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Educ Stud Math
DOI 10.1007/s10649-008-9126-4

Beyond ‘blaming the victim’ and ‘standing in awe

of noble savages’: a response to “Revisiting Lave’s
‘cognition in practice’”

David W. Carraher

# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract Everyday Mathematics has contributed in important ways to long-standing

debates about mathematical concepts, symbolic representation, and the role of contexts in
thinking—the latter topic reaching back at least as far as Kant’s notion of scheme. The
descriptive work plays a role, of course. But it is only by making sense of the observations
that science moves forward. If over time the expression Everyday Mathematics drops from
usage, I would be neither surprised nor disappointed. Eventually the field needs to become
absorbed into the mainstream traditions of research in mathematics education. However it
would be disappointing if it is remembered only for its descriptive and proscriptive aspects,
without recognizing the contributions to research, theory, and the cultural context of
learning and thinking.

Keywords Concepts . Everyday mathematics . School mathematics . Street mathematics

1 The case made by Greiffenhagen and Sharrock

“School arithmetic and its everyday other” (Greiffenhagen and Sharrock 2008) offers a
strong criticism of studies of Everyday Mathematics, questioning the underlying
motivation, the evidence presented, and the “ways in which theoretical conclusions are
drawn from empirical methods.” The authors are especially critical of the view that
everyday and school mathematics are “different kinds of mathematics”—something they
believe is widely endorsed by researchers in the area. They acknowledge that studies of
Everyday Mathematics have made a contribution by “document[ing] a rich variety of
arithmetic practices involved in activities such as tailoring, carpet laying, dieting, or grocery
shopping. More importantly, these studies have helped to rectify outmoded models of
rationality, cognition, and (school) instruction.” But the review generally takes a harsh
stance, referring to the claims as “misleading” (mentioned eight times), “exaggerated” (four
times), “stretched” (2), “overstated” (1) and “narrow” (1). Further, it characterizes the
findings as “commonplace” (4) and “[un]controversial” (3).

D. W. Carraher (*)
TERC, 2067 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02140, USA
e-mail: david_carraher@terc.edu
 D.W. Carraher

The editor of Educational Studies in Mathematics asked me to respond to the review

article as an author who has contributed several works to the field since 1981. There are
several points about which I am in full agreement with Greiffenhagen and Sharrock.
Nonetheless I believe they are mistaken in many of their assumptions and their
characterization of research in the field.
“School arithmetic and its everyday other” builds its case on a review of Cognition In
Practice (Lave 1988). The authors give the rationale for this focus as follows:
Lave’s case studies seem no less robust, and often more detailed, than their
successors’, which report much the same kind of conclusions. Nor have the problems
that we find with Lave’s studies been surpassed by her successors through improved
forms of interpretation, and the themes of later studies are in general harmony with
Lave’s.” (Greiffenhagen and Sharrock 2008)
They argue that Lave’s findings—and by extension those of the field as a whole—are
“not all that remarkable” because they rely on a “stretched, if not invalid [distinction
between formal and informal reasoning that depends] on a very narrow interpretation of
‘what is taught in school’ contrasting with a very liberal one of what is ‘developed
independently of school mathematics’” (op. cit.).
The authors distinguish “predominantly descriptive studies documenting a variety of
mathematical practices” and “[the] much larger critical campaign, which wants to re-assess
fundamental questions about the nature of mathematics, cognition, and rationality.”
According to the authors, “the descriptive studies [of mathematics out-of-school]
deflat[ed] the idea that mathematical competences can only be acquired by attending
(Western) schools.” Secondly, the “critical project … a reaction against then prevailing
theoretical regimes of rationalism, cognitivism, and formalism in the social and human
sciences” presumably generated a shock-wave that rippled throughout the aforementioned
fields. They then argue that Everyday Mathematics is not all that it has been cracked up to be.
First I will consider their appraisal of the descriptive and critical aspects of Everyday
Mathematics. Then I will address their claims about the scope, power, and efficiency of
Everyday Mathematics. Finally I highlight some contributions to mathematics learning and
education that the authors overlooked.

