Here’s the petition, but please read below first.
http://commonstandards.wordpress.com/

This is outside the scope of what I usually do on this blog, but I am so fed up with the never-ending schemes of the reformers to manipulate children into their ill-conceived ideas of what they “should” be that I feel the need to do something on the issue of common standards.

Thus, a simple petition to draw attention to what I think is an obvious hypocrisy, not to mention irony. Our country is run, at the political, business and social levels, by a people educated without the new common standards. If this inadequately equips one for leadership and life, then it seems the very people proposing the common standards actually have no leg upon which to teeter. Why should we accept their ideas and not others? They’ve only been able to reach a consensus through compromise anyway, so what we’ve ended up with is not an ideal but a collection of concessions.

And once we embrace said standards, who will be left to correct our course if we start to suspect we’re wrong? Or maybe we’ll never know, since we all only know the same things.

There’s more irony than this, though. The truth is that education is already far too common from school to school, far too the same for every child. No Child Left Behind helped get us there, but it began with the start of modern public schooling in the mid-1800s.

Adding further to the irony, it’s not that I think they’ll actually pull off common standards. It’s that they’ll do even more damage in the process of trying than they’ve already done or might otherwise do. At least now, there’s still a little space for a passionate teacher to share his or her specialty and light some intellectual fires, for some rogue teacher to allow students to pursue their own interests to the nth.

Is the desire for homogeneity, control, measurability and comparability so strong that we’re bent on tracking down the last remnant of originality or innovation so we can stamp it to death with a common curriculum?

Please share this pass-along (no signature required) petition – first with your governor, then with your friends and colleagues. Let’s make a statement.

Related reading: Common Standards Alarm

This page will be devoted to things we can all do to help in specific situations where the freedom of parents to direct their children’s education is threatened. Items will be removed from this page when there is no longer a need for action.

Homeschoolers in Russia Threatened: Please e-mail or write
Info: http://www.hslda.org/hs/international/Russia/201008230.asp

Homeschoolers in Botswana Threatened: Please e-mail or write
Info: http://www.hslda.org/hs/international/201009030.asp

United States: Petition to Object to Common Standards
Note: This is an issue that will come to haunt private and homeschoolers
Petition: http://commonstandards.wordpress.com/

The Common Standards outlines for math and English/language arts have a professor of education up in arms. Professor William G. Wraga, of the University of Georgia, Athens, says there’s a big hole in the standards — they fail to address the interdisciplinary purpose of educating students for democracy.

“…the standards, in effect, envision a single purpose for schooling: education to serve economic interests,” he writes.

“Why is this blind spot so dangerous?” he continues. “Historically, centralized control of school curriculum has served as a political tool of totalitarian states. Clearly, these common standards are intended to increasingly centralize and standardize curriculum in the United States.”

He grants that the standards were not fashioned for intentional anti-democratic purposes, but he stands by his assertion that they will result in said dénouement and that the real original intention of American schooling – training as democratic citizens – is indeed, at dire risk.

Mr. Wraga again: “Arguably, education for democratic citizenship is the historic national goal of education in the United States. Thomas Jefferson asserted: ‘Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree.’” He also calls on George Washington, then concludes:

“Preparation for citizenship in a democracy must be a substantive, expressly signified component of the common core for all students in the United States.”

Okay, where to begin… Professor Wraga is right about two things: Historically, public schools have been a major tool of tyrants, and our founders did believe that a good general education was important for the preservation of the type of government they envisioned and fashioned.

But – what our founders were thinking about in the way of education in no way resembles what Horace Mann, et al, gave us. If you have your doubts, take a look at what their own educations consisted of – surely they had in mind something at least resembling this (there were some blatant exceptions, like Benjamin Rush).

The reality we ended up with was and is meant to do exactly what the tyrants that so concern Mr. Wraga have always used it for – educate citizens for the state.

