OPINION: Why Common Core is Destroying American Children
There’s no denying, as I’ve written many times on Carolina Culture Warrior, that protecting American children is becoming a full time job with awful stuff being spewed out and exposed to young people in this country. We are living in a permissive society these days. Kids and teens access garbage on YouTube 24/7, and even if you are a strict parent to your child, they can get it in a schoolyard on their smartphones and tablets. Take a look at what’s on television, Kardashians, Kirby Buckets, Maury, the reality shows on MTV, vile cartoons like Oggy and the Cockroaches on Nickelodeon, the list goes on and on. I’m not on a mission to moralize all adults. If you’re an adult, watch trash like Kardashians and Maury if you want. But, children need to be protected from this kind of stuff, and they’re not being protected by it.
Here’s a problem that’s worse than the cultural problem here in America however, the decline of our education system. Ever since the introduction of Common Core here in America, the current education monopoly – British publisher Pearson plc. – is telling kids in public schools across the country to hate the very principles our nation values, and also demonize the founding fathers as horrible racists who just wanted to steal this land from indigenous people and kill them in the process. The math common core uses is very confusing too, even for NBC’s education correspondent. My mother runs the Phoenix Academy charter school in High Point, so she knows about this firsthand. There is no denying that common core is definitely a problem. Among its architects are the above-mentioned Pearson, and an individual named Dr. Alison Rampersad – a Marxist. The fact that a self-admitting socialist is a part of this tells you everything you need to know about the Common Core curriculum. This is the kind of stuff George Orwell predicted in his last novel before his death, 1984. Apparently, he was over 30 years too early in his predictions. It doesn’t help that our children are also bombarded with garbage on MTV that tells its mostly teenage audience how awful conservatism really is.
To put this aside a bit, I want to talk about a little trip I took during my spring break this year. My family and I (including a friend of my sister’s) went to the Colonial Williamsburg attraction in Williamsburg, Virginia. It’s an outdoor museum that preserves what life in America was like before and during its founding. It’s filled with historical places such as taverns, coffee houses, and even a church. There is also a historical film they show at the visitor’s center called Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot. Premiering in 1957, the film is now the longest-running motion picture in history. As you can see, Williamsburg shows us what real American history is like. Our founding fathers spent a lot of time here.
Now, back to the story of Common Core, it’s stuff like what that curriculum is doing to rewrite history and make our founding an awful time that makes me really appreciate that trip. People have had atrocities, especially our founders. Atrocities are the human condition however, and people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were human beings too, born to make mistakes like all of us. But, we all learn from our blunders, including the founding fathers. And that’s exactly what the architects of Common Core do not want you to think about them. This historical revisionism can only get worse, and we can only hope when 2016 comes, we have a president that can fix this mess we’re in right now.
