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” by referencing 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 an argument based on evidence and history. However beneath the rhetoric lies a specific epistemological claim: that disciplines like mathematics are self-contained, autonomous, and politically neutral—that they can and should be taught in isolation from the cultural and historical conditions in which they developed, and the consequences of their application are irrelevant. This ostensible “depoliticization” is the organizing logic of a more extensive, coordinated effort to strip STEM education across the United States of the historical, social, and political contexts that ground both learning and understanding.
These efforts demand a response, one grounded in scholarship and facts. Teaching STEM as neutral is not just historically and philosophically inaccurate; it is an ideological choice with both pedagogical and 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.
The neutrality mandate that demands STEM be taught as a collection of decontextualized facts, is not a defense of objectivity, but an attempt to wall off content from broader, more systemic inquiry. It is the removal of the conceptual and social frameworks students would need to see, understand, and question the political and civic dimensions of scientific and mathematical knowledge and its application in the real world. As such, it stands in direct opposition to much of American educational theory, learning research, and, in particular, a half-century of STEM improvement efforts 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 improves student learning, engagement, and persistence in STEM, it also builds awareness of the deep entanglement of science and technology in our personal, professional, and social lives.
The Historical Record: Disciplines Are Not Born Neutral
The assertion that mathematics has nothing to do with politics is a claim that is refuted by the historical record. The the origins of many of the foundational mathematical principals we teach are practical, economic, and therefore political. Geometry comes from the Greek ‘geometria’—earth measurement. Its earliest practitioners were Egyptian and Mesopotamian property 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 of bureaucratic tasks–surveying land, estimating quantities of food stores, construction and engineering projects. Calculus was developed independently by Newton and Leibniz in the late seventeenth century, not as a pure intellectual exercise., but to meet specific needs. Algebra and geometry could not adequately describe motion, gravity, and the emerging solar system, so calculus was born to respond to that need.
The basic instruments of modern statistical analysis, such as correlation, regression, and standard deviation, had an explicitly political origin. Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fisher established those methods the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to answer questions about human “fitness” and heredity, and they were used to advance eugenics as a “science.” Students using these tools in psychology, sociology, public health, or data science are working with methods that were deveoped to answer political questions about race and population.
Probability theory was developed to support gambling and insurance. These were commercial sectors 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 commercial need for steam engine efficiency in an industrializing economy. Physics as a field as fueled by industrial capitalism’s need to understand and quantify energy and work.
Biology is no exception. Taxonomy, comparative anatomy, and evolutionary theory justified the claims of empire. The systematic classification of plants, animals, and peoples functioned as both a scientific and administrative project, organizing the natural world in ways that rationalized extraction and control over resources. Advances in Chemistry were driven by the needs of industry in the nineteenth century. Dyes, explosives, and fertilizers were not byproducts of research, but drivers of the science.
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 erasure of history and the abstraction of a tool from its origins, which is then declared “neutral” science.
Abstraction Does Not Negate Origins
Abstracting a mathematical or scientific development from its origins does not make it politically neutral. Instead, it obscures its political or ideological roots, making it seem natural or inevitable.
But while one can strip social context from the learning, it stays in the tool’s design, assumptions, and default uses. A student learning statistical methods without their eugenic origins does not become a neutral agent. She becomes less intellectually equipped to notice those assumptions buried in the applications—in surveillance technology, actuarial models, or standardized tests that sort students into tracks.
John Dewey and other educational philosophers knew that knowledge removed from its social context is not purer. It becomes less useful and less honest. In this way, certain types of knowledge simply appear as ‘how things are’—universal, inevitable, and “common sense.” Claims about two genders, racial hierarchies, and intelligence quotients are now politically weaponized examples of this ‘naturalization.’
A current example of the pitfalls of the belief in mathematical “neutrality” may be the algorithm. Algorithms are basically the application of mathematical formulae 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; approval of medical treatment, the targeting systems of autonomous weapons. These are not neutral processes transparently applying objective rules. They are tools built by people with biases, assumptions, priorities, and blind spots, which are then encoded into algorithms and formulae and presented as objective.
As educational researchers McGee and Bentley have documented, 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 a range of contexts, such as their access to education, the institutions they can attend, and in the political structures that control 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, but a powerful motivator for STEM learning. As cognitive scientists and learning researchers have insisted for over a century, 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 irrelevant dimensions to be excluded. They are, particularly for students from communities most affected by the consequences of “neutral” science and mathematics, a key motivation for active engagement and understanding, and a source of civic empowerment.
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 the contexts students need to understand that knowledge is produced to serve specific needs, and in specific social and economic conditions.
In STEM, the political intervention is to mandate that disciplines be taught as autonomous, self-justifying, and politically neutral and the enforcement is to flag—as Florida, Texas, and now federal agencies are doing—any keyword that suggests that social and cultural context illuminates the facts, including race, income, gender, misinformation, social justice, equity.
The social sciences and humanities, where social context is explicit in the subject matter, demand a different strategy, i.e. rewrite the content. Florida’s revising of the sociology curriculum, the federal 1776 Commission, the elimination of AP African American Studies in multiple states, the attacks on ethnic studies programs, are not simply political statements. They are a strategy that the cultural historian Raymond Williams called “selective tradition,” a cherry-picking of facts and frameworks that signals 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 and challenge the status-quo. Authentic and systemic inquiry inevitably reveals that arrangements which appear as “natural” are in fact constructed, contested, and serve particular interests. The knowledge that is excluded is that which suggests “another world is possible.” 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, and human agency, as an important dimension of what we “know,” which is always contingent and subject to revision and correction by new knowledge.
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 or relevance as a motivational add-on. Instead, it treats the relationship between scientific knowledge and civic consequence as constitutive of what it means to understand science, and more importantly, to understand the larger systems in which science is an important, but not the only, factor.
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–of immediate concern to students themselves.
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 why it matters to them in the “real world.”
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. It is the suppression that is the radical, and one might add, the “un-American” act.
The Neutrality Mandate as Political Choice
In the early days of the Cold War, 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 inclusive goals and democratic ambitions for college learning, but admitted he was skeptical that the educational sector could acheive these goals through its own internal institutional efforts without answering a key question: “Who calls the tune?” When higher education, including scientific research, 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, and more critically, their own potential role in changing the narrative. It produces graduates who can run the gerrymandering algorithm without the tools to ask whether they should. Employees 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, the civic consequences that follow from their application, and what alternative futures are possible
This is what SENCER and other civically engaged pedagogies offer educators. 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 responses. 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. Its also an inspiring history, of honest and selfless inquiry, world-changing improvements to human life, or as one wit put it: “all part of the same great quest to de-stupify ourselves.”
Teaching that history and those processes do not undermine science. It makes science, as well as 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–understanding that may lead students to challenge the status quo and imagine alternatives. Educators who recognize this have both the scholarly foundation, the pedagogical tradition, and the responsibility, to make this happen.
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