White privilege bolstered by teaching math

[Dill]

(10-27-2017, 08:25 PM)JustWinBaby Wrote: Give me a break.  Plenty of "corruption" that stems from govt funding, as well.  

Math - not the soft sciences - builds cars, roads and bridges.  The soft sciences don't write code, either.  The soft sciences aren't going to cure cancer.  We can go on and on and on.  The economic and quality of life attributable to hard sciences are not just private interests, but public ones.

You honestly believe, for example, that funding on, say, gender studies should be equal to funding for diabetes research?

My point was not about "corruption," at least in the usual sense of individuals seeking graft. And did you notice that I included "government" under external forces? Walmart did not force NCLB on schools.

I am just curious. Why have you responded to my contextualization of Gutierrez' work as if I had posed a zero sum, binary choice between hard and "soft" sciences?  I certainly agree that the "economic and quality of life attributable to hard sciences are not just private interests, but public ones." And I add that most US research universities are publicly funded and used to be the world's primary resource for basic research. Perhaps they still are, but it is getting more difficult as Republican state legislatures steadily defund them.

I reread my post and cannot find where I said gender studies funding should be equal to diabetes funding. Guitierrez, so far as I know, is not asking that gender or other "soft" studies should get the SAME percentage of funding as other groups, some of which inherently require more money to practice. 

"Math" and "code writers" don't determine where, when or whether bridges are built. They don't explain why EPA regulations  are enforced or repealed, or why climate science is funded or defunded. They don't decide value questions--like who gets to vote and who doesn't--which are also central to quality of life.  Some may want us to believe that "math" decided to unplug the educational programs Guitierrez champions and skews funding away from further research into what already works, but she's having none of it.