Common Core: A Lesson Plan for Raising Up Compliant, Non-Thinking Citizens
As I point out in my new book, A Government Of Wolves The Emerging American Police State
, there are several methods for controlling a population.
You can intimidate the citizenry into
obedience through force, by relaying on military strength and weaponry
such as SWAT team raids, militarized police, and a vast array of lethal
and nonlethal weapons.
You can manipulate them into marching
in lockstep with your dictates through the use of propaganda and
carefully timed fear tactics about threats to their safety, whether
through the phantom menace of terrorist attacks or shooting sprees by
solitary gunmen.
Or you can indoctrinate them into
compliance from an early age through the schools, discouraging them from
thinking for themselves while rewarding them for regurgitating whatever
the government, through its so-called educational standards, dictates
they should be taught.
Those who founded America believed that
an educated citizenry knowledgeable about their rights was the surest
means of preserving freedom. If so, then the inverse should also hold
true: that the surest way for a government to maintain its power and
keep the citizenry in line is by rendering them ignorant of their rights
and unable to think for themselves.
When viewed in light of the
government’s ongoing attempts to amass power at great cost to
Americans—in terms of free speech rights, privacy, due process, etc.—the
debate over Common Core State Standards, which would transform and nationalize school curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade, becomes that much more critical.
Essentially, these standards, which
were developed through a partnership between big government and
corporations, in the absence of any real input from parents or educators
with practical, hands-on classroom experience, and are being rolled out
in 45 states and the District of Columbia, will create a generation of
test-takers capable of little else, molded and shaped by the federal
government and its corporate allies into what it considers to be ideal
citizens.
Moreover, as Valerie Strauss
reports for the Washington Post: “The costs of the tests, which have
multiple pieces throughout the year plus the computer platforms needed
to administer and score them, will be enormous and will come at the
expense of more important things. The plunging scores will be used as an
excuse to close more public schools and open more privatized charters
and voucher schools, especially in poor communities of color. If, as
proposed, the Common Core’s ‘college and career ready’ performance level
becomes the standard for high school graduation, it will push more kids
out of high school than it will prepare for college.”
With so much money to be made and so
many questionable agendas at work, it is little wonder, then, that
attempts are being made to squelch any and all opposition to these
standards. For example, at a recent public forum to discuss the
implementation of these standards in Baltimore County public schools,
one parent, 46-year-old Robert Small, found himself “pulled out of the
meeting, arrested and charged with second-degree assault of a police
officer” simply for daring to voice his discontent with the standards
during a Q&A session with the superintendent.
“Don’t stand for this. You are sitting
here like cattle,” shouted Robert Small to his fellow attendees as he
was being dragged out of the “forum” on the Common Core standards. “Is
this America?”
No, Mr. Small, this is no longer
America. This is, instead, fascism with a smile, sold to us by our
so-called representatives, calculating corporations, and an educational
system that is marching in lockstep with the government’s agenda.
In this way, we are being conditioned
to be slaves without knowing it. That way, we are easier to control. “A
really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the
all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers
control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because
they love their servitude,” writes Aldous Huxley.
The original purpose of a
pre-university education in early America was not to prepare young
people to be doctors or lawyers but, as Thomas Jefferson believed, to
make citizens knowledgeable about “their rights, interests, and duties
as men and citizens.”
Yet that’s where the problem arises
for us today. Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their
basic rights, largely due to an educational system that does a poor job
of teaching the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the
Bill of Rights.
Many studies confirm this. For instance, when Newsweek
asked 1,000 adult U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship
test, 29 percent of respondents couldn’t name the current vice president
of the United States. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why
America fought the Cold War. More critically, 44 percent were unable to
define the Bill of Rights.
That Americans are constitutionally
illiterate is not a mere oversight on the part of government educators.
And things will only get worse under Common Core, which as the
Washington Post reports, is a not-so-subtle attempt “to circumvent
federal restrictions on the adoption of a national curriculum.”
Putting aside the profit-driven
motives of the corporations and the power-driven motives of the
government, there is also an inherent arrogance in the implementation of
these Common Core standards that speaks to the government’s view that
parents essentially forfeit their rights when they send their children
to a public school, and should have little to no say in what their kids
are taught and how they are treated by school officials. This is evident
in the transformation of the schools into quasi-prisons, complete with
metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, and surveillance cameras. The
result is a generation of young people browbeaten into believing that
they have no true rights, while government authorities have total power
and can violate constitutional rights whenever they see fit.
Yet as Richard Dreyfuss, Oscar-winning
actor and civics education activist, warns: “Unless we teach the ideas
that make America a miracle of government, it will go away in your kids’
lifetimes, and we will be a fable.”
MichaelSavage4Prez
