Well, Jim, I care. I cared back in 1986 when I took my two children out of Jane Addams Elementary School and taught them and their two younger siblings at home for the next 17 years. And I care now. That's why I work with my grandchildren and others as a reading mentor.
But you are looking at the fruit and not the root of the problem. Common Core did not bring us to the point of being in the bottom third of international standings in literacy. Centralization of education with the creation of the Department of Education and the concomitant infusion of federal dollars (read: Control) was the womb in which Common Core was conceived. But our nation's plunge into educational mediocrity was a done deal many years before 1979.
Enter: Revolution by Education.
In far away Cambodia in 1975, a Communist dictator named Pol Pot methodically shot anyone who wore glasses because it meant, or suggested, their ability to read, to think for themselves. The nation was purged of its intelligentsia so that Communism could flourish.
Whereas Cambodia had her Pol Pot, America had her John Dewey.
Dewey and his Marxist buddies took over the teacher colleges and began to intentionally remove the pedagogical pillars that created a strong, private mind, able to think for itself. They developed curricula that turned the classroom into a psych lab and produced the collective mind, a character that was fitted for their vision of a utopian socialist America. How so?
They destroyed literacy.
They threw out phonetics and spelling, inserted "whole language," and "new" math. They amalgamated Geography and History into "social studies." One of their biggest triumphs was The Workbook with fill-in-the-blank exercises that an average chimp could be trained to do. For instance, if a child sees C_T and is tasked with inserting a vowel for an animal that goes "meow," he will write in "A". But what is imprinted on the brain is "A", not CAT. This is just one small example of the subterfuge involved. The English language is based on a sound-symbol alphabet, but these men substituted look-say which is based on the Oriental method of symbol-word language. English does not have a pictograph for the thing we call a tree. We see t-r-ee and sound it out. Sight words can be grasped for awhile, but by fourth grade the child is frustrated, confused, and bored. Sex and drugs can be very enticing to a 10 year old whose mental escape hatches have been locked.
Cursive writing has been replaced with truncated texts. They've been taught to save the planet instead of their own souls. The aid of the medical-industrial complex has been enlisted to morph normal, energetic little boys into zombies, lest they grow into men who ask questions. They enter their ejukashun adventure with their bodies containing more neuron-tangling mercury from mandated vaccines than is considered safe by the EPA. Their parents need not prepare a bowl of hot oatmeal or scrambled eggs or pack them a brown bag; they can have a federally-funded chemical shit storm for breakfast and lunch, provided by corporate caterers who are beholden to stockholders' profits rather than children's ability to stay awake during their Globalism 101 class.
A gun to the head or the bloodless coup of illiteracy; is the end not the same?
America is stupid.
America is conquered.
