Common Core education: the insane bottom lineJon Rappoport For the sake of my argument here, Im putting aside the fact that public education belongs under the purview of the states and not the federal government. This article is about how the federal government decided Common Core would succeed. Im not going to recite brain-numbing examples of teaching basic math to very young children, under the Common Core system. Suffice it to say, I can add 9 and 6 and come up with the right answer. And I know why 9 and 6 equals 15. I dont need Boolean algebra or set theory or a base-10 system to understand why addition works. The bottom line on Common Core was articulated by Diane Ravitch in her 2013 book, Reign of Error. Ravitch writes: these new [Common Core] standards had never been field-tested anywhere. No one can say with certainty whether the Common Core standards will improve education, whether they will reduce or increase achievement gaps among different groups, or how much it will cost to implement them. Some scholars believe they [Common Core standards] will make no difference, and some critics say they will cost billions to implement; others say they will lead to more testing. In short, whatever else Common Core is, it is an experimental hypothesis. It has never been field-tested. No one knew how well it would work when it was proposed, implemented, and accepted. No one knows now. Butno problem. Lets try it out on millions of American school childrenand lets pretend were sure, in advance, that it will be a success. This is like saying, Better dentistry can be achieved by pulling 14 teeth from every teenager. Lets implement and fund this program at the federal level and bribe dentists by assuring them theyll be reimbursed for their efforts. This is the new health-plan for teeth in America. We dont need to do studies. We dont need to do clinical trials. Because we desire better dentistry, we know well get it. Our intentions are all the proof we need. The extreme irrationality of this approach to education should be taught, in schools, as a prime example of non-logic and non-application of the scientific method. I would teach it in the eighth grade. Im quite sure students would catch on right away: You mean this is how the government decided our new education would be a good thing? With no proof? Just some weird claims? Wow. How can I get out of the system? A group of abstract thinkers got together and decided they knew, from the top of their mountain view, that Common Core would succeed. Well, thats part of what abstract means, when youre talking about mass programming. No reason to test a hypothesis. Common Core is a self-evident truth. How nice. For them. Nice work if you can get it. Your job is to come up with an education plan that will replace the old plan. Explain it and float it on the basis that uniform and across-the-board standards are always better than patchwork standards. People respond positively to the term uniform. Talk about failures of the old plan. Youll be fine. Sound authoritative. That, in a nutshell, is Common Core. Well, when you have thousands of police forces in towns and cities across the land, the result is a wide variance in enforcement methods. Thats unacceptable. We need one national police force operating according to one standard plan. Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly), many people like that idea. They automatically assume one top-down force is better than many smaller forces. They believe top-down equals fair. How quaint. How delightful. How trusting. Lets move along to the next phase of Common Core: deciding in 10 or 20 years how well its working. I cant wait for that. On what basis will the federal assessment be written? If its written at all? College readiness of the student seems to be the official acid test for how well Common Core works. Which college? Podunk Junior Community College, where every applicant who can breathe on a mirror and produce fog is accepted? Harvard? Some state college that exists on federal money is going to say, Common Core is an abject failure and the federal idiots who put it together should be given prison terms? With Common Core, we have an experimental hypothesis that was never tested in the field; and later on, we will have an assessment of its success based on standards loose enough to allow any conclusion under the sunespecially a conclusion that supports the program, which by that time will be too big to fail. Perfect. Finally, judging from the overwrought abstract methods of math instruction for very young Common Core students, I predict the following: Basic strategies of mind control will have an exceptionally deleterious effect on those children. The basic strategies involve a) a captive audience, b) compulsory learning, c) purposely making simple factors quite complex, and thereby d) inducing a state of confusion on both an intellectual and emotional level. Thus manufacturing extreme cognitive dissonance. The experimental subjects (children) will become highly resentful, quiescent, desperate. Ideal candidates for psychiatric diagnoses and drugging with toxic compounds. In fact, the failure of Common Core will be laid at the door of the rising tide of mental illness in America. Underneath it all, these grown children will be walking powder kegs. They will bring chaos in ways people are afraid to imagine. If