Having said that, however:
Fran also links to another piece you should read concerning Common Core and the teaching of American History. A long time ago, Steven Den Beste wrote an essay on the four most important inventions in history, upon which I based my überpost Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them. Den Beste stated in his peice:
In my opinion, the four most important inventions in human history are spoken language, writing, movable type printing and digital electronic information processing (computers and networks). Each represented a massive improvement in our ability to distribute information and to preserve it for later use, and this is the foundation of all other human knowledge activities. There are many other inventions which can be cited as being important (agriculture, boats, metal, money, ceramic pottery, postmodernist literary theory) but those have less pervasive overall affects.In the intervening years, I've written a lot of posts on education (236 tagged that, according to Blogger). My point in focusing on education has been that the Left has used the last two of those inventions infiltrating and controlling what each new generation is taught, laying the foundation for our future.
Fran's post Sometimes One Weapon is Enough expands on that. Chillingly. He links to this piece, which explains:
We have a new set of AP American history standards and it’s only the first out of 33 AP course standards to be written. We can give thanks to the Architect of Common Core and College Board president, David Coleman. He has taken the five page outline currently given to teachers and has turned it into a 98 page Framework.The weaponization of public education kicks into high gear.
The new standards interpret American History for us.
Jane Robbins describes a few problems:
The new Framework inculcates a consistently negative view of American culture. For example, the units on colonial America stress the development of a "rigid racial hierarchy" and a "strong belief in British racial and cultural superiority." The Framework ignores the United States' founding principles and their influence in inspiring the spread of democracy and galvanizing the movement to abolish slavery. The Framework continues this theme by reinterpreting Manifest Destiny—rather than a belief that America has a mission to spread democracy and new technologies across the continent, the Framework teaches that it "was built on a belief in white racial superiority and a sense of American cultural superiority.”She goes on to note:
A particularly troubling failure of the Framework is its dismissal of the Declaration of Independence and the principles so eloquently expressed there. The Framework's entire discussion of this seminal document consists of just one phrase in one sentence: "The colonists' belief in the superiority of republican self-government based on the natural rights of the people found its clearest American expression in Thomas Paine's Common Sense and in the Declaration of Independence." The Framework thus ignores the philosophical underpinnings of the Declaration and the willingness of the signers to pledge "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" to the cause of freedom.
At this point, however, it seems redundant.
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