Socio-cultural foundation of mathematics and science education

For the first half of this century, mathematics and to a lesser extent science, have practicallyignored Anthropology. Except for a few examples of algebraic structures drawn from kinshiprelations, and which served to reinforce the prevailing idea of Mathematics as a universal,basically aprioristic form of knowledge, no reference to Anthropology, not even to culturalAnthropology, appears as of interest to mathematicians. They might have said that this wasbecause Anthropology was not relevant to a purely intellectual construction. Mathematicsand Science Education were also biased toward primarily the technologically advanced,economically developed, politically structured and stable societies, where wage-labour andidentifiable class structure were prevalent. Recognition of alien educational structures anddifferent cultural modes were ignored. Research has been dominated by statistical models