A good friend of mine recently has become embedded in his state’s common core debate and, as a result, I’ve been been proxy to some of the chain emails among his friends. I’ve always thought common core a bad idea for various reasons but it’s never been something I’ve really looked into. Some states have recently dumped common core, as it has been attacked both by traditionalists and even some inner city districts. But as the ship is going done, it seems to become more and more radicalized. Based on the info I’ve received recently from a couple friends, one of whom is a professor of mathematics, here are some interesting facts I’ve discovered about Common Core.
– Common Core was originally packaged as standardized testing on reading and math, which was supposed not to involve content, but that quickly changed. The original intent, it seems, all along was to modify content.
– Common Core has radically changed the way mathematics is taught — basically the general trend from Newton / Leibniz to the present has been overturned. Most of the symbols, notations, descriptions, vocabulary, etc., have been discarded and are replaced by more “visual” approaches, often involving silly video-game-like graphics. A math professor I know said students who have learned math by this approach aren’t even able to comprehend traditional math because it seems like a foreign language to them. Apparently the unspoken rationale behind this approach is that blacks and mestizos cannot learn traditional math and Common Core is more “POC friendly,” although it seems to have made little difference in test scores. Nonetheless, at least trying to advance blacks is a worthy cause to discard two thousand years of accumulated mathematical wisdom.
– Common Core has dumped the study of grammar altogether. Literally, no traditional grammar. Grammar has been replaced by “feel good” unstructured expository writing and basic new-speak guidelines. There are students now who have no idea what an adjective, relative clause or diagramming a sentence is. Students who learn English this way would never be able to learn an inflected grammar-heavy language, like Latin or German, but maybe that’s the point. Rationale? Apparently the Schools of “Education” think grammar is racist because blacks and mestizos cannot fully comprehend it. Modern (as in post-Middle) English grammar must be discarded to make way for some new Third World hybrid language (Dindu-Spanglish?).
– Although Common Core was originally sold as “content free,” it quickly scrapped nearly all the European and other white writers from reading lists. Vergil’ Aeneid, Beowulf, Goethe’s writings, and Shakespeare’s plays have made way for bunch of non-white writers complaining about something — usually white people for their shortcomings. Defenders of Common Core say it prescribes no particular books. It’s about “how to read,” not what to read. It just so happens in learning “how to read” one shouldn’t read white people.
If these descriptions are true, and I really have no reason to believe they are not, as I’ve seen many of the source materials, what in the hell is going on here? Is it complete idiocracy or a deliberate ((( attempt ))) to sabotage learning and the accumulated knowledge of the past 2000 years? Both?
If you know kids in a public school, tell them to GTFO. The bitch is run by Upgrayedd now.
Related:
“School Vouchers: A Trojan Horse to Destroy Private Schools”
Occam's Razor 