COMMON CORE REVEALING ITS TRUE COLORS

Many of you are beginning to follow the inherent dangers of Common Core - a subject which came up briefly in the Secret Space Program conference - and have been sending articles on this topic. In fact, so timely is this topic that I wish I had the time and energy to start a forum on it, where people could post their own encounters and horror stories with what my co-author and I call the "edugarchy" in our forthcoming book Rotten to the (Common) Core. Indeed, my other "contact" in education, Mr. S.D., sent an article which was corroborative of one of the main theses in the forthcoming book, namely, that the Common Core system is really designed simply to dispense with teachers altogether. Consider this frightening development:

CBE and Teaching Machines

That's right, it's all been tried before, but in case you missed the resemblance between Skinner's operant conditioning, outcome based education, and today's Common Core push for individually adaptive computerized assessment- which my co-author and I believe to be the real "demon-in-the-machine", consider this passage:

"...compare how eerily similar his descriptions are of the teaching machine to the new, next-gen assessment programs that are being pushed aggressively upon us from all angles.

"Here’s Skinner:

"'As soon as the student has written his response, he operates the machine, and learns immediately whether he is right or wrong. This is a great improvement over the system in which papers are corrected by a teacher, where the student must wait perhaps until another day, to learn whether or not what he is written is right.

"'Such immediate knowledge has two principle effects: it leads most rapidly to the formation of correct behavior. The student quickly learns to be right.'

"Those pesky teachers! I guess they were getting in the way of innovation back in the 50’s too.

"Now compare the Skinner quote with this description that comes from the website of Questar – the testing company recently adopted by New York State:

"'With tablets and the right software, this approach is possible on an individualized basis: after every five minutes of individualized tablet-based instruction, students would be presented with a brief series of questions that adapt to their skill level, much as computer-adaptive tests operate today. After that assessment, the next set of instructional material would be customized according to these results'"

Tthere you have it, in black and white: the problem is the teachers, or rather, the problem for these "edugarchs" is the human factor in education. The problem isn't the idea of common standards (after all, that's as old as education itself); the problem is the human interaction, with all its successes, brilliances, mediocrities, and so on.

But the real problem is the edugarchy itself, the privileged corporations and addle-minded billionaire busybodies who think technology is the answer to everything; that human virtues and aspirations are not things to be valued and handed down, but assualted and replaced in their dystopian vision to dehumanize us all, to reduce us all, teacher and student alike, to nothing but stimulus-response mechanisms in a culture gone mad with materialism and consumerism.

The good news is, the revolt is growing, and education - real education that values the evolution of the Western tradition and culture - will continue, and probably increasingly have to do so underground. And let us make no mistake: it is a life and death matter, for this is our children's future. If you want to see that future as it would look under a generation of common core, then look at Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, and the moral and intellectual pigmies you see on television. If you want to see the future for your children in another way entirely, then look at your parents and grandparents, look at the great men and women of history who so fashioned our culture, and at that long and incontestable fact that in the evolution of our culture, music, letters, art, and science, that the vast majority of them never took a standardized test, much less an individually adaptive one, from a "certified" teacher, but rather, were trained by actual scholars in their fields who never darkened the doorstep of an American teachers' college.

And in a way, that's all good, because it means the Amairikuhn system of edgykayshun and all the claptrap we've suffered from Dewey, Thorndike, Counts, Conant, and Chauncey and others, have created the mess we're in, and it's evident to anyone with a mind that it has been an utter failure. And for those of you wondering what to do:: home school, and if you can afford it, hire a real teacher or tutor, and I would boldly suggest that one requirement be the lack of a teaching certification, or a written repudiation of the whole edubbabling scheme and all its pomps and works(for there are many good teachers who had to go through the misery of education methodology courses who nonetheless remain good teachers of their disciplines).

See you on the flip side...

 

Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and "strange stuff". His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into "alternative history and science".

16 Comments

  1. Roger on November 11, 2015 at 9:48 am

    Depends on the school. I was a military brat and went to schools all over the United States. The high school in Morristown TN was the worst. Teachers got drunk in class and only went through the motions of trying to teach a classroom of 50 students who didn’t want to be there. Drop out rate was 50% and in order to combat this and keep federal funding they set up as many potential drop outs as they could and sent them to prison/reform school until they graduated. In prison they became psychologically and physically abused as they got an educated on criminality. West coast schools were great and had much more advanced courses and treated their students like responsible and valuable individuals in comparison. I aced my tests, often knew more about the obsolete text book subjects than the authors and teachers because of my constant reading of everything I could get my hands on. I became very bored and resentful of being held back with the rest of the class and forced to go over and over the same material that was mostly obsolete now anyway. A computerized, individualized, learn at your own pace type option would have been better for someone like me. I also like the idea of customizing emphasize on subjects that interest the individual, something a lone teacher in a classroom of 50 pupils could never do. I probably wouldn’t have dropped out if this was the case. Not saying there are not problems with the establishment version of this but the concept shouldn’t be dismissed completely.



