I have some news for the big industrialists who are behind the new national curriculum, the "Common Core Standards", American values are good the world over and for all time. They (the industrialists) not only don't know education, like the rest of us, they don't know what the future will bring. No matter how much they profess to know the 21st century they don't know. Remember when they wanted all the kids to learn Japanese? The Japanese were going to take over the world economically and we better get on the bandwagon. Yeah right . Japan's economy has been in the pit of despair for at least 20 years!!
Sure, technology has opened up communications the world wide, all the more reason to know what your national values are so as not to get confused. Good values, a good mind and the ability to read will take our students into the 21st century, whatever it may bring. I always go back to Apollo 13 when those men had to get their friends home. No one gave them lessons on perseverance and taking leadership in an emergency but they had the values they needed when the emergency occurred. They didn't have the technology we use today, they brought their friends home using a slide rule.
A few people in a room do not have the keys to our future in America. They don't know what the future is, only what they want it to be. This nation will not be changed to reflect their ideological biases. Sorry boys and girls, this trick has been tried many times before, and as the Catholic Bishop says, you lose.The enduring truths in our Declaration of Independence,"We hold these truths to be SELF- EVIDENT that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness---"will prevail. No small group of individuals will decide what Americans will believe, now or in the future. They may make a good run at destroying public education, but they will not determine the future of this country.
I notice all the liberal groups that name themselves as the "American Way". No one is fooled, the American way is not socialism. Pursuit of Happiness means your right to your private property , the General Welfare Clause in the constitution restricts the Federal Government from treating one state or region differently from another( IT DOES NOT GIVE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT THE RIGHT TO COLLECT PEOPLES PROPERTY AND REDISTRIBUTE IT), and Justice means simply fairness under the law, there is no Social Justice. And for the people doing the planning survey here in Helena, I feel I must inform you that there is no GLOBAL LANGUAGE or GLOBAL CULTURE ! Countless dictatorships from the Communists to the Nazis have tried to change culture and enduring truths with their own form of propaganda, it has never worked and it won't work this time either.
A national curriculum such as the Common Core is a national disaster. It is a huge and shameful, to say nothing of UNLAWFUL, usurpation of power from the states and local school districts. The ideas in it up to this point, are pretty bad. Seriously, reading Martin Luther King's letter from the jail in Birmingham (which is a beautiful piece of literature) in an inner city classroom and asking the teacher to get the kids to concentrate on what the word tension means in this letter for a week, and then to discuss the points in it as Socrates would, are not going to happen. Frankly, most teachers are not versed in teaching Socratic thought. Taking all pre-reading skills away is a big jump, a big risk with no proven results. Combining Algebra and Geometry is also a big gamble. Where are the pretrials on all these things? The liberals have wanted a national curriculum almost as bad as national healthcare for a long time- all tenets of Marx and the centralized state.They want it, as Marx wanted it, to propagandize for their wonderful "new world order", so they think. What they are really doing is taking away the rights of local school districts to educate and creating a national disaster.
The industrialists such as Bill Gates who have been led down this primrose path will soon realize that they have not created a panacea in our schools that will give them the workers of tomorrow. Strong societal values and respect for this country as it was founded is what will allow America to build a strong economy that will give everyone a chance. Teachers in classrooms and local schools are the place to build curriculums that will work, not centralized wizards who think they (for some reason) are smarter than the rest of us and have an inside track on the future. God Bless America, and this fight, as our great Naval hero John Paul Jones declared, has only just begun!
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