The newest push for creating education “standards” for the
American public school system have taken shape and they are packaged in a
program called the “Common Core Curriculum”. This new set of standards is
supposed to focus on the learning needed to be a success in the world. But when
an administrator in the Illinois public school system argues that it is more
important to explain how a student gets an answer of 11 from a 4x3
multiplication problem, instead of getting the right answer, this is a program
that lacks all common sense.
Anything created by Washington DC bureaucrats (and state
politicians associated with DC) to teach our children should be thrown out just
because it comes from Washington DC elites. It is also a product of the “do-gooder”
types like Bill Gates (who does good through charities) and others that have forgotten
what education is and is not. It is not a one size fits all proposition.
Centralized command and control of education dumbs down
everyone. Education should be a local process that teaches to the strengths and
skills of the individual student. Should every kid know how to read, write, and
calculate numbers? Yes, but how they get there is best left to local educators
and parents to determine.
Many educated men and women throughout our history were self-taught
including President Lincoln. Education is the self-pursuit of knowledge. Our
kids need to be taught a passion to learn and what will make them the most
productive throughout their lives. By bringing together parents, educators, and
the business community, local communities could determine what works best for
their kids. Setting guidelines for students at certain levels is fine but to
make a kid wait to take calculus until 10th grade when a kid is
ready in the 6th grade is ludicrous. The study of the US
Constitution and American history must replace all of this global push but that’s
a post for another day.
Home school programs have the right formula in many ways.
Most curriculums are self-paced. Kids are encouraged to keep moving forward and
learning more at their pace. When you base education on a kid’s age it is
limiting to so many kids. Kids are smarter than most people give them credit
for.
Common Core makes no sense. We have a 50% drop out rate in
many urban public school systems. In many more affluent communities we have
kids in first grade that can already read, write, add, multiply and subtract
but when the get to school their education is slowed down to align what they
learn with their age. How do you create a one size fits all program when there
are millions of sizes of educational preparedness?
The answer is you can’t. The answer is not Common Core, it
is common sense…
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