Abstract
Sriraman, Roscoe and English pose and address a number of questions about the politics of mathematics education in their chapter “Politicizing Mathematics Education: Has Politics gone too far? Or not far enough?” All of their questions are particularly relevant at this critical moment of a global financial crisis and an increasingly irrefutable global environment crisis. We are facing the consequences of what Beck (1992) calls ‘manufactured’ uncertainties in his thesis of the risk society: the ‘latent side-effects’ of an unchecked belief in industrialisation and technological progress that has led to technological and economic systems that are so complex and intractable that not even the technical rationality that has been seen to be the driver of society’s ‘progress’ could protect us from the risks they create (p. 157). It is a critical moment to be calling into question the place of mathematical knowledge that is undeniably implicated in the whole trajectory of industrialization and the globalisation of the economic system. It is a critical moment to be foregrounding the importance of critical mathematics education.
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Yasukawa, K. (2010). Commentary on Politicizing Mathematics Education: Has Politics Gone too Far? Or Not Far Enough?. In: Sriraman, B., English, L. (eds) Theories of Mathematics Education. Advances in Mathematics Education. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00742-2_59
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