'It Stinks': 10-Year-Old Says Common Core Is 'Nonsense'

Fox News Insider ^ | December 17, 2014

[Kaslin]

10-year-old Elizabeth Blaine dropped the mic at a Montclair, New Jersey, school board meeting Monday night, sharing her support for a policy that lets parents opt out their children from taking the Common Core test, also known as PARCC (Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers).

"I love to read. I love to write. I love to do math. But I don’t love the PARCC. Why? Because it stinks," Elizabeth said.

"This is crazy!" she continued. "I am one of the most gifted students in my grade (or so my mom says) and I have not even the slightest clue as to what this means."

"I am glad my mom and dad are letting me opt out, because I don’t want to deal with this nonsense."

The full text of Elizabeth's speech reads:

I love to read. I love to write. I love to do math. But I don’t love the PARCC. Why? Because it stinks.

[ForYourChildren]

Get your children out of the public schools (government indoctrination centers) - Now!!

[ForYourChildren]

Common Core - America, you’ve been Grubered again.

[ExCTCitizen]

My thoughts exactly...

[OneWingedShark]

Their goals are worthy ones, but they’re implementation just plain sucks.

I don't think their goals are actually their goals, if you know what I mean.

[Fester Chugabrew]

Public school gimmicks have long passed the goal of being a petty annoyance. They are inimical to the state.

[OneWingedShark]

The purpose of Common Core is to destroy learning.
Common Core is a weapon of mass destruction, and its supporters should be tried for treason and crimes against humanity.

John Taylor Gatto explains it all very well in two articles, and it's not just Common Core, but the entire modern Public Education edifice; here's some portions [and links] of the two articles:

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

— John Gatto, Against School

But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:

Out of the 168 hours in each week, my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.

My children watch 55 hours of television a week according to recent reports. That leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.

My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 6 hours getting ready, going and coming home, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours. During that time, they are under constant surveillance, have no private time or private space, and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course, my kids eat, and that takes some time - not much, because they've lost the tradition of family dining, but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals, we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours.

[…]

I want to tell you what the effect is on children of taking all their time from them - time they need to grow up - and forcing them to spend it on abstractions. You need to hear this, because no reform that doesn't attack these specific pathologies will be anything more than a facade.

1. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days and who can blame them? Toys are us.
2. The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what they do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?
3. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they have a continuous present, the exact moment they are at is the boundary of their consciousness.
4. The children I teach are ahistorical, they have no sense of how past has predestined their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.
5. The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, and they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.
6. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. My guess is that they are like many adopted people I've known in this respect - they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so intimate relationships have to be avoided.
7. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically "grade" everything - and television mentors who offer everything in the world for free.
8. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.

— John Gatto, Why Schools Don't Educate

[Talisker]

Great post, thanks.

[maine-iac7]

Their goals are worthy ones, but they’re implementation just plain sucks.

OMGosh - Have you been visiting some other planet for a while?

Their goals are to finish destroying the education of our children. They count on - need- an illiterate people to believe whatever they are told - and vote accordingly.

[OneWingedShark]

You’re quite welcome; but it’s really mostly Mr. Gatto there.

[PA Engineer]

Thanks for the link.

[maine-iac7]

You opine: “CC has put more kids into homeschooling than anything else. It’s a shame too because public school is where kids learn to socialize, get into sports and other team building activities, etc. etc.”

Still swallowing that old canard?

Bulletin: Home schooled kids are not raised/schooled in a bubble. They ‘socialize” with people of all ages - a much more normal situation. they get more schooling in MUCH less time per day, leaving much more time for other pursuits - including time OUTDOORS - and they are legally allowed to play the sports at public schools, if they choose. And the parents and kids that are home schooled aren’t isolated - they have great local associations - gatherings, trips, projects. ,

They DO miss out on public school ‘socializing’ such as “sex” ed. taught by Planned Parenthood personnel, on gay/lesbian indoctrination, on classrooms with teachers espousing that historic hero, “Che”, and such - and upcoming ‘White Privilege” classes.

