Common Core, the United States and the Unified State

The United States consist of fifty different states, united for constitutionally specified purposes but not required to be united for others.
She is not and should not become a single unified entity.

Each of our fifty States is different from the others, although decreasingly so. Within each State there are also differences. Life in our rural areas — in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia for example — has little resemblance to life inside the Washington beltway where our feral Federal masters congregate.

Dumping all fifty of the United States into a federally designed “one-size-fits-all” dumpster will continue to have pernicious consequences; how pernicious they will be is a function of how long it will be permitted to continue. A Bill Whittle Afterburner video about the Common Core abomination suggests why it cannot — and will not — be suitable for diverse people in fifty diverse states with thousands of diverse school districts. Common Core is to education as ObamaCare is to health care.

Is the motivation to have Common Core fail — as ObamaCare may so that it can be replaced by an even worse “single payer” system — or to survive long enough to transform the United States into a Unified Socialist State of America (USSA)?

Dr. Kim Chi-un Nobel Laureate Obama lectures extremists

Here are a summary of and comment on Common Core from MB50’s “Liquid Mud” Rant:

The standards clearly communicate what is expected of students at each grade level. This will allow our teachers to be better equipped to know exactly what they need to help students learn and establish individualized benchmarks for them. The Common Core State Standards focus on core conceptual understandings and procedures starting in the early grades…

Essentially, what Common Core consists of is a standardized block of instruction on all the major subjects – Math, English and Language Arts – per standards that government bureaucrats devised. Initially, 45 states and the District of Columbia signed on, but as more states found out the curriculum is decidedly slanted to a particular point of view (socialism), a number of states are now working on legislation to bail out. And they are designed to allow controlling statists to get their claws into your kids as early on in their academic careers as possible. [Emphasis added.]

New legislation introduced by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, would prohibit federal funds from being used to finance Common Core implementation around the country. He has also introduced criticized the CCSS, calling them an “inappropriate overreach to standardize and control the education of our children.”

He’s far from being alone in rejecting the CCSS. According to an assessment of the core by the Washington Policy Center, scores of education experts have also rejected them, saying one of the biggest problems with the program is that it will stifle classroom innovation, which comes primarily from individual states. [Emphasis added.]

A Rutherford Institute article titled Common Core: A Lesson Plan for Raising Up Compliant, Non-Thinking Citizens observes,

[T]here are several methods for controlling a population. You can intimidate the citizenry into obedience through force, relying on military strength and weaponry such as SWAT team raids, militarized police, and a vast array of lethal and nonlethal weapons. You can manipulate them into marching in lockstep with your dictates through the use of propaganda and carefully timed fear tactics about threats to their safety, whether through the phantom menace of terrorist attacks or shooting sprees by solitary gunmen.  Or you can indoctrinate them into compliance from an early age through the schools, discouraging them from thinking for themselves while rewarding them for regurgitating whatever the government, through its so-called educational standards, dictates they should be taught. [Emphasis added.]

Those who founded America believed that an educated citizenry knowledgeable about their rights was the surest means of preserving freedom. If so, then the inverse should also hold true: that the surest way for a government to maintain its power and keep the citizenry in line is by rendering them ignorant of their rights and unable to think for themselves. [Emphasis added.]

When viewed in light of the government’s ongoing attempts to amass power at great cost to Americans—in terms of free speech rights, privacy, due process, etc.—the debate over Common Core State Standards, which would transform and nationalize school curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade, becomes that much more critical. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

That Americans are constitutionally illiterate is not a mere oversight on the part of government educators. And things will only get worse under Common Core, which as the Washington Post reports, is a not-so-subtle attempt “to circumvent federal restrictions on the adoption of a national curriculum.” One principal, a former proponent who is now leading the charge against Common Core, quickly realized that Common Core was not about educational reform as President Obama would have us believe. Rather, it’s about pushing a curriculum wrapped around incessant pre-testing, testing and test prep that teaches students how to take tests but not how to think, analyze or learn. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

Putting aside the profit-driven motives of the corporations and the power-driven motives of the government, there is also an inherent arrogance in the implementation of these Common Core standards that speaks to the government’s view that parents essentially forfeit their rights when they send their children to a public school, and should have little to no say in what their kids are taught and how they are treated by school officials. This is evident in the transformation of the schools into quasi-prisons, complete with metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, and surveillance cameras. Equally arrogant are school zero tolerance policies that punish serious offenders of a school weapons policy the same as a child who draws a picture of a gun, no matter what the parents or students have to say about the matter. The result is a generation of young people browbeaten into believing that they have no true rights, while government authorities have total power and can violate constitutional rights whenever they see fit. [Emphasis added.]

Our Federal masters likely believe that the less the “little” people know — and think — about our Constitution the less it will be used to pester them. Knowledge and reflection — if widespread — would limit their abilities to transform us radically —  and hence the nation —  into a Unified Socialist State of America. What might Grandpa Jones have thought of Common Core and its likely consequences?