2 The aims of everyday mathematics research

The authors wonder, “Why did studies of everyday or street mathematics have such an
impact on mathematics education and other fields such as cultural anthropology or
cognitive science?” To me, their question reflects how much the prevailing assumptions
about mathematics learning and education have changed in the last quarter century.
When we initially investigated the mathematics of young street vendors in Brazil
(Carraher, Carraher and Schliemann 1982), half of the students who entered first grade in
public schools were not attending grade 2 one year later.1 At the time, such statistics were
unremarkable and largely ignored, for it was “well known” why children from the lowest
rungs of the socio-economic ladder were failing.2 Their parents were not strong supporters
of education. They lived in communities where the struggles of everyday life required a
different set of priorities. Most elementary school teachers did not have a university degree.

1
A quarter of the children repeated first grade; another quarter dropped out of school.
2
The majority of students from middle class on up attended private schools.
Beyond victims and noble savages

The school day itself lasted only three hours. And if these reasons were not enough, the
children were considered undernourished and prone to disease and cognitive-developmental
lags. So the fact that children in public schools tended to fail in mathematics and drop out
altogether came as no surprise to most Brazilian parents and educators of that period.
When we found that street vendor youths had significantly better performance on
“comparable” arithmetic tasks administered a week later at their homes, I realized that
wide-spread beliefs about failure in school required re-examination, something my
colleagues had already begun to suspect in their prior investigation3 of public school
children (Carraher and Schliemann 1983).
In our first study we interviewed only five youths so it might appear reasonable to
conclude, as Greiffenhagen and Sharrock did in the case of Lave’s studies, that the public
reaction was disproportionate to the data. But our findings flew in the face of prevailing
wisdom in Brazil about school failure. When conditions are ripe, unexpected findings may
receive disproportionate attention due to their status as counterexamples. This happens not
only in education. In linguistics, a study of two individuals raised serious doubts about the
logic presumed to be inherent to standard, grammatically-correct speech and absent in non-
standard speech (Labov 1969). The inability of a single, sane hospital resident to convince
the staff that he was healthy shook the confidence of many about the objectivity of
psychiatric diagnoses (Rosenhan 1973).

2.1 The “critical project”

Many researchers in the field of Everyday Mathematics—including Scribner (1984), Saxe

(1991), Resnick (1986, 1987), as well as my colleagues and I (Carraher et al. 1982;
Carraher, Carraher and Schliemann 1985; Nunes, Schliemann and Carraher 1993)—have
recognized the contributions of Jean Lave without either endorsing or rejecting her critical
project. Like Lave, we were aware of the social and historical structures behind school
failure. However, we were somewhat circumspect about sweeping claims regarding human
learning, reasoning, and development. And we had rather different views about
epistemology. For example, although we believed, like Lave, in the importance of
situations, we believed that knowledge was located in the minds of individuals rather than
in physical settings such as supermarket aisles.
Greiffenhagen and Sharrock characterize Lave’s “critical project” as a diatribe against
prevailing theories regarding the nature of mathematics, cognition, and rationality. The naïve
reader could be led to believe that her invectives—yes, invectives—were attempts to secure a
seat in the academic pantheon. But for Lave this was no mere disagreement among members
of an intellectual elite. When she lived with tribes people in the forests of Maranhão, Brazil,
she realized how difficult it was for her, when transplanted into the culture of the tribe she was
studying, to answer problems easily solved by tribe members. She also had to run for safety
when recent settlers became angered at the approach of “Indians on their land.” It requires
little imagination to realize how farmers’ views about the intellectual capacity of native South
Americans served to justify actions against them. Lave was well aware of the “cover” that the
field of anthropology had historically provided for the systematic exploitation of peoples
unable to defend themselves. Some background to this “supporting role” of anthropology can
be found in Cole, Gay, Glick and Sharp (1971) introduction to “The cultural context of
learning and thinking” as well as in Leacock’s (1971) critique of the “culture of poverty.”

