How will the Australian Curriculum’s priority of ‘engagement with Asia’ change the way mathematics is taught in schools?
Let’s turn to page 343:
…the priority of Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia provides rich and engaging contexts for developing students’ mathematical knowledge, skills and understanding…
In this learning area, students develop mathematical understanding in fields such as number, patterns, measurement, symmetry and statistics by drawing on knowledge of and examples from the Asia region. These could include calculation, money, art, architecture, design and travel. Investigations involving data collection, representation and analysis can be used to examine issues pertinent to the Asia region.
It’s nuts of course. But is it just a little bit nutty or subversively and dangerously nutty? I’m beginning to fear the latter, after reading Daniel Hannan’s, Inventing Freedom: How The English-Speaking Peoples Made The Modern World.
“Engagement with Asia” looks like a limp excuse to avoid the unfashionable topic of Australia’s colonial cultural heritage. Hannan prosecutes the case for Anglospherical Exceptionalism, calling Australia as a star witness. He writes:
The inhabitants of a damp island at the western tip of the Eurasian landmass stumbled upon the idea that the government ought to be subject to the law, and not the other way around… For the first time in the history of the species, a system grew up that, on the whole rewarded production better than predation…
That spirit was exported to the colonies. In Australia:
a society began to develop that, as in North America, exaggerated the traits contemporary Europeans associated with the British…
Any visitor to Australia is struck by the endurance of these characteristics: informality, bloody-mindedness, individualism, self-reliance… Here, in short, is [J.S] Mill’s libertarian philosophy made flesh.
So far, so good. But Hannan warns:
Having developed and exported the most successful system of government known to the human race, the English-speaking peoples are tiptoeing away from their own creation…
Britain’s intellectual elites see Anglosphere values as an impediment to assimilation into a European polity. Their equivalents in Australia see them as a distraction from their country’s supposed Asian destiny.
Greg Lindsay wrote on this theme in The Australian Financial Review yesterday.