Washington DC —
Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr. Beacon Press Order from Amazon.com
When Bob Moses taught math in Tanzania from 1969 until 1976, he was already a veteran of the voting rights movement in the southern United States. For nearly a decade, he had been one of the student organizers who experienced jail and beatings and worse while conducting voter registration campaigns.
He was also an experienced educator. After completing graduate school at Harvard, he had taught at the elite Horace Mann prep school before being lured south. And in Mississippi, his work with the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) took him to classrooms of a markedly different character. Despite the vast disparity in resources between the schools, Moses felt they all suffered from a lack of community expectations about work and family and social purpose.
Africa was a revelation. "For the first time," he says, "I felt what it was like to work in a school where the expectations of students drove the learning. There was purpose, motivation in day-to-day schoolwork." This, he says, was an important inspiration for his mission of the last decade -- an organization he founded called the Algebra Project, which has so far involved more than 400,000 children in 25 cities across the United States.
Charlie Cobb -- another former SNCC organizer, who is now senior diplomatic correspondent for allAfrica.com -- lived in Tanzania during two of the years that Bob Moses was there. "It was in Tanzania," he says, "a crossroads of Africa and Africans, that a lot of us learned that political struggle was about more than color. And that political struggle was about more than being against something. The essential discussion in Tanzania was about how human resources were mobilized."
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The project advances the radical notion that sixth-grade students -- ages 11 and 12 -- can learn Algebra, even in poor, minority schools, and that such abilities are key to tackling the systemic obstacles that reinforce poverty and powerlessness.
Now Bob Moses and Charlie Cobb have written a book that connects the voting and civil rights work of the late 1960s with the contemporary struggle to re-define pedagogy. American students, Moses says, feel disconnected; their education is alien from their lives.
"Students give themselves an enormous amount of what I think of as slack," he says, space that opens up when you don't really have any over-arching purpose. "In Tanzania, students did not cut themselves that kind of slack." It wasn't, he says, that he had the "best" students, but that students could see the connection between education and their futures -- both as individuals and as a nation -- and performed accordingly.
With support that included grants from the Open Society Institute, as well as the MacArthur and Lilly Foundations and the National Science Foundation, the Algebra Project has become a potent challenge to conventional teaching and learning. At a time when education tops the US political agenda, Radical Equations is a timely intervention in the debate over how to proceed.
