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Breaking: Andrew Cuomo Backs Down - Health Workers Exposed to Ebola Will Self-Quarantine at Home

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wheat-dogg, raker of forests, master of steam10/27/2014 4:28:22 am PDT

re: #269 Wendell Zurkowitz (slave to the waffle light)

We place a lot of practical emphasis on education, which is a good thing in many respects, but I fear that we are failing in teaching basics, like how science works, how history is written and researched as well as basic civics, media and how our political system works.

A lot of very cynical people are exploiting this gap to promote their agendas, which are damaging to America over the long run.

For probably obvious reasons, I’m really concerned with the quality and direction of education in the USA. From my perspective as a foreign teacher in a very top-down, regimented, exam-driven education system, I’m alarmed by the willingness in the States to drive public education toward that model. Meanwhile, a small but alarmingly effective component of society wants to demolish public education in favor of a mish-mosh of charter, religious and private for-profit schools.

The top-down model (NCLB, Common Core, for example) stresses exam results, driving school systems to cut back on the arts and music, and other “soft” subjects that are not being tested. The drive to gut public education removes a common experience (and a politically neutral curriculum) that binds most Americans together.

Predictably, the kind of people who want to segregate their kids in a compartmentalized education system resent and mistrust the Common Core as some kind of government plot. Some of them don’t even trust the AP or IB programs. Since their organization and drive is effective and focused, those are the people who get elected to school boards, who get media attention, and who commandeer the RWNJ media network. They don’t oppose Common Core on its educational merits or demerits. They oppose it because it comes from the Government and (zog forbid) because it encourages students to think and question everything — including the bullshit the RR and RWNJ fringe want students to internalize.