Making a Healthier and Safer Mathematics for Children in the New Republic

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

Abstract

U.S. mathematics education emerged as a scientific and pedagogical object of inquiry in the early nineteenth century (Cohen, 1999). Reform involved balancing a divine plan for salvation with efforts to rationalize and cultivate a mind-body-spirit balance, in part through new pedagogical and hygienic techniques. Unlike earlier Enlightenment logics, the making of a mathematics for children in the United States required complex shifts in ways of thinking about health and pathology. New relations between minds, bodies, social groups, and systems accompanied new techniques locating childhood as distinct from immature adulthood.

This paper draws from the analytic concepts of biopower and biopolitics (e.g., Rabinow & Rose, 2006) and concerns with how mathematics education fabricates bodies (Yolcu & Popkewitz, 2019) to explore how mathematics education reform emerged and traveled as a health concern through a proliferation of techniques to regulate and discipline bodies and populations in the early nineteenth century United States. A range of textbooks, journal articles, books, and other documents from the 1820s and 1830s are examined to trace how the new science of pedagogy traveled with transatlantic discourses on health and school mathematics reform.

The first section focuses on how early nineteenth-century mathematics education emerged as a school subject for children in the United States that required new theories of childhood and new hopes and fears of cultivating health and preventing disease. For example, as health became increasingly seen as alignment of the mind, body, and spirit, the corporeal body became a site for new pedagogical interventions and illness prevention through schooling. With mathematics education, hopes for cultivating the mind were frequently coupled with fears of illness from ignoring the body and/or emotions. Strategies for cultivating the mind while not injuring the mind-body-spirit balance included incorporating movement, encouraging counting on fingers, and promoting “cheer” in the classroom (Author, 2019). However, such practices also circulated with the pathologization of children who appeared to be precocious and/or physically or morally unhealthy (Author, 2019).

The second section considers how concerns with health and disease were also tethered to racializing political projects. For example, some mathematics textbooks also advocated missionary projects and preparing for the conversion of ‘heathens’ (Weeks, 1822). Journal articles also used school mathematics as an exemplar for why school reform was needed, with one article claiming that the future of the republic rested on selectively recruiting the “dark and ignorant” who appeared to demonstrate the correct physiognomic, sensory, and bodily capacities into education for the production of scientific “talent” (“Young Arithmetician,” 1837).

The paper concludes by considering how these school mathematics techniques raise new questions about assumptions in more recent socio-political, body, and affectivity studies. For example, mathematics education researchers have argued that approaching the body as intimately connected with emotions and thought is something new (Roth & Walshaw, 2019). Similarly, increasing emphasis on the biosocial and embodiment as routes to equity may ignore traces of nineteenth-century efforts to categorize and quantify sensation and perception as primary routes for planning the future through education (Crary, 1988).

Author

• Ryan Ziols, Georgia State University