December 5, 2012 - 9:25 am
Stanley Kurtz has an important post about educational standards, known as Common Core, coming from the Obama administration. The standards have never received much publicity in the media and thus Obama has never had to bother with defending or explaining them.
Kurtz’s post is too good to quote — read the whole thing here.
Chances are, if you have children in public schools, Common Core is either in your local classrooms or it’s on the way. Not every state has adopted Obama’s Common Core curriculum yet, but most have. Thankfully, Texas has not and will not. But most states could not resist the allure of the federal dollars that always accompany federal strings.
If this is true, and actually expected, then I think the intent is clear–cult of personality worship of Barack Obama.
Is George Washington’s Fairwell Adress in there? Odds are….no, though it could be. Is anything else of the “American Canon” type stuff of say, 1935, in there? It should be easy to figure out.
My guess only threat of armed conflict will take care of this, because the Progressives will not stop otherwise. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead? Well, okay then. Torpedoes away.
“My guess is”. Apologies.
A key component of the Common Core is the replacement of fiction with non-fiction, informational reading selections. Kurtz deplores this, pointing out that the suggested non-fiction readings in the Common Core are akin to propaganda. This may well be true, but there is another more insidious function of non-fiction readings in an English curriculum.
I’m a linguist and we have long been aware of an interesting phenomenon in language teaching. When you teach the language of an “enemy” country, you are careful to teach it primarily via non-fiction readings. So, for instance, in teaching Russian or Chinese, you teach learners to read these languages by using newspapers, short science articles, interviews with prominent people, etc. You do NOT teach learners of these languages by using a lot of poetry, short stories, etc. Why? Because fiction evokes affects (emotions, sentiments, feelings) in people while they read. So when you read stories or poems in a foreign language, you also develop feelings of liking, love, respect, etc., for the people who speak that language.
The arising of feelings as we read cannot be controlled–it just happens, that’s how we humans are. In fact, in the early 1800s, the German poet and critic Schiller wrote a work in which he outlined how and why non-fiction texts (and music) TRAIN our emotions. We learn from Schiller that we need to select such texts carefully, so that the proper emotions are evoked and readers learn how to recognize their emotions as they read and learn the hundreds of words that identify emotions.
When you read fiction in a regular English K-12 English class, you are simultaneously learning to love, cherish, and respect the culture that has produced the fiction. This is unavoidable, as I have suggested above. So, the purpose of reducing the amount of fiction in the curriculum is to reduce the amount of affect (emotions, feelings, sentiments) that readers experience. In short, readers with less exposure to fiction in the English curriculum are readers who will experience less love, less passion, less affection for the culture that produced the reading material. This is the real underlying reason for the increase in the amount of informational texts to the detriment of fictional texts in the Core Curriculum. It will produce a population of readers who feel less affection for the English-speaking culture.
Fiction is not “eliminated” by Common Core. Much of the alarmism from teachers about having to “reduce” the amount of fiction to accommodate Common Core is a great big strawman. If they do indeed have to eliminate some, then they need to focus on the quality of what they finally select for fiction. The whole point of Common Core is “deep reading,” meaning that the student spends more time doing a more through job of reading and understanding fewer texts (both fiction and non-fiction). They then must demonstrate that they have effectively grasped the meaning of the content they just read. IOW: they become better students. THAT is what they are supposed to be in school for, yes? If they want to read more fiction, they are better equipped to do so on their own time thanks the the rigors of Common Core.
I loved reading as a kid, all kinds of reading but I partcularly liked American fiction classics like “Caddie Woodlawn” and “Tom Sawyer”, and I loved biographies, they were abundant in our library about various American historical personalities and after reading enough of them a grasp of American historical continuity and lore really took hold in me. Recently, since the election I’ve rediscovered my library card as a way to try and get some return on investment on taxes, taking up “Last of the Mohicans” and non fiction work “Soft Despotism:Democracy’s Drift”, excellent and very relevant for these days. But enough about me. It looks as though the conservative movement is going to have to retrench and come from outside our compromised institutions in order to affect the next generations. Your theory about non fiction is interesting, we will have to come up with extra curricular groups that encourage kids to read outside the bounds of a list of homework requirments and spend their time reading for the pure pleasure of it. Fiction, Non-fiction, whatever, just have them pick up a phyiscal book and turn the pages in a quite comfortable space. The very Art of reading could become lost to the faddish texting and internet infotainment world we live in. I thought about a Kindle, but for now I’m loving my library card.
Folks:
Slow down with the alrmism, please.
A I stated in a previous post, Common Core did not originate with Obama and the White House, but from without in the academic community. It is intended as a sincere means to make academic standards in K-12 more rigorous. In-and-of-itself Common Core is not a “plot” to disseminate leftist propaganda.
Having said that, it is true that the left is deft (no rhyme intended) at hijacking concepts and harnessing it to their own purposes — it is what they live for. It is also true that the biggest challenges to Common Core are: the dismal literacy rate of perhaps a majority of American students, and the legitimate resistance by many teachers to top-down approaches.
HP,
> did not originate with Obama and the White House
Bad ideas, unconstitutional ideas, don’t become good and constitutional simply because they originated prior to Obama, or outside his the Obama WH.
Please explain how Common Core is “bad,” and do so in detail. Otherwise your remarks are a simplistic and unfounded dismissal.
– more voc-ed.
I think to many are uniformed!
Common core was born by several concerned states governors addressing how transient families with school aged children are today — transferring from district to district and state to state. Curriculum content and standards varied from district to district and state to state disadvantaging most transiet students.
So the answer is, have Washington DC direct the curriculum for all states, because of those pesky differences between states?
The solution to such a minor problem is not the federal takeover of the entire curriculum of every public school student in the country.
I don’t think I stated any political position. I only addressed the orgins of core curriculum so direct your stones elsewhere!
Zeke:
It may be futile to convince some. I know from observation and experience that Common Core has flaws, but it is a sincere effort to improve the quality of education. What you and I are seeing is an unwillingness by many on the “conservative” side to separate the wheat from the chaff. But, to be fair, their reaction is understandable becasue they see American values and systems under assault from cynical, corrupt leftists, and have many examples of direct WH intrusion to point to. The Left has poisoned the well, and many on the Right have been provoked into similar behavior.
The decline in Americas education systems measured by any standards, began in the 60s by what is now commonly referred to as the democrats lefties. Since then, both parties and their special interest cronies, have equal blame for the circular evolutions of educational experiementing and decline. Additionally, those who attempt to place the blame on classroom teachers for the decline in education, deserve no place at the debate table.
If you read the review of the Math part of Common Core by the one Mathematician involved in the review of the program (R. James Milgram), you will see how atrocious it is. He goes step by step, grade by grade and points out fallacies, mistakes, out of order teaching, and duplication of concepts but using different terms each time. All of which will not improve math scores but only confuse kids more.
http://concernedabouteducation.posterous.com/review-of-common-core-math-standards