In April 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis defended rejecting 41 percent of the state’s submitted math textbooks—the highest rate in state history—citing “indoctrination” through references to Social-Emotional Learning and Critical Race Theory. “Math is about getting the right answer,” DeSantis said. “It’s not about how you feel about the problem.” His Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz Jr., echoed: “We’re not going to let our students be indoctrinated. Math is math. It’s not about social justice. It’s about facts and figures.”
These statements were a political provocation aimed at a base rather than a serious educational argument. However beneath the rhetoric lies a problematic and consequential epistemological claim: that disciplines like mathematics are self-contained, autonomous, and politically neutral—that they can and should be taught in isolation from the social conditions in which they developed and the social consequences of their application. This ostensible “depoliticization” is the organizing logic of a more extensive, coordinated effort to strip STEM education across the United States of historical, social, and political context.
This movement demands a scholarly response. Teaching STEM as neutral is not just historically and philosophically inaccurate; it is a deliberate pedagogical choice with civic consequences. It supports the production of technically skilled graduates who are disinclined, and unequpped, to question whose interests are served by STEM knowledge and how that knowledge is deployed.
This essay argues that the neutrality mandate—the demand that STEM be taught free of social context—is not a defense of objectivity. It is an exertion of control through omission: the systematic removal of the conceptual frameworks students would need to see and question the political and civic dimensions of scientific and mathematical knowledge and their application in the real world. And it stands in direct opposition to much of American educational theory, learning research, and, in particular, a half-century of STEM reform, including the reforms supported by the Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities (SENCER) project. SENCER has spent more than two decades demonstrating that contextualized STEM teaching not only builds civic capacity, but it also results in better pedagogy and, more importantly, better science.
The Historical Record: Disciplines Are Not Born Neutral
The assertion that mathematics has nothing to do with politics is, first and foremost, a historical claim. Historical evidence contradicts this view.
Consider the origins of the foundational mathematical tools we teach. Geometry comes from the Greek ‘geometria’—earth measurement. Its earliest practitioners were Egyptian and Mesopotamian surveyors. They calculated field boundaries and assessed taxes. The Pythagorean theorem was known to Babylonian mathematicians over a thousand years before Pythagoras. They used it for practical administration in agrarian states. Calculus was developed independently by Newton and Leibniz in the late seventeenth century. They did not see it as a mere intellectual exercise. Algebra and geometry could not adequately describe motion, gravity, and the emerging solar system, so calculus was born.
Statistics present a more convincing case. The basic instruments of modern statistical analysis—correlation, regression, and standard deviation—were developed in significant part by Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fisher in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were invented to answer questions about human “fitness” and heredity, and were used as instruments of eugenics. Students using these tools in psychology, sociology, public health, or data science are working with methods that were purpose-built to answer political questions about race and population—questions their instructors may never mention.
Probability theory was developed through gambling and insurance. These were commercial institutions embedded in specific social and legal structures. Operations research arose during World War II to optimize bombing campaigns and submarine warfare. Linear programming and combinatorial optimization, which form the mathematical basis for drawing legislative district maps, stem directly from military logistics. Thermodynamics emerged from the need for steam engine efficiency in an industrializing economy. Physics as we know it was advanced by industrial capitalism’s need to understand energy and work.
Biology is no exception. Taxonomy, comparative anatomy, and evolutionary theory helped justify the empire. Colonial natural history consisted of systemically classifying plants, animals, and peoples. This functioned as both a scientific and administrative project. It organized the natural world in ways that rationalized extraction and authority. Chemistry advanced greatly with the German chemical industry in the nineteenth century. Dyes, explosives, and fertilizers were not extras—they drove the science forward.
None of this means that the knowledge produced in these fields is invalid or that the mathematical propositions are false. Two plus two is still four; the theorems hold. But the claim that mathematics has “nothing to do with politics” is simply not a description of how mathematics came to be. It is a retrospective erasure—the abstraction of a tool from its origins and re-produced as “neutral” science.
Abstraction Does Not Negate Origins
At the heart of this essay: abstracting a mathematical or scientific tool from its origins does not make it politically neutral. Instead, it obscures its political dimension, making it seem natural or inevitable.
Although social context is stripped from pedagogy, it stays in the tool’s design, assumptions, and default uses. A student learning statistical methods without their eugenic origins does not become neutral. She becomes less able to notice those assumptions in place—in predictive policing, actuarial models, or standardized tests that sort students into tracks.
John Dewey and other educational philosophers knew that knowledge removed from its context is not purer. It becomes less useful and less honest. This is knowledge without the ability for self-examination. In this way, certain types of knowledge simply appear as ‘how things are’—universal and inevitable. Claims about two genders, racial hierarchies, and intelligence quotients are now politically weaponized examples of this ‘naturalization.’
