The Common Core Curriculum for American Schools

Guess what! The United States Federal Department of Education has crafted a new initiative to replace the failed “No Child Left Behind” program of the 1990’s.

The new program with which the states are required to comply or lose federal dollars is called the Common Core Curriculum. This new way of teaching for all public schools in the nation from K→12 upsets the tried and true “old-fashioned” teaching by which subjects were presented in their proper contexts and with logical background so that the subjects might be properly understood.

This program manifests a break-up of logical, traditional, thinking instead of more traditional methods. Consider this: Into the mix of 11^th grade English literature class is Presidential Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management. Also, Fed Views by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the Cost Conundrum: Health Care Costs in McAllen, Texas, and Untangling the Roots of Cancer. Eleventh grade students are also taught to master the “California Invasive Plant Inventory” based on the claim that “invasive non-native plants threaten wild lands.”

After reading about this Common Core Curriculum and listening to a speech from the Westlake school superintendent, I am increasingly concerned about the socialist and environmentalist bent of the program. This thing is loaded up with politically correct ideas and teachings. The patterns of fractured thinking in the subject matter has been reduced to simple formulas about oppressors and the oppressed, capitalists and workers, Western imperialist and their non-western victims. Government has become the solution, not the problem.

This kind of thinking about the world in which we live indoctrinates kids in what to think rather than how to think. It has been said that “…you can’t make socialists out of individualists—children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.”

Hmmm…. This new effort by the educationalist establishment looks like another strange, new, style of teaching—this one aimed at the agenda of new age people planners. I am suspicious of such new and revolutionary changes to traditional teaching. Remember the “new math?” It was deemed the latest in teaching math; and it turned out to be a disaster.