I believe the correct answer is, no we shouldn’t because Maths is racist.
Instead for the answers, we should always accept people’s lived experience/truths.
*gets coat
Focusing on the correct answer in maths ‘is racist’
May 20 2021, The Times
There is a new frontier in the war on racism: maths.
In California a state education panel is to consider curriculum reforms designed to support “equitable” mathematics instruction for all six million schoolchildren outside the public sector. If approved, getting the “right answer” in a maths problem may no longer be a pupil’s main objective.
The framework sets out to tackle the ways that students’ “mathematics identities are shaped in part by a culture of societal and institutionalised racism”. It argues that this partly explains the history of underrepresentation of black, Hispanic and indigenous people, as well as women and low income students, in “mathematics and mathematics-related domains”.
Opponents of the attempt to root out “white supremacy” in maths argue that ethnic minority and low income students will be disproportionately harmed by accompanying proposals to cut back on algebra teaching.
The framework draws on a manual developed last year by educationalists in California. It claimed that maths teaching methods perpetuated racist discrimination and needed to be overhauled so that non-white pupils could “reclaim their mathematical ancestry”.
The indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom” identified by the guide included a focus on “getting the right answer” at the expense of understanding concepts and reasoning.
Teachers who uphold “the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict”, two characteristics of racist systems in organisations, according to the manual.
“If this framework spreads it could condemn a generation of children to irrelevance in science, technology, engineering and math fields, where the right answer is not a matter of opinion,” wrote James Robbins, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, in USA Today.
Williamson Evers, a former assistant secretary of education under President Obama, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “encouraging those gifted in math to shine will be a distant memory”.