An example of the pitfalls of the belief in mathematical “neutrality” may be the algorithm. Algorithms are, precisely, the application of mathematical reasoning to problems. And they are now deployed in domains of serious civic consequence: facial recognition and predictive policing; credit scoring and insurance pricing; hiring decisions and benefits determinations; the targeting systems of autonomous weapons. These are not neutral tools transparently applying objective rules. They are tools built by people—people with biases, assumptions, priorities, and blind spots—which are then encoded into mathematical formulae and presented as objective tools.
As educational researchers, McGee and Bentley have documented that the experience of being subjected to these systems is inseparable from identity. Black and Latinx students negotiating STEM fields are acutely aware of how mathematical and scientific authority can be deployed against them—in their access to education, in the institutions they attend, and in the systems that govern their communities. McGee and Bentley’s research on what they call an “equity ethic” among minority students suggests that awareness of these stakes is not a distraction from STEM learning—it is a powerful motivator for STEM learning. How you feel about a problem does, in fact, bear on how much and how well you learn about the disciplinary facts that surround it.
Governor DeSantis had it precisely backwards. The affective and civic dimensions of STEM problems are not contaminants to be excluded. They are, for many students—particularly those from communities most affected by the consequences of “neutral” science and mathematics—the conditions of genuine engagement.
The Two-Front War on Contextual Knowledge
Efforts to remove context from STEM education are part of a larger strategy to strip American education of tools students need to understand that knowledge is produced in specific social and economic conditions—including power interests.
In STEM, the move is to enforce abstraction: to mandate that disciplines be taught as autonomous, self-justifying, and politically neutral. Strip the history. Remove the social context. Prohibit the civic application. This works because abstraction is already built into the self-presentation of these disciplines as fact-based and “value-neutral.” The intervention is to harden that abstraction into policy, and to flag—as Florida, Texas, and now federal agencies are doing—any keyword that suggests that context matters: race, income, gender, misinformation, social justice, equity.
The social sciences and humanities, where the social context is explicit in the subject matter, demand a different strategy: rewrite the content. Florida’s sociology curriculum rewrites, the federal 1776 Commission, the elimination of AP African American Studies in multiple states, the attacks on ethnic studies programs—these are not simply political statements. They are interventions in what the cultural historian Raymond Williams called the “selective tradition,” the tradition that dictates which knowledge counts, which histories are legible, and which analytical frameworks are available to students.
Both moves have the same target: the idea that knowledge can be used to denaturalize—to show that arrangements which appear inevitable are in fact constructed, contested, and serving particular interests. The target is not, ultimately, critical race theory or social-emotional learning. The target is the sociology of scientific knowledge itself: the intellectual tradition, running from Dewey and Merton through Kuhn and beyond, that treats the conditions of knowledge production as an important dimension of genuine understanding.
That tradition is precisely what effective STEM education, at its best, has always embodied—and what the SENCER model has made explicit, grounded in pedagogy, and validated empirically.
SENCER and the Alternative Tradition
The Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities initiative was founded in 2001 on a deceptively simple premise: that the most effective way to engage students in learning science is to connect that science to the civic problems that actually affect their lives. The SENCER model does not treat civic context as a motivational add-on—a spoonful of relevance to help the disciplinary medicine go down. It treats the relationship between scientific knowledge and civic consequence as constitutive of what it means to understand science at all.
From its earliest iterations, SENCER courses addressed problems that were explicitly bound up with questions of power, equity, and social consequence: food security and agricultural science; health disparities and epidemiology; environmental justice and toxicology; climate impacts and atmospheric chemistry; the history of race science in genetics. These were not chosen because they were politically convenient. They were chosen because they were scientifically rich, civically urgent, and—crucially—honest about the conditions under which scientific knowledge is produced and applied.
This approach connects directly, if not always explicitly, to the educational theories of William James and John Dewey. James’s “Talks to Teachers” argued that genuine learning is inseparable from student interest—not interest as entertainment, but interest as the condition of authentic engagement between a learner and a problem that matters. Dewey went further: education for democratic citizenship requires not simply technical knowledge but the capacity to bring that knowledge to bear on contested public questions, to deliberate about ends as well as means.
For over a hundred years, learning research has consistently validated this framework. Context-based STEM teaching improves retention and persistence, particularly among students from historically excluded groups. It is not a sacrifice of rigor for relevance. It is a recognition that the artificial separation of disciplinary knowledge from its conditions and consequences is itself a kind of pedagogical failure—a failure to teach students what science actually is and how it actually works in the “real world” that they live in.
