Mathematics and science education research against the audit culture

Effective efforts that seek basic reforms of our policies and practices in curriculum, teaching, and evaluation are only as strong as their understanding of the relations between schools and the larger society. Mathematical and scientific knowledge is not just any knowledge. It performs specific functions currently Y functions that are tied to the kind of economy that we have, the unequal pattern of benefits generated by this economy, and the distribution of social and economic power that supports this structure. Technical/administrative knowledge and the importance of its production, accumulation, control, and use may contradict a proposal for widespread distribution of such knowledge. The return on investments of capital in education may not be worth the cost in the eyes of the business community. Thus in the absence of a recognition of the larger social functions of the knowledge itself, any call for a curriculum that is based on a wider distribution of mathematical knowledge that involves expensive changes in resources and time (and that may interfere with more elitist uses of the knowledge) is vulnerable unless it participates in much larger efforts to transform the use and control of Knowledge in more democratic directions. © National Science Council, Taiwan 2006.