Wednesday, June 11, 2014

The Trouble with Common Core

I haven’t been paying too much attention to the new educational program, Common Core that activists are imposing on the country.

In some way, it feels like a completely ridiculous notion. The idea that the world’s richest man is best qualified to know what every school should teach strikes one as a rank absurdity. Being richer than everyone does not mean that you better than everyone else.

Apparently, being really, really rich means that you can hire an army of experts and produce an educational program that you believe—because they told you-- will serve the best interests of all American students. 

And yet, being rich does not make you an authority on education. You are forced to depend on people who are recognized authorities. If you are sufficiently naïve you will not suspect that they have a political agenda.

For the record, we assume that Bill Gates, like many very wealthy people, has had his mind hijacked by a band of do-gooders. One supposes the he is a candidate for forgiveness, on Biblical grounds: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Up until now, most of the press reports about Common Core suggest that it’s a dopey way to teach math. Those who concocted it do not much like rote memorization of multiplication tables, but prefer convoluted explanations that show how the process occurs.

They did not seem to understand that memorizing multiplication tables is far more efficient than thinking through what it really means to say that 9 x 7 = 63.

This morning Betsy McCaughey shines a light into some of the darker recesses of Common Core and shows why some states are trying to save their children from it.

It turns out that Common Core standards for American history contain a goodly part of indoctrination in an anti-American ideology. It’s more guilt trip than history. So much so that you suspect that William Ayers—President’s Obama’s good friend from Chicago—was part of the committee of experts.

McCaughey writes:

Contrary to what the public is told, Common Core is not about standards. It’s about content — what pupils are taught. In the Social Studies Framework approved on April 29th by New York State’s education authorities (but not parents), American history is presented as four centuries of racism, economic oppression, and gender discrimination. Teachers are encouraged to help students identify their differences instead of their common American identity. Gone are heroes, ideals, and American exceptionalism.

Eleventh grade American history begins with the colonial period, but Puritans and their churches, standing on virtually every New England town green to this day, are erased. Amazingly, Puritan leader John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” vision, an enduring symbol of American exceptionalism cited by politicians from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and Michael Dukakis, is gone. Religion is expunged from New York State’s account of how this nation began.

Instead, the focus is on “Native Americans who eventually lost much of their land and experienced a drastic decline in population through diseases and armed conflict.” The other focus is on slavery and indentured servitude. True, the curriculum includes political developments and democratic principles. But overall, it’s so slanted as to be untrue.

The indoctrination begins early. In grade three, “students are introduced to the concepts of prejudice, discrimination and human rights, as well as social action.” Grade four suggested reading includes “The Kid’s Guide to Social Action.”

Grade nine shortchanges the discovery of the Americas by European explorers, renaming it the dreary topic, “The Encounter.” Students will “map the exchange of crops and animals and the spread of diseases across the world” due to the Encounter, and study “the decimation of indigenous populations in the Americas” and the “the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa, including the development of the kingdoms of the Ashanti and Dahomey.”

So, Bill and Melinda Gates are using their vast fortune to empower the thought police. Worse yet, it's an exercise in self-loathing. The Gateses and their experts do not understand that diminishing and demeaning the nation will demoralize children. Children who are taught not to feel pride in their nation will not feel pride in their own achievements. They will be prone to more psychological dysfunction.

But, Common Core does not stop at indoctrination. Bizarrely, it does not want to teach handwriting.

McCaughy explains:

Common Core eliminates handwriting, the basis of communication for over two thousand years. Students learn to print in kindergarten and first grade, but then instruction shifts to keyboards. The next generation will not be able to read an historical document in its original, or even a letter from Grandma. Worse, scientists warn this ignores the proven connection between writing and absorbing information. Kids will learn less and remember less.

Worse yet, even if you send your children to private school or prefer to homeschool them, you will have to use Common Core standards. The program that McCaughy calls ObamaCore has now become the basis for SAT and Act test:

Private schools and home schooling won’t shield you if you want your children to compete for college. ACT and SAT tests are already being aligned with Common Core. This is a No Exit system.

Call it a soft tyranny.

8 comments:

  1. Soviet of WashingtonJune 11, 2014 at 10:04 AM

    "we assume that Bill Gates, like many very wealthy people, has had his mind hijacked by a band of do-gooders."

    More likely, do-gooder Melinda has his balls held hostage in a jar on the dresser as a bond for good behavior.

