Common Core Instructs Students to Learn About Gettysburg Address Without Mentioning the Civil War

Fox News Insider ^ | NOV 30 2013 9:41AM

[Olog-hai]

Is it possible to teach students the meaning behind President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address without mentioning the Civil War?

According to the government’s new Common Core education standards, the Gettysburg Address must be taught without mentioning the Civil War and explaining why President Lincoln was in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. …

[SC_Pete]

They don’t want the kids to focus on how many white people were killed to free the slaves.

[Apple Pan Dowdy]

"Going through the links, one finally finds out that the passage is being read in English class. In that context, it makes some sense to stay on the subject and not cover history questions."

No it doesn't.

Knowledge cannot be compartmentalized into "subject" groups. True knowledge encompasses many disciplines and must be put into context with all other knowledge. This is a shallow example but one that comes readily to mind.... you can read a recipe for apple pie, but you can't possibly comprehend what an apple pie is if you do not have any idea what an apple is.

Back when I taught Elementary school in the 70's, we went to great lengths to coordinate the different subjects so that a particular lesson could be taught "cross-platform" so-to-speak, and encompass math, history, science, language, literature and perhaps even P.E. It made the lesson more real to the students as they could see that it touched them in many ways and had many applications in their lives. We used to sit in grade-level department meetings and come up with ideas of how we could achieve this.

But, you must understand that if people today are too knowledgeable about a particular subject, for instance an historical event, then it will be too difficult for government propagandists to rewrite the facts to their own evil benefits. It would be too difficult for them to redefine Lincoln's words to mean something entirely different.

[Flick Lives]

What’s the new official purpose of the Gettysburg Address? Global Warming?

[nurees]

Bingo. Many of my seasoned teachers have compared CC to how they taught years ago but now have the added burden of the reporting and assessment that is so controversial. It is a fine fine line. I have for example ensured my teachers have access to a variety of historical documents based on grade level, biographies (even have preschool board books on presidents and Independence Day), immigration, dust bowl, how Washington works, how elections work, etc. I can go on and on and the schools are interested and buying from me. I do what I can to preview and ensure accuracy, identify bias and so on. My Social Studies teachers are collaborating with English to work with assorted mythologies as part of world history. I know of one grade working on learning about inventors in Social Studies while collaborating with the Science teacher on related experiments. My favorite was one entire school reading the Wizard of Oz. Each week there were activities like learning about weather, creating a tornado in a soda bottle, learning the georgraphy of the Midwest, learning all about the state of Kansas...this went on and on so that every subject area was hit in some fashion. The kids and teachers solved it. Yeah, CC is dangerous and controversial in many areas but not all schools are going down the path of changing history.

[wita]

I somewhat disagree. The real issue is common core is barely out of the box and reality has not yet sunk in due to slow implementation. It was so designed as to become unstoppable once the truth was out, and it certainly isn’t yet. Once the testing is in place teachers will no longer have the luxury of doing things the way they know is successful, they will be forced by testing needs to teach common core.

It may end up another too big to fail. Only two courses as yet have written standards with more to come and the real ball buster is the data mining that is out in the future somewhere out of sight. No one seems to mind about the potential expense as long as big gov is in the mix, but just like medicaid expansion, no one knows, not even the Shadow, what the long term economic issues will be.

[a fool in paradise]

This may be the lesson plan here. I couldn’t get the actual PDF of the Gettysburg Address to display (I suspect it is a variant without the mention of God/Creator).

It does discuss divorcing the context of the speech from the lesson plan.

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/american-civil-war/resources/gettysburg-address

“Introduction - Tell the students that they will be learning what Abraham Lincoln was saying in the Gettysburg Address by reading and understanding Lincoln’s own words. Resist the temptation to put the speech into too much context. Remember, we are trying to let the students discover what Lincoln had to say and then develop ideas based solely on his words.”