An Alternative to the Common Core
For much of our modern era, our culture thought of the human heart as a machine that would wear out after a given number of heart beats. People with heart disease were put in bed to prolong their lives.That is a quote from this op-ed in the Ogden Utah Standard-Examiner, which I am going to urge you to read. The author is Lynn Stoddard, a retired educator from Utah now in his 80s, who is perhaps best known for his development some 25 years ago of an approach called Educating for Human Greatness (and which is now promoted in the revised book he co-wrote with Anthony Dallman-Jones).Lynn's approach is very different than what we are seeing in the current version of the standards movement. The best way to grasp is to take the time to read the relatively brief op ed (from which I am not allowed to quote further - again, you can read it here
Below the fold I want to place it in the larger context of the current thrust in educational policy.
"Taking Out Dick Lugar" - Dana Milbank without snark
When Indiana Republicans go to the polls on Tuesday, they will do more than choose a candidate for the Senate. They will choose between party and country.So begins this well written column by the usually snarky Dana Milbank. In it he provides a clear contrast between Senator Dick Lugar, certainly no liberal but an important voice for nuclear sanity, and the the tea-party hothead and favorite Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock. The second paragraph clearly indicates the thrust of the column:
That’s a stark assessment but true. On one side is a man who has made it his life’s work to build a cross-aisle consensus for keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states. On the other side is a man who mocks his opponent for such efforts and who talks more about fighting Democrats than fighting America’s enemies.Milbank not only goes through the important achievements of Lugar's tenure in the Senate, such as the1992 Nunn-Lugar Act "which has disarmed thousands of Soviet nuclear warheads once aimed at the United States." He also shows how Mourdock has distorted statements of President Obama to try to tarnish Lugar with being insufficiently conservative: Mourdock cuts off a presidential statement about working with Obama without