The call of ICMI Study 24 to develop research that provides understanding of the changes in the school mathematics curriculum has resulted in this valuable and comprehensive collection of systematic and nuanced reflections on its multiple dimensions and its constant transformations. In this commentary, I point to a central issue that needs further attention to advance the area of research that the Study 24 intends to contribute to.

I have engaged in the reading of the chapters from a theoretical and analytical perspective which can be called the study of the cultural politics of mathematics education (e.g. Kollosche, 2016; Valero, 2018). Such perspective studies mathematics education as a wide network of cultural and political practices. It is interested in tracing how mathematics education emerges in the relations between people, institutions and materialities, where different mathematical practices are assembled as teaching and learning are performed. Mathematics education is constantly contested and negotiated given the value and importance that is attributed to mathematical knowledge and competence in a contemporary techno-scientific, dominantly capitalist world.

A special sensibility to the Foucaultian notion of discourse (e.g. Foucault, 1970, 1972) had been helpful in identifying recurring enunciations that appear across the chapters and that configure statements on what is the mathematics curriculum, what is its reform and how these two have become an object of research. The examination of elements of the discourse in this volume is important since it will have a role in the further making of curricular change as an object of scientific examination in mathematics education. As such, the notions in this book actively – and not neutrally – shape the very same phenomena that it intends to study. And since, as all authors here seem to agree, the mathematics curriculum has increasingly become a central area of schooling, the ways in which we conceive of and study it sets part of the direction for its further transformations in the future.

A statement in the book is that the mathematics curriculum is influenced by several contextual factors across time (different periods) and space (different countries and national cultures). In a way, this is an evident observation since it is impossible to deny that the mathematics curriculum makes part of the curricular technologies that, since the nineteenth century, organise state-controlled mass education. But it is also salient insight that sets the object of study ‘mathematics curriculum’ in relation to a ‘context’. The question emerges of how such relationship is conceptualised in the chapters.

One first discursive recurrence is the way this relationship is expressed in the use of formulations such as ‘the factors that influence’, the ‘vested interests of stakeholders on’ or ‘the values that permeate’ the mathematics curriculum. The recurrences and the types of constructions in the expressions in different chapters seem to convey the idea that the mathematics curriculum is constructed as an object that is separated from the context, although obviously linked to it. Such relationship is similar to that of a liquid contained in a cup: the nature and character of the liquid does not necessarily change by the form or characteristics of the cup; the former are only circumstantially shaped by the latter. As an object of study of mathematics education research, the way the mathematics curriculum is referred to puts forward the idea that researchers mainly conceive of it as an object in itself, with a core and nature rooted in mathematics, and that we can study the external, non-mathematical influences that affect it. For most, the context is conceived as a series of forces that shape the contours of the curriculum, but seems not to alter its core nature of the mathematics that should be mobilised in education.

Such a statement on the curriculum as a distinct object of mathematics education research may be articulated with respect to the inevitable disciplinary framing that defines the interest of mathematics education research with respect to a focus on mathematics and its related processes of teaching and learning. For example, the idea of a curriculum as a didactic transposition from mathematical scholarly knowledge to a group of students’ learnt knowledge is a particular way of narrowing the broad anthropological enterprise of knowledge transformation in cultural and institutionally framed processes in a pedagogical organisation (e.g., Chap. 13).

The effect of such theoretical framing foregrounds the mathematical knowledge and backgrounds its cultural assemblage as it circulates through different institutional norms and practices. Even if in some chapters there is an interest in exploring the contextual setting on which the mathematics curriculum appears (e.g. Chap. 6), such exploration is carried out to pinpointing the interest, values or influences that may explain the changes in the mathematical contents or orientations in the curriculum. This is of course an important endeavour that casts light into the “very complex relations between [mathematics,] the mathematics curriculum and different cultures (Chap. 6, p. 89) [… and offers insight into] major driving forces behind mathematics curriculum changes that are not necessarily mathematical in nature” (Chap. 6, p. 97). The latter, of course, should be carefully considered.

Such an understanding of the relationship between the curriculum and its context leaves unexplored the possibility that those non-mathematical driving forces may indeed be equally or on occasions even more determinant or constitutive of the school mathematics curriculum than mathematics itself. What would happen in that case? Would we still have an object of study of mathematics education research called the mathematics curriculum and its transformation? From most chapters one can draw the statement that the school mathematics curriculum is political in that it has become increasingly valued and privileged; there is an increasing interest in governments and supranational agencies to steer it; and its enactment has consequential effects on the population, groups and individuals, to the point that in our recent history it has acquired a strategic cultural and economic importance. In other words, there is power at stake in the mathematics curriculum.

As a field of study, we posit the importance of the curriculum on the salience and power of mathematics as a central form of knowledge in the making of the modern world. With this, we foreground the mathematics and background the cultural project that has configured a modern rationality in different spheres of life, also in education. This is the backgrounded context in which mathematics, education and the mathematics curriculum as an important power device of such culture has formed.

In contrast to this reasoning, it is possible to present a different, still complementary and quite productive alternative. What would happen if we foregrounded the understanding of modern education and subordinated the making of the school mathematics curriculum as part of it? In taking this turn we need to explore the conditions on which modern mathematics curricula emerged. Modern school systems started configuring as part of the political process of consolidation of nation-States. Following historians of education such as Tröhler (2016), in most of the Western world new political constitutions were followed by laws of education that became operationalised in official curricula. Education in modernity is political since it has been one of the most effective technologies to bind people into an invented community called nation and into a political body with the rational organisation of the state.

Education can be thought as a political technology for “making types of people” (Popkewitz et al., 2017) with particular cognitive, behavioural and moral characteristics. In a rational, knowledge-based political regime, such aspirations are made operational through plans of study. Thus, the curricula of school subjects amalgamate a series of political aspirations for who the desired, virtuous citizen of a nation should be, with transformed disciplinary knowledge and pedagogical practices, all of which together offer the frame to form the mind, the body and the soul of children and people.

Following this perspective, the study of the mathematics curriculum and its transformation is undetachable from both the larger political project of governing the population through education, and from the micro-organisation of the pedagogical practices and what they should do for people, for the nation and for the state. This means that understanding changes in the mathematics curriculum requires asking questions and investigating the particular contribution of school mathematics to the making of modern subjectivities in general and desirable citizen in particular. It is digging into how the changes in contents and orientations bring forward clear political aspirations for people (students as citizens) and which subjectivities and sensibilities mathematical contents and curricular orientations may potentially fabricate.

In other words, the study of the transformations of the mathematics curriculum needs to embrace the inseparability of the curriculum from its context. Phrased in other terms, further research on the curriculum can further embrace one of the major contributions of socio-cultural-political studies in mathematics education, namely, the recognition that the objectivation of mathematics is inseparable from the subjectivation that is effected through learning and education (e.g. Radford, 2018).

A final point is that the exploration of the cultural politics of the mathematics curriculum requires engaging in interdisciplinary research with scholars from other educational disciplines or social sciences to examine together the generalities and specificities of the changes in the mathematics curriculum. Such collective work would result, with no doubt, in the advancement on the productive line of research that this volume aims to advance.