3
The investigation of school failure was carried out before the first street vendor study; it was published after
it, however.
 D.W. Carraher

Nor was the track record of the field of psychology something to boast about, as Terezinha
Nunes (T. N. Carraher 1989) and others (e.g. Gould 1996) have shown.
In recent years such views have been largely disavowed by anthropology and
psychology. Nonetheless they live on in educational settings where failure to learn is
casually treated as evidence of a student’s underlying pathologies and deficiencies. This is a
form of “blaming the victim” (Ryan 1976).
The situation in schools is actually much more complex than this. In recent decades there has
been a (long overdue) backlash against blaming the victim. In extreme cases, a good part of the
knowledge students bring into the classroom is uncritically viewed as remarkable and powerful.
Not merely as starting points for instruction. Self-invented algorithms have sometimes been
treated as alternatives to the computation routines taught in schools. Instruction in long division,
fractions, and a host of traditional topics in mathematics has been curtailed on the grounds that
such topics are rarely used in daily life or can be easily solved by using hand calculators.
When we first published our study with street vendors, we were surprised by the
“bimodal distribution of reactions.” Some people dismissed the mathematics of street
vendors as limited and unimpressive. Others extolled the virtues of their computation
routines, going so far as to recommend that a tidy part of early mathematics curriculum be
allotted to self-invented algorithms. It seemed as if our findings were Rorschach ink blots
onto which readers projected their beliefs about social class, economic stratification, self-
determination, and nature versus nurture. If so, findings from the field of Everyday
Mathematics were likely to be used to promote ideologies rather than to better understand
how mathematics is learned, taught and employed in and out of school.

2.2 The “research project”

In attempting to fit Everyday Mathematics studies into descriptive and proscriptive pigeon-
holes, Greiffenhagen and Sharrock overlooked the fact that Everyday Mathematics has been
a field of research—not merely descriptive studies, but also investigations about the nature
of mathematical learning, reasoning and development. As such, the work has been dealing
with issues of importance to both theory and practice.
Research is not about simply collecting data (the descriptive aspect), nor about asserting
one’s views and value premises while criticizing the views of others (the critical project). It
is fundamentally about trying to understand phenomena.
We spent many years trying to make sense of our initial observations and devising new
studies, both in and out of school, to better understand the nature of mathematical
reasoning. We did not hope to form an enclave of “true believers” and renegades against
prevailing dogma. Much the contrary: we wanted to integrate our findings into long-
standing traditions of learning, cognition, and epistemology. We often framed problems in
terms of oppositions (everyday vs. academic), but we were continuously seeking to build
upon and refine research and theories about human cognition.

3 Asking the right questions

3.1 The wrong question

Anyone who has worked in the field of Everyday Mathematics has sooner or later used
oppositions when trying to characterize the field-oppositions resting on distinctions based on
(a) setting (“in” versus “out” of school, “street versus school mathematics”, “everyday” versus
Beyond victims and noble savages

“academic” mathematics), (b) linguistic register (“written” versus “oral” mathematics), and (c)
degree of explicitness or abstractness (“informal” versus “formal” mathematics).
I am sympathetic to Greiffenhagen and Sharrock’s concern that simple oppositions are
problematic. But the presumption that the two sorts of mathematics (whatever one wishes to
label them) are really one and the same, is equally problematic. The authors do say that the
everyday and school mathematics differ in “methods.” But they fail to recognize that the
methods are associated with different conceptualizations of the mathematics.
For convenience, I will refer to the two poles as “everyday” and “school” mathematics.
Admittedly, this is a compromise, but any pair of terms is going to raise issues.
People have sometimes referred to the everyday pole as “real-life mathematics”, but this
suggests that classrooms are somehow not part of real-life.4 Others have landed in difficulty
by describing the everyday pole as “context-bound” and the school pole as “context-free.”
Researchers of “pure” mathematics also work within contexts, but these contexts are not the
physical setting surrounding the mathematician; they are more akin to frameworks that the
mathematician brings to bear on problems—frameworks that have generally been
developed by the mathematics community over long periods of time (Carraher and
Schliemann 2002).
The question, “Are Everyday Mathematics and school mathematics altogether different
or just the same?” generally leads to fruitless arguments. One needs to ask more nuanced
questions to advance the research agenda.

