"Common Core" is the latest label placed on the idea of national school curriculums. Deciding what our children are to be taught is too large a prize for the corpro-fascist state to leave in the hands of parents, communities, or even whole states. And make no mistake, the power to decide what is taught at public schools across the whole nation will not escape politicization. Not when the power to set what the educational outcomes should be is taken that far out of the hands of the families and communities where the children actually sit and learn. Education of your children just becomes one more lever every group with an agenda can fight over.
Common Core must necessarily take power further away from the parents of the individual child being educated and deposit that power in a central location. After all, if there is only one set of standards for everyone, then there is only one set of deciders for what those standards should be. If community "A" has one vision for their children's learning, and other communities have different ideas, then who decides?
The localist solution is that each community decides for it self. Each will learn what works for them and what they want to borrow from the others. Common Core's answer is that we all get absorbed into one collectivist blob, and the self-important Masters of the Universe pick out what they want from that blob and impose it on everyone.
The localist solution represents true diversity. It represents the triumph of the free market of ideas as applied to education. Common Core represents the phoney synthetic non-sensical "diversity" of the other side. It is a vision of "uniform diversity", a contradiction where the state determines from a central location what respect for diversity means. It will therefore control whose views are promoted in the name of "tolerance" and "diversity." It will likewise control whose views are dismissed as "bigotry" and "intolerance" in the name of diversity. None of this will be the decision of any individual parents anymore, or any even any local school districts. Nor any state. The collective will now give one answer, "the" answer, to which others are expected to agree.
Common Core is the antithesis of freedom, and of free market principles in education. It is the end of innovation. What the Five Year Plans were to economic innovation and productivity, common core will be to educational innovation and productivity. Oh they will go to great lengths to push changes in technology and technique regarding how ideas are disseminated, but progress and innovation in what is really important, the ideas themselves, will be a dead letter.
The organic, true "Common Core" consisted of a classical body of knowledge passed from one generation to the next over a thousand years of Western Civilization. In addition to true innovation, we will also lose this true and natural common core once called "classical education". A torch of knowledge passed on by our forebears for a thousand years will be dropped and extinguished in our generation. The new ruling elites just have so many ideas about what they want to do with those school hours you see. And much of what made Western Civilization what it was conflicts with post-modern thinking, and therefore will be jettisoned.
Because the Constitution does not give the Federal Government any authority whatsoever on the issue of education, it has become necessary for Fedgov to use its printing press to bribe the states into surrendering their authority. Of course, there should be no printing press either, but the power to create money from thin air is among the first extra-legal powers those who desire to be tyrants give to themselves. It is the master key which gives them the power to, over time, acquire to themselves all other powers as well. This is why, of all possible political philosophies, only Localism can resist the centralization of government power into one place. Even anarchist theorems have no defense against the fiat printing press. But I digress, with regards to Common Core, despite bribing states with their own citizen's money to cede control over education standards to Washington, some states are resistant.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett recently made the decision to delay the implementation of Common Core. Not stop it mind you, but apparently he wanted a few things sorted out before proceeding. Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson wrote a letter to Corbett which many have interpreted as a veiled threat to with-hold projects and charitable contributions to the state unless the state casts aside its doubts and cedes control of education to the people behind the curtain who are running Common Core. Tillerson does not say it so bluntly of course, and he repeats the lie that Common Core was put together by parents and educators.
Obviously if it really was the work of a broad segment of Pennsylvania parents and teachers then the state would not have to be bribed and pressured into implementing it. One does not have to go through Washington and back to implement one's own ideas. These are the ideas of the ruling class wrapped up in the lie that they are our own ideas in order to fool us into "taking ownership" of their ideas for us. Common Core will do for education what Obamacare is presently doing to health insurance.
I am amazed at how many people take transparently false claims at face value just because them come from someone in a position of authority, even though most also realize that our present authorities are corrupt. Tillson also claims that Common Core is a state program because states can decide how they will implement the standards and goals given to them by others. Just because your boss gives you some leeway in how to accomplish the goals he gives you does not mean that you are your own boss.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee tried that same con years ago, referring to such an arrangement as "local control of schools" while describing (and carrying out) policies which did the exact opposite. They take a buzz phrase that sounds good to people and slap it on a program which does the exact opposite, seemingly without a pang of conscience. I have concluded that if we continue to be too polite to call them out for lying to us, they are going to keep lying as long as it works. Since I have had enough of being lied to, when someone lies to me, I am going to call it what it is. If you are also tired of being lied to, I suggest you join me in that practice.
Big corporations are among those interest groups who would like a say in what your child's education looks like. For example, they would love to shift their job training costs off unto the backs of taxpayers. This idea used to be called "Workforce Education", and it is still around. The idea is that local boards filled with whichever employers have the most political pull get to sit around a table and say "We need X number of nurses and Y number of machine operators". Public dollars would then be used to train workers for those fields from about the age of 16 and up. Of course whoever gets on this board is going to ask for a number far in excess of their actual needs so that they can cherry pick the best. Nor can any such government panel keep up with the fast-changing needs of our modern technological society.
This sort of thing will naturally cut into the sort of general and broad-based education where a core body of knowledge was passed from one generation to the next. But of course worker drones don't need the connected sense of ideas necessary for self-government, because that sort of thing is not in the new plan.
My friends, the enemies of liberty have detailed and integrated plans to centralize power and control of your life into their hands. If you desire to resist them, you must also have an integrated philosophy of government, one with a systematized approach to blocking the centralization of power. If you try to fight back piecemeal, unaware of how they lay the foundation for future victories, the battle will be lost by the time you see the need to fight it. An integrated philosophy allows one to see the truth threat in things which are passed off as innocent or even helpful. Localism is that philosophy of government. The rules for corporations, money, political parties, and federalism all had to be altered before the centralizers could put us in this terrible position in education.
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