Patriot Post and energy dependence

 

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Why can't Ohio get rid of Common Core?

Art credit: fotosearch.com

A little over a month ago, Oklahoma got rid of Common Core. But legislation to get rid of Common Core in Ohio continues to languish in the statehouse. Why? Here’s a clue from July 16 in the Columbus Dispatch about Gov. Kasich, from a paragraph buried toward the end of the article:

Kasich spoke [on July 15] to more than 200 members of the Ashland Area, Bucyrus Area, Clear Fork Valley, Galion-Crestline and Richland Area chambers of commerce at Deer Ridge Golf Club south of Mansfield.

. . .

The governor also defended the Common Core, saying while the plan sets overall goals for educational achievement, local school boards must approve the curriculum to achieve those objectives. Common Core is a set of common standards for math and English/language arts.

Goals and common standards? Here is a stinging analysis of the “common standards” from Bruce Deitrick Price at American Thinker:

“Drop a precision part so it would deform a tiny bit and malfunction down the line.”  That’s practically an epitaph for the destructive results achieved by our elite educators throughout the 20^th century.

Great cunning was displayed in educational sabotage.  Typically, there is an optimal sequence in learning something, no matter if it's tennis, driving a car, typing, speaking French, or American history.  Disrupt that ideal sequence, teach things in a confusing way, and you will have poor results.

Consider reading.  The ideal sequence is that the child memorizes the alphabet, learns the sounds represented by each letter, and then learns to blend those sounds.  At that point, the child is reading.  This extraordinary skill was once routinely mastered in the first grade.  That was before saboteurs got to work.

The essence of their technique was to hide the alphabet and the sounds.  The child was kept busy doing the worst possible thing: memorizing words as diagrams.  This is a slow task, and hopeless.  English has several hundred thousand words, and many are remarkably similar: life, light, flight, lite, lifer, lit, fife, fifth, fight, fright.  Also, consider Dolch lists for the fifth or sixth grade.  The student is still illiterate at the age of 11 or 12.  Clearly, that was the plan. 

In arithmetic, the sabotage technique was equally obvious.  Again, the Education Establishment used relentless praise of a lie – in this case, that children would learn math more quickly if, at the elementary level, they studied a mix of easy and advanced concepts.  This makes as much sense as taking novice skiers up on the black-diamond slopes...which would make perfect sense if you were trying to kill kids.

New Math came along in the 1960s, and children were expected to learn matrices, statistics, Boolean algebra, set theory, base-8.  Stuff that was once taught in college now had to be taught in the second grade.  Only a saboteur would say so.  Twenty years later, Reform Math used similar gimmicks.  Children today are still bedeviled by weird and unnecessary complexities, now often ridiculed as Common Core Math.

In the teaching of general knowledge, our saboteurs were particularly ingenious.  They created what military people call interlocking fire.  Nothing survives.

Multiculturalism says don’t bother learning anything about your own culture.  Relevance says don’t bother learning anything about faraway cultures.  Self-esteem says don’t teach anything that some children won't be able to handle.  No Memorization says don’t ask a child to remember anything.  In case any little wisp of knowledge might still get through, Constructivism says that teachers should not teach.  In a sick way, all of this is genius.  From K to 12, schools have an array of reasons why they need not bother teaching.

Read the rest here.

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