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There is a new education fad now being implemented in 46 states and the District of Columbia. Common Core is a top-down scheme hatched by two Washington, D.C. lobbying organizations, promoted by wealthy philanthropists and utopian dreamers, and pushed by the federal government. These uniform standards will eventually result in a national curriculum as teachers align to required tests. Common Core invades student privacy because Common Core mandates collection and distribution of personally identifiable student information. It also ends local control of education.
The Story-Killers exposes the truth about Common Core (CC). Promoters argue that we must adopt CC standards or else students won't be "career and college ready"
Dr. Moore suggests there is a "crisis in literacy" that is the result of "schools not teaching students to read properly since about 1960." Every experimental fad has been a "disaster." Common Core replaces great literature with inferior recent works and relies heavily on informational texts. Moore suggests that the modern literature CC favors is sometimes so nihilistic that "it could very well turn [students] off of life." When a valuable literary work slips in, the CC "story-killers" ruin it for students by making them tear it apart with boring "compare and contrast" exercises and other dissections "in a lifeless, mechanical way."
The author outlines an alternative prescription for righting American education: a traditional, classical,liberal education. Dr. Moore has the advantage over the promoters and subsidizers of Common Core in that he has operated a successful school. His suggested high-school curriculum embraces "not so much the past but the permanent": classics "without the interference of the post-modern purveyors of perversity, pettiness, and ennui." Students would read primary sources and original documents from authors of "the best that has been thought and said and done and discovered."
With CC's heavy focus on "informational texts," students don't have time to read great literature. Common Core suggests that students read the "history of the grocery bag" (an actual CC suggested text) when they could be reading Homer, Shakespeare, or Dickens. Parents should be aware that Common Core is another fad that will waste taxpayer money and fail to educate students. (Create Space Publishing, 2013, 269 pp., $15.00) |
or able to succeed in "twenty-first century global competition." CC promotes "job training" and "workforce preparation." But education is not only about getting a job, nor is it only about attending college. Education is meant to prepare individuals for life as well-informed, independent, and analytical thinkers.
