ALL IS NOT GOLD THAT GLITTERS, AND TWO AND TWO MAKE FOUR.

You'd think that equipping little kids with the ability to count is a different order of intellectual effort than equipping older kids with the understanding that a record player cannot play the sounds that would shake the record player to pieces (no matter how hard some heavy metal bands try.)

Apparently, though, the splitting of theoretical hairs is sufficiently important that Cathy Young, more generally a Reason writer, devotes a lengthy column to "The culture wars come to math and reach a new low."  After a link-rich wade into the social media kerfuffle, she quotes a friendly neighborhood mathematician.

In mathematics, operations on numbers or any other kind of mathematical objects are done under certain axioms. The axioms we introduce into mathematics are the foundation of all the discussions in math. Under the axioms introduced by [Giuseppe] Peano, we built up the entire theory of natural numbers. As a result of the axioms, we have 1+1=2. The variation of axioms may lead to a different theory. For certain mathematical purposes, we might need to create a new theory, in which 1+1=3. However, either the 1, or the 3 (or both) has a completely different meaning than the ones we know in daily life.

Yeah, duh. Complex numbers and nonstandard analysis come to mind. But, dog-gone-it, don't leave the kids with no foundation to go shopping or trade Pokemon cards just because you get your jollies subverting the dominant paradigm.

When Stanford mathematician and science writer Keith Devlin weighed in on this dispute on the blog of the Mathematical Association of America, the title of his post began with, “Of course 2+2=4 is cultural” — which some took as a defense of “2+2≠4.” But the second part of the title was, “That doesn’t mean the sum could be anything else.” What he means by “cultural,” Devlin explains, is that math is a creation of human culture as well as discovery of universal principles.

Indeed, Devlin notes that “2+2=4” has often served as a paradigm of “obvious truth” because it’s “noncontroversial in all human cultures that have counting numbers and arithmetic up to 4,” i.e. “pretty well all cultures today.”

Ms Young concludes, "Social justice math is gibberish. This gibberish is especially damaging to kids whose socioeconomic background puts them at risk of academic failure." Exactly. Deconstruct the institutions of prosperity at your peril, particularly if you hope to have more people sharing in that prosperity.