Somehow I’d missed the fact that Florida recently banned 41% of proposed maths textbooks from it’s schools, mostly on the basis of them apparently being “too woke”. A list of the 54 textbooks that were rejected is available.
Or as the Florida Department of Education writes in their definitely not over-dramatic press release:
Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students
Pressed for examples of what that could even mean - exactly what level of Rich White Man Anti-America hatred mind control was infused into these books? - well the worst they managed to produce were a couple of examples that asked students to answer standard looking (to me?) math questions, which happened to use a dataset of Implicit Association Test results.
Now there is certainly substantial debate to be had as to to what extent the results of the IAT translate into real world racism. And perhaps the textbook authors could have been a little more careful with their chart titles given that the FAQ of Harvard’s “Project Implicit” says that the authors wouldn’t necessarily use the word “prejudice” in describing the results of the test. But “indoctrination” seems a strong word if this is the worst example the Florida DoE could come up with. I don’t think many people belive that the IAT measures nothing.
This is a math textbook. So a more relevant issue might be more whether the results have patterns that you can use math to describe, and, well, that seems pretty self-evident. Plus, if you were looking to argue that the IAT is invalid, mathematics would likely be one of the main tools you’d use.
It seems publishers are nonetheless willing to rewrite some of them anyway, with 17 books since being approved on the basis that all WOKE CONTENT has been removed - communicated by the Florida Department of Education with a graphic that the makers of Brass Eye would be jealous of.
