While US Students Are Taught That Math Is Racist, Chinese Scientists Declare They're Years Away from Putting the World in Checkmate
While students in U.S. public schools are being taught that math is racist, Chinese scientists say they have built two supercomputers that dwarf the capabilities of anything currently available in the West.
The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported the Chinese researchers claimed one of the supercomputers is one million times faster than the nearest competitor, Google’s Sycamore.
Further, they have produced a second, even faster one that “uses light photons to achieve never-before seen results.”
“According to the research team, the light-based Jiuzhang 2 can calculate in one millisecond a task that would take the world’s fastest conventional computer 30 trillion years,” the Post said.
“The team’s findings are detailed in two papers published in the peer-reviewed academic journals Physical Review Letters and Science Bulletin.”
The communist China state-run Global Times reported, “It’s the first time that China has reached quantum advantage in a superconducting quantum computing system.”
Helen Raleigh — an immigration policy fellow with the Centennial Institute in Colorado who was born and raised in communist China — tweeted in response to the Post’s report: “While American public schools are teaching kids that math is racist, Chinese scientists have built 2 quantum computers which can calculate in one millisecond a task that would take the world’s fastest conventional computer 30 trillion years.”
While American public schools are teaching kids that math is racist, Chinese scientists have built 2 quantum computers which can calculate in one millisecond a task that would take the world’s fastest conventional computer 30 trillion years. https://t.co/06LoyVOxj7
— Helen Raleigh (@HRaleighspeaks) October 26, 2021
On the education front, Chinese students outperformed their American counterparts the Program for International Student Assessment in 2018.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development administered the test to 600,000 15-year-olds across 79 countries, assessing reading, math and science skills.
Students from four provinces in China — Beijing, Shanghai and the eastern provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang — earned the highest level 4 rating in all three subjects, while America students ranked level 3 in reading and science and level 2 in math.
U.S. students scored lower in math than most European countries, as well as Singapore, Japan and Korea.
Big Think reported, “Socio-economic background did play a role in the test scores, accounting for 12 percent of the variation in reading performance in each country, on average. But the results also showed that the poorest 10 percent of students in China still outperformed the OECD average.”
While America should be focused on getting back to basics — reading, writing, arithmetic — the emphasis in education of late seems to be on race.
It, of course, is the left’s constant obsession, at the expense of everything else.
The California Department of Education is in the process of revising its K-12 mathematics curriculum framework to promote “equity.”
Williamson Evers — director of the Center on Educational Excellence at the Independent Institute and who served as an assistant secretary of education during the George W. Bush administration — sent up the red flares in a May opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal.
He noted that the framework recommends eight times that teachers draw lessons from the document, “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction,” also published in May.
“This manual claims that teachers addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of ‘white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,’ including a focus on ‘getting the right answer,’ teaching math in a ‘linear fashion,’ requiring students to ‘show their work’ and grading them on demonstrated knowledge of the subject matter,” according to Evers.
“Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity,” the manual says.
The document also dives directly into the political, encouraging teachers to, “Identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist and racist views.”
Would that be the same capitalism that has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system conceived by man?
Even China, while it maintains a one party communist political rule, began adopting capitalist principles in the 1980s, leading to its meteoric economic rise.
The Oregon Department of Education is also promoting a course for teachers based on the “Pathway” document.
Watch out! Bad ideas that start out west have a way of drifting east.
Abraham Lincoln made a famous prediction concerning America’s future: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Certainly promoting critical race thinking, even in mathematics, tears at the fabric of American society.
Our concern should not be focused on China and its apparent development of these supercomputers; it should be on the Leftists in the U.S. and what they are doing to undermine our nation’s future and make us noncompetitive.
America fell behind Soviet Russia briefly in the space race in the late 1950s and early ’60s, then leap-frogged them to the moon.
We can do the same with China and supercomputers or anything else that matters, but only if we stay true to the principle of giving people an equal opportunity to fully exercise their gifts and achieve excellence, instead of lowering expectations for all in the name of achieving equity.
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