Indigenous Maths Is Better Than Colonist Maths

You’d think maths is maths, right? 2 + 2 = 4, no matter what culture you’re from. Well, Indigenous mathematics is apparently completely different to our western style of maths. And of course, perhaps unsurprisingly to many of you, Western maths is a result of evil colonisation, didn’t you know? As seen on a news article on the ANU website: “Maths has no borders: Professor Rowena Ball brings Indigenous mathematics to ANU”. I find it interesting that a non-Indigenous lady is bringing Indigenous maths to the uni. Wouldn’t that be similar to: “Food has no borders: Professor Ball brings Pakistani food to ANU”? Of course, I’m joking. She’d probably bring kangaroo tail stew.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, Indigenous maths! So why are we talking about Indigenous maths? Why is this even being brought up? Well, it’s because Indigenous people are falling behind when it comes to maths. “‘Unacceptable’: Indigenous maths achievement gap under scrutiny”. Basically, the achievement gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students continues to widen.

If you take a look at the Australian Government’s ACARA website, they report on the National Assessment Program, NAPLAN results, which take into account Indigeneity. These are the average achievement scores for Year 9 in Numeracy for 2023. You can see that the average score is 567, with boys doing slightly better than girls. However, Indigenous students are scoring significantly worse than their non-Indigenous peers at 491 vs 573 – a more than 80-point difference. Surprisingly, or not, the best performers are those that have a language background other than English. So if you can’t speak English, you do well at maths, if you’re Aboriginal, well for whatever reason, on average you’re doing quite poorly. Surely there’s a societal issue at play here. It’s certainly not from a lack of capability.

Well it didn’t take me long to find the answer. This is the Government’s My School website where you can search for individual schools and t..