Aroused parents are storming school boards not because their kids are being pumped full of grad-school poli-sci, but because right-wing opportunists have triggered the innate bigotry that millions of nice, white parents in America harbor against cultural contamination by influences Arabic, Hispanic, black, brown, Asian or otherwise cosmopolitan. 

This visceral fear of the Other is ingrained among Us. But wait, there’s good news. The CRT fuss will soon pass because a) no one’s teaching it, nor would any competent teacher even think of struggling to explain it to a classroom full of typically catatonic teenagers, and b) parents have an even shorter attention span than their kids and they’ll eventually tire of attending school board meetings where — before they have their moment to strut and fret — they have to stew silently through a three-hour agenda focused on budgets, buses and lunch menus.

But even if somewhere, some goofball school district contrived to add CRT to its curriculum, the board would face a few cruel realities common to the ordeal of every American public-school teacher.

First, most kids hate school. Hence, as a matter of principle, they hate CRT. Your basic kid would expunge it from his/her consciousness with nary a regret.

Second, even kids who pay attention briefly (’til after the quiz) forget everything — every word — conveyed to them by teachers.

Third, for practical reasons, any official effort to enlighten kids about racial issues composes less than one percent of any curriculum. This is because teachers — and moreso, principals, superintendents and school boards — quail at the sight of any political, social, racial, literary or religious topic that might invite hysteria from the PTA’s lunatic fringe. 

There are rare cases of teachers tiptoeing into topics of race, class and faith. However, this usually occurs in Advanced Placement or “honors” courses among students who have indicated a deviant interest in abstruse and controversial notions. Typically, this sort of effort — even among gifted students — tends to backfire (there’s a snitch in every class), plunging the teacher into a living hell of parental rage, administrative inquisition, drink, divorce and costly litigation.

Except for these AP experiments in critical thinking, the real work of every school is simply civilizing kids to a point where most are less likely to spend their lives as gangsters, drug addicts, sexual predators, serial killers or Yankees fans

Fourth, CRT would be — if it were ever actually attempted — subject to even the brightest students’ tendency to sift the information imparted in class. Kids select what they prefer to remember, discarding as useless roughly nine-tenths of their education. I was, for example, forced in grade school, to memorize cover-to-cover the Baltimore Catechism. All I can recall today is the first two questions:

(“Who made you?”) “God made me.”

(“Why did God make you?”) “God made me to show forth His goodness and to share with me His everlasting happiness in Heaven.”

The rest is a blur.

And yet, from seven years in Catholic school, I created a personal impression of a Jesus who, despite the grim pedagogy of the nuns and priests, was a thoroughly human nice guy. I chose to see not a Son of God, nor a savior nor the Judge of the living and the dead. My Jesus was a mentor and thinker, a sort of young uncle, like my mom’s brother Hilary. I wouldn’t have contrived this Jesus were it not for my catechism and my teachers, but I arrived at my relationship with him by picking, choosing, disregarding and rejecting most of the rote crap and tendentious propaganda that composed the formal diocesan curriculum.

This is normal. This is how kids think.

Fifth, and finally, school boards simply don’t have time to waste on intractable political issues. They tend to be consumed by real-life problems. For example, during my newspaper days, I was alarmed at the election to the Mansfield (Mass.) School Committee of a civic neophyte who campaigned on a sort of “mad-as-hell” platform. I thought him ignorantly ideological and ill-qualified to oversee the community’s educational mission. I forget his name. Let’s call him Orville.

I was wrong about Orville. As soon as he took office, he buckled down to nuts and bolts, studying spreadsheets, listening to the superintendent with an open mind, showing respect for teachers, doing his homework, asking smart questions. I saw in Orville the deference toward educational professionals that’s vital to the sustenance of the common school, a concept born in the USA and disdained by the ruling elites of every other nation until America proved it possible. 

Orville proved to be among the best school board members I’ve ever observed. And I’ve observed a lot. As a reporter in Wisconsin, Illinois and Massachusetts, I covered at least 400 school board meetings. Virtually every one of these tiresome sessions dwelt on budgets and taxes, schoolbus schedules, vacation days, hirings and firings, building, parking, paving and roofing crises, plumbing and electricity, snow, rain, cold, heat, sanitation, the health, safety and feeding of children and — above all else — sports.

I would have enjoyed — but never got — a meeting that blazed with fury over books to ban, theories not to teach, subversive teachers to purge or toilets to purify. 

When such explosive issues appear, in rare cases and in widely dispersed communities, they almost never erupt from local parents, whose concerns are deeply parochial. Ugly confrontations require outside forces, political actors with axes to grind, torches to wave and gullible citizens to frighten. When wedge-issue warriors descend on a school district, they force upon its guardians an element with which they’re unaccustomed and ill-equipped to cope. They compel school board to set aside their job — sending kids out into the world with a bare minimum of wherewithal — to become the arbiters of inchoate rage, impossible demands and imaginary dragons.

Our latest dragon is the CRT chimera. It will disappear, like its forebears, in a puff of stinking smoke. But where it has roamed, the scorched earth left behind will ruin the careers of a few teachers. It will linger in the disillusionment of well-meaning civic volunteers like Orville and, of course. It will leave intact — an inch beneath the surface — the deep-seated racism from which the monster sprang.