The Common Core Straight Jacket
By Alan
Caruba
American
education was based on some very fundamental principles and, from the 1640s
until the 1840s, they were, in the words of Joseph Bast, the president of The Heartland Institute, “real civics, real economics, and real virtues.”
Bast is
the co-author of “Education and Capitalism” and in a recent speech at the Eighth
annual Wisconsin Conservative Conference took a look at the way an education
system that produced citizens who understood the values that existed before
“progressives” took over the nation’s school system, turning it into a
one-size-fits-all system of indoctrination.
“One-size-fits-all
is easier for bureaucracies, but it’s not good for kids. No two kids learn the
same way, and no two teachers teach the same way”, but Common Core not only
makes this assumption, but enforces it.
The good
news is, as Bast notes, that “since the early 1960s, parents and activists have
been fighting to return to the country’s education system to what had worked so
well for 200 years.”
In a Wall Street Journal commentary by Jamie Gass and Charles Chieppo, they called Common
Core “uncommonly inadequate” and documented the way it destroys student academic
achievement. Gass directs the Center for School Reform at the Boston-based
Pioneer Institute where Chieppo is a senior fellow.
The brain
child of Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education, and
spelled out in a letter to Hillary Clinton following Bill Clinton’s election in
1992, Gass and Chieppo quoted its stated intention “to remold the entire
American system” into “a system of labor-market boards at the local, state, and
federal levels” where curriculum and ‘job matching’ will be handled by
government functionaries.”
Gass and
Chieppo cited the way in Massachusetts Common Core’s English standards “reduce
by 60% the amount of classic literature, poetry, and drama that students will
read. For example, the Common core ignores the novels of Charles Dickens, Edith
Wharton, and Mark Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ It also delays the point at which
Bay State students reach Algerbra I—the gateway to higher math study—from
eighth to ninth grade or later.”
Common
Core is not a plan to produce a new generation of citizens who understand the
values on which the nation was based and built, but rather one that focuses on
job skills to the detriment of civics, economics, history, the arts, and
traditional values. It is a system for serfs, not citizens. It is yet another
example of how progressives view people
as mere instruments of the state and how they have used the schools to
indoctrinate and train them for that purpose.
“We have a
president,” says Bast, “who thinks wealth is created by redistribution, that
the producers of the world will continue to produce no matter how high the
taxes or how heavy the regulations. High school and college students are taught
to think the same way” to the detriment
of “honesty, hard work, self-responsibility, faith, hope, and love. Are these
things being taught in public schools today?” asked Bast. “Maybe in some, but
not in many.”
“As long
as government owns and operates ninety percent of the schools in the United
States,” Bast warns, “we have no right to expect that fewer than ninety percent
of students who graduate will be socialists.” The result of the two Obama
elections are testimony to that.
In a
commentary on leftist school indoctrination, Bruce Thornton, a research fellow
at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a professor of classics and humanities at
the California State University, described the distortions today’s students are
being taught in K-12.
“The
founding of the United States, then, was not about things like freedom and
inalienable rights, but instead reflected the economic interests and power of
wealthy white property owners.”
“The civil
war wasn’t about freeing the slaves or preserving the union, but about economic
competition between the industrial north and the plantation south.”
“The
settling of the West was not an epic saga of hardships endured to create a
civilization in the wilderness, but genocide of the Indians whose lands and
resources were stolen to serve capitalism exploitation.”
This is
not what students who attended American schools in the 1940’s and 1950’s
learned, but starting in the 1960s these distortions were, as Thornton noted,
“married to identity politics, the defining of ethnic minorities and Third
World peoples on the basis of their status as victims of capitalist hegemony
and its imperialist and colonialist mechanisms.” Feminism added women to the
list of victims “sacrificed to the white male structure.”
The result, said Thornton was “a student population ignorant of the basic facts of history, the vacuum filled with melodramas of victimization, racism, oppression, and violence that cast the United States as the global villain guilty of crimes against humanity.”
It’s a
noticeable, though small, trend as parents homeschool their children. A report
in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are
homeschooled has increased 75%, however that still represents only 4% of
school-age children nationwide. These children do far better on standardized
assessment exams than those in government schools.
The good
news is that parents and activists across the nation are fighting back to
ensure that school choice, based on a voucher system, and other options that
include tuition tax credits, special needs scholarships, and education savings
accounts. These empower parents to enroll their children in schools that have
demonstrated higher standards and traditional values.
“If we can
return to a free-market education system,” says Bast, “we can solve most of our
political problems.”
© Alan
Caruba, 2013
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