Mathematics Education and the Problem of Political Forgetting: In Search of Research Methodologies for Global Crisis

Abstract

ore and more, standardized, efficiencies-based, and surveillance-driven modus operandi are prescriptively defining the interests of the individual and collective in terms of market-driven imperatives in consonance with the demands of the nation state competing for resources, means, and power on a global stage (Swanson, 2010a, 2010b, 2013). While Trumpianism and the rise of popul(ar)ist nationalism has confused the straightforwardness of the “common sense” of neoliberalism, it is without undoing its expansionist effects in an increasingly unequal world (Gamal & Swanson, in press). Acting in accordance with “(inter)national” relations of exchange, this dominant economic rationalism is reflected in the production of consumer-driven homo economicus for the New Knowledge Economy through the increasing trend towards techno-scientistic corporatist economic utilitarianism in education, of which mathematics education plays a leading role under a veil of political neutrality. This growth of techno-scientistic and managerialist instrumentality is, for Hobart (1993), aligned with the growth of ignorance. It tends to facilitate what Biesta (2005) has referred to as “learning” discourses, or the prevalence of “learnification.” This functionalism is concomitant