How anthropology can contribute to mathematics education

This paper starts from two statements based on a literature review. The first one concerns the learning process and states that learning is situated and socioculturally contextualized. Learning happens in the space of the background and the foreground of the learner in his or her particular environment of experience. This statement is based on the Vygotsky and the Cultural psychology approach (Cole, 1996) and on the work of Vithal & Skovsmose (1997).The second statement concerns the deficient theory of the learning process (instead of the deficiently of the learner). Based on the international comparative research on mathematical skills we claim that the drop out of school of many groups of children (OECD, 2010) has to do with the insufficient learning system at school that fail to fit with the daily background knowledge of the children.In the final part of the paper we will present three different ethnomathematical cases based on the educational practices that the authors developed in recent years.