Government Schools Common Core IndoctrinationSARTRE TheCommon Core site attempts to outline the purpose and worthiness of their education standards. Sounds like a noble goal; however, what is the reality? As a natural outgrowth of meeting the charge to define college and career readiness, the Standards also lay out a vision of what it means to be a literate person in the twenty-first century. Indeed, the skills and understandings students are expected to demonstrate have wide applicability outside the classroom or workplace. Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex works of literature. They habitually perform the critical reading necessary to pick carefully through the staggering amount of information available today in print and digitally. They actively seek the wide, deep, and thoughtful engagement with high-quality literary and informational texts that builds knowledge, enlarges experience, and broadens worldviews. They reflexively demonstrate the cogent reasoning and use of evidence that is essential to both private deliberation and responsible citizenship in a democratic republic. In short, students who meet the Standards develop the skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening that are the foundation for any creative and purposeful expression in language. Radical Math boasts over 700 lesson plans, articles, charts, books, and websites that cover a wide range of socio-political issues including redistribution of wealth, discrimination against the poor by whites, corporations, banks, etc., and the message that widespread racism against blacks continues in the United States today. Now compare this critical appraisal to the lofty mission of math back in the Common Core mission statement. How can this statement below square with the above practice? For over a decade, research studies of mathematics education in high-performing countries have pointed to the conclusion that the mathematics curriculum in the United States must become substantially more focused and coherent in order to improve mathematics achievement in this country. To deliver on the promise of common standards, the standards must address the problem of a curriculum that is a mile wide and an inch deep. These Standards are a substantial answer to that challenge. Integration into a 21st century business and social model is the ultimate intent of the Common Core objective. Nowhere is there a debate of what kind of future mankind wants or the kind of reality that all human beings are intrinsically part of. Those questions require the study in humanity education and liberal arts training that are quite different from the instruction in algorithm programming. The worldview of this Common Core inculcation presupposes that society accepts their premises as a fait accompli. Their technocrat approach to instruction demands that authentic education must be marginalized if not outright eliminated. The traditional Christian cosmology has no place in this brave new world. In the article,Common Cores Negative Impact on Education and Biblical Literacy, explains the destructive nature of this dehumanizing standardization. The central organizing theme of the Common Core ELA standards is that study of creative literature must be diminished in favor of nonfiction informational texts. The idea is that students should be drilled in the types of documents they are more likely to encounter in their entry-level jobs (and make no mistake, Common Core is a workforce-development model, not an education model). The fundamental problem with the Common Core approach is that, to achieve its job-training goals, it recognizes no difference between one complex text and another complex text. A great work of literature has value far beyond the complexity of the words used it allows students to understand the eternal human condition; it allows them to confront human challenges that recur throughout the ages; it teaches empathy, prudence, forgiveness; it transports the readers to places and times not their own. The Common Core ELA standards are, quite simply, indifferent to this type of education. Training, not educating, is their goal. They are not interested in helping students become the people God created them to be; they are interested in creating workers. You can just hear the profane condemnation from theAmerican Federation of Teacher and theNational Education Association opposing the mere mention of God in their secular temples of perdition. Irony excluded, how biblical revelation dare be debated in a non-judgmental culture of relativism. At the heart of the government school establishment is an unending choir of fallen angels that preach their vision of paradise, while demanding ever higher budgets and far greater control over the indoctrination of their impressionable guinea pigs. One factor is the century-long effort to nationalize and standardize American education. The standardization efforts have their roots in Dewey, Cubberley, and the schools of education at Stanford and Columbia. They picked up steam in the 1960s and 1970s as the national teachers unions gained more power. They strengthened more when President Jimmy Carter fulfilled a promise to the NEA by creating a separate, cabinet-level Department of Education. The educrats dream of a day when every student in America will receive exactly the same education, using the same textbooks and lesson plans. Those textbooks and lesson plans will, of course, be developed by the best and the brightest, who will pass them down on tablets of stone. The worker bees and drones will be programmed to follow them exactly. This is a nightmare scenario, one which anyone who believes in individual rights, local control, and federalism should oppose at every opportunity. The Common Core Standards become dangerous when they form a stepping stone which helps to move the educrats vision forward. Top-down control always is intended to eradicate the voice of the individual. Under a national coordinated imposition of federal funding, local school districts have become dependent upon the conditional requirements of conformity to keep the money flowing. Reform is no longer possible. A Federal Department of Education hastens central controls for social compliance. At this point, an education free from public schools, has more value than going through the disinformation that is currently being taught. The errors that are learned in childhood are more difficult to overturn, then if they were never acquired in the first place. So what exactly is the advantage in an education under government approved instructors? If you want to reverse the decay in moral aptitude, you must find alternatives for the education of your children. Common Core pronouncements sound so nice. In spite of this, the key question is whether their program of study teaches the principles of developing good citizens. Lest we forget, a good citizen is an independent thinking and rationally responsible trained advocate of liberty and moral values. Maintaining and expanding a structure of mindless and obedient State compliance is ridiculous. SARTRE is the pen name of James Hall, a reformed, former political operative. This pundits formal instruction in History, Philosophy and Political Science served as training for activism, on the staff of several politicians and in many campaigns. A believer in authentic Public Service, independent business interests were pursued in the private sector. Speculation in markets, and international business investments, allowed for extensive travel and a world view for commerce. SARTRE is the publisher of BREAKING ALL THE RULES. Contact batr@batr.org 