Neoliberal Mathematics Education Research in the Service of Big Capital

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that international Mathematics Education Research (MER) is dictated by the interests and agenda of the imperialist countries, which dehistoricizes the material conditions of imperialized and impoverished nations while deliberately obfuscating the economic reasons underlying the “failure” of mathematics learning outcomes of their students. Instead, in the guise of improving mathematics teaching/learning, such researches usually blame the very people of these imperialized countries for the ‘low learning outcomes’ of their school students, attributing it to “cultural” and “local” beliefs, mindsets, practices, etc., thereby producing academic justifications for the neoliberal destruction of their public education systems. I begin my argument by drawing from my PhD research study with visually challenged mathematics learners from socio-economically marginalized communities in India. I then follow it up with a brief overview of some mathematics education research works in the context of Sub-Saharan African countries to illustrate my point.

Keywords

• Imperialism
• Exclusion
• Marxism
• Neoliberalism
• Political Economy