The claim that school mathematics is detached from human interests or consideration has long been critiqued (Bishop 1991, Powell & Frankenstein, 1997). The critical theorists Ernest, Greer and Sriraman (2009) argue that mathematics education is culturally and politically situated, rooted in human values and human experience. But which interests and whose experience? Who is counting and who counts? The Danish philosopher Ole Skovsmose (2012), warning that a mathematical rationality should not be blindly celebrated, argues that school mathematics has a disciplinary function in training for order, efficiency, and obedience in following procedure. Conditioning for what he calls  ‘prescription-readiness’, it privileges technicist imperatives over ethical and social considerations. In performing calculations,  social, personal and moral considerations are diminished or dismissed when they are difficult to quantify. Skovsmose (2008) calls this reductionism in school mathematics ‘ethical filtration’ or ‘ethical erasure’.

Skovsmose (2008) notes that engineering education is often detached from ethical considerations. In engineering, different research groups focus on tricky but separate problems, ignoring the fact that their solutions might serve as part of an overall military research programme; that the ethical problems might not be addressed at all is not noticed. Dissection of the curriculum is a general phenomenon within engineering education (Skovsmose, 2012). Skovsmose accounts for two further ways in which mathematics produces ethical erasure. First, the reframing of the ethical as the personal along with a contingent dismissal of the personal as trivial. Second, the disposal of ethical considerations entirely so that calculations come to be positioned as ‘value-free’, as ‘neutral’. In mathematics, then, ethical objections become reframed as ‘personal problems’, as ‘taken care of somewhere else’, and/or as irrelevant to the ‘value-free’ space of mathematics. Consequently, students who are conditioned to the diminishment or disposal of the ethical, come to associate the sanctioned discard of ethical questions with mathematics.  Thus, ethical disposal comes to be re-positioned as a different ‘truth’, that of the ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’ of the discipline.

The form of mathematics education known as ‘traditionalist’ or ‘absolutist’ (Stemhagen, 2009) is characterised by the relative absence of ethical considerations, a ‘dissected curriculum’ and the absence of the personal. Despite the importance of passion, beauty and elegance to the work of practicing mathematicians (Landri 2007), the traditionalist takes a dry approach, with a fundamental belief in mathematics as a bastion of certainty and rigor (Stemhagen, 2009). Supporters of absolutist mathematics are led to believe that their own role as individuals is merely to receive, reproduce or transmit knowledge as accurately as possible (Ernest 2002). Similarly, De Freitas (2008) argues that traditional/absolutist mathematics re/produces a discipline of mastery and submission. Yet the absolutist model still prevails in many classrooms in Europe and the USA, despite the low level of mathematical competence it produces in comparison to a constructivist ‘reform’ approach (see Boaler, Altendorff & Kent, 2011) and despite the availability of models for ethical pedagogies in mathematics (see Boaler, 2008 and García-Carrión & Diez Paloma, 2015).

During the last 200 years, in France and the USA and in countries in which they have influence, the discourse of absolutist mathematics descended from military engineering to civil engineering to school mathematics. This link between the military and mathematics has remained below the threshold of visibility, due to its little-known history (Ocean & Skourdoumbis, 2016). Practices such as commands and obedience, following rules without question, silence, surveillance, competition, testing and ranking reflect the military education discourse of the 19^th century and the discursive practices of 21^st century school mathematics. These practices continue to condition for compliance and normalise ethical erasure in school mathematics in current times. 

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