Ok, so a disclaimer this is not meant to be self-serving, self-adulation or boastful in anyway. I simple am using myself for the purposes of this post to demonstrate a point. I know myself very well and I am a very unique individual. I am well educated having been through homeschooling, through college 3 times, and traveled extensively as well as well read. I have an Eidetic memory. I have an IQ much higher than is required for Mensa Membership. I am extremely analytical and think in mathematical equations. The reason I mention all of this is because of the subject of Common Core and public education. Currently the Federal Government is pushing Common Core down our throats. It is supposed to standardize education and ensure all students are equally trained. Public education has tried for years at this less than noble goal. The issue lies not with the watered-down and quite frankly fictionalized material they will teach your children but in the concept that all children learn the same or will even achieve the same end. Let’s be frank for a moment. Not all little Johnnies are going to grow up and become CEOs. To be more blunt most Johnnies are going to grow up and do menial tasks for somebody else’s Johnny who is either smarter or better connected than yours. Does this mean one Johnny is worth more and should or can be better educated than another? Yes! However each Johnny should be educated to the best of their ability and desire. It is a parental responsibility to install a desire to learn and to help a child develop their abilities. Now with-out going into the particulars of why sending your child to a state re-education facility is a bad idea we will stick to why Common Core and public schooling will not do what we are told it will. More to the point why it will do the exact opposite to the children forced to endure it. As previously alluded I am an above average guy upstairs. When I was homeschooled I was bored because I grasped nearly everything quickly; this lead to some fracas. I didn’t want to do my school work, not because I couldn’t but because I was bored and had other things to think about or do. As a college student I have attended three institutions. The first was a Private Christian College with moderate levels of intellectual requirements. The second was a private secular for profit school. The third was a large Christian University who was the most intellectually advanced of the lot. (Note this is not saying much because colleges are designed to encourage regurgitation not learning.) I was bored in all three schools. The first school the students were taught not to think but to regurgitate what we were told. Boring! I had more than a few brush ups with professors because what they taught when examined with any sort of honest analytics would fail. The second was a pure disaster for learning. It was a student loan mill designed to get student loan money and questions, learning and thinking were considered to be road blocks in the road to profit. To the point where I was given all my my classes assignments on the first day and told to just do them at my pace and be quite. I was usually done by the end of the first week and played on my lap top or worked on my writings. My third school was done online. I never opened a text book to learn the entire time and aced nearly every class. The few I didn’t ace were due to not having to complete meaningless assignments such as going to listen to a speech. Thing was that in multiple places and styles of learning I was bored beyond belief in when they were subjects I love. The professors could not teach or if they could teach they could not teach to my level. Every education program that has more than one student has a choice. Either they teach to the dumbest person in the room’s ability or teach to the mean and loose the brightest and the dumbest. Do keep in mind the old saying the best do and the rest teach. Every program ended up teaching to the lowest common denominator. So I got left out. Keep this in mind. The common complaint amongst bright students has always been boredom in school. The second complaint amongst the less intelligent is the inability to understand so they check out also. This will get worse if you go to a standardized program especially on a national scale. It has failed on a local level in public schools for centuries why would making the program bigger help? Common Core if it is truly about education cannot be successful to the majority of the students if its goal is education that stimulates and promotes thought, questioning and curiosity. It can only be successful if it is about indoctrination and training the students to regurgitate. Without going Orwellian this is a legitimate line of questioning. There have been numerous instances over the years where school textbooks have been found to be erroneous or flat out teaching lies as truth. You can open any school text book and see the evolutionary theory being taught as presupposed fact even though it is a theory. Or the complete lack of factual information about the history of various political parties and such organizations as the KKK or the Japanese internment camps. Here is the point you are going to lose a vast majority of your students either out of boredom or lack of understanding on one hand or you will end up with a lot of mindless monkeys who simply repeat what they have been told. Either way the ability to think, process, reason, analyze and develop counter arguments goes out of education. No to anybody who has done a cursory investigation into public education knows that the American student is far behind the rest of the world in learning ability as well as in key subjects such as math, science, language and practical skills. If this is where they have brought us why would you as a thinking person conclude that they have suddenly decided to turn course and are no longer trying to make followers? This system of society is based on creating a working middle class. You hear politicians talk about a strong middle class. The poor don’t matter they are leaches for the purposes of serving the middle class. The middle class is the key because they are the ones who will make the upper-class richer. They will fight to defend the upper-classes gains and property. They will do as they are told for fear of dropping to the poor class. They will vote to keep the upper-class in power so they can keep their middle –class life style. They will take down anybody who tries to usurp the upper-class because the status quo upper class is their gravy train. Do not quit me wrong being average and having an average life style is nice and comfortable but we are Americans we built our nation on wanting more, being more and being better and continuously improving. Not establishing a mean. Common Core is a bad thing. Public education is a bad thing. It is not about making leaders and thinkers it is about creating good mindless workers who labor for the upper-class. Try to think out-side the box and work for your own good and the good of those you love. Watch the government come with fines, penalties and prison. Try to not be a team player and blaze your own trail and see how fast others come against you or want to rid off your coat tails. Try bucking the system and see how fast it turns on you. Pioneers are gone; developers have absconded; now they are trying to rid us of the next generation of thinkers. Look around and see how uneducated people are. See how the sameness permeates everything and everybody. Listen how well people parrot what the media tells them. Watch social media and see how many fake stories get passed around as fact when even a tiny bit of research would disprove it. See how many people buy into the lie and tell me how we are not already zombies. Tell me Common Core is not just another step to an “employed” society who doesn’t think and only works as they are told to. Who is John Galt? ©Aleksandr Gifford 10/02/2013
Posted on: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 00:34:37 +0000