    Interestingly enough, the Seattle (Seattle!!) school board recently voted to remove a preferred Common Core math teaching book from the curriculum and replace it with one based on the Singapore teaching method (Singapore has the 2nd best math test results in the world). Of course the progs at both district and individual school level are still trying to obstruct things.

    See the blog of UW professor Cliff Mass for more detail:

    http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/06/math-victory-in-seattle.html

    and

    http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/06/some-seattle-school-district.html

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  2. Thank you for passing on the good news.

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  3. There is some room for education in the need to teach the Common Core indoctrination to pass the "test of lower order thinking for the lower orders" as the multiple choice test was defined by the man who implemented its widespread use in the run up to WWI. He failed in stopping its use after the mobilization. This year is the centennial of the lower order testing.

    If you teach children the historical facts, then teach them the common core, as required regurgitation for passing the test, they will have a contrast from which they could develop thinking skills as they resolve the discontinuities.

    So homeschooled kids or those in under "edumedication" who become curious are likely to develop independent thought.

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  4. Thought experiment: Would you prefer to be governed by the top 1% of people who truly earned their money through hard work and determination, or would you want to be ruled by the top 1% as measured by IQ? Practical people or MENSA people? You pick.

    Our society is being held hostage -- if not run into the ground -- by experts. The PhD factory produces more and more people who know more and more about less and less.

    I look at someone with a PhD like I do someone who's completed a marathon. I recognize their accomplishment, as indeed it is an accomplishment. An outstanding one. But it doesn't give the PhD holder anymore reason -- nor qualification -- to determine what is best for me, nor direct public policy for millions of people.

    By the way, I love all of you out there who have PhDs. What I'm saying is that your PhD does not mean you're better than another person who owns a car wash and employs 25 people. You don't need a PhD to run a car wash, but you need a lot more social skills to employ 25 people than you do writing and presenting papers.

    Reality check: Did Socrates have a PhD? Was Socrates an idiot? Would you rather be taught by Socrates, or the well-above-average professor at a modern American Ivy League university? Explain your choice.

    Tip

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  5. We DON'T have experts - we have Leftists, who seek to impose their vision of perfection on America.

    I'm not that impressed with PhDs, who can both slant their research, and write the abstracts (which are all many of the media read about their work) that give a misleading impression of the outcome of the study.

    I'm with Tip - yes, completion of a PhD is an accomplishment. No, it does not give the holder of that degree carte blanche to impose change on the system they studied. There's a difference between the person who solves the theoretical problem (scientist), and the person that makes a system work (engineer).

    I would NOT ride in a car designed by a scientist. I do, each day, in a car designed by an engineer.

    Same thing with schools. The PhD can do the research. The nuts-and-bolts guy is the one that puts that research into practice, successfully. Most engineers, and most successful school reformers, know when to depend on the research, and when to jigger the system with some shims.

    Bill Gates, through his support of Common Core, put the scientists in charge. He should have put the problem in the hands of engineers.

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  6. "Religion is expunged from New York State’s account of how this nation began.

    Instead, the focus is on “Native Americans who eventually lost much of their land and experienced a drastic decline in population through diseases and armed conflict.”

    - Its unfortunate that religion is expunged because religion is the reason First Nations peoples lost much of their land.

    doctrineofdiscovery.org

    I hope at least they teach about the indoctrinating boarding schools that religious missionaries forced kids into.

    How could they just erase the religious history from this nation's history? If we don't know history we may be destined to repeat it and that would be dangerous for the religious freedom and liberty we have finally achieved today.

    As far as math I would have loved some sort of explanation of why it works the way it does instead of just the memorization back in my school days. The memorization should be there but my brain is such that I need to understand the bigger picture or concept behind mechanisms and I was never shown that and hence never "got" math. Now as an adult I feel I missed out on a fascinating subject that probably would have led me into the sciences had I been able to master it (through a more conceptual understanding). I love the sciences today but fall short in truly understanding them due to my math block.

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  7. "we assume that Bill Gates, like many very wealthy people, has had his mind hijacked by a band of do-gooders."

    - Why assume that?

    "More likely, do-gooder Melinda has his balls held hostage in a jar on the dresser as a bond for good behavior."

    - Because "successful men" that you admire can't make mistakes but their wives can and under the influence of those wives the successful men can impose their wives mistaken thought processes onto the nation?

    Why the hero worship of Bill Gates from either of you?

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  8. "Thought experiment: Would you prefer to be governed by the top 1% of people who truly earned their money through hard work and determination, or would you want to be ruled by the top 1% as measured by IQ? Practical people or MENSA people? You pick."

    Neither.

    ReplyDelete