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Economy: the absent centre of mathematics education

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Abstract

Social and political turns in mathematics education research have brought into the field postmodern theorisations that researchers have been using to dismantle traditional philosophies of mathematics, to posit mathematics in the sociocultural terrain, and to spell out the role mathematics has in school exclusion. Sociopolitical perspectives constitute a privileged field of research to address the influence of economy on mathematical achievement. However, instead of investigating the role of economy in students’ achievement, sociopolitical studies have been contributing to a disavowal of the economic dimension of school mathematics. This paper synthesises a set of investigations carried out by the author in the last 5 years endeavouring to posit mathematics education in the political and economic spectrum of our time. It takes advantage of the contemporary combination of Hegel’s dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marx’s critique of political economy, carried out by Slavoj Žižek, to develop a critique of the way research within the so-called ‘sociopolitical turn’ deals with the issue of equity; and marks out the contours of mathematics education’s ideological belonging.

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Notes

  1. For example, in the very recent JRME Special Issue on equity none of the articles deals with the socioeconomic, class or other categories susceptible of economic analysis. As surveyed by Lubienski and Bowen (2000), the lack of studies dealing with social class is a common feature not only of the sociopolitical turn but also of mathematics education, and educational sciences, more generally.

  2. This is obviously also the case with the vast majority of mathematics education research (which disavows not only the economy but also shows a historical tendency to disavow the social and cultural dimensions, by being centred in a psychological approach). As Valero and I explored (Pais and Valero 2012), even socioculturalism and its use of Marxist psychological theories such as the ones of Lev Vygotsky and Alexei Leontiev, end up focusing on the cultural and historical dimension of learning, thus completely obliterating its economic dimension. Nonetheless my criticism concerns also research that, although seeking to go beyond a ‘didactical’, ‘psychological’ and ‘sociocultural’ perspective of school mathematics, by means of emphasising ‘political’ issues, refrains from analysing the relation between school mathematics and the economy.

  3. A slogan propagated in the last decades by national policy and curricula (e.g. the UK’s national curriculum, see http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/teachingandlearning/curriculum/secondary), professional organisations (e.g. NCTM 2000) and researchers (e.g. Presmeg 2010) alike.

  4. When Lacan (seminar of 23 April 1974, in Le séminaire, Livre XXI: Les non-dupes errant, unpublished, cited in Fink 1995, p. 142) says that “[t]he real is what does not depend on my idea of it”, he is pointing to the dimension of human subjectivity that is independent of our knowledge of it—the Freudian unconscious. Such a conceptualisation is what allows Žižek to transpose the real qua psychic dimension to social analysis. His argument is that we may very well know that our economic system is unfair, that schools are subjected to economic pressures, but nonetheless its functioning is real, that is, it does not depend on our knowledge of it. The same point is made by Lundin (2012) apropos of mathematics education: “[m]easurements, grades, and examinations have consequences only inside the system in which they play a central role (…) it should be as obvious that opinions, thoughts and feelings towards this system do not affect its proper functioning” (p. 83).

  5. This is not to say that all these aspects are not important for equity and social justice. They are important, as various studies have been showing, but it is only through assessment that they become actualised as excluding factors.

  6. Which, notwithstanding their use of so-called poststructuralist theories, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis, are not regarded as part of the sociopolitical turn.

  7. Understood as the ideological material that allows researchers to assert the importance of mathematics for everyday activities, notwithstanding all the evidence that mathematics is not used by people in their daily activities (Lundin 2012; Pais 2013).

  8. But also “politics of recognition” or “identity politics”. See Butler et al. (2000) for an account of the terms in which the relation between “politics” and “Political” is carried within contemporary theory.

  9. Hysterical because it is impossible to satisfy.

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  1. Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, 53 Bonsall Street, Manchester, M15 6GX, UK

    Alexandre Pais

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Pais, A. Economy: the absent centre of mathematics education. ZDM Mathematics Education 46, 1085–1093 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-014-0625-8

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