Hierarchies of "Real-Life Needs": Humanitarian Techniques and the Racialized Tracking of Science and Mathematics Education

• In Event: The Cultural Politics of Health/Pathology in STEM Education Reforms Past and Present

Abstract

Critical analyses of tracking have demonstrated how IQ and ability testing contributed to projecting a racialized hierarchy of perceived ability in science and mathematics (Oakes, 1985/2005; Martin, 2013). Yet little scholarship has examined how diagnostic techniques from anthropology and public health were also integral to the emergence of tracking in school science and mathematics. These humanitarian techniques accompanied IQ tests into U.S. science and mathematics classrooms, promising to distinguish the ‘real-life needs’ of a particular class of students by inspecting their bodily hygiene, daily habits, and home conditions. Public health concerns took center stage in instruction targeting populations perceived as not-yet-responsible citizens—in effect, pathologizing bodies and racializing pupils along a hierarchy of needs.

As an entangled history of the present (Sobe, 2013), this paper draws on early twentieth-century science and mathematics education journals, textbooks, and reports to analyze how pre-Sputnik humanitarian techniques contributed to generating different forms of school mathematics and science, different levels of needs, and different types of ‘lives.’ The first few decades of the twentieth century saw a rapid proliferation of science and mathematics courses (e.g., general science, social mathematics) designed to meet the immediate needs of “all” students—a term that differentiated the “masses,” as well as racialized and colonized groups, from those seen as “potential specialists” (e.g., AEF, 1938; Hunter, 1920; Koch, 1913; NCTM, 1944).

Those marked by tests as slow learners or low-performing minds were designated as bodies of concern, which demanded closer monitoring of their physiological functioning and home environments with goals of reforming their lives and improving their civic potential as healthy citizens. These goals became linked under the rubric of health through the assembly of psychological procedures (i.e., diagnosing which children were capable of making rational decisions for their own well-being) and humanitarian techniques (i.e., inspecting which families could manage their children’s bodies in line with particular cultural practices codified as hygienic living). In the relationality between mental tests identifying ‘able minds’ and home interviews and community surveys monitoring ‘abject bodies,’ different needs became projected onto students, triaging them along a trajectory of stratified coursework.

Drawing on recent reviews of culturally responsive science and mathematics teaching (Brown, 2017; Abdulrahim & Orosco, 2019), we conclude by considering how these techniques continue to circulate in equity-oriented pedagogies today, despite widespread repudiation of tracking practices. Our historical analysis demands rethinking the premise of the anthropological or social “turn” in science and mathematics education (e.g., Hammond & Brandt, 2004; Lerman, 2000) as entirely new, or as necessarily overcoming the racializing judgments of psychological sorting mechanisms. Left undisturbed, humanitarian techniques risk reinscribing difference, regenerating the perceived “need” for tracking and differentiated instruction, and reinforcing broader relations of marginalization and exclusion.

Authors

• Ayse Yolcu, Hacettepe University

• Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison