Scarecrows Countering Common Core
We seem to be caught up in a national hysteria that confuses association with cause. Everywhere there is talk of “graduation rates” and being “college-ready”. There is a monochrome drumbeat about moving lock-step through a series of educational steps that equate with career-ladder steps. And I know well the history of public education as a sine qua non for the inexorable employment demands of the industrial revolution.
But regardless of its potential manifestation as an employment-readier, education ought not to be about training workers to be capitalist cogs. This approach is backwards, violating the existential right of a child’s development. We bring life to our babies and want them to develop an understanding and appreciation of the vast possibilities that human intellect and talent and insight has brought to bear on our civilized world. There are so many ways to be and things to learn and possibilities for contributing to society meaningfully. Building the tools to be a part of this is the meaning of education: that is what we parents should want to bring to our child’s educational plate.
But it takes a lot of time to get a good sampling of these possibilities, time and