To Participate or Not to Participate? That Is Not the Question!

We take an experience of educational failure in school mathematics to illustrate the liberal capitalist ideology at work in educational institutions. This will be done by means of confronting the official discourse, which posits inclusion and equity as fundamental goals of mathematics education, with its actualization within a secondary school, whose student-intake can be labeled as marginalised or underprivileged. What normally runs well within the official discourse, when actualized in a specific practice, often encounters a series of obstacles that end up perverting the official intention. Usually research strives for identifying such obstacles under the imperative to eliminate them. This is assumed to ensure the full actualization of the official aims. However, we are instead interested in understanding these obstacles since they stand for the symptomatic points, which allow one to grasp the ideology manifest in current educational practices.