Originally published at the Virginia Free Citizen. Reprinted by permission
Article 2 in a series on Common Core
For those of you who don’t know who or what the Greatest Generation was, it was, for senior citizens of today, most likely your parents; for the younger generation it was likely your grandparents, and for the very youngest generation, it might even have been your great-grandparents. People from that generation grew up and went to school during the Great Depression. They fought and won two world wars—WW II and the Korean War. They did a lot with very little. They were creative and inventive, because they had to be. The motto, “Necessity is the Mother of Invention” aptly applies to that generation.
The Greatest Generation had a Traditional Education, unlike our education today, that is Outcome-Based Education, and/or Common Core Education. They are credited with developing and inventing many of the things that we use and take for granted today. To quote Tom Brokaw, who named them the Greatest Generation, they were
a generation of towering achievement and modest demeanor, a legacy of their formative years when they were participants in and witness to sacrifices of the highest order.
Let me state again, that they had a Traditional Education. They gave us things like penicillin, transistors for radios and such, color TV, computers, tape recorders, Tupperware, microwaves, Velcro, Duct Tape and much, much more.
The United States had the worlds’ greatest education system back then, but since about 1958, student performance began hitting a snag, and since 1970, it has basically flat lined while total cost and the number of employees has steadily risen. Incidentally, enrollment has only increased slightly. See the chart here: Public School Spending. “Officials” vs. “Some Critics”(Cato)
In 1983, “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform” made the headlines, and local, state and federal people turned their attention to education reforms. Good money was thrown after bad. As one retired teacher of the 70s and 80s explained, he couldn’t say how many times he has sat in dynamic workshops on “new ideas” to make education better and thought “didn’t we do this twelve years ago under a different name, and it didn’t work then, either?”
So, what has happened with education reform?
Over the past five decades, and now moving into the sixth decade, education has failed to improve. Our federal government has been inserting itself into education and our schools more and more, decade by decade, and taking parental responsibility from parents and giving it to school people; much of it heaped on the shoulders of teachers. Think busing, sex education, after school programs, breakfast for students, school lunch restrictions, and mounds of regulatory paperwork.
Today, teachers are not only instructors, they are mommy/daddy, nurse, counselor, advisor, clothing provider, babysitter and more.
It’s little wonder that teachers no longer have the time to do all that is required of them to actually teach the “three Rs.” Teachers are pushed to their limits—some even to the point of leaving the profession.
Along with federal government interference into education, came an ample amount of Progressive indoctrination. In some cases, classroom authority has also been taken away from teachers. They are no longer the authority in their own classrooms. I’m sure many of you reading this remember school days when you were expected to be well-behaved. A report sent home to your parents when you weren’t, meant you were in “big trouble.”
Today, President Obama is calling for more leniency in the classroom, that some students just can’t help it when they act out, so teachers should be more understanding. Why should educators and other students have to put up with children that don’t behave? And, yes, safety may even be an issue when students are allowed to “act out.”
There are other issues about how we got from the Greatest Generation to our schools of today and Common Core.
From the United Nations to Common Core
The United Nations has a tremendous influence on education and our schools, starting in 1948, with the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights Treaty,” ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1976. It provides for international human rights principles and practices that hint at an involvement in our education.
By 1989, U.N. involvement in lives in no longer a hint. The “Treaty on The Rights of the Child,” that year, is very invasive into the lives of families.
The United States is one of only two countries that has not ratified it.
Parents should really be concerned about it and work to prevent it from being ratified, if they wish to remain the parental authority over their own children. Here are just a few provisions in it:
- If a child disagrees with a decision his or her family makes, that child is granted a review of that decision by the government.
- Children can choose their own religion.
- Children can sue their parents.
- Schools that don’t teach “alternative worldwide views” go against Article 29 of the treaty.
For more information on this, check out Parental Rights.org and review the 20 Things You need to know about the UN Agenda to Remove Parental Rights of the Child.(PDF)
In 1992, the Agenda 21 Initiative came into fashion with its own chapter on “Education, Public Awareness & Training.” Since this is an initiative, it doesn’t have to be ratified by our U.S. Senate. People around the world and in our country have promoted it, so many of its provisions are just happening.
In 2000. we have UNESCO’s “Education for All by 2025.” Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledge $60 BILLION in grants to the U.N. Money can buy anything! There were other treaties and initiatives along the way, but this will give you an idea of the influx of U. N. ideology into our lives and schools.
In 2008, then candidate for president, Barack Obama, promoted a “Global Fund for Education: Achieving Education for All.” (related link-Brookings) He called for U.S. taxpayers to pay for the education of the world at $7 BILLION annually. And, in November 2010, U. S. Secretary of Education, Arnie Duncan, spoke at the UNESCO meeting in Paris, on “The Vision of Education Reform in the U.S.,” saying “The Obama administration has an ambitious and unified theory of action that propels [their] agenda,” with one of the goals being “to close the achievement gap.”
What’s the quickest way to close the gap? Certainly it will take time to bring lower-achieving students who might learn more slowly up to snuff, so the question is: How quickly can the higher-achieving students be dumbed down?
Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with Marc Tucker, had a plan to change America into a cradle-to-the-grave system, with a web of labor-market boards and an education system designed specifically to provide a workforce. President Clinton also gave us Goals 2000, many goals being based on Outcome-Based Education. One specific goal was having a 90% graduation rate. That would be wonderful to reach, but a decade later in 2010, according to edweek.org, the graduation rate was still only 74.7% nationally.
In Chicago, a firestorm of personalities came together—Bill Ayers, Vartan Gregorian and Barack Obama. You may remember Bill Ayers, the former 60s/70s terrorist leader of the Communist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the founder of another Communist group, the Weather Underground that bombed government buildings and police stations. Back then, he told our youth to “Kill the police; Kill your parents . . .”
After college and his reign of terror, he became a professor at the University of Illinois, in Chicago, educating future teachers. In 1995, Ayers and Vartan Gregorian, who was born in Persia (now Iran), chose Barack Obama to head up the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a $49.2 million school-reform project. That money was used to fund many of Ayers’ radical organizations.
Linda Darling-Hammond, an associate of Bill Ayers, was Barack Obama’s Education Director for then President Obama’s Transition Team into the White House. A Stanford professor, she is deeply involved in the development of the Common Core State Standards, and now is a high-ranking member of the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium (SBAC), one of two consortiums developing testing for CC. The other one is Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).
Let’s go back to Vartan Gregorian. You already know that he was born in Persia. He is CEO of Carnegie Corp. of NY that funds Muslim organizations, some with known connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. He is also a board member of U. S.-based, Qatar Foundation International, an organization that promotes, among other things, education that connects cultures and global citizenship. Qatar Foundation International, part of Qatar Foundation has a direct line to Al Jazeera and the Muslim Brotherhood, and into our schools through Qatar K-12 curriculum for public, private and home schools and college undergrad to PhD curriculum. (http://www.qfi.org/list/89/2/Global-Schools-Network) By the way, Vartan Gregorian is also the author of the book Islam, a Mosaic Not a Monolith that establishes the Islamic goal of world dominance.
In 2009, President Barack Obama flew to Cairo, Egypt, to give a speech. There, he asked the Qatar government to “Connect all schools” by Internet; the idea being that students in a classroom in one country could connect to students in a classroom in another country.
see: Muslim Brotherhood group to ‘connect all U.S. schools (WND)
That might even be a “cool” idea, it the Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t doing the connecting.
The ongoing series can be found on the Virginia Free Citizen
Copyright ©2014 The Virginia Free Citizen. All Rights Reserved