And homeschoolers aren’t as likely to get bullied without protection, or be surrounded by drugs, or have to start sharing bathrooms with members of the opposite sex who think they aren’t who they are...

I’ve know many homeschoolers - well adjusted, bright, accomplished, EDUCATED, etc.

The old saw of needing public school for ‘socializing’ hasn’t been true for decades...not the kind of ‘socializing’ experienced in public - aka Government Indoctrination Camps - schools today.

People - you need to EDUCATE yourselves on CC

look at these short clips - and others on the YouTube site

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZEGijN_8R0

[khelus]

“Somewhere, I read a tale told in an interview with a little Chinese woman who’d escaped Mao. She spoke of how Common Core is like what she experienced under Mao in school: same stuff, same way of teaching.

She specifically mentioned that people were taught to not think for themselves, and that, in the US, she noticed people could think for themselves. Apparently, this non-independent thinking carries through the lives of people who learn this way.’

“Communism survivor: Common Core looks scary familiar
..................
I am telling you, Chinese children are not trained to be independent thinkers,” she said. “They are trained to be massive skilled workers for corporations. And they have no idea what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 where government ordered soldiers to shoot its own 1,000 students.”

http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/communism-survivor-common-core-looks-scary-familiar/

[Tanniker Smith]

I was referring to the established goals of Common Core (the math part, at least), or the goals of those who implemented it. And have you been in a classroom in a while, on either this or some other planet.

[petitfour]

Have you been in a classroom lately? I am no fan of Common Core. It stinks just like the girl in the article says. However, Common Core must be failing if illiteracy is its goal. I have spent some time in classrooms lately, and the same children who would have learned to read, write, and calculate are the same as when there was no Common Core. I think the math curriculum is garbage. But my children do not seem to have any problems learning what is being taught. They are doing Algebra in every grade now. I think they should focus on fundamentals of addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. Traditionally fourth graders would be doing a lot of long division at this point, but that is not what I am seeing. They are doing seventh grade word problems but using bar graphs to solve the problems.

It is hard to program out the can-do core beliefs of people who have God given freedoms. And speaking of God, I was in a second grade classroom recently, and the students were watching an old Disney (I think) cartoon about Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed was singing a little tune about how “the Lord’s been good to me.” A few hours later, the students were completing a lesson on Johnny Appleseed, and a child who tends to stay in trouble and not complete all of his work looked at me and started telling me about how God takes care of us. Hopefully, his apple seed will grow, and he will become a responsible, freedom loving follower of God when he is an adult.

[jmacusa]

I did this kind of math fifty years ago in Catholic school and I got held back. I wuz robbed!!

[RinaseaofDs]

Common Core - Commie at the core.

[jjsheridan5]

I was a math wiz back in school. I was constantly coming up with new ways to solve problems, and would often find those new methods to be superior. This approach was certainly one of those methods. Methods similar to this are invaluable when attempting to complex problems quickly, and in your head. However, and this is a big “however”, I also tutored a lot of people, at various points. Most were somewhere around average or above average in ability. Teaching methods like this to kids who lack the ability is like trying to teach your dog to fly a plane. It just won’t work. All it will do is create confusion, and get in the way of methods that do work.

[Lurker]

“Why aren’t these kids learning basic math? “

Because that would lead to a basic understanding of economics and Herr Gruber says that’s a bad thing for the American people to have.

That’s why.

[Delta Dawn]

This young lady probably has latent Tea Party tendencies and needs to be sent to a special government education facility. At least until she is 60 or so...

[jmacusa]

I agree. It's generally in the nature of young children that physically and emotionally their brains and minds are not that fully developed yet to the point of understanding, deciphering and solving complex problems and situations nor do they have enough life experience to do so. And when kids run into such situations they will more often than not turn to adults for help and guidance. And it's in this that I find Common Core so destructive and pernicious because without enough life experience and emotionally maturity children will think and do what adults tell them to even if it's just to please adults. "When a man tells me "I am not on your side'' I say "Who are you? We already have your children''.-- Adolph Hitler.