The way my side lost the Math Wars is like the way we are losing the "home front" in Israel's fight for survival. The current discussion on the horror in discovering that people we thought should know better but do not know better, is one really important example. Please let me explain.
My side in the Math Wars (we never had a good name for ourselves) was comprised of university math professors, K-12 math teachers, mathematically sophisticated parents, and some people who served in policy positions in state governments (CA and MA). How on Earth did we lose the debate on math education? It's as if lawyers debated tort law with truck drivers, and lost.
The Math Wars began in the early 1990s with fights over textbooks, pedagogy, curricula, and teacher training. We wrote papers and op-eds, we presented to parents and politicians, we debated the Education Mafia. After several years of getting nowhere, I took a step back and wondered what the Hell was going on. We were experts in the field, and no one was listening to us.
In short, the collapse of math education was never a technical problem like the wrong textbooks or ineffective pedagogy---problems that are easily fixable. The one and only problem was the Education Mafia: that corrupt syndicate of the schools of education, the teachers unions, and the professional organizations like "The Dark Side of The Force" (my pet name for the NCTM, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics).
In other words, it's not that America buys the wrong textbooks, it's that we hired the wrong people. We need astronomers but we hired astrologers.
No education reform is possible without reforming the Education Mafia, and the Education Mafia cannot be reformed. You cannot turn astrologers into astronomers. The only way is to get the Education Mafia out of education. But when I explained this to my comrades, my arguments fell on deaf ears. Understand: they did not refute me, they just did not respond.
Now I had another mystery on my hands. Look, I may or may not be right, but after years of failure, you would think my comrades would be more receptive to an alternative discussion. That they were not, sheds light on allies who are not allies in Israel's fight for survival.
It turned out that all my comrades but one are on the political Left. To my knowledge, two are commited Marxists, the rest are "Yellow Dog Democrats". And the consequence is enormous.
You see, they are ideologically committed to the political structure of public education as it currently exists. They would never raise a hand against a union, and they want the continued existence of the "DOPE" (the U.S. Dept of Public Education). They want the Education Mafia to do the job of teaching children, but they want to tell the Education Mafia how to do their job. (We were painfully naive.)
In other words, my comrades, wonderful people that they truly are, are right about everything regarding the teaching of mathematics, and they are ideologically incapable of making it happen. The one thing that needed to be done was the one thing they could not do. They wanted to persuade the Education Mafia, not fight it. We were doomed from the start.
Now consider the political fight for Israel. There is just too much about Israel and its fight for survival that violates Leftist dogma. And you can see how hard it is for our erstwhile allies to see through that.
In math education, everything is clear, and obvious, and present. You can read a textbook, you can walk into a classroom and watch the teacher, you can talk to the students. There is nothing abstract about it. My comrades know when the Education Mafia talk shit about math education. And they still can't see through their ideological blinders.
On the other hand, Israel is far away geographically, linguistically, and culturally. The Muslims are even farther away. It's difficult for any American to really know what's going on in the Middle East. It's ever so much harder for them to know that people like Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Andrew Napolitano, and Owen Jones are talking shit about Israel in Gaza.
Thanks to the blizzard of propaganda blowing out of the Left, it is impossible to talk facts and logic when discussing Israel. It is more understandable, if not any less disturbing, that people we thought and hoped were our allies cannot see through their ideological blinders.
Whatever we have been doing up to now is not it.