you think Im exaggerating, I can only say I was once a schoolteacher, and I had a number of those students in my classrooms. Theyd been subjected to earlier, less powerful forms of cognitive dissonance, and they were a mess, to put it mildly. A few of them were on their way to becoming career criminals. Common Core is a much heavier version of cognitive dissonance, and its effects will reverberate at deeper emotional levels. I say, if you possibly can, bring your children home and school them there. Awaken their bright minds. Show them they are competent. Teach them logic. Encourage their natural curiosity and their creative power. Foster their independence. Then they will be able to deal with the world and its contradictions and dissonances from a position of strengthinstead of struggling as its victims. Dont permit them to become Common Cores test guinea pigs. In one of the first interviews I did with retired propaganda operative Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym), in 1999, he told me: You need to understand that propaganda has a number of objectives. Its not always about planting false ideas in peoples minds. Sometimes its about giving them contradictory data, or data that will set up a confusion and leave them hanging, unable to figure out what the storyline is. They expect something rational, and you give them something that makes no sense. You leave them in a swamp. You do that enough times and people will experience actual pain. And theyll feel stupid. I then asked Medavoy if this approach could be applied to education in schools Of course, he said. Remember something called the New Math? It was introduced into schools in the 1960s. It was based on a branch of logic called set theory. Simple arithmetic was translated into that complex garble. An easy problem or arithmetical calculation suddenly became bizarre and often incomprehensible. Boiling water suddenly became a seventeen-step process for PhD candidatesonly you were dealing with seven-year olds. The New Math was a trap for young minds. A maze. Once youre in it, you cant get out. You dont know where youre going. Every day, new confusions are added to old confusions. Right out there in the open, this was a program of brainwashing. The goal wasnt planting falsehoods. Under the guise of teaching logic and critical thinking, the goal was mass confusion. Young minds want answers. If you keep denying them those answers, you induce chaos. You pour chaos into what would otherwise be a straightforward process. You demean thinking. You make children believe thinking has no purpose. Do you see? Do your see what that achieves? Schools become factories for insanity. Most people just dont get this. They dont see that inducing confusion is a tactic, a weapon. Its powerful. There should be a whole branch of college learning called Confusion Studies. How its done. How its manufactured. How its used. You could revolutionize higher learning with that. You could clear away tons of garbage. You could wake people up to what has been done to them. You could eventually change society for the better. Thats why colleges dont teach students this subject. Too many of their courses are run by professors who make their living through delivering sophistry. Im here to tell you that some of this is quite, quite intentional. It isnt just business as usual. Its a psychological operation. The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine. Destroying the very fabric of humanity one program at a time. And too many of them succeed because of cooperation due to public schooling. Brilliant. 9 plus 6 wouldnt equal 15 in anything but a base-10 system. You are wrong about Common Core math not being field tested. This math program has been taken from a previous math curriculum put into use in the US school system in the early sixties called New Math. New Math was considered a failure and the comprehensive math scores of students in this program fell dramatically and it was quickly shelved after three or four years. Here is a link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math However, this overview in the link is quite complex and is over burdened with mathematical terminology with no real indication of exactly what was meant or done.. I know about this because I was a student in the sixties and I learned math with the methods that are now being described as the common core method. People with access to what New Math texts and worksheets really looked like need to pull this stuff out and compare it as I think they will find Common Core is a giant plagiarism of these failed methods. Some hack thought no one would notice. Since the people that wanted a new method didnt care how good it was, why not just swipe something forgotten. I noticed because I had to make a concerted effort to untangle myself from these poor methods. At the time of the huge new math debacle there was much discussion. Excerpt from link In 1965, cartoonist Charles Schulz authored a series of Peanuts strips which detailed kindergartner Sallys frustrations with New Math. In the first strip, she is depicted puzzling over sets, one to one matching, equivalent sets, non-equivalent sets, sets of one, sets of two, renaming two, subsets, joining sets, number sentences, placeholders. Eventually she bursts into tears and exclaims, All I want to know is, how much is two and two? 