Posted on 12/07/2012 9:48:19 PM PST by Mozilla
The Obama Administration has launched its newest campaign to confiscate the minds of our children. To qualify for federal grant funds, Obama is requiring states to adopt a new program called Common Core State Standards In English. The program would wipe great works of literature from English curriculums across the country. And replace them with “information text”, such as “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management”, an Order, of course, favorable to the Liberal environmentalist movement.
Via Lucianne, Powerline reports,
Controversy is brewing over new Common Core State Standards in English that call on public schools to emphasize the reading of “information text” instead of fictional literature. According to the Washington Post, English teachers across the country are upset by what they consider the government’s effort “to drive literature out of the classroom.”
English teachers are right to be upset, but they shouldn’t take it personally. The government has nothing much against literature, per se. Rather, this initiative is driven in large part by the desire to promote political propaganda in the classroom. The study of literature is being downgraded in the process, but for a good cause.
Consider that one of the “informational texts” recommended as a replacement for, say, Great Expectations is “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management.” Students would thus study government propaganda in English class (this Executive Order was issued under President Bush, but it is still propaganda — a political sop to the environmental left, as Stanley Kurtz shows).
(Excerpt) Read more at thegatewaypundit.com ...
It's not a bad list. I would make a few changes, but I don't have heartburn over it. But the main point is that this list is offered as a short set of non-binding examples to illustrate the recommended range and complexity level. The actual curriculum design is left (so far) to state and local school authorities, who will be the folks actually picking the texts. Or looking over the shoulders of the English teachers, if the teachers choose the texts.
That said, I am opposed to a federal curriculum authority for 101 good reasons, and averting the development of such an entity is a primary reason for resisting the ever-increasing flood of federal money into K-12 education. He who pays the piper will ultimately call the tune, and the feds are waging checkbook imperialism in the schools. The risk of mission creep is always present, and if we're not careful we'll soon have very detailed federal curricula being imposed. But that's a down-the-road threat. The standards being dicussed today aren't there yet.
Either people were so eager for the money that they didn't read the fine print or they didn't understand what a national curriculum was, how unconstitutional it was, and what it would ineveitably mean under Obama.
Literature is old technology entertainment. It’s academic value is dubious. I can’t understand the high regard literature is held in. Few people ever got a job for knowing the memoirs of a geisha or what Harry Potter is up to.
“Government is a parasite — a cancer that by nature tries to spread deeper into society. Those who want to run others’ lives won’t give up and start minding their own business.” -Harry Browne
“Schools have not necessarily much to do with education... they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.” -Winston Churchill
“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... “ —Johann Gotlieb fitche
As the labor unions move the communists into power - nationally and globally- they are buying their own ticket to a future of Chi-com slave labor. Communists don’t tolerate labor unions any more than they tolerate America’s constitutional Republic form of government and Bill of Rights. I guess the union leaders figure they will be communist party bosses with total power over the labor camps. They really don’t give a fig about American workers.
Hmmm...
Hong Kong education plan draws protests (decry Chinese patriotic brainwashing)
Monday, July 30, 2012 3:32:52 PM · by Cincinatus’ Wife · 1 replies
San Francisco Chronicle ^ | July 30, 2012
Tens of thousands of protesters paraded through Hong Kong on Sunday, waving placards denouncing “brainwashing” by China’s ruling Communist Party and calling for the scrapping of plans for “national education” courses in local schools. [snip] Sunday’s protesters decried this as brainwashing. Protest placards borrowed lyrics from “Another Brick in the Wall,” a song by the British rock group Pink Floyd: “We don’t need no thought control. Leave them kids alone.” Hong Kong officials deny that the new courses - due to start in primary schools this year and secondary schools in 2013 - will mimic “patriotic education” teaching on the...
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