快猫短视频

Born and educated in New York State, Robert Moses came to Mississippi in the early 1960s to work on voter registration for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He helped win black people the vote. From 1969 to 1975 he worked for the ministry of education in Tanzania. Today the disenfranchised are still his mission, and his tool is mathematics. Since its inception in 1982, his Algebra Project has involved more than 40,000 schoolchildren in 28 urban and rural school districts. He is author of Radical Equations: Math literacy and civil rights (Beacon, 2001).

You have said that mathematics literacy is as important for black children in the US today as reading and writing were to black children in the 1960s. Why?

There is a long tradition within the black movement from slavery times of people trying to gain literacy as an avenue to freedom. In the 1960s in Mississippi you had to be literate to vote, which for black people was a vicious cycle: the country was denying an entire people their education through its politics and then denying them access to the political arena because they were illiterate. Today the issue of literacy has come around again because of computers. Without computer literacy you don鈥檛 have economic access. Computer literacy today is as important as reading and writing literacy used to be. Before, you could leave school and go to some of the industrial shops and make good money. But at the cutting edge of today鈥檚 economic system you need knowledge of computers and their context. You need to be able to encode and decode information that contains quantitative data.

We鈥檙e talking 鈥渒nowledge workers鈥濃��

We鈥檙e talking about people who work in computers, consumer electronics, communications equipment, electronic components, semiconductors, industrial electronics, photonics, software services, data processing and defence electronics. According to the American Electronics Association, workers in these industries earned 82 per cent more than people in other industries.

Do you need to know mathematics to use a computer?

At the heart of computers are software and programs constructed with highly symbolic languages that use logic and mathematics. Students need to understand the technology that drives the economy. They also need to be able to encode and decode information that is partially written with quantitative data.

Why is algebra in particular so important?

Because historically algebra was assigned a certain role in the US educational system. It was the gateway to higher mathematics. Students learned how to manipulate abstract symbolic representations for underlying mathematical concepts. It didn鈥檛 have to be algebra, but that鈥檚 the decision the mathematical community made. In France, geometry is the driving force of mathematics education. Some people argue that it should be a mix, but I don鈥檛 think there鈥檒l be a cultural change any time soon, so for the time being it鈥檚 going to be algebra.

Why are so many children in the US 鈥渕athematics illiterate鈥�?

The country suffers from what I call 鈥渟harecropper鈥� education. There are 300 or more black and Latino high schools in the US where 50 to 60 per cent of children who join in the 9th grade [aged 14] don鈥檛 graduate. They leave without any foundation in mathematics, and when they get out they can鈥檛 find a job, or at best they get jobs in McDonald鈥檚, or they get service jobs at very minimal levels of pay and cannot support a family. It is not a stable life so they spill into the street and end up feeding the criminal justice system. In certain school systems when they get to the 11th grade they take what is equivalent to an 8th-grade 鈥渇unctional literacy exam鈥� to move into their senior year. In a case last year the New York State court of appeal declared that the state was obliged only to give a minimal education to its children. It said the crucial thing was that the children had to be able to serve on juries and vote, and that an 8th-grade education was sufficient for that. The judge wrote that there were a lot of low-paying jobs and that they needed people to fill these jobs. In a nutshell, that is the concept of the sharecrop education that the country inherited after slavery. It has condemned a whole people.

Why has mathematics not been a priority up to now?

Until recently it was fine to be at college and say that you were a 鈥渕athematics phobic鈥�, and that culture was really associated with language. Failure was tolerated in mathematics but not in English. But computers have changed all that.

Why is it so difficult for black children in particular to learn mathematics?

It鈥檚 more complicated than race. Mathematics illiteracy is not unique to blacks the way the denial of the right to vote was in Mississippi. The barrier is within the discipline itself. The country has never agreed that elementary teachers should be competent in mathematics, and the same is true at the high-school level. So you don鈥檛 have the network of teachers needed to provide children with a 鈥渇loor鈥� in their mathematics education. There are highly qualified teachers in upper and middle-class suburban schools and in private schools, but that is not replicated in the inner city and in rural areas. We could get away with it during the industrial age but we cannot get away with it any more.

How are you trying to change the system?

