This is my former Purdue graduate student, Duke Pesta, launching an informative, eye-opening, and blistering public attack on Common Core, the system of faux-education that is already ruining your high schools and colleges. Duke is an old school, conservative educator whose experience in academia has amply proven that, in higher education, free speech is not free. It makes the person who speaks his/her mind a pariah if they go against the radical consensus, and it costs them their jobs and their future. You either go along with the herd or you get destroyed. I personally think that the Common Core is a disaster that is already creating clones instead of enabling students to think for themselves. It is a process that was instituted to standardize the way students think, rewards them for agreeing with the teacher, punishes them for thinking for themselves, and gets rid of real teachers who wont buy into it. You agree with Big Brother and you succeed, you raise questions and you die, simple as that. It was also instituted in state after state without any warning, or input from educators or parents, or debate and democratic process, in order to enforce a consensus ideology. It has nothing to do with education and everything to do with creating a herd, and it is inherently destructive of democracy. Nor is it a politically partisan issue. It has been instituted in states controlled by both parties. They want the federal money that comes their way if they go along with it. Duke is a working class kid from Cleveland whose dad died when he was nine. His mother worked 60 hour weeks to put her three kids in Catholic schools so they could get a real education. In graduate school, Duke drove from West Lafayette, Indiana to Cleveland every weekend to tend bar in order to pay his tuition and help his family. He was shunned by many grad students at Purdue because he was from the working class, didnt have student debts because he worked weekends, asked questions that went against what others believed but didnt have the ability to discuss. He was also one of the three finest college teachers Ive ever seen in action (one of those three has been exterminated, and Duke is untenured and about to be exterminated). But he doesnt care and continues to speak his mind because hes got the kind of guts that few have. Duke has literally committed every word by Shakespeare to memory. He teaches tough authors and works--Homer, the Bible, Virgil, Dante (the whole Divine Comedy, not just The Inferno), Chaucer, Cervantes, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and his favorite novel, The Brothers Karamazov--and everywhere hes ever been the students adore him while other teachers roil in jealousy and administrators hate his guts. He is victimized by ad hominem attacks, but no one has ever been able to successfully debate him because hes too smart for them, his arguments are too brilliant, and hes right. He was fired from two schools because he was too popular with the students and wouldnt play the game (he successfully sued one of those schools, Ursinas College), and its probably going to happen a third time--the administrators at U of Wisconsin, Oshkosh are upset that he helped found Freedom Project Education, an on-line website that helps parents who want to home school their children, which will cost the university system tuition revenue. But as I said, he doesnt care. Hes an American and insists on his right as a citizen to speak the truth. And hes doing it to prevent your kids from being turned into robots as they focus on learning what theyre told in order to do well on the standardized tests that will determine their success or failure. Love him, hate him, it doesnt matter. But you have to admire a man like this. Im very proud of Duke Pesta. Below you can listen to him for yourself in a video speech as he explains what horrors are being inflicted on your children. youtube/watch?v=Si-kx5-MKSE
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 01:22:27 +0000
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