By now, if you haven’t been living under a rock, like those guys in the old Geico Commercial, you have probably heard of  Common Core.

This is a curriculum being taught in 45 states, whose official purpose is to set a national standard for what American Students in our public schools should know at each grade level.

In other words, it is a “cookie cutter” approach to education.

And, according to Conservative Pundit, Michelle Malkin, it is something that definitely needs to be watched over by concerned parents…

For decades, collectivist agitators in our schools have chipped away at academic excellence in the name of fairness, diversity, and social justice. “Progressive” reformers denounced Western-civilization requirements, the Founding Fathers, and the Great Books as racist. They attacked traditional grammar classes as irrelevant in modern life. They deemed grouping students by ability to be bad for self-esteem. They replaced time-tested rote techniques and standard algorithms with fuzzy math, inventive spelling, and multicultural claptrap.

Under President Obama, these top-down mal-formers — empowered by Washington education bureaucrats and backed by misguided liberal philanthropists led by billionaire Bill Gates — are now presiding over a radical makeover of your children’s school curriculum. It’s being done in the name of federal “Common Core” standards that do anything but set the achievement bar high.

Common Core was enabled by Obama’s federal stimulus law and his Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” gimmickry. The administration bribed cash-starved states into adopting unseen instructional standards as a condition of winning billions of dollars in grants. Even states that lost their bids for Race to the Top money were required to commit to a dumbed-down and amorphous curricular “alignment.”

In practice, Common Core’s dubious “college-ready” and “career-ready” standards undermine local control of education, usurp state autonomy over curricular materials, and foist untested, mediocre, and incoherent pedagogical theories on America’s schoolchildren.

You may be saying to yourself, “Malkin’s gone off the deep end again. It’s just a simple Educational Program. Right?

Wrong.

Fox News reports that…

It’s exactly what critics of the Common Core school curriculum warned about: Partisan political statements masquerading as English lessons finding their way into elementary school classrooms.

Teaching materials aligned with the controversial national educational standards ask fifth-graders to edit such sentences as “(The president) makes sure the laws of the country are fair,” “The wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation” and “the commands of government officials must be obeyed by all.” The sentences, which appear in worksheets published by New Jersey-based Pearson Education, are presented not only for their substance, but also to teach children how to streamline bulky writing.

“Parents should insist on reviewing their children’s school assignments,” said Glyn Wright, executive director of the Eagle Forum, a think tank that opposes implementation of Common Core. “Many parents will be shocked to find that some ‘Common Core-approved’ curriculum is full of inappropriate left-wing notions, disinformation, and fails to teach the truth of American exceptionalism and opportunity.”

The politically charged lesson appears in a worksheet titled “Hold the Flag High,” in which students are taught about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. The assignment asks students to make examples of sentences; “less wordy by replacing the underlined words with a possessive noun phrase.” They are then presented with a half-dozen sentences describing the job duties of a U.S. president.

But if the lessons are meant as a primer on the Constitution, there’s another problem, note critics. The job of making sure laws are fair is not the president’s, but the judicial branch’s. The executive branch’s duty is to administer laws. And the example that places the well-being of the nation above the “wants of an individual” appears to run counter to the basic principles of the Bill of Rights.

There is another danger with Common Core…one that you would find in the old Soviet Union or Modern China.

Conservative/Libertarian Talk Show Host Glenn Beck explains…

One of the aspects of Common Core that hasn’t been discussed at any great length is the idea of creating a new generation, a new work force that has been educated in a specific way.

“Could we, could we just look at that, though, for a second because on the surface, that does sound good. That, oh, they’re going to train for a job. Okay. You’ve got a corporation training people not by choice,” Glenn said. “Let’s say the Glenn Beck School of Broadcast. If you want to come to the Glenn Beck School of Broadcast, you can come to the Glenn Beck School of Broadcast and I’ll teach your kids about history and everything else, all the way up because it will provide great new reporters for TheBlaze, great new filmmakers for TheBlaze. That’s great. That would be your choice.”

“But if Glenn Beck was putting in all of this money and dumping it in because I say ‘I’m going to have all these new trained workers and I’m going to help design the curriculum and everything else,’ if I and a group of other industrialists were all getting together and saying, ‘Let’s do this because this is going to be good for us,’ that’s evil,” he continued.

“That’s one of the aspects of this Common Core thing we haven’t really talked about much is that part of this plan is to pigeonhole the kids into a certain line of work. And they are going to decide, by the time they are in junior high or something, middle school. The plan is to know whether they are going to be a technician, a mechanic or a doctor. And then you funnel them through that system.”

[MICROSOFT’S BILL] GATES: For the first time, there will be a large uniform base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better.

“So let’s just translate. So this is great because it’s going to help kids learn. But, listen to me. There are going to be a long line of customers. Uniform customers,” Glenn said. “I just have to make one product because nobody’s going to get out of that product line… He starts in the beginning talking about how this is a state run, state run, state run. No, it’s not. Why is the U.N. involved in this? It’s state‑run. The governors have been convinced, ‘Oh, they came up with this. No, they didn’t. Don’t you see, you governors, you’ve been played. Now, an honest governor will come out in an honest moment and reflect and say, ‘Gosh, was I played? Wait a minute. What?’ These governors are all taking ownership of this and they didn’t have anything to do with it. And they want to believe that they are changing everything for the better, and they are not.”

“We are dealing with evil. And if you want to look at it just from the standpoint of not manipulating our children with their data and everything else, just look at it. Leftists, just look at it as gigantic corporations going in and controlling your children’s future. Don’t you want your child to be able to say, ‘No, there’s more to me than an employee of Microsoft.’ ‘There’s more to me than an employee of GE or an employee of Google,’” Glenn continued. “Maybe my kid wants to put Google and Microsoft out of business. There’s more to me than just a worker for somebody else. I mean, it’s incredible how we are enslaving ourselves and doing it so clearly.”

For example, in the state of Mississippi, the preparation for a student’s “Common Core Career Path” starts with a computer survey, taken in Middle School. The student answers questions about their likes and dislikes, and, if they have a future job already chosen. After the Guidance Counselor and other School Officials analyze the results of the Survey, they sit down with the students, and map out the rest of their scholastic days, setting a class schedule which would best prepare them for their “Career Choice”.

Since I heard about this “Brave New World” in Education, my question has always been: What if, in, say, 12th Grade, they decide that they would rather have a different job than what they chose for themselves in Middle School?

By that time, they are out of luck, having only had those courses which met the criteria of being applicable to their original job choice.

It seems to me that between the Socialist Ideology being taught in Common Core English Lessons, and the pigeon-holing of students through the use of the “Career Path” initiative, American kids are being programmed by the State (as in the Federal Government).

Sound familiar?

If you put together the information I reported on yesterday, concerning the Discipline Guidelines, issued by the Department of Justice and the Department of Education, the anti-bully (pro-homosexual) national campaign still going on in schools, and the attempts to bar Christianity from America’s Public Schools, it creates a scenario, in many ways, reminiscent of the old Soviet Union.

Somehow, I believe that our Founding Fathers would not have viewed this as the the purpose of an American Education,do you?

Until He Comes,

KJ