Here’s Horace Mann himself – great father of public schooling — on the claim he feels the state has on children:

After a child has arrived at the legal age for attending school, whether he be the child of noble or of peasant, the only two absolute grounds of exemption from attendance are sickness and death. The German language has a word for which we have no equivalent either in language or in idea. The word is used in reference to children, and signifies due to the school; that is, when the legal age for going to school arrives, the right of the school to the child’s attendance attaches, just as, with us, the right of a creditor to the payment of a note or bond attaches on the day of its maturity. — Life and Works of Horace Mann: Vol. III (Boston: Life and Shepard Publishers, 1891)

The Germany to which Mann refers is the same country that bowed to Adolf Hitler just forty years after Mann’s glowing recommendation of its school policies. Germany’s schools turned out to be easy prey for Hitler, who quickly turned them into temples to himself and Nazi theory.

So, is the peril of common standards that citizens will not be educated for democracy? No. The failure to educate children to protect their own liberties has been going on in American schools for a very long time and is demonstrably a key function of them.

If common standards add any more danger to U.S. education than already exists, it will be the fact that they move schools even further from the possibility of the innovation it would take to make any true difference and yet closer to the standardization and uniformity that suffocate excellence.

The people who wield power over schooling in our country are slowly annihilating anything that remotely resembles education. I won’t judge their motives, but motives don’t really matter. As author and political philosopher Isabel Paterson wrote:

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. – The God of the Machine

Good motives or bad, the results are the same when they are applied via the police power of the state.

Finally, not that anyone trying to reform American education today cares what someone like John Stuart Mill had to say, but let’s hear him out anyway:

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body. – From On Liberty

The danger is in choosing the state as the primary means to equip our children for life. It’s a danger that grows with the practice of it and is remedied not by reform but by abandonment – the self-defining act of walking away and doing something better.

The great thing about independent education options is that we’re free to focus on excellence.

We don’t need to preface every change we want to introduce with long, depressing stories and studies about the pathologies of the human condition. We know they exist, we know what they are, we know we all have them, and we know they’re more complicated than any school program can address.

We know and we move on. We move on because we also know a lot of what is good, and we know that doing and offering what is good is a great way to overcome what is bad.

So we create good things. Other people see that they’re good and they want to participate. And the good things grow. And other people get inspired and create more good things.

There’s not just one good way to do education. There’s not just one good set of material to learn. There’s not just one good way to be prepared for life. There’s not even just one good way to be prepared for college.

There are lots of good ways to live and to get better at living, and that’s what education is all about.

A new study, reports Home School Legal Defense Association — Exploring Academic Outcomes of Homeschooled Students,* by Michael F. Cogan shows that homeschoolers are not just succeeding in college, they’re continuing their above-average tradition.

Consider this: 

• Homeschoolers scored higher on the ACT (26.5) compared with the overall student body (25).
• Homeschoolers earned more college credit (14.7) prior to their freshman year compared to the student body (6).
• Homeschooled students earned a higher fall semester GPA (3.37) when compared to other freshman students (3.08).
• Homeschooled students earned a higher first-year GPA (3.41) when compared to other freshman students (3.12).
• Homeschooled students earned a higher fourth-year GPA (3.46) when compared to other freshman students who completed their fourth year (3.16).

  The evidence for independent education just keeps mounting. The evidence damning education by the state also keeps mounting.

  As the state gasps and grasps, we must all help to keep the option of freedom before parents. If they don’t know it can work, if they don’t know how many others are doing it, they can’t make the choice. 

* http://i.bnet.com/blogs/homeschool.pdf?tag=content%3Bcol1

Here’s a wonderful idea – Vacation Liberty School. Even better, they provide everything you need to run your own.

It’s short – like VBS – five days for 2.5 hours a day or five weeks at one afternoon or evening each. Children ages 10-15 learn, from a Christian perspective, all about the founding of America.

The lessons on liberty, tyranny, economic freedom, the connection between faith, hope and charity and liberty, and more are chockfull of hands-on activities that make them memorable.

You’ll find video clips, lesson plans, outlines for planning the logistics of the whole thing, and lots more at their web site. I’d wager that many of you could adapt the program for other age groups or types of people (how about immigrants?).

This is an easy, doable, important idea. Great for homeschool groups, church groups, private schools, communities, your neighborhood!

Take a look at this chart that shows an overview of the program. It will entice you to plunge in and start doing your own.

[Many thanks to Frances for letting me know about the article this piece refers to.]

Let’s say you have your children in a daycare situation and you discover that the provider is failing to do what they said they would, including keeping your children mentally stimulated and physically safe. Children are exposed to bullying, have easy access to toxic substances and are left largely to fend for themselves. They are bored, victimized, afraid, neglected and deteriorating or stagnating by every measure.

What would you do? Would you:

A) Remove your children from the daycare
B) Contact authorities to have the facility’s license revoked
C) Increase the amount of time your children spend at daycare

Almost everyone at every level of government, across the political spectrum, from every walk of life, agrees that American public schools are doing a poor job of educating children, as well as a poor job of keeping them emotionally and psychologically healthy and physically safe.

The federal government, via its education spokesperson, Arne Duncan, says it thinks the solution is: C) Increase the amount of time children spend at school, with possibilities reaching 12-14 hours a day, seven days a week.

Public schools, Mr. Duncan thinks, are the solution to — everything, apparently: childcare needs, poor test scores, social ills, you name it. The more time children spend there, the better.

It’s not that Mr. Duncan thinks schools are okay as they are. He doesn’t. But he has solutions for that, too — and I quote, “Nothing moves people as quickly as the opportunity for more funding, especially at a time like today.”

More time, more money, more testing — these are the answers.

Let’s wrap this up just so we’re clear on things: Take a system of education that is failing children in every imaginable area, expand its role in children’s lives, use methods of forcing improvement that have never worked before, and — voila! Um, I said Voila!

[Many thanks to Frances for sending a link to this story.]

Graduate Erica Goldson, valedictorian of Coxsackie-Athens High School’s (NY) class of 2010, shares on her blog her deep disappointment with her education and explores what it means to become educated.

A look at the school’s web site will let you know immediately that its personnel think it’s doing quite well. The photographs paint a picture of a happy, nurturing and exciting place where children are living up to their potential, Erica’s contrary opinion aside.

This is what happens when school becomes a bureaucracy of the state — committees are formed, special interests are lent an ear, agendas are proposed and plans fashioned to execute those agendas. Everyone is so excited to see that others will now be required to concede that their ideas are wonderful enough to elicit the backing of the state.

And what about the people — children — upon whom these agendas are enacted? Tsk, tsk. What a question. The agendas and plans and programs speak for themselves. Aren’t they beautiful? Aren’t they so organized? Aren’t they so measurable? Won’t we get the niftiest stats out of it all? Isn’t this a good cause? If the children rebel or balk at them, well, clearly the problem is the children. It’s obviously not us.

And if children are a problem, we clearly need more committees and agendas and plans, all informed by “experts” and special interests who know exactly why children are bucking our beautiful plans for them. So we form our committees and we get medicated children and therapized children and specially educated children and labeled children and children pressured by frightened and threatened parents.

It’s all so much fun. And to prove the children are having fun, we catch them in moments of laughter, at least the ones who are laughing, and we take pictures of them and put them on our web sites and in our PR materials. Aren’t our children happy?

And then a valedictorian comes along and suggests she was ill-educated and bored in school and that over a decade of her life has been wasted by the well-meaning people who run her school. And, well, what do we say?

That’s the great part. There’s no need to say anything. Public education is too big and powerful and useful to be brought down by a few cranky kids who get a glimpse of what their education might have been.

But it’s important for the kids to keep speaking. It will inspire other kids to take a look at their own situations, and it might even inspire a few teachers to take a closer look at themselves. Maybe it will help some of the children under “remediation” realize they are not the problem.

Neither the kids nor the teachers will be able to make much of a dent in the system, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll consider freedom.

The more who do, the more opportunity will be created for others. That’s how something worthwhile grows — people act freely and inspire others by their example. Then more people act freely. In freely acting and exploring and seeking, people find meaning for their lives and create possibility.

