If you’re not yet outraged about the federal Common Core curriculum, it’s time you were.
A Deerhound Diary
Being the observations of a retired Scottish blogger by a lord of Scots
If you’re not yet outraged about the federal Common Core curriculum, it’s time you were.
Who are these people who get away with creating such ridiculous curricula and get it approved?
It seems they must hate everyone.
It’s okay as long as there is a heavy emphasis on evolution being responsible for the creation of li- I mean, er, the origin of life. And that global warming is real. If you understand those two truths, everything else is cream cheese.
Thanks for sharing this. I think outrage is growing as more details spread. It’s the type of thing most people weren’t really paying attention to as it got put into place.
This is ridiculous. Everybody complains that the government is beholden to big businesses and special interest groups — but somehow that won’t affect its decisions to adopt “new, cutting-edge” educational programs?? Curricula (driven by “standards” efforts like this) are a huge, huge, highly profitable business. You can’t have schools teaching math and reading the same ol’ way every year, because then you can’t move as much “new, cutting-edge” curricula product. And boy, howdy, that stuff costs a fortune (not to mention the endless tests that have to be written up to verify that the standards are being followed, the bureaucracies that have to be built up to provide “accountability”, etc). Especially since the folks buying it are spending everyone else’s money. Oh yeah. I’m sure Bill Gates has no interest at all in the extent to which schools are going to have to rely on new tech to implement and track these new standards (beyond the welfare of the children, of course).
Any competent teacher with the ability to run a disciplined classroom and the freedom to do so can, without ultra-modern cutting-edge curricula, teach kids to read, calculate, and think. And any parents with an interest in their kids’ education are perfectly capable of assessing whether or not their kids are getting a good one. This ain’t hard. But if you make it hard, there’s good money to be had.
Hell, if the job’s done right after a few years the kid can take it over himself. During read-aloud time in the evenings, my two olders are hearing a bio of Nathaniel Bowditch. Forced out of formal schooling at age 10 and into apprenticeship. But he loved learning. When an older scholar discovered his interest in astronomy, he loaned him a copy of Newton’s Principia. At age 16, Bowditch taught himself Latin so he could read it. Later on, he would write a work on navigation that would be the definitive text for over a century.
Incidentally, this reminds me of a Chesterton quote I ran across recently:
“The state had less power over a man when it could send him to be burned at the stake than it does now when it sends him to public school.”
Now, I can’t find the actual GKC citation for this quote. But it is quoted by Dale Ahlquist of the American Chesterton Society. I know a little about Ahlquist, and he is highly unlikely to be misattributing something to GKC.
No kidding. This is why I go to PTO meetings at my sons’ school. I’m the only man, the only teacher (from another school), the only one who seems to care. CT is awash in the Common Core, and while it’s starting to get some flack, it’s a lot like Obamacare — too late, we’re doomed.