Animal Farm is a more basic expression of the totalitarianism-as-helping-the-people theme.
1984 goes into the dynamics of crushing the human spirit and perverting the service vocations into servants of evil. A 12-year-old is smack in the middle of learning to trust the mechanisms of society to be what they claim to be, and not think her teacher, for example, is keeping a dossier on her and her parents to send them to a concentration camp.
One of the most fundamental tactics of the Left is raping childhood. They are obsessed with shattering children's spirits and crippling them while they are still native and vulnerable, by exposing them to truths beyond their maturity level so they have no context to guide them. That's the strategy behind Common Core, too - deny the stability of straightforward basics and replace them with advanced alternatives and theories without any supporting context or knowledge. This strategy creates existential despair that, because its done so early in life, destroys their ability to climb out of it by emotionally overwhelming them.
It's very carefully thought-out, cold-blooded, methodical evil.
I agree. Even without Common Core, I was exposed to plenty of that existentialistic garbage in my private prep school (Waiting for Godot, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Floating Opera) in early high school. My wife’s Canadian French immersion did not provide Balzac, but rather modern nihilistic post-Sarte existentialist Swill (not even Victor Hugo, which at least is classic French literature).
Common Core formalizes, nationalizes, and streamlines the process.