What is now being suppressed—through keyword filters in NSF grant applications, through curricular mandates in state after state, through the quiet defunding of programs that connect STEM to civic life—is not radical pedagogy. It is mainstream science education research. The suppression is the radical act.
The Neutrality Mandate as Political Choice
The sociologist Robert Lynd (cited in an earlier post), writing in response to the Presidential Report “Higher Education and Democracy (1946) expressed his strong approval of its key goals and democratic aims for college learning, but admitted he was skeptical that the educational sector could acheive these goals through its own internal institutional efforts. He asked a question that has only become more pressing: “Who calls the tune?” When higher education, including science, is organized, funded, and governed in the service of external economic and political interests, who decides the terms or the goals? In science, government policy after WWII was that research and teaching should be insulated from politics and allowed to develop according to its own “value-free” internal logic. This was itself a political answer. It determined who and what would benefit from scientific research and investment, which questions to ask, and which applications to pursue.
The current neutrality mandate offers a contemporary version of the same answer. Insisting that STEM disciplines be taught without reference to their social contexts or civic consequences does not remove politics from science education. It removes from students the conceptual vocabulary they would need to see the politics that remain. It produces graduates who can run the gerrymandering algorithm without the tools to ask whether they should. Who can apply the predictive policing model without the framework to evaluate its assumptions? Those who have been trained, in effect, not to ask “who calls the tune?”
This is not a neutral educational outcome. It is a specific one that serves specific interests. The question is whether we are willing to recognize that and work towards other, more democratic, ends.
Toward a Pedagogy of Inquiry, Skepticism, and Civic Empowerment
The alternative is not to politicize STEM in the sense that critics fear—to introduce ideological advocacy into scientific practice or to compromise mathematical rigor for political effect. The alternative is to teach STEM honestly: to include the history of how disciplines developed, the social conditions that shaped their tools, and the civic consequences that follow from their application.
This is what SENCER has demonstrated is possible. It is what a course in genetics that uses the history of race science as context teaches, more honestly and more rigorously, about how scientific consensus forms and how it can be corrupted. It is what a virology course that examines both COVID-19 and the 1918 influenza pandemic teaches about the political economy of public health response. It is what a statistics course that traces the eugenic origins of its basic methods teaches about the assumptions embedded in standard tools.
Teaching the social context of STEM knowledge does not contaminate that knowledge. It completes it. Students who understand why a tool was built are better equipped to use it well, to identify its limits, and to ask whether it should be used at all. That is not social justice imposed on mathematics. That is epistemology—the basic intellectual practice of understanding what we know, how we came to know it, and what our knowledge can and cannot do.
The early 20th century critic Van Wyck Brooks wrote in 1918 that American culture needed a “usable past”—a history not of monuments, bromides, and settled answers but of live problems and active traditions that could inform present action. The history of science and mathematics is exactly such a past. It is full of choices made under pressure, tools built for purposes that were not always acknowledged, and knowledge claimed as universal while serving particular ends.
Teaching that history and thos processes do not undermine science. It makes science—and scientists, and citizens—more capable of the self-examination that honest inquiry requires.
The neutrality mandate is not a defense of objectivity. It is a campaign against the conditions of genuine understanding. Educators who recognize this have both the scholarly foundation, the pedagogical tradition, and the responsibility to declare this —clearly, directly, and without apology.
References and Notes
Note: Key sources informing this argument include:
On the historical origins of mathematical disciplines: Judith Grabiner, The Origins of Cauchy’s Rigorous Calculus (1981); Ivor Grattan-Guinness, The Norton History of the Mathematical Sciences (1997).
On statistics and eugenics: Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking (1986); Donald MacKenzie, Statistics in Britain, 1865–1930 (1981).
On algorithms and bias: Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction (2016); Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality (2018); Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, “Gender Shades,” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (2018).
On student engagement and equity in STEM: McGee, E., & Bentley, L. (2017). The Equity Ethic: Black and Latinx College Students Reengineering Their STEM Careers toward Justice. American Journal of Education, 124(1), 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1086/693954
On SENCER and civic engagement in science education: W. David Burns, “Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities,” Peer Review (2002); National Center for Science and Civic Engagement, SENCER Model Course Library, sencer.net.
On the sociology of scientific knowledge: Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science (1973); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
On Florida’s textbook rejections: Florida Department of Education, Mathematics Textbook Adoption Review (2022); Associated Press coverage, April–May 2022.
On College Education and Civic Responsibility; John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916); S. Lynd, “Who Calls the Tune?” (1948). The Journal of Higher Education, 19(4), 163–217. https://doi.org/10.2307/1975859