The curricular development of the Celaá Law obliges teachers to teach all subjects with a “gender perspective”. The order has been followed to the letter by an editorial that has now been forced to self-amend and partially rectify its textbook in the face of criticism received on social networks and in full offensive by the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, to review and refine the “ideological burden” of the school textbooks of the new educational law. The corrected text is a manual for the first year of Baccalaureate that proclaimed “Mathematics against sexism” in which everything good in this discipline was feminine and the masculine was described as “tasteless”, “simpleton” and “boring”.
In its first version, the book of Applied Mathematics I from the publisher TuLibro, said that Mathematics, “as its own genre makes us intuit, repels machismo and inequality.” It bolded feminine items and associated feminine with “exciting.” “How creepy petroleum derivatives give me! But how derivatives make me shudder with joy! How insipid is wholemeal bread! But how tasty is wholemeal? (…) What can a product do when faced with a power? The second is faster to write, more precise and more stimulating. How boring are the exercises and how stimulating is the Mathematical Olympiad”.
Now the authors have polished all the aspects likely to generate controversy – they have been accused of defending an “intolerable feminism” – and, in a loop of political correctness within the initial political correctness, they have turned the approach around. There is no longer “Mathematics against sexism” but “Mathematics for equality”. The opposition between the genders is now presented as inclusion. A paragraph has been added that says: “Mathematics is that wonderful country in which the masculine and the feminine coexist in harmony, complement each other and enrich each other.”
In addition, masculine articles have also been included in bold. The discipline still “repels machismo and inequality” but the part that previously said “as its own gender makes us intuit” has been eliminated. As masculine positive aspects, theorems, polynomials, triangles, concepts have now been included… Before, only operations, matrices, derivatives… were praised, to which positive values were attributed simply because of their morphological gender. feminine.
But now that changes. If before it was said: “Can anyone imagine a polynomial without an unknown?”, now it is expressed: “Can anyone imagine an unknown without a polynomial?” I mean, just the other way around.
This newspaper contacted one of the authors on Saturday, Margarita Iglesias Roger, who is also head of the Department of Mathematics at the IES Ramon Muntaner in Xirivella (Valencia). “It is a pity that the critics failed to appreciate the lighthearted and slightly humorous tone of the page, the underlying intention of showing Mathematics as a territory in which the masculine and the feminine coexist in harmony, complement each other and enrich each other” , he explained, adding: “We assume that perhaps we have not managed to convey this approach and that the text may give rise to second interpretations. For this reason, we take the opportunity to apologize if someone has felt offended.”
Iglesias and Fernando Marqués, the co-author, spoke with the publisher to “rectify everything that has generated discomfort and thus not give rise to unintended interpretations.” The publisher sent a book to EL MUNDO to verify that “no academic content has been cut” and that the role of women in this scientific field is not “exaggerated”. “We don’t even use inclusive language,” Iglesias excused himself. After reviewing the book, it is found that no content has been cut and that several references to female mathematicians appear, but not as many as in other copies from other publishers. The most striking thing is the rectified epigraph.
Bruno J. García, editor of TuLibro, also points out: “After making a new reading of the text, we have considered that it is possible that, when using a metaphor to explain equality, we have not resorted to the appropriate examples and words, and that has given rise to an interpretation that we were not looking for with the original text”. He defends that the new wording “closes the meaning much better” that they pursued “with the metaphor and does not lead to confusion of the purpose of equality” that they want to convey “between men and women”.
“We regret not having been able to communicate and capture our original idea with the right words and that some kind of controversy may have arisen,” says the person in charge of this publishing house, which is dedicated to self-publishing teachers’ books at an economic cost. The corrected version will be available to students from September.
The publishers are going to notify the Mathematics departments of the educational centers and have also contacted the Government of the Community of Madrid, despite the fact that the book is intended, in principle, for students in the Valencian Community. But Ayuso has led the protest against the new government curricula and the way they are being reflected in textbooks. He has taken the Baccalaureate study plan to the Supreme Court and has announced a special plan for the regional educational inspection to review the manuals once they reach the educational centers. He is also going to eliminate content related to sexuality from his Infant curricular development.
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