Rotten to the Common Core – Part 2

·       --By Bill Evelyn on --

The Immorality of Government Schools

So you think standardized testing is good? Have you ever asked what is the purpose of standardized testing? Standardized testing is a tool to label and carve up children into little groups. Standardized testing is an admission that all children are not the same, but they need to be labeled and grouped by their intellectual capabilities. The Utopian dreamers use the labels to exclude and punish one group of children and include and reward another. Standardized testing is not a creation of moral or humane people, it was created by the bigoted and abusive Utopian dreamer. To embrace standardized testing is arrogant, because it assumes that it accurately assesses every child in the population. The immorality of standardized testing is that it can be rigged to produce whatever outcome the Utopian dreamer mandates. Common Core’s legitimacy is based on its nationwide standardized testing and it purposefully discards the individual for the needs of the state.

There is no evidence that standardized testing in government schools successfully increases literacy rates. ‘The 1840 census indicated that the literacy rate in the United States stood at 93% to 100%. It remained the same at least through the 1870 census and the opening of the first public schools. By 1942 the literacy rate was measured at 96% as the government tested 18,000,000 men signing up for service in World War 2. These men were educated in the 1920′s and 1930′s. The first crack in the literacy rate showed itself during testing of men for the Korean War educated in the 1930′s and 1940′s. Literacy fell to 81% by 1950 and by the Vietnam War with men educated in the 1950′s and 1960′s it fell to 73%.’ 1 A Department of Education commissioned study of literacy in the United States reported in 2006 that 46%-51% of American adults scored below the threshold of functional literacy.

Armed with this knowledge the Utopian dreamer tells us that Common Core, standardized testing, merit pay, longer school days, smaller class size, more homework, career ladders, higher pay for teachers, compulsory kindergarten, and more preschool facilities will reverse course. If these things could improve our schools then we should be living in the Utopian dreamers paradise.

The National Center for Education Statistics reports that spending per pupil has risen 277% since 1961 to a grand total of $610 billion per year (2009). Shall we double down on the spending? When children were not badgered to read by government schools, we had a 98% national literacy rate. Now that children are badgered into reading, we have a 46% national literacy rate. Hmmmm …. My personal story is different. My family provided my primary education, which was supplemented by government school.

One of my earliest memories was the day President Kennedy was shot, because we were sitting and reading in a semi-circle with my first grade teacher Mrs. Dixon. Mrs. Dixon asked each and every student to read aloud several paragraphs from our readers. [Amish children are required to read the Bible aloud in church at the age of eight.] A fourth grader burst-in and interrupted our reading session yelling to Ms. Dixon that President Kennedy had been shot. I probably remember this event clearly because Ms. Dixon became visibly upset and started to cry. We learned to read using phonetics, which is much different than used today for reading instruction.

Samuel Blumenthal explains reading instruction today; “The traditional school used the phonics or phonetic method. That is, children were first taught the alphabet, then the sounds the letters stand for, and in a short time they became independent readers. The new method — look-say or the word method — taught children to read English as if it were Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphics.” 2 The intent of the Utopian dreamers in government schools was not literacy skills, it was socialization skills to model children for the good of the state. Hence the reason why there is a 46% illiteracy rate in the United States. The Utopian dreamer’s plan is actually working well.

Every child is different and learns things at different rates. Use driving a car as an example. Driving a car is perhaps one of the most cognitively difficult skills to master not to include flying. It requires eye hand coordination, an understanding of the instruments, speed control, looking in all directions and in the mirrors, negotiating around other cars, and anticipating incident situations. Controlling a 2,000 lb deadly weapon with the equivalent explosive force of three sticks of dynamite in the fuel tank is very complex. Yet millions of people learn to drive with relative ease. Do any of you wonder why learning to drive was so easy? It is due to the fact you wanted to learn to drive. It is exciting and you apply vast amounts of mental energy to learn this complex task. It is the same with music, algebra, history, English, and the arts.

If your child is extremely excited about music and has no interest in algebra … why should he/she be required or expected to test the same in algebra as a science student in another state? If a future electrical engineer tests high on math skills … why should she/he be required or expected to test the same in history as a budding lawyer from another state? Why should any student be required to test for entry into a liberal arts college when they have absolutely no desire or ambition to go to college. Maybe a child simply desires to be a car mechanic. The standardized test abuses children by categorizing and labeling them in ways that destroy their self-respect and self-ambition. Children are cajoled and forced to learn things that they have no desire to learn and if they refuse they are punished and labeled a problem student. No wonder there is an increase in diagnosed dyslexia and autism. The punishing atmosphere in government schools no doubt contributes, and ‘The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that the number of children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has increased by 16% since 2007. Some six million children aged 4 to 17 allegedly now suffer from ADHD, including one in five high-school males. How are these children to be treated? Simple: Drug them with the amphetamines Ritalin or Adderall.’ 3 We gleefully load up our children with mind altering drugs thinking it is going to make them better. <groan>

The creature we know as government school is the brain child of the Utopian dreamer named John Dewey. Dewey felt that “the one part of our identity that is the most private, the mind, is really not the property of the individual at all, but of humanity, which is merely a euphemism for the collective or the state. That concept is at the very heart of the Orwellian nightmare, and yet the same concept is the very basis of our progressive-humanist-behaviorist education system.” 4

The most immoral change was the way children were taught to read. Since it had been ordained by Dewey and his Utopian dreamer colleagues that literacy skills were to be destroyed in favor of the development of social skills for the good of the collective. That social skill is compliance. They purposefully set into motion a system that would create illiterates and masses that obediently serve the state.

The tolerance American parents display constantly amazes me. They willingly send their children to a big brick jailhouse, into a pressure-cooker of psychodrama, run by jailers they do not know, and taught by pedagogues they do not know. They willfully allow their children to be dumbed-down, punished, abused, categorized, labeled, and shoved into little groups to serve the state. Once the children are labeled and put into groups the pecking order emerges. The acute taunting, mockery, intimidation, and despair due to the indifference of the machine turns into horrifying reality.

Why do parents do this to their children?

1Charles Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of Amercian Education, Oddyseus, 412 pages, page 78

2Samuel Blumenthal, Who Killed Excellence?, MISES Daily, September 1985

3The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

4Ibid.

About Bill Evelyn

Bill Evelyn was raised in the village of Oaks in Valley Forge, PA. Upon graduation from university, Bill entered the United States Air Force and flew F-4 Phantoms in the Philippines, Korea, Europe, did an exchange tour on the USS Midway. Bill has lived in Forsyth County since 2000, longer than any other place in his life. Bill is active in the tea party and Republican Party.