ABSTRACT
Absolutist philosophies are committed to a belief in the absolute objectivity and neutrality of mathematics, as are a range of personal philosophies of mathematics. The values of mathematicians have developed as part of a discipline with its own powerful inner logic and aesthetics. This ideological position is the most committed to the issues of equal opportunities and anti-racist mathematics teaching, and is the only perspective to perceive the problems of racial education fully, with their epistemological and socio-political dimensions. The absolutist response to this charge is that mathematics is objective and neutral and value-free. The acknowledgment of the culture-bound nature of mathematics leads inevitably to the acknowledgment of its value-laden nature. Since mathematics is linked with all human knowledge, it is culture-bound and imbued with the values of its makers and their cultural contexts. Social constructivism views mathematics as the product of organized human activity, over the course of time.
