ABSTRACT
The philosophy and related practice of school mathematics that authors develop and advocate for in these pages, Democratic Mathematics Education, is intended to serve as an ingress, not an obstruction, to the wider world. While taking math class seriously as a space for democratic education is the main focus of this book, there are other benefits to the approach we develop. With this project, we develop an alternative conception of mathematics for educators and students, a way out of the dualistic trap of being forced to understand mathematics as strictly made or found. An aim of this project is to establish that it can be useful to think of mathematics as partly made and partly found and that the most critical component of the discipline is in the changing patterns of interaction between what is given and those who construct mathematical understandings.
