DOES COMMON CORE LEAD TO FEDERAL TYRANNY?

What Homeschool parents need to know about the common core

http://hedua.com/blog/homeschool-common-core/

Home Educating Family Association - Rob Shearer – 6/12/2013

The Common Core Standards controversy grows as conservatives and homeschoolers increasingly dig in their heels to denounce and oppose the standards. The opposition genuinely puzzles many elected officials and education bureaucrats. They’re scratching their heads because the Common Core Standards seem (to them) to be innocuous.

There are powerful forces at work trying to make fundamental changes in the American education system. The Common Core Standards are one piece of a larger movement. In and of themselves they are not alarming. The larger movement is.

The educrats dream of a day when every student in America will receive exactly the same education, using the same textbooks and lesson plans. Those textbooks and lesson plans will, of course, be developed by the best and the brightest, who will pass them down on tablets of stone. The worker bees and drones will be programmed to follow them exactly. This is a nightmare scenario, one which anyone who believes in individual rights, local control, and federalism should oppose at every opportunity. The Common Core Standards become dangerous when they form a stepping stone which helps to move the educrats’ vision forward.

A national testing and comprehensive student database is being built to measure students’ progress, ostensibly in learning the skills laid out in the Common Core. The creation and use of this testing program and database was made a requirement for any state which wanted to receive education funding under the Stimulus Act.

The educrats have run wild with the possibilities. A February 2013 draft report from the federal Department of Education has set off alarm bells. This report calls for gathering, collating, and analyzing a wide array of non-academic data in order to assist students in developing the character traits of “grit, tenacity, & perseverance.”

This goes far beyond the Common Core Standards and should be denounced from the rooftops for all the obvious reasons.

What we oppose is top-down federal control and the imposition of a national curriculum and national standards. And we most deeply oppose the central government’s presumption in thinking that it can or should take over responsibility for shaping our children’s character and attitudes. Such a move is not merely impractical or unwise; it is tyranny.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” – C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (1948)

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