The Common Core: What We Need is a History Lesson!

By Rich Kozlovich

On September 6, 2013, Marilyn Assenheim wrote an article titled, “The Common Core Curriculum: Education’s Final Frontier”.   She starts out saying; “Do you know what the Common Core Curriculum is? Whether you have children or not, unless you live in Alaska, Texas, Nebraska or Virginia, it behooves you to become familiar with it before it kicks in, full-bore, in 2014.”

She notes that “forty five states have adopted the entire Common Core Curriculum”, and then asks why that’s “so dangerous”.   After all, Federal standards have been with us for decades, ever since Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education in the 1970’s.  So how is this different? 

“Simply put, Common Core is the federal government’s takeover of education. As defined, Common Core “standardizes English and Mathematics for grades K-12.” New, national testing occurs in grades 3-8 and again in grade 10 or 11; that has yet to be determined. But what does all that mean? It means that the federal government now decides what children learn. Neither parents nor local school districts will have any say in what is being taught. Education is being nationalized.” 

And that’s bad why?

Make no mistake about this. Public education is not now, nor has it ever been about reading, writing and arithmetic, that was only a secondary goal.  The real goal was about molding the children of society in order to get an outcome desired by the leaders of society.  In the 1600’s when it first started the goal was to create a society of responsible Christians. 

However, what happens when people with other values control public education?  Try to grasp what is really going on by understanding what has gone on in the past when leftists took over control of the world’s governments.  They soon demanded the right to control everything everyone did, and the most sure way to do that was to control what children are taught.

Let’s take a short trip back to 1930’s and see how Adolph Hitler intended to take complete control of German society.  This is from the Nizkor project which is an ongoing Internet-based project run by B'nai Brith Canada dedicated to countering Holocaust denial.

The reshaping of education and retraining of youth in Germany was a key element to Hitler’s plans.  When the “Nazi conspirators publicly announced the purposes of their educational and training program. Hitler stated at Elbing, Germany: "When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side, and you will not get me on your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to me already.  A people lives forever. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants however now stand in the new camp.” In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community'." (2455-PS)  

Hitler said on 1 May 1937:  "The youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled. *** This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing." (2454-PS)

The first sentence in the official instructors manual for high schools reads: "The German school is a part of the National Socialist Educational order. It is its obligation to form the national socialistic personality in cooperation with the other educational powers of the nation, but by its distinctive educational means." (2453-PS)

Hitler stated in Mein Kampf: "On this basis the whole education by the National State must aim primarily not at the stuffing with mere knowledge, but at the building up of bodies which are physically healthy to the core. The development of intellectual faculties comes only after this." (2392-PS)

Common Core is to America what the ‘reshaping of education and retaining youth’ was to Nazi Germany.  Sound a bit too paranoid?  Yet this has been the historical pattern for much of the rest of the world in the 20^th century.  The patterns of life keep repeating over and over again, whether it was in Nazi Germany, the USSR, China or Japan before the war…or any other socialist totalitarian system, including religious systems such as Islam.  The answer is always in the history books.  The answers may not be pleasant, they may not be acceptable, but even if there are modern variations to any historical foundation from which you can draw conclusions, the end goal is always the same.
 
To determine what's right and what's wrong should be based on two things. Everything has an historical foundation and everything we are told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality. If what is being presented to us by those in responsible positions violate either of those criteria....it's wrong. From that point on we merely have to develop the intellectual argument to show why it's wrong. But that requires being that "tiresome voice of dissent", which is what drives editorials, position platforms, social activism and even pop culture", because no effort can be too small in stifling that dissent!

But we should ask ourselves; why is it so easy to stifle dissent?  Because it's "far easier to muffle the truth than to act on it." “It is definitely more pleasant if no one has to do anything heroic, to plan, or think confrontationally”,  and heterodoxy isn't for the faint of heart - and that’s what central planners count on.