Yearly Archives: 2013

Janice Campbell gets to the heart of what’s wrong with Common Core Standards. Yes, our type of education far surpasses CCS. We don’t have to worry about “our ways” not being “better” than it. The key problem is in what is required. And requirements take time. The minutes – hours you spend working on their requirements, the trivial, are minutes – hours – that are not spent on the worthy. It is wasted time and wasted minds. Just as time spent doing busy-work workbook pages or twaddle reading – or watching twaddle TV or playing videos games for that matter – steals time from the worthy, and creates tastes for the lesser, so is the goal of CCS.

If the goal is to cause students to tune out and despise the art of reading, that [the CCS required types of reading] is exactly the type of text that is needed. Rather than grappling with big, meaty ideas such as truth, justice, and integrity, students will be provided with the mental equivalent of rabbit pellets. Every trivial piece of nonsense students are forced to cover steals time from something more valuable. [emphasis mine]

Quoting from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, she goes on to show the folly of this approach:

“‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman.  And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact.  We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact.”

C. S. Lewis described imagination as ‘the organ of meaning,” and he was right. Great literature engages both mind and heart, evokes interest, and sparks connections in memory. A reduced focus on literature and story means a reduction in the understanding of metaphor, and the ability to think abstractly. [emphasis mine]

And that is why we use real, living books in Lifestyle Education through Discipleship™, always have and always will.

Read the rest of Janice’s article

Wisdom from Theodore Roosevelt

Yesterday I posted Part 1 on Common Core with several links providing information on what it is and why it’s not good. But perhaps you think, We homeschool. This doesn’t affect us. While it may not (at this point) dictate that we have to comply with the Common Core Standards, that certainly doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect us. It surely does.

Aside from affecting us as free citizens and taxpayers, one of the primary ways this is already affecting us as home educators is in some homeschool curriculum being re-written to align with Common Core Standards. I have no fear that homeschoolers would not be able to complete the work required by these standards; as I understand them they are vague, dumbed down and set to produce non-free-thinkers. But even though we go far beyond them, they go another direction, and requirements in them would greatly change the way many of us homeschool if the time comes that we are expected to comply. We all need to fight this at the government level.

At the homeschool curriculum level we need to take a different approach. Although I am saddened to see some homeschool resource providers making changes to align with this detrimental government control, each is doing what they feel is best for their company. We should not be surprised to see companies that are not strictly homeschool providers adopting these standards. Those companies primarily supply government funded schools and would of course meet the standards necessary to sell their materials. For companies that do primarily provide to home educators, the degree to which they are changing things, their motivations, and probably many other factors vary. Our goal is not to come against these publishers, just against Common Core Standards.

As for Me & My House ministries and Lifestyle Education through Discipleship™ resources, we will not change anything in our resources in order to align with Common Core or the directions it is leading. We have never been interested in aligning our own home education nor our company with government standards. In fact just the opposite, we seek to glorify only God and not follow man’s ways. When the ways of man clearly erode liberty (as Common Core does), we choose to not only not follow them, but also to speak up against them, to help others see their dangers.

We are pleased to see many other home education publishers taking a stand to not align with Common Core. If home education companies you buy from are making this stand, be sure to thank them for standing for liberty against further (especially national level) government control of education. (This does not mean that nothing in their resources fulfills CCS. It could co-incidently. It means they have not purposely or knowingly added to or changed their materials to align with CCS.)

If home education companies you buy from do make changes to align to CCS, please don’t make it your crusade to bad mouth them. Rather try to dialogue with them. Find out why they are doing so. Explain the dangers you see in doing so, and if you choose to no longer use their resources, explain to them why. Then move on and devote your energies to fighting Common Core at it’s root. Contacting your state and national government representatives.

If you don’t know where a company stands, ask them. Hopefully they will tell you that they have not and will not align. But if they have aligned or plan to, ask why. Or perhaps they don’t know much about CCS and its dangers. Be an educator. Everyone needs to know about this and be standing against it at the governmental level. Be a fighter at the government level, a gracious educator at the personal level.

We will personally shift from using any resources that purposely change to align with CCS. But since we don’t use standard curriculum or textbooks, I don’t foresee that need coming. Each of you must make your own decision as to what to continue to use.

I also urge you to become well informed on educational issues. Do not turn a blind eye. If you have not already seen the movie Indoctrination, I highly suggest that you do (or read the book). Also for a limited time, the Foundation for American Christian Education is providing, for free, their presentation on the History of Education. You will see that Common Core is not something new that spring out of nowhere. (We’ve found that this presentation works best with the Firefox browser. Some others don’t provide the audio.) And for further in-depth reading, any of John Gatto’s works: The Underground History of American Education (online), Dumbing Us Down, or Weapons of Mass Instruction (I haven’t read the last one yet.)

If you haven’t heard of Common Core Standards, you probably haven’t been around education or the internet lately. Common Core Standards are just the steady progress of national governmental control of education, perpetual dumbing down, and creating cookie cutter cogs in a wheel. Our government seems to think that throwing lots more money at education, making it less independent and one-size-fits-all, and putting it in the jurisdiction of a national committee will solve the dismal decline of literacy in America (as if socialism has ever worked).

Even though CCS came to be in 2010, as with most current government programs full details still are not known. 45 states have chosen to align with standards that aren’t even fully set forth yet. (Remind you of other legislation? “Just pass it. You can read it and we can make it up later.”) States have opted in to get federal money (your and my tax money.) We are glad that our state is one of the handful that has not opted in.

If you aren’t well informed on Common Core Standards and don’t understand the problem with them, below are several links to helpful information. If you don’t think this affects home educators, stay tuned for Part 2.

As quoted in the post just before this one: “This notion that the children belong to the state, that their education must be provided for by the state … is inimical at every step to liberty.” ~ J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937)

Please educate yourself by reading/ watching the information at some of these links.

HSLDA – Common Core State Standards Initiative: Too Close to a National Curriculum
Many more links at the bottom of this article.

Glenn Beck – at Truth in American Education or at the Blaze  IS THE ‘COMMON CORE’ INITIATIVE DUMBING DOWN AMERICA’S STUDENTS?

Heritage Foundation –  A National Education Standards Exit Strategy for States or States Must Reject National Education Standards While There is Still Time

Stop Common Core –  video series What is Common Core?

Classical Conversations issued A Response to President Obama’s New State Standards for Education

My friend, Gina Glenn, has an entire Pinterest page devoted to Common Core articles links

Many other links (that I haven’t read all of) can be found in this blog article – Common Core Primer.

Many decades before Voddie Baucham said … [stay tuned for this one]

J. Gresham Machen noted at the beginning of compulsory education:

“This notion that the children belong to the state, that their education must be provided for by the state … is inimical at every step to liberty.”