3.2 What are mathematical concepts?

Had the authors ventured more deeply into the arena, they would have discovered that the
dilemma (“Everyday Mathematics is either just the same or totally different from Academic
Mathematics”) has already been grabbed by the horns and upended. For me, Vergnaud’s
theory of concepts and conceptual fields (Vergnaud 1979, 1985) played a critical role.
Vergnaud views concepts as consisting of three components: invariants, symbols, and
situations. His theory doesn’t settle the issues we need to understand but it does allow us to
frame questions that prove far more useful than “Are they the same or different
mathematics?”

3.2.1 Concepts entail invariants and symbols

The first component of concepts, invariants, when considered in isolation, evokes Platonic
Forms (although it would be incorrect to view Vergnaud’s theory of concepts as Platonist).
Platonism itself has long been held in high regard among professional mathematicians
because it captures important aspects of the knowledge they most aspire to: timeless, ideal
forms that cannot be directly apprehended through the perceptual apparatus. The notion of
anamnesis or reminiscence from the Meno dialogue strikes the modern researcher as
downright mystical. On the whole, Platonism is silent regarding how people learn and teach
mathematics.
The notion of invariant is close to the idea of “signified”: invariants refer to
mathematical objects, properties, and relations. As an invariant, a number is not a physical
thing, but rather an idea connected to other ideas through its properties, relations, and

4
In fairness, I don’t believe that the authors fall into this trap in their section, “What is ‘real’ mathematics?”
Their use of single quotation around the word real serves to distance them from the remarks made by
supermarket shoppers.
 D.W. Carraher

operations. On the other hand, symbols are closer to what are referred to in semiotics as
“signifiers.” The distinction between invariant and symbol (roughly, signified and signifier)
is very important in mathematics education research.
By this token (no pun intended), the symbol “8” is not a number but rather, a particular
kind of signifier—a numeral—that stands for the idea of eight. We have made similar points
for the invariants function and equation (Carraher, Schliemann and Schwartz 2007). The
same point could be made with regard to any mathematical object.
When a teacher draws a triangle on a sheet of paper, the object she is attempting to
represent is not the drawn triangle itself but rather the idea of a triangle (or a family of
triangles). The drawn triangle is the signifier; the ideal triangle is the signified.
Imagine a line drawn on a blackboard with numbers increasing in value from left to
right. The chalk line is not the number line mathematicians talk about: it has a thickness and
a fixed length, whereas the real number line5 has no thickness and it extends to infinity in
both directions. And, given any two points chosen on the real number line, there is always
an infinite number of points (and corresponding numbers) in between.
Even in elementary mathematics, it is important that students shift their attention toward
ideas, relations and structures not available to direct perception. Otherwise they run the risk
of confusing that which is drawn, written, or uttered with the things they are meant to stand
for, namely, mathematical objects and operations.
Vergnaud employs the term symbol in the broad sense of semiotics. Symbols are
signifiers that take on a variety of forms within and outside of mathematics. Symbol(ic)
systems are structures that allow individual symbols to be composed, operated upon and
interpreted within a set of conventions.
Just as it is naïve to equate invariants with concepts, it is wrong to equate symbols with
concepts. And symbolization is only part of (although an important part of) conceptualization.

3.2.2 Concepts entail situations

Situations are the third component of concepts in Vergnaud’s theory. This is the most
difficult component to understand, and Vergnaud has provided no more than a fleeting
sketch. Nonetheless situations are critical to the present discussion. In fact, whenever the
term context, model or arena (in Lave’s sense) creep into a discussion about mathematical
knowledge, people are attempting to deal with the role of situations in conceptualization.
One often discusses situations as if they were places or occasions in which mathematical
concepts are deployed. In Vergnaud’s theory, situations are an integral part of concepts.
This is humorously evident in the early stages of learning, where irrelevant characteristics
of situations are wedded to the concepts—for example, when young students believe that
fractions are about pizzas or density is fundamentally about floating and sinking in water.
Much research has shown, in ways consistent with Piaget’s description of cognitive
development, that children learn mathematics through actions in the physical world and
reflections on the results of those actions. Number is introduced through counting (things),
rational numbers through the measurement of quantities. Early mathematics instruction often
relies on modeling, with a curious twist: instead of simply applying previously learned
mathematical methods to represent phenomena in the physical world, children acquire
knowledge of mathematics through making sense of worldly phenomena. But because
mathematics is drawn to the increasingly abstract (Alexsandrov 1989), children need to learn

