Mandatory teaching standards that focus on critical theory and identity politics to the detriment of liberalism and individualism are already working their way through state legislatures in the US.
Now, maths education itself has been deemed “racist.” A group of educators just released a document calling for a transformation of maths education that focuses on “dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visibilising the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture with respect to math.”
Among the educators’ recommendations, which officials in some states are promoting, are calls to “identify and challenge the ways that maths is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views,” “provide learning opportunities that use maths as resistance,” and “encourage them to disrupt the disproportionate push-out of people of colour in [STEM] fields.”
Loneliness among Americans has been growing in recent years, but the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically exacerbated the problem. A new report by Harvard University researchers finds that 36 percent of Americans are experiencing “serious loneliness,” and some groups, such as young adults and mothers with small children, are especially isolated.
Researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s “Making Caring Common” project analysed data from an October 2020 online survey of 950 Americans. “Alarming numbers of Americans are lonely,” they conclude in their paper, and those surveyed “reported substantial increases in loneliness since the outbreak of the pandemic.”