This is what America is about — the liberty to create a fulfilling life, to live for a purpose other than the growth of government and the gratification of do-gooders and do-badders who have learned they can employ the state (in every sense of that word) to effect their various agendas.

Hats off to Erica and to every other young person who has the courage to question the system. May many more follow in your footsteps.

On its web site, the National Education Association has a nifty list of what it calls “Diversity Events” for the entire year.

All manner of religious holidays show up on the list, as well as things like Independence Day and Ghandi’s birthday. Then there are things you might expect, like International Literacy Day; some cutesy celebrations that may or may not do any good, like No Name Calling Week; and a few truly odd things, like “Completion of Transcontinental Railroad in 1869″ (though what these have to do with diversity is a mystery).

But maybe the oddest item of all on the list is the one celebrated on October 1st — “Communist China Established.”

Here’s the little paragraph that accompanies it:

In Tiananmen Square in 1949, Mao Zedong, chairman of the Communist Party of China, proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, saying that the “Chinese people have stood up!”

The Chinese people stood up another time in Tiananmen Square, and got plowed down, but that event is not on the list.

Overall, it’s a fairly benign list, but this one item says a lot.

In spite of any set-backs the NEA has experienced in its battle against charter schools and vouchers and tenure-attacks, it is still largely the voice of public education today — the place to see where public schools are headed. It’s a big, well-funded and powerful voice at every political level, and you can be sure that a lot of savvy people working for the organization are plotting effective ways to counter the attacks on its agendas.

In the meantime, schools get worse, society coarsens, children suffer, and reformers keep thinking they have some special power — people power — that will eventually bring the NEA to its senses or its knees.

It ain’t gonna happen. Maybe that’s why the NEA celebrates Mao’s triumph.

Of course, we don’t live in communist China, so we have a choice.

We can choose to take all the energy and enthusiasm and good ideas and money we’re now throwing at public schools and create a better way. A free way. A hopeful way that will truly serve the needs of all children.

It’s something the public schools have been claiming expertise at, while demonstrating the opposite, for 160 years. Isn’t it time to face the fact that they can’t or won’t do it? Isn’t it time to take things into our own hands?

No matter how much the NEA identifies with Chairman Mao, they can’t plow us down.

Okay, I’m mad again. I try when I write to be passionate yet calm, but every once in a while I can’t help it – I just get really angry.

It’s not as if this stuff is new, but there’s no end to it. 

The state of Montana has decided it’s their civic duty to teach kindergarten children to recognize and learn the proper words for their anatomical private parts.

Maybe we should do away with that euphemism — private parts — if children attend public school, because that’s one place where nothing is private, including your body parts.

I am so bone-weary tired of the way schools, politicians, and an endless array of activists keep jerking children around and pretending they give a hoot about them. I am bone-weary tired of parents who let them do it. I am bone-weary tired of all the people who should know better trying to reform, instead of replace, the sorry houses of exploitation and moral and intellectual dilapidation we call public schools.

How many news stories do we need before we agree something awful is happening in public schools? How many children have to be traumatized, neglected, abused, exploited, miseducated, uneducated, molested, and even killed before we do something serious?

Not only are children treated like lab rats and inmates, they become animals who turn on one another. If you think I’m exaggerating, I suggest you spend some time in a typical middle school. Even teachers speak this strongly about it.

How much longer will this hoax go on? How much longer will we judge schools based on their own PR and the handful of popular kids and their parents who think they’re just peachy keen because they serve their particular interests and desires?

Our prisons are full, our therapists’ offices are full, our legal and illegal drug dealers are doing a booming business. The psychiatric/social service industry specializing in children is growing by leaps and bounds. Traumatized children are analyzed, labeled, drugged and stigmatized almost beyond belief.

We see all this, yet we continue to believe that school is a nice place for most children? Please! Do we value our own pleasures and comforts so much that we’ll sacrifice our own children for them? Do we value our own money so much that we’ll sacrifice children to save it and make it? 

What a pathetic society we’ve become. What a sorry bunch of adults make up this country. Pity the children. Pity the poor children we inflict all this upon.

God save us from ourselves and our children from us.