We suggest that Mathematics Education theory and practice can find new directions through recognizing their dystopic characteristics, and embracing them as both the source of challenges and method of response. This contrasts with the generally utopic approach of most scholarship. We offer critical ethnomathematics education as a model for such an approach, since it has its own origins in lingering dystopic legacies of colonialism. A perpetual hopelessness and disempowerment is one implicit curriculum of contemporary mathematics education, where the mathematics once learns might help to describe things, yet hardly assists in transforming the reification of power and agency in society. Embracing dystopia rather than trying to circumvent it helps us see that it is more crucial to rethink curriculum than pedagogy.