5
The expression, “real number line” denotes not a number line that is real but instead a line on which the
“real numbers” are located.
Beyond victims and noble savages

to extricate themselves from empirical observation, demonstration, and trial and error
methods. Mathematics must take on a life of its own, so to speak, and students need to
develop an appreciation of validity independent of empirical corroboration. Likewise, they
need to be able to derive new symbolic expressions from existing expressions by treating the
written forms as syntactical objects, without having to imbue the forms with extra-
mathematical meaning. How students make (or fail to make) such a transition is an important
topic for research.

3.2.3 Concepts in everyday mathematics

When we first observed street vendors solving arithmetic problems in work settings we
were tempted to conclude that we were witnessing a “different mathematics.” But it soon
became apparent that such a claim is too broad. Perhaps street vendors were representing
different things, an idea that resonated with Reed and Lave’s (1979) distinction between the
manipulation of quantities and the manipulation of symbols. The street vendors were not
operating directly on written symbols as pupils are taught to do in school. Maybe they were
imagining actions involving currency and items purchased. But such a system of
representation would be worthless if vendors were not able to keep track of precise values
or amounts—something very unlikely if their computations depended on mental images of
physical objects.
When we looked closely at the intermediate values involved in their mental
computations, it became clear that the mental algorithms were not the same ones taught
in school. In addition and subtraction, for example, one performs column-wise
computations proceeding from right to left. School addition required one to “carry” values
from one column to the next if the total in a column surpassed 9; school subtraction
required one to “borrow” from the column at the left in order to proceed. Our street vendors
did not use such algorithms. They did compose and decompose amounts, but they did so in
ways that did not quite match standard procedures taught in school. And they often broke
apart amounts opportunistically, in ways that made good use of the particular values at
hand. For example, in subtracting 58 from 253, a vendor might appear to first decompose
58 into 53+5. He might then subtract 53 from 253, obtaining 200. Next, he might subtract
the 5 (the remaining part of the subtrahend) from 200, reaching an answer of 195. Of course
there were many ways that the subtrahend could have been broken up. But the way chosen
allowed the problem-solver to pass, on the way to a solution, through the number 200.
Subtractions with minuends containing zeros are known to be relatively difficult for
school children, so much so that they are restricted in the early grades to problems where
each of the digits in the subtrahend is no greater than the corresponding digit in the
minuend; they are also told, “you can’t subtract a larger number [i.e. digit] from a smaller
one.” Why should street vendors prefer algorithms that are more difficult?
I wondered about this through 1984 when it suddenly dawned on me (Carraher 1984a, b):
for street vendors “round numbers” such as 200 involved less cognitive overhead. Their
mental representations of 200 did not contain three digits. They only needed to represent the
hundreds, of which there was a single amount (two); there was no need to keep track of tens
and units. It seemed that the number system of the street vendors was not a place value
system6 at all!

6
A place value number systems assigns values to each digit based on its left-to-right location along a string
of digits. That is why the strings 253, 235, 523, 532, 325 and 352 represent unique values even though the
digits are the same in each case.
 D.W. Carraher

So the mental arithmetic of street vendors involved somewhat different symbolic

representations from those taught in school. We did not have direct access to their mental
representations. But it began to appear reasonable that their number system was structured
somewhat differently from the number system introduced in school.
I wondered how it was possible for two different symbolic systems to consistently
produce the same, correct answers to arithmetic problems. This might have been obvious to
those familiar with the history of mathematics. But it took some time for me to realize that
each representational system would need to respect the same properties of arithmetic.
Here is where the notion of invariant proved useful. When talking about whole numbers
and measures, addition does not depend on the order of the addends. That is, addition is
commutative regardless of the values being used: A+B=B+A. This simple law,7 and others
like it,8 cannot be violated without wreaking havoc on the results. But there are multiple
ways to correctly enact arithmetic operations that respect the law. Historically, there were
also various methods for multiplying, including the Egyptian ‘halving and doubling
method’, the Venetian grid methods, abacus-based methods, and of course our own column
multiplication which we refer to simply as “multiplication” thereby treating the algorithm as
interchangeable with the concept (Menninger 1992).
This line of interpretation suggests that the street vendors were comfortable with the
commutative property of addition when doing oral mathematics. The difficulties they
exhibited with school algorithms seemed to be more tied to the symbolic procedures
themselves (or to other invariants).

