Common Core: Programming Machines vs. Teaching Children

Quote found at Crisis Magazine: Saving the Uncommon Core of Catholic Education

We already know how much President Obama values quality education... so long as it doesn't come by way of voucher programs or private religious schools. He made his feelings clear again while speaking in Ireland this past week. He said, "If towns remain divided, if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs, if we can't see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division, it discourages cooperation."

In President Obama's strange reality, getting a different type of education from someone else spoils a person for any type of future cooperation or peace.

The way to peace, he claims, is sameness. No wonder he loves Common Core so much. 

But is he right about cooperation being negated by private education? I seem to remember quite a few people coming together to collaborate on a big project well before national education was a thing... as I recall, they created an entire united Republic out of thirteen contentious colonies, no small feat. In their early education, most of the framers were homeschooled, or tutored at home. George Washington didn't go to college. John Adams graduated from Harvard. James Madison, author of The Federalist Papers and key contributor to the framing of the Constitution, graduated from Princeton. Thomas Jefferson went to the College of William and Mary. And all the major schools were actually founded and financed by churches. The only thing they had in common was compulsory Bible classes.

So the idea that religious education is divisive falls a little flat when you actually look at history.

Yet President Obama insists on attacking private education. Remember when he shut down D.C.'s voucher program that allowed poor kids to choose which private school they wanted to attend? Republicans passed a bill to re-fund the program, which had already proven to improve graduation rates among poor students and bridge the education gap between rich and poor students, much to President Obama's chagrin.

That was all in 2012, and this year? Yep, he succeeded in ending funding for school choice in D.C. once again.

What does he have against school choice? It doesn't meet his major goal for American citizens, which is not excellence, but sameness. "...if we can't see ourselves in one another... it discourages cooperation." Cooperation. Which is, of course, the most important thing our students could learn, right? Math? Pshaw! Literature? Irrelevant! What our kids really need is to learn how to get along in the new uber-collectivist society which is the end result of President Obama's "fundamental change[s]" to America.

Here he is laying out the formula for peaceful cooperation:


Some people disagree with President Obama about the goals of education. Rather than sameness and cooperation, they dare to believe the aim of a thorough education ought to be real learning.

"In the 1930's progressive educators tried to devalue impractical liberal arts education and saw schools as mechanisms for preparing students for particular roles within the social structure. During this era, schooling became job preparation. But in the ancient world job preparation was known as a 'servile education' because it prepared students to serve a master in a particular kind of work. Modern education theorists would say that I'm being ridiculous to associate an ancient notion of servile education with skills for the 21st century which will allow students to adapt to an ever-changing society. But as long as students are told that the end of education is a job or a career, they will forever be servants of some master.

Joy Pullman, an education policy analyst for the Heartland Institute, and a Hillsdale grad, by the way, recently won the Robert Novak award to study and write about Common Core. Pullman is quickly becoming one of the nation's experts on Common Core. At a recent hearing in Wisconsin on Common Core Standards, Pullman addressed Common Core's misguided focus. 'In a self-governing nation, we need citizens who can govern themselves. The ability to support oneself with meaningful work is an important part, but only a part of self-government. When a nation expands workforce training so that it crowds out other things that rightly belong in education, we end up turning out neither good workers nor good citizens.'

The ancients knew that in order for men to be truly free, they must have a liberal education that includes study of literature and history, mathematics and science, music and art. Yes, man is made for work, but he's also made for so much more. Education should be about the highest things. We should study these things--the stars, plant cells, square roots, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Mozart's Requiem, Lincoln's 'Gettysburg Address'--not simply because they'll get us into the right college or into the right line of work. Rather we should study these noble things because they can tell us who we are, why we're here, what our relationship is to each other as human beings and to the world that surrounds us, among other things.

Commenting on Common Core Standards, Anthony Esolen, English professor at Providence College, said this: 'What appalls me most... about the standards is the cavalier contempt for great works of human art and thought in literary form. It is sheer ignorance of the life of the imagination. We are not programming machines.... We are teaching children.... We are to be forming the minds and hearts of men and women.... [and we should] raise them to be human beings, honoring what is good and right, and cherishing what is beautiful...'

If education has become, as Common Core openly declares, 'preparation for work in a global economy,' then this situation is far worse than Common Core critics ever anticipated. And the concerns about cost and quality, and yes, even the Constitutionality of Common Core, pale in comparison to the concerns for the hearts, minds, and souls of America's children."

-Dr. Daniel B. Coupland
Associate Professor of Education, Hillsdale College

Watch his full remarks below:

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.