ABSTRACT
Despite claims that teachers and students, as intersubjectively constituted epistemic beings, negotiate school mathematics by intersubjective means, the frameworks of school mathematics continue to function in a manner that conceals the connections between authority and understanding. Reduced cognitive agency results from the uneven distribution of cognitive resources, competence, and power in the classroom, as mathematical knowledge is alternately pushed, shared, and repressed. If we cannot keep insisting on students’ rights to be treated as capable, willing, and self-reliant beings, emancipation is a distant dream. We learn to accept the transience of our own lives. Without truth and ethics, real emancipatory ideals become impossible to sustain. Problems in mathematics education emerge whenever long-held ideas are challenged. This scientific investigation attempts to find fresh ideas for the undefined mission of freedom by combining a more nuanced evaluation of relationships, one that may acknowledge the potential for inventiveness and autonomy despite social restraints.
