MUST READ Book: “Rotten to the (Common) Core”
Get out your highlighters and Post-It flags, I’ve got a must-read to share with everyone interested in learning the history of Common Core.
In Rotten to the (Common) Core, by Joseph P. Farrell and Gary Lawrence, you will travel all the way back to the turn of the century, over one hundred years ago, to learn about the players who helped bring progressive education reform to the table.
Joseph Farrell is well known for intensive investigation of banks and ruling structures while Gary Lawrence is a long time, well respected instructor in New York. Together they bring you the history and the current implications of that history.
I knew this book would be good when flipping through the pages upon receiving it and seeing the names of some of the big players whom I have learned about over the years.
It is essential to learn about these folks and the foundations that help foist their rotten ideas onto American school children. In fact, you will even learn how the foundations work and how they are a danger to our Republic. You will see that the Common Core is just the latest renaming of the reform aimed at getting those all-important “assessments” into the classroom so that the job of sorting our kids like cattle into a crazy new caste system can be completed.
I’m not sure where to begin outlining this maddening walk through the American education system. You’ll learn how our current reforms have nothing to do with education or personalized learning.
I’ve written before about Common Core assessments being the embodiment of an unknown being asking confusing questions to see how your child thinks and then “individualizing” the experience by adjusting the next question to fit with the previous answer.
In Rotten to the (Common) Core the authors will highlight exactly how the powers that be use these “assessments” to mold your children’s thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs.
I will give you a hint about what you’ll learn: It was never about education. It was always about psychological control over the American population through brainwashing and the promotion of the “collective” over the individual. The emphasis on sorting students like human capital and the surveillance state collecting every bit of information about them that they can is frightening.
Some of the big names and players discussed, such as John Dewey, Wilhelm Wundt, James B. Conant, and the foundations they worked for, the Carnegie Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation just to name a couple, were cleverly named to sound like they were about education but were always more about psychology and using the classroom as a laboratory where they could experiment on young minds.
They uncover the farce of current “professional development” for teachers when Gary Lawrence, a New York state instructor, gives you a peek into what happens in a typical meeting. It’s truly fascinating, and unfortunately, just as I expected, they use flowery words and puff themselves up to sound important while really saying nothing at all. Or, worse, they regurgitate the plans and “methods” that teachers are to use while never talking about actual transmission of knowledge. They highlight the fact that these “educgarchs” (combination of education and oligarchy) have actually redefined certain words and phrases, so while they may sound palatable to the average person, they really mean something else.
I found myself reading aloud to my husband the description of “Robert/a,” the authors example of a “Facilitator,” basically one of the education bureaucrats from hell that you will encounter if you ever go to a board of education meeting, continuing education class, or “informational” meeting held by your state’s superintendent. I laughed out loud because it was so spot-on and reaffirming to know that I am not the only one who actually leaves these meetings feeling angry that I was just condescended to for 2 hours.
I will tell you that this is not an easy read, or at least it wasn’t for me, and I knew a lot of the general idea before I even picked it up. There are names and methods and papers quoted from that you need to know about that will be immensely helpful in realizing just how far American education has gone off course. If you want to know the history and be able to speak knowledgably about it then I suggest you get this book and prepare to wear out some highlighters.
Read the footnotes and investigate those sources also. This book, while a great start to understanding the problem and something that will put you head and shoulders above even your local education district office in knowledge, isn’t a comprehensive outline. A comprehensive outline would take an entire set of books – which I hope the authors will contemplate writing in the future.
When you read the edubabble and start to get lost in the big words that mean nothing to you and realize that this is how all of the people involved in education have been led to this precipice you will gain new insight into how the whole country is being psychologized into submission.
Without the thoughtful explanation of what should be in education, after the edubabble nightmare, you may never even realize exactly what has just been shoved down your throat in the name of collectivism and political correctness.
I am adding this book to my arsenal and I will, no doubt, be going back to and referring to it in many future conversations.
The Common Core assessments are the point of no return, folks. If we don’t stop this madness now, and I mean right now, the future of our Republic is already spelled out. We have nobody to blame but ourselves for letting it happen.
