Originally published May 9 2014
Indiana votes to replace Common Core with their own education standards
by PF Louis
(NaturalNews) One of the very first states to adopt Common Core's education standards, Indiana, has of late April 2014 trashed it and gone back to the drawing board. Originally, there were 45 states that signed on to the Obama administration's "suggested" education program to ensure high school graduates were "college- and career-ready."
The Obama administration had earlier embraced the Common Core State Standards Initiative standards that were drawn up by state education superintendents and the National Governors Association to impose national standards among kindergarten through 12th grade students.
This is a worthy goal, as more and more public schoolers don't meet those requirements. What's questioned by more states now after the initial signups is the testing methods to meet those standards.
Resistance to Common Core and more
A NYC public school principal, Elizabeth Phillips, wrote in her New York Times op-ed piece that the testing questions are tricky and developmentally inappropriate, especially under the duress of three long consecutive days of testing.
She challenged State Board of Regents members to take even the lower-grade tests themselves to determine if they "still believed that these tests gave schools and parents valuable information about a child's reading or writing ability."
Actually, since when are multiple choice tests a measure for true understanding or literacy? Clever characters can easily figure their way through the right choices. At Antioch West University in California during the 1980s, students were required to submit essays on various subject matters. In other words, they were required to explain what they understood.
This requirement demands grammatically correct literacy, spelling and a good understanding of the subject. Math testing should involve straight-ahead problem solving that is relevant to one's career decision without tricky scenarios as background.
Bureaucrats running education is not so keen an idea for starters. Retired NY state public school teacher John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling ended his acceptance speech for the 1990 NYC Teacher of the Year award with these lines:
"Experts in education have never been right, their 'solutions' are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough. Time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family. I've said my piece. Thank you."
And Robert Kennedy Jr. once quipped, "Americans are over entertained and under informed."
Now it's even worse. Most kids are contaminated with too much sugar, food additives, pesticides, fluoridated water and forced vaccinations.
The instruments of mass hypnosis, indoctrination and social engineering are the mainstream media and the education "system." Homeschooling or out-of-the-matrix private schools, such as Montessori and others, enable focusing on individuals rather than social engineering (http://www.naturalnews.com).
So does exposure to books that are not favored by any portion of the controlling segment of our population, such as War Is a Racket, written in the mid-1930s by twice Medal of Honor awarded retired Marine General Smedley Butler. It's still available online.
Less exposure to mainstream TV and mindless entertainment would help. Language depreciation is another factor. The habit of reading through words not correctly understood leads to less understanding, less intelligence and dimmer discrimination. Dictionary use should be developed early.
Here's an excerpt from socially critical comic George Carlin's monologue "The Real Owners of America," wherein Carlin explains why education won't get any better:
They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. ... You know what they want? Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively [etc].
Here's the video clip of Carlin's complete education rant (https://www.youtube.com). Text in the sources below.
Sources for this article include:
George Carlin text:
http://www.rense.com
http://www.naturalnews.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com
http://www.newyorker.com
http://www.nytimes.com
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