Building the Health of Nations Through School Mathematics: Math Anxiety and the Fear of Disease

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

Abstract

As a commonsense of contemporary reforms both in and outside of the United States, mathematics education is envisioned as a way to make a healthy and stable future through the renovation of society. This promise becomes visible in statements about the importance of both math and science to “the health and longevity of our Nation’s citizenry, economy, and environmental resources” (Holdren, 2013, p. i). The assumption that a healthy nation and citizenry can be made through mathematics education provides backdrop to the paper’s initial questions about the historical links between math and nation-building in the United States. The historical analysis examines how certain “desirable” kinds of people became normalized through mathematics education. This is to consider how the demarcation of mathematical kinds of citizens and selves made space for the emergence of a pathological condition expressed as “math anxiety”—an abnormality that would be marked upon racialized and gendered bodies that would stand in as a threat to the nation’s health, in need of diagnosis and cure.

The first section explores the historical conditions that make it possible to think that school mathematics can and must contribute to a healthy, stable, and prosperous future. The analysis is approached as a “cultural history of the present” (Popkewitz, Franklin, & Pereyra, 2001) to understand the normative ways of reasoning about the role of school mathematics in organizing what counts as a healthy nation and citizen. Specifically, it looks at a post-WWII moment in the United States when school mathematics was historically positioned as a “tool of modern life”—to be utilized for modeling and planning the future (College Entrance Examination Board, 1959/1970). This section considers how school math embodied a way of reasoning about how to make rational and sensible citizens who can and should contribute to the overall health of the United States.

Emerging as a pedagogical problem in the United States in the 1970s, math anxiety appeared in educational literature as a form of emotional and cognitive abnormality expressed as fear, rage, frustration, suffering, despair, panic, disorganization, and avoidance. The analysis here examines mathematics education literature beginning in the 1970s to uncover the norms and rules that position math anxiety as a problem situated within the child—posed as a risk to the healthy nation. With a presumed need to account for affective factors related to and impeding math learning, this section highlights appeals for developing a sense of understanding of the causes, a prescription of cures, and a sympathy for those suffering from math anxiety so as to bring healing. The historical analysis interrogates how the norms that define math anxiety and who appears to have it are neither neutral nor natural ways to think about children.

With implications for equity and diversity, the paper will end with a discussion of how math anxiety has become a technology by which to differentiate who is seen as “healthy” and who appears to be plagued by “math anxiety” and is in need of a cure.

Author

• Jennifer Diaz, Augsburg College