Why Common Core Won’t Work – A Common Sense Reasoning
One of the lofty and often lauded goals of the Common Core are that it will produce students who are ready for the global economy and have strong 21st century skills.
I believe “training for the future” with a push on global and 21st century skills are not necessarily a good thing.
The most obvious question here is: do we know what the future will bring? I don’t think so. Predicting the future is not an exact science, if it can be called a science at all. For years fortune tellers have been playing at telling the future and for a vast majority of people, failing. Predicting the future is a fool’s errand.
Remember when the powers that be were pushing college on kids? You must go to college! You will surely fail at life if you don’t go to college! So, kids went to college. And they racked up thousands upon thousands of dollars in college loans that they would have to pay off after they got their dream job. Unfortunately for the kids, and the economy, those jobs didn’t exist when they graduated.
As Mike Rowe so accurately stated on TV: “We are lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist. That’s nuts.”
So here we are supposedly preparing kids for what the powers that be think the future will look like. Sadly, it’s in much the same way as we pushed for kids to attend college. That push failed miserably.
What’s important is that schools lay those important foundational educational skills. Reading, writing, math, spelling, history, and science. And I’m talking about real history. Not the watered down “social studies” classes that list history as the very bottom of the list of “skills” they are trying to impart. These skills are tried and true. They helped Jobs to create the iPod and the United States to be the first country to land on the moon, for goodness’ sake!
If our kids don’t learn history aren’t they doomed to repeat it? With things as horrific as the holocaust on one end and things about the big college push of the 90s on the other. The holocaust was evil. The college push failure is certainly horrible for those kids who are now scrimping and scraping to get by and raise their families with skills they learned in college that are useless for the job they are holding.
Have they done a risk assessment? No. These standards are brand new and have never been tried. Ever.
Why should we part ways with what is tried and true and made America the greatest and smartest nation in the world to gamble on this huge mistake called Common Core? In fact, our education system was the envy of the world until the federal government got involved!
You know the old term, “anything worth doing is worth doing right?” Why are education departments across the country ignoring that important question? Aren’t our children and our country’s futures more important than a hasty rollout akin to Obamacare?
If we go down the rabbit trail really quickly I can point out that maybe they do know what the future will look like. Planned economy, anyone?
It’s time for parents to see that the people in the educational departments in our states, although supposedly trained to know what’s best for our kids, in fact, do not know what’s best. We, as parents, need to take that back.
You cannot ignore what the loss will be if we take this gamble and are wrong. Our kids’ futures are done before they’ve begun.
