... I’ve been writing a lot about the latest dreary exercise in pedagogical flummery and inhumanity, the Common Core Standards. I’ll be writing more. But they do serve one purpose, as it seems to me. They can stir Catholic bishops, pastors, teachers, and parents to take stock of where we are.
... This rotten pedagogy, this dispiriting transformation of English and history, and what little poetry is allowed to remain on the lifeboat, into the Inhumanities—this rejection of wisdom and this reduction of knowledge to information, and of art to “transferable skills”—it is not spanking new. But it now presents itself as so thoroughly and comically bad, and so inimical to human culture in general and the Catholic faith in particular, that we might just begin to say, “The building was wrong from the start!” And then we can build upon truly human and Catholic principles.
So here I’d like to introduce my readers to someone who is aiming to do just that. I offer his example to inspire others to go and do likewise, or to assist him in his wonderful undertaking.
Peter Searby has a vision. He understands that boys are treated pretty shabbily in our schools—and not just the public schools. He recalls interviewing a nine year old boy, who told him that he hated school, because they gave the kids only fifteen minutes a day to go outside, and then only for talking, not for running and playing. Otherwise, school life meant being confined to a chair, listening to the teacher talk, and filling out innumerable worksheets. Searby knows, too, that many boys are drugged to smother what is a normal physiological and emotional reaction to the abnormal environment in which they are compelled to wear out their days. He understands that such boys, bored, resentful, and inured to failure, cannot become stalwart contributors to a healthy society, or clear-eyed defenders of the Church.
Searby’s answer is not to toss to the boys a little extra work. It is to reconceive the whole idea of teaching boys. Or rather it is to return to what we all know about those creatures, from history, from every human culture, from biology, and from the abundant evidence of our eyes and ears. What would a healthy and hearty Catholic school for boys look like?
His words are not just far from those of our reigning educrats. They come from a different world entirely:
The photo shows a frustrated 7-year-old girl in tears and anguish after she is unable to solve a math equation using the suggested problem-solving method.
“I’m a photographer,” a caption accompanying the photo states. “This is my daughter…and this is the first photo of her that I have ever hated.”
The girl’s mother, Kelly Poynter, says she attempted to assist her daughter, but that she too was unable to comprehend the purported lesson.
“After checking her work, I had found 2 math problems were incorrect. I tried to help her understand where she went wrong through her process but I don’t understand it myself and was not much help,” Poynter says in a post that appeared at eagnews.org, a Common Core watchdog site.
Even after Poynter gave up, her daughter continued to try to wrap her mind around the problem. “I told her to forget about it and we’d try again tomorrow but she became very upset that she could not get the answer and kept trying and trying to fix it,” Poynter says, claiming the photo was snapped inadvertently while clicking through camera settings. “She is hard on herself as she very much wants to excel in school and not be pulled for extra help all of the time.”
Poynter says it’s all the more sad to see her daughter like this as she is a cancer-survivor and usually high spirited. “She is a fighter with a resilient spirit,” Poynter asserts. “It crushes me to see her cry; to see her struggle. My daughter deserves a happy childhood.”
Poynter says she’d like the photo’s publicity to go towards raising awareness and bringing “about much needed change in public education.”
That picture is the encapsulation of an entire civilization being robbed of their birthright.
She is probably a very bright little girl, and yet is being started down a path that will result in disliking learning and knowledge because of the counterfeit versions forced on her. The Fundamental Transformers don't care how many of these little victims they leave in their wake.
Welcome my son...welcome to the machine;
What did you dream? It's alright we told you what to dream...
The first three word [sic] of the Constitution are the most important. They clearly state that the people—not the king, not the legislature, not the courts—are the true rulers in American government. This principle is known as popular sovereignty.
But who are “We the People”? This question troubled the nation for centuries. As Lucy Stone, one of America’s first advocates for women’s rights, asked in 1853, “‘We the People’? Which ‘We the People’? The women were not included.” Neither were white males who did not own property, American Indians, or African Americans—slave or free. Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American on the Supreme Court, described the limitation:
For a sense of the evolving nature of the Constitution, we need to look no further than the first three words of the document’s preamble: ‘We the People.’ When the Founding Fathers used this phrase in 1787, they did not have in mind the majority of American citizens . . . The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 could not . . . have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendant of an African slave.