Progress, Wealth, and Mathematics Achievement

I am interested in discussing the historical conditions that make it possible to formulate the idea that the mathematical qualifications of citizens in modern states is connected to the progress and economic development of nations. I interconnect apparently unrelated areas in an attempt to shed light on the grid of intelligibility that makes it possible to fabricate children’s differential achievement in mathematics as a social fact connected to the wealth and development of nations.
The emergence of the connection between people’s mathematical qualifications and social progress can be traced to the end of the 19th century. During the second half of the 19th century, mathematics teachers in different countries struggled to make mathematics part of the classic school curricula. During the second industrialization, the justification for the need for mathematics education was formulated in the first international mathematics education journal (Laisant & Fehr, 1899). In the times of the Cold War, a similar argument emerged, however the justification was related to keeping the supremacy of the Capitalist West in front of the growing menace of the expansion of the Communist Soviet Union. Nowadays, professional associations argue that the low numbers of people in STEM fields can severely damage the competitiveness of developed nations in international, globalized markets.
The narrative that connects progress, economic superiority, and development to citizen’s mathematical competence is made intelligible as a result, among others, of the growing series of comparative information on educational achievement and development. Such reports can be seen as performances of the comparative logic of Modernity that operates differential positioning, not only among individuals but also among nations, with respect to what is considered to be the desired and normal level of development and growth. “Mathematics for all” can be seen as an effect of power that operates on subjects and nations alike to determine who are the individuals/nations who excel, while creating a narrative of inclusion for all those who, by the very same logic, are differentiated. The mathematics school curriculum in the 20th century embodied and made available cosmopolitan forms of reason, which build on the belief of science-based human reason having a universal, emancipatory capacity for changing the world and people. The ‘homeless mind’ (Popkewitz, 2008, p. 29) that school mathematics has operated is a type of individuality where the subject is set in relation “to transcendental categories that seem to have no particular historical location or author to establish a home” (p. 30). In this way, subjects are inserted in a logic of quantification that makes possible a scientific rationality based on numbers and facts for the planning of society. The mathematics curriculum is an important technology of the self that inserts subjects into the forms of thinking and acting needed for people to become the ideal cosmopolitan citizen.

Laisant, C.-A., & Fehr, H. (1899). Préface. L' Enseignement Mathématique, 1(1), 1-5.
Popkewitz, T. S. (2008). Cosmopolitanism and the age of school reform: Science, education, and making society by making the child. New York: Routledge.