When “Fair” Quietly Becomes “Equal Outcome” in Maths Education

It was a normal afternoon. I was driving my son to BMX training, and he was listening to one of his favourite YouTube series, Numberblocks.

I like Numberblocks. It is a clever BBC maths cartoon that explains numbers visually and playfully. For a child stuck in the car, it is one of the better ways to pass the time. Normally, I barely pay attention. After all, how wrong could a children’s maths program be?

Then came an episode called Happy Campers.

In the episode, Two had brought two apples. He gave one apple to One. Now Two had one apple, and One had one apple. The result was equal. Simple maths.

But then One says, “It’s equal.” And Two says, “And that’s fair.” These two lines are repeated multiple times in the episode. The word fair immediately caught my attention. I paused the video and explained to my seven-year-old son that I disagreed.

If Two brought the apples, they are Two’s apples. It is up to Two whether he wants to share them or not. If he gives one apple to One, that may be kind, generous, or nice. It creates an equal result. But it has nothing to do with “fair”. Two can decide what to do with his apples because they are simply his apples.

The next episode kept playing, but my mind stayed with those two apples.

How did “equal” become “fair” in maths education? Is this harmless child-friendly language, or part of a broader corruption of words? Has the political phrase “fair share” shaped the way children are taught to think about division, ownership, sharing, and equality?

Because this is not a small distinction.

Equal is a mathematical word.

Fair is a moral word.

At first, I wondered whether this was just a BBC thing — typical left-leaning messages sneaking into a children’s program. Then I dug further, and what I found was more surprising.

NSW Department of Education’s official curriculum resources include an Early Stage 1 mathematics lesson titled “Let’s share to be fair”. The task is about creating equal groups and sharing fruit equally into groups. Another NSW resource, “Sharing collections”, also points teachers to “Let’s share to be fair” as a resource focused on sharing fruit equally into groups.

So in official NSW maths education material, “fair” is being used where the actual mathematical concept is “equal”.

That is where the language becomes dangerous.

The phrase “fair share” is everywhere in politics. We are told that the rich should pay their fair share, corporations should pay their fair share, and resources should be shared fairly. But what does “fair” even mean?

Equal dollars? Equal percentages? Equal sacrifice? Proportional contribution? Need-based redistribution?

The power of “fair share” is that it sounds morally obvious before it has been defined. Nobody wants to be unfair. So once a policy is labelled “fair”, anyone who questions it can be painted as selfish, greedy, or unjust.

That is how language does political work.

And the pattern is not limited to Australia. While the US Common Core and England’s National Curriculum mostly use cleaner mathematical wording such as “equal shares” and “equal groups”, New Zealand’s official curriculum resources use “Fair shares”; Ontario’s curriculum support explicitly says “fair-sharing or equal-sharing”; France uses partage équitable — equitable or fair sharing — in official maths material; and Spain has linked division with repartos equitativos, or equitable distributions.

Different countries use different wording. But wherever government education material turns equal division into “fair sharing”, the same conceptual slide appears: a measurable mathematical result becomes a moral claim.

This fits a broader pattern in our media, politics, and education system.

Good words are quietly redefined. “Safety” can come to mean scrapping freedom. “Inclusion” can come to mean conformity. “Love” can come to mean never criticising anything. Even “science” can become “How dare you do your own research?”

These are good words. That is precisely why they are powerful.

Orwell warned in Politics and the English Language that political language is designed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”. That is the genius of corrupted language: it does not usually announce itself as propaganda. It arrives wearing respectable clothes.

This matters most in education. Adults may detect rhetorical tricks. Children usually cannot. They absorb language before they can analyse it. If they repeatedly hear that equal outcome is “fair”, they may absorb the moral assumption long before they are old enough to question it.

So teach the maths. Teach equal shares, equal groups, and division. Use mathematical words for mathematical concepts. Do not dress up arithmetic as morality. Do not smuggle ideology into a worksheet and call it numeracy.

When language is corrupted, thought follows. And when children’s language is corrupted, the future follows.