3.3 Is everyday mathematics as good as school mathematics?

We should not assume that Everyday Mathematics is equal in scope, power, and efficiency
to School Mathematics. Studies by Schliemann (Schliemann, Araujo, Cassundé, Mecedo
and Nicéas 1998) have demonstrated for example, that people who rely on oral mathematics
may not recognize the commutative property of multiplication. Ask them whether they
would prefer (a) 100 coins worth 25 cents each or (b) 25 coins worth 100 cents each, and
you may find that, before they have determined the result of each case, they may suspect
that one of the two options has a higher value. If they do not have a method for performing
multiplication, other than through repeated addition, they cannot be expected to be aware of
the commutative property of multiplication.
This brings us to the issue of the relative scope and power of Everyday Mathematics as
compared to school mathematics.
In comparing everyday and school mathematics Greiffenhagen and Sharrock state:
& The calculations that people encounter in many everyday situations typically
involve small and ‘round’ numbers;
& The most usual arithmetic practices are addition, subtraction, and multiplication of
‘simple’ numbers (e.g., doubling or trebling);
& When we compare schooled and unschooled children, we find that they perform
equally on the simple problems that they encounter as part of their everyday lives—
but that schooled children perform better at complicated problems (‘school
problems’).

7
Note that this law says nothing about procedures for adding two numbers. A+B=B+A is not a method.
8
They are the Field Axioms or more correctly, the commutative ring axioms (Bass 2008).
Beyond victims and noble savages

I fully agree with the authors on these points; my colleagues and I have made similar
observations elsewhere (Carraher et al. 2007). Greiffenhagen and Sharrock are correct in
noting that the threshold for success in supermarket mathematics was set considerably
lower than for paper-and-pencil tests: declining to carry out a calculation in the supermarket
was treated as appropriate for the setting but declining to provide an answer to an item on
the paper and pencil arithmetic test was treated as an error. This makes comparisons of
performance across situations misleading.
However, the authors appear to be laboring under the impression that researchers believe
that Everyday Mathematics constitutes a viable and possibly superior alternative to school
mathematics: “…it is suggested that [E]veryday [M]athematics (with a success rate of 98%)
is therefore superior to [S]chool [M]athematics (with a success rate of 59%).”
For problems of any weight, Everyday Mathematics is fairly limited in efficiency, power,
scope, and depth. For these reasons alone it should not be regarded as an alternative to the
mathematics found in textbooks. At best it is a “pedagogical point of departure” in early
mathematics, not an end of mathematics education (Carraher et al. 1985). Educators can
profit from identifying student’s semi-invented9 algorithms and analyzing how they work or
fail to work (Ball and Cohen 1999). This is very different from elevating them to the goals
of instruction.

4 Conclusion

Everyday Mathematics has contributed in important ways to long-standing debates about

mathematical concepts, symbolic representation, and the role of contexts in thinking—the
latter topic reaching back at least as far as Kant’s notion of scheme. The descriptive work
plays a role, of course. But it is only by making sense of the observations that science
moves forward. If over time the expression Everyday Mathematics drops from usage, I
would be neither surprised nor disappointed. Eventually the field needs to become absorbed
into the mainstream traditions of research in mathematics education. However I would be
disappointed if it is remembered only for its descriptive and proscriptive aspects, without
recognizing the contributions to research, theory, and the cultural context of learning and
thinking.

References

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meaning (pp. 1–64). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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9
By semi-invented I mean those algorithms that are an amalgam of introduced conventions and the student’s
own fashioning.
 D.W. Carraher

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