Contraries: PBS Lessons in Green Housing and "Killing Shakespeare" for Common Core

By Mary Grabar Posted July 2, 2013

PBS classroom lesson on Community BuildingThis appeared here and I wish to thank Mary for allowing me to publish her work.  RK

While students flee for summer fun 'n sun, their teachers are preparing indoctrination lessons for the fall, with help from our government and our government-supported PBS. A "documentary film and strategic entertainment company," Kontentreal, produces propaganda films for PBS, which then distributes them to government schools. One is about Generation G, a generation of preteens anxious about the sustainability of the planet. It's filmed at the exclusive Sidwell Friends School attended by Sasha and Malia Obama.

PBS Teachers, in its most recent newsletter, promotes a lesson in collectivism for high school students called "Affordable Green Housing"--produced by Kontentreal. The focus is on "community," which means forcing people of all income levels to live together.

The promo video tells teachers that the lesson should focus on "fostering diversity" and being "environmentally responsible." It features a bunch of urban planning types around a table discussing how dehumanizing the free public housing was because it isolated the residents. Now they must be integrated into all neighborhoods. Forcing such mixed housing is much more "organic" than the patterns made by the real estate free market system.

All kinds of helpful pedagogical aids are given to teachers. (Such a great resourse!) They are told that students should be given discussion questions before watching the video. "Next day" suggested activities include three: 1) having students individually answer questions, 2) answer questions as a group, and 3) do a "group graffiti draw," with groups given colored markers based on their question. Students are to walk around the room and write the answers on large sheets of posted paper, making "graffiti walls."

So write on a "graffiti wall," because it's so much easier than sitting down and reading and writing a research paper on the fall-out of Great Society programs that devastated once thriving, safe--and diverse--inner-city neighborhoods! The pretend-graffiti wall will probably be the only kind of graffiti wall that the Sidwell students will ever have to worry about in their "green neighborhoods."

The irony of the "graffiti walls" will be lost because under the federal education program called Common Core high school students will be spending only about 25% of their time in English class reading literature and being exposed to real irony.

And when they do read literature, they will be able to do it through graphic novels.

According to Publishers Weekly, Diamond Book Distributors now has a wide offering of Common Core-compliant graphic books. The list was released at the recent American Library Association meeting in Chicago and features such offerings as Power Lunch with a healthful superhero with an apple in hand on the cover. It's for kindergartners and first-graders. Congressman John Lewis's March, about the civil rights movement, offers challenging pictures for high school students. Other high school offerings include A Comic Book History of Comics and Kill Shakespeare. Graphic adaptations of actual Shakespeare plays are not on the list, however, although graphic adaptations of other classics, like Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, and Native American "Classics" are. Here we have evidence about the "standards" of Common Core. Maybe it is appropriate that a title like "Kill Shakespeare" should appear on a list of Common Core compliant graphic books.