Opus 2017-368: Headlines: Oh, Well

The headline in The Federalist read that Bill Gates admits the Common Core Curriculum (CCC) has been a failure.  For those of us who went into the classroom with our brains turned on and our memory intact that is no surprise.  CCC was simply another attempt to move public education toward a socialist propaganda tool by dumbing down learning.  It stressed group work and feeling good about a process while ignoring data and facts.  There was nothing new.  It was just well financed by people like Gates and their political cronies.

What struck me about the title was the honesty of the word “experiment”.  The liberal education establishment was simply using your children as a guinea pig to further their desire to substitute a docile mass of sheep for what used to be thinking Americans.  The following statement by Gates in a speech sounds noble.

“If there is one thing I have learned,” Gates says in concluding his speech, “it is that no matter how enthusiastic we might be about one approach or another, the decision to go from pilot to wide-scale usage is ultimately and always something that has to be decided by you and others the field.”

The next sentence is the indictment on the CCC movement.

“If this statement encompasses his Common Core debacle, Gates could have at least the humility to recall that Common Core had no pilot before he took it national.”

A pilot program is a carefully controlled experiment that is run before a new technique or product is introduced.  There was no pilot program to see if the ideas of Common Core had merit.  One of the hidden truths of public education is that there never is.  The testing is done on the children with trillions of tax dollars.

I don’t so much blame Gates as the teachers and administrators who sat like mute slugs while this was being pushed in our schools.  Gates meant well but children are not computers.  The teachers should have known better.  The problem is that the teachers were trained by people who had drunk the kool aid.

It will take years for CCC to be removed from the system.  If history is any guide it will be replaced by something just like it by the same people that brought this debacle.  I am so glad I don’t need to argue with them any more and be patted on the head.

homo unius libri