Ideologies of mathematics education cover the belief systems to which the way mathematics education is implemented. They are radical, conservative, liberal, and democracy. The differences of the ideology in mathematics education may lead the differences on how to develop and manage knowledge, teaching, learning, and schooling. In most learning situations we are concerned with activity taking place over periods of time comprising personal reflection making sense of engagement in this activity; a government representative might understand mathematics in terms of how it might be partitioned for the purpose of testing (Brown, T, 1994).
Comparison among countries certainly reveals both the similarities and the differences in the policy process. The ideologies described by Cochran-Smith and Fries (2001, in Furlong, 2002), as underpinning the reform process, are indeed very similar. Yet at the same time, a study of how those ideologies have been appropriated, by whom, and how they have been advanced reveals important differences. He further claimed that what that demonstrates, is the complexity of the process of globalization. Furlong quotes Eatherstone (1993), “One paradoxical consequence of the process of globalization, the awareness of the finitude and boundedness of the plane of humanity, is not to produce homogeneity, but to familiarize us with greater diversity, the extensive range of local cultures”.
Ernest, P (2007) explores some of the ways in which the globalization and the global knowledge have impacts on mathematics education. He has identified four components of the ideological effects to mathematics education. First, there is the reconceptualization of knowledge and the impact of the ethos of managerialism in the commodification and fetishization of knowledge. Second, there is the ideology of progressivism with its fetishization of the idea of progress. Third, there is the further component of individualism which in addition to promoting the cult of the individual at the expense of the community, also helps to sustain the ideology of consumerism. Fourth is the myth of the universal standards in mathematics education research, which can delegitimate research strategies that for ground ethics or community action more than is considered ‘seemly’ in traditional research terms.
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