  2. yankee phil on November 11, 2015 at 7:03 am

    This is to be the new system of education for the untermensch. The upper classes,those who are willing to pay for private schooling, will get the traditional personal spoon feeding method of lower school education. I think the catch will be the Ivy League schools will only accept the private schooled students.



  3. duncan mckean on November 10, 2015 at 9:24 pm

    BRAVO BRAVO!!!!!! therrrre be fire in the belly brother..thanks for the boost of hope.
    the fire within is the differential between consumerism and materialism..the fire by itself can not be quantified..thats our humanity.thats our creativity.like jeff goldbloom in the fly movie when he tries to transport a steak then fry it .compare it with the one that wasn’t transported.he almost vomited when tasting the transported steak.



  4. Robert Barricklow on November 10, 2015 at 6:42 pm

    The system is a neoliberal one designed for maximum profits.
    The endgame is to break public services[like education] by financializing them to bankruptcy, and at a point of failure[by design] to replace them entirely with privately owned, profit-making services. This system is designed for constant expansion of poverty & destitution. Of course, an education that enables critical thinking; with a solid background in arts/sciences, reading & math skills, and a solid background/participation in representative governance with local activism tools – would stop this madness of neoliberalism & the coming TPP/TTIP dead in their ungodly tracks. No wonder education has been targeted with such disregard for what it should be. For the sake of humanity; and indeed, all living beings – people worldwide need to stop this fascism of insanity.



  5. bdw000 on November 10, 2015 at 4:57 pm

    “and it’s evident to anyone with a mind that it has been an utter failure”

    I respectfully disagree.

    The system is working EXACTLY as designed. Our educational system has been working to destroy our civilization for quite a while now, and in 25 to 50 years it will have succeeded. This is not by accident. This is not through incompetence. Despite what you think of the appearances, it is all by design.

    Here’s a {paraphrased from memory) quote from Timothy Leary from the 1970’s I think:

    “The educational system is working just the way they want it to: it is producing young people motivated by fear and greed.”



  6. DownunderET on November 10, 2015 at 12:37 pm

    Eh don’t know much about American edumarcation but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist (sorry about the pun-where are they going to get more of them) to see the American kids of the future are going to be struggling to get a job. It’s hard to get a job NOW, so how are they going to have a future.



  7. marcos anthony toledo on November 10, 2015 at 9:11 am

    Our oligarchs war on conscience awareness being awake has a long history. Anything if used well including the boobtube can further your education. You just have to know how to use it and never stop thinking. Books magazines comicbooks can educate but in the end you must want to know and seek out for yourself what you want to learn and know. Science fiction has dealt with this issue in short stories such as “Thirty Days Has September” or the novel “The Learning Machine”. As for our elites one wonders what they read or look at they seem to confuse dreaming for thinking and be afraid be very afraid of their twisted fantasies and idiocies.



  8. WalkingDead on November 10, 2015 at 8:28 am

    Common core, like feminism, gay rights, the constant attack on the family and Christianity are all designed to keep you traumatized. Why? Because traumatized people spend more on things they don’t need than happy, well adjusted people. Like everything else, it’s about the money. The elite will never be satisfied until they own it all. The only thing they will left to devour after that is each other.



  9. Rickster on November 10, 2015 at 6:42 am

    My thinking is Common Core is creating a baseline to falsely prove a lower intelligence level in Americans making the case for the import of H1B immigration to the US so corporations can pay less for labor. It’s a small investment for future savings on labor cost.



  10. basta on November 10, 2015 at 5:42 am

    “Is our children learning?”

    Apparently not. All they lack are yet more touchscreens ($$$ to Apple Corp.), technocrat cadres (another layer of surveillance/paranoia) and an all-out embrace of Skinner/Pavlovian conditioning (If it works on pigeons and dogs, hey! Why not your little Johnny?).

    I think Common Core could vastly improve on their performance if only, as in Clockwork Orange, the subjects’ — oops! I meant “students'” — heads were put in a vise and their eyelids clamped open and artificial tears supplied (after all, we’ve had the proof of concept on film for nearly a half-century now).

    With this tried-and-true teaching method, they could finally reach the maximum efficiency of brainwashing — oops! I meant “learning.”

    /s



  11. kitona on November 10, 2015 at 5:36 am

    Although home schooling or hiring private tutors/teachers (which is basically a version of private school) may be appealing for the sake of your own children, is it really the best thing for a concerned citizen to do? Personally, I went to a public school and even though it was far from perfect, I do believe that public education should have a very large role in what we would like to have as a democracy.

    So in that respect, wouldn’t the best approach to Common Core be through mass resistance? Put your (presumably smart) kids into the public system to gum it up until it breaks. Or is American public education so hopeless that it is time to abandon it and role the dice with all these new private charter schools?



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