“It” is a problem and Grandpa Jones was not fond of “it;” neither am I.

Although anyone is capable of producing “it” and shoveling “it” in great quantities, the most prodigious and consistent producers and shovelers of “it” are politicians. Every time they open their mouths “it” comes out. They write laws that are full of  “it” and then turn them over to bureaucrats,  who then write regulations that multiply “it” a hundred fold. They then open the flood gates and “it” starts rolling down-hill. Politicians don’t like “it” for themselves. So, they write other laws protecting them from the “it” they produce for the rest of us. [Emphasis added.]

As noted at Socialism is Not the Answer in an article titled Common Core . . .  stealth jihad directed at America’s children,

[W]ith one of its most in-your-face leftist agenda aspects, the Common Core curriculum has, for example, replaced the world’s great literary works with what’s called ‘informational texts’…another name for government propaganda. Shakespeare, Hemingway, and the other literary giants will be replaced by ‘informational texts’ extolling the virtues of same-sex marriage, abortion, drug use, and the all-important acceptance of all things islam.  Students in the lower grades will now divide their time between literature and these leftist writings until high school, when literary works will make up a mere 30% of English/Language Arts instruction. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

Also, contrary to the traditional American belief that justice is based on individual rights, Common Core teaches ‘Social Justice’ meaning teachers must teach that America is an unjust and oppressive society that should be changed. [Emphasis added.]

And the most unbelievable of all is that Common Core is using our public schools, Catholic schools, and private schools to indoctrinate our children into islam. ‘The Five Pillars of Islam’ are an integral part of Common Core teaching beginning in pre-k and lasting through the12th grade.  For example, students have muslim beliefs lessons where they must watch videos, research pre-selected web sites, complete worksheets, and create posters about the duties of muslims.

Should fourth graders — nationwide — be taught Ebonics and what pimps and “mobstaz” are? Is it a goal to dumb down those who try to use “standard” English? One evening back in the 1980’s, a friend and fellow attorney attended a city council meeting in a Maryland suburb of Washington. It had been recommended that Ebonics be taught in the schools. He rose to ask (in jest) whether Black Mathematics would also be taught. Many attendees were shocked by his political incorrectness. We may now be reaching that point in teaching mathematics. As noted in the article at Socialism is Not the Answer linked above,

[T]he teaching of math under Common Core guidelines means getting the right answer just does NOT matter anymore as long as the student can explain the faulty reasoning they used to get to that wrong answer.  2 + 2 = 5 is OK…just explain how you got that answer.  And Common Core puts many students mathematically two years behind those of many high-achieving  countries. For example, Algebra 1 would be taught in 9th grade NOT 8th grade as  previously taught, making calculus inaccessible to them in high school,  and this would affect top-tier college entrance requirements.

Are Common Core math graduates already preparing official analyses demonstrating,  in politically correct “mathematical” fashion, how ObamaCare will help us all?

Formerly Great Britain is now about to regulate, strenuously, its once free press — by royal decree. Are we in for more “education” of the same sort?

The modern left hates the idea of a free press, and of free speech in general, because it knows that in a free exchange of ideas it will always lose. Leftists fantasize about a press controlled by journalism professors, lawyers and other members of the great and the good, who would ensure the public was “educated” with a non-stop diet of stories about racism, inequality, global warming and third-world poverty, and despise the celebrity-worshiping and crime-obsessed majority of the British public that doesn’t share their politics or their good taste. [Emphasis added.]

But state regulation will also be a victory for the political classes as a whole, including nominally conservative politicians, whose aims increasingly coincide with the those of the statist left: the carving out of special privileges, and the transfer of power to themselves and away from the people; such goals are difficult to achieve in an environment of transparency and free speech. A left-wing crackdown on the freedoms of its political opponents is to be entirely expected, but it’s a shameful reflection on the state of conservatism in Britain that so many Tory MPs are happy to collude in it. [Emphasis added.]

Americans will point to the First Amendment to insist that “it couldn’t happen here,” and it probably won’t, so long as the country’s most influential newspapers hew to the liberal-left line. However, the left makes no attempt to hide its contempt for the Constitution, and more than one Democrat has raised the prospect of reintroducing the Fairness Doctrine to silence conservative talk radio, while Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin think politicians should be able to decide who’s a journalist and who isn’t. If Britain throws away 300 years of press freedom on a whim, the American left will be casting envious glances across the Atlantic.

Such procedures would be congenial accomplices for Common Core and ObamaCare. Such procedures, Common Core, ObamaCare and other similar dangers must be resisted if the United States are to continue, and be revived, as free, individual and different states.

I’d like to think that we are the people our Federal masters have been warning us about and that as time passes more of us will reject their overtures.