There is an opening now because schools are undergoing a fundamental technology shift. Every school in some sense is an artefact of industrial-age technology. As that changes, as schools become up to date with computers, there will be opportunities to change what to teach and how to teach it. We are trying to establish a floor, a standard in mathematics literacy that every child will have. But you cannot change America unless you work the demand from the bottom. What eventually got us the right to vote was the sharecroppers themselves making the demand. The deeper problem here is how to get the young people to take up this mathematics problem. Once we have the young people motivated, we will have the leverage to change the whole country.

How do you convince children that mathematics is relevant to them?

The key is to find things that interest them that involve mathematics. I started out in the early 1980s with my own children when they were in middle school. When they were in their early 20s, they and some of their friends came down to Mississippi and started doing mathematics with my middle school students. They were able to do something that I couldn鈥檛, which was to make mathematics hip. They have been working with kids who are into hip-hop and also into mathematics. It鈥檚 partly the technology that allows them to do this, tools such as calculators that can draw graphs. Young people think this kind of technology is worthy of their attention. They have a culture that is different from book culture and they understand that pushing buttons is nothing to be afraid of.

How much support have you had from the mathematics community in the US?

There are probably no more than 10 research mathematicians who concern themselves with school mathematics. It isn鈥檛 a tradition within the academic community. But we have support from a small but centrally placed and deeply committed network through the National Science Foundation, which has been funding our teacher-training programme over the past four years and is currently funding us with about $550,000 over three years to develop experientially based mathematics modules for 9th-grade algebra classes.

Have you encountered any resistance in trying to make mathematics available to everyone 鈥� in breaking down the walls of an academic elite?

There is resistance, we do run into that. A sense of, why should we go out of our way to figure out how to help these people? The traditional role of science and mathematics education has been to train an elite, create a priesthood, find a few bright students and bring them into university research. It hasn鈥檛 been a literacy effort. But on the other hand we have had encouragement from the whole economic sector, where people understand the need to have an intelligent workforce. Those people are saying, 鈥淲e have to open this up.鈥�

You did your masters in philosophy. How has that helped your mathematics mission?

I don鈥檛 think I could do the work that I am doing if I had taken just a straight mathematics degree. Opening children鈥檚 minds to mathematics requires me to look at fundamental mathematical concepts, such as metaphors for addition and subtraction as you pass from arithmetic to algebra. People majoring in maths are not taught to think about that.

What do you love about mathematics?

I love making it relevant to the kids, showing them how it can apply to problems in real life. Like drug-taking, for example, deriving concepts for questions such as how long do the drugs stay in the system, when do they get flushed out? Apply it to something like that and the kids have to acknowledge it as important because everyone they know is taking drugs.

You鈥檝e said yourself that you had an elitist education. How did you end up in Mississippi campaigning on the right to vote?

I had been almost totally immersed in white society since 1952, first at Hamilton College in New York as an undergraduate, then at Harvard as a graduate, then as a teacher at Horace Mann, an elite private school in the Bronx. But the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 woke me up. I was mesmerised by the pictures I saw almost every day on the front pages of The New York Times 鈥� young committed black faces sitting at whites-only lunch counters or picketing, directly and with great dignity, challenging white supremacy in the South. They looked like I felt.

Did you grow up with racism?

I started to hit it when I got to high school, although at that stage I didn鈥檛 really understand it. When I went to Hamilton, there were just 3 blacks out of 500 on the campus. It was kind of schizophrenic because I was friendly with everyone, but there was this line in the sand. One of the things I had taught myself to do was repress my feelings whenever I felt humiliated. I think many African Americans becoming deeply involved with white society for the first time do this. Finally finding a way to personally take on prejudice and racism 鈥� to engage 鈥� creates a feeling of great release. It is what I felt participating in my first demonstration in Newport News, Virginia: release.

Would you still describe yourself as a grassroots freedom fighter?

I guess so. One thing I always say about this country is that you can struggle in it and still live a good life. I learned to identify with the grassroots through black civil rights leaders like Ella Baker, Amzie Moore, C. C. Bryant, people who had really lived that life in struggle. My father also had that touch with the grassroots. He was not in any kind of network of struggle but he looked upon himself as the man in the street, the common man. So I learned from him as well.