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| `Crimes of the Educators` with Alex Numan |
Following Alex Numan`s talk about the history of education in America, Dr Duke Pesta, speaks about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Despite six years of Common Core and about 400 talks in forty different states, he is disappointed that there is still about ninety percent of every audience who does not know what Common Core is. It is for that reason Common Core is winning.
"What is farce?" he asks the audience, and gives a quote from Karl Marx. "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."
"What Marx meant by that is if you win the battle of history, if you tragically transform, then everything that comes next is farce. And Common Core is nothing but pure farce."
He continues: "So Alex took you over 100 years to show you how American Education went from the best in the world... the most equitable - went from all of that to being a tragedy, a tragedy of too much corporate involvement, too much meaningless testing, too little real accountability."
"They have got us dizzy with a thousand different crises every week," explains Pesta. "Trying to pay a mortgage, gas prices, keeping up with everything... Lack of transparency is a huge advantage."
"Say what you like about Obamacare ... it did appear in front of the Supreme Court. None of that happened with Common Core. Nobody was consulted about Common Core. I`ve said it many times in my talks that educational reform is every bit - probably more dangerously transformational than even healthcare, because you`re getting kids - and you are completely warping them with regards to how to view their own government, with regards to how to view their civic responsibilities. You`re shielding them from critical information about what`s made this country successful ... You`re shielding that information, and you`re replacing it with a lot of loaded propaganda."
Pesta identifies the real turning point in American education as taking place after the second world war and provides a quote:
"Far too many people in America, both in and out of education, look upon the elementary school as a place to learn reading, writing and arithmetic..."(1947)
National Education Association.
"They had no intention of leaving it that way." says Pesta. "You heard about Horace Mann; you heard about John Dewey."
"Education for international understanding involves the use of education as a force for conditioning the will of the people..."(1948)
National Education Association"This is globalism. This is UNESCO. The purpose of modern education in post-war America is to transition American kids - not to teach them to read, write and critical thinking - but to transition them to global existence, to global citizenship."
"And by the time you get to 1969:"
"Schools will become clinics whose purpose is to provide individualized, psycho-social treatment for the student, and teachers must become psycho-social therapists..." (1969)
National Education Association.
Well, a lot of these ideas might originate in America but they do cross the Atlantic and are settling into classrooms in Scotland under the guise of health and wellbeing.
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