Florida releases examples of banned math textbooks that include lessons in … empathy?
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The closer we get to the midterm elections, the more Republicans fall in love with hysterics. Sure, the Republican Party has long relied on stirring hate and outrage to rile up their fanbase, but these last few months feel like a special effort. After all, conservatives know they’ve failed to lead during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and they know Donald Trump’s presidency has been nothing but an international embarrassment. If conservatives like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis think they stand a chance at becoming president, for example, they’re likely quite motivated to attack easy targets as much as possible.
We’ve seen DeSantis (among others) sign heinous legislation into law, targeting rights from reproductive health to gender-affirming health care to (ahem) saying gay in the classroom. We’ve seen conservatives call for book bans if not book burnings. Critical race theory (CRT) has become an absolute rallying cry for the right, though I’m willing to bet plenty of folks on all sides of the political aisle couldn’t give the correct definition of the concept if they tried. This is perhaps how we’ve gotten to a point where examples from math textbooks are being banned from public school classrooms for references to CRT and checks notes lessons in empathy.
Where is this happening? If you guessed Florida, you guessed right.
RELATED: School districts in blue states aren’t safe from hysteria—just look at what’s happening in Maryland
We now have a few examples of examples from math textbooks that allegedly include references to CRT and social-emotional learning (SEL), as reported by CNN. Social-emotional learning, as some background, helps students learn how to solve problems and make decisions while managing their emotions and using empathy. Sadly, it’s easy to see why conservatives would want to stomp this sort of learning out—imagine if their minions developed a hint of empathy for the marginalized people they love to hate? Suddenly they’d have to work a lot harder to get votes.
In a more advanced application, social-emotional learning is valuable for adults, too, when it comes to us understanding how and why we engage with others (as well as ourselves) in various situations at home, work, or with friends. For white people like myself, for example, this could mean an opportunity to identify and take accountability for microaggressions or racial bias. For able-bodied people like myself, it could mean challenging ableism when it comes to, say, deciding who gets a work opportunity or what logistics go into planning a community event.
Again, these skills sound basic on the surface, but plenty of people lack them for a number of reasons. Kids learning this sort of stuff in school is absolutely not a bad thing.
The Florida Department of Education shared four pages as examples, but The New York Times gained access to more than 20 texts as well. Surprising absolutely no one, the agency has not been specific in what counts as a violation of policy versus an outright ban, so it’s unclear what specifically caused which issue in the pages the Times acquired.
One example shared by the Times includes a word problem where, in addition to the obvious math, students are able to learn how to support a friend who is scared about crossing a bridge in the jungle. Students learn that they can help the hypothetical friend by building up their confidence and supporting them, which is probably why conservatives are upset about it.
“We don’t want things like math to have, you know, some of these other concepts introduced,” DeSantis told reporters at a press conference on Monday, April 18. “It’s not been proven to be effective, and quite frankly, it takes our eye off the ball.”
Ah, yes, because nothing distracts from learning like … developing basic social skills, compassion, and real-world problem-solving. Guess kids should go back to copying multiplication tables on the blackboard and call it a day?
If it gets conservative votes, that’s probably more than fine with them, which is why we have to keep up the fight to do and be better for youth.