Americans Must Get Rid of Common Core

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At The Federalist, Dallas-area English teacher and educational thought leader, Auguste Meyrat, explains why America must ditch the smothering and stifling Common Core curriculum as soon as possible. He writes:

Most Americans might receive a mediocre education, but this education may be so mediocre that the intended brainwashing might not even be effective. True, some will feel the Bern and join the Socialist Party, and others will become feminists and beat up women who protest abortion. A precious few may even become conservatives. Most, though, seem content to remain disengaged from politics, religion, and most ideas in general, and allow the mainstream media to think for them.

Because indoctrination happens in the absence of thinking, many teachers who engage in indoctrination do so unconsciously. They themselves take what they’re given and pass it along without thinking. Ideologues often intervene at this level by writing the scripts for teachers, which is how LGBT advocacy and anti-Semitic fabrications become included in their lessons.

Even changing curriculum will not prevent indoctrination. Curriculum should help guide the teacher to create lessons and use materials that will train the students to think and function independently. Instead, most public school curricula, either adopting the Common Core standards or imitating them, do the opposite.

Common Core has facilitated progressive indoctrination by smothering independent thought and stifling intellectual development. It effectively trains students not to think by emphasizing skills over content, process over product, and relative standards over absolute ones.

The humanities suffer the most from the focus on teaching supposedly practical skills rather than quality content. Instead of reading great poetry and literature, English teachers asked their students to read more journalistic nonfiction and develop research skills. Instead of reading for meaning and writing clearly, students read for bias and learn to write fluff.

History teachers now teach their students “history skills,” which involve everything except remembering actual history and synthesizing information. Consequently, both literary and historical content is drained of relevance or meaning. While students learn to process data, they do not think about anything in particular.

Math and science are hurt more by Common Core’s obsession with the process over the product.

Reaching the right answer means little in Common Core math. It is more important that students learn various arbitrary methods through which they can arrive at an answer.

Students receive more credit for following a needlessly complicated breakdown, complete with color-coding and an array of abstract terms, for relatively simple computation.

Word problems also loom large, causing teachers to spend less time on their subject and more time teaching students to highlight the right terms.