Common Core will lead to schools of indoctrination
As the saga of the Affordable Care Act continues, another mammoth program being pushed by the Department of Education for approval by all state legislatures is a national curriculum, which is called Common Core State Standards.
This is purposely misleading, as they are national standards. This program would nationalize education against the constitutional provisions that prescribe this responsibility to the states. The founders realized that giving the function of educating citizens to the federal government would eventually be used politically, to mold the minds of children by defining moral values and beliefs of the populace while enlarging their power.
By delegating the responsibility to the states, the founders empowered the people and local neighborhood officials to create and execute their own school curriculum. They understood that decentralizing power of educating children would promote quality of education through local pride of their neighborhood schools, innovation, competition, continuity of instruction and the fostering of the moral values of the community. These neighborhood schools were grass-roots facilities scrutinized by the locals who kept our education nonpolitical and on a high level compared to other nations.
This local control of education has been transferred unconstitutionally to the federal government through greed, shrewd grants and regulation. Already there are signs that government schools are pushing their progressive ideology down the throats of our children. In Skoke, Ill., fourth-grade classes were taught on work sheet lessons that government is equal to the family, according to the lesson. It sets the rules and takes care of people’s needs such as food, education and health. There have been other schools using students to sing the praise of our current president, preaching acceptance of previously perverted behavior and reciting collectivist slogans to convince students that government exists to take care of them.
CCSS expedites the process of making government schools a vehicle for propagandizing students. The centralized government would be able to “teach” moral relativism, fairness, political correctness, multiculturalism, tolerance for the progressive agenda and bigotry for the traditional moral values. These Marxist/progressive concepts are changing the culture to welfare dependency.
Teachers, state representatives and Jeb Bush were used as window dressing to make it appear that this was a bottom-up process. The Gates Foundation has funded almost every aspect of this training, although it was a creation of Department of Education bureaucrats. It has not addressed the incredible increase in non-teaching staff and union’s powerful adverse impact on U.S. education.
This top-down, one-size-fits-all approach just like No Child Left Behind will leave many children behind with no way to catch up. Teachers will have to teach to the test, be at the same page at the same time to cover the same material and agenda messages throughout the country. This is supposed to be a selling point for transferring students to other states who will be able to slide into the same deficient learning.
Academic vigor will be sacrificed for supposed “critical thinking.” Notions such as moral relativism, multiculturalism, tolerance and so on, which are progressive ideals passed off as undeniable truths, are arrived at by a supposedly superior level of thinking.
These socialist concepts will be reinforced by the instructors’ exploiting their authority in subjective process activities such as open-ended questioning, brainstorming, sensitivity training and literary interpretations. These processes attempt to convince the students that nontraditional behaving and thinking is better. Since facts are irrelevant and ignored, there can be no critical thinking. The concentration on emotion rather than facts increases the vulnerability of students to indoctrination because they will not have reliable data to draw contrary decisions.
The CCSS will insidiously divide the students who are willing and able to comply from those who refuse to accept the worldview that is alien to their beliefs.
It will not individualize instruction for advancing lifetime learners but indoctrinate for the common good of a centralized controlled government. Data collection on each child’s academic performance, interests, health care, family configuration, attitudes and values and probably that of their family members will follow them for life.
Research CCSS for yourself and see it is another overreach of the ruling class to solidify a non-socially mobile totalitarian state.
Dr. Maglio is a columnist carried by various newspapers, an author of several books and owner/director of Wider Horizons School, a college prep program. You can visit Dr. Maglio at www.drmaglio.blogspot.com.
