Monday, September 04, 2017

Common Core education

I had a conversation with an old friend ten days ago...visited for a few hours, we talked lots of stuff.

One of which was about the diff between our grade-school educations. He was in one school system the whole time, in Florida. I had eight different schools over the same 12 years.

My schools, as best I remember it, as that was 40-50 years ago, seemed an even-handed explanation of things. His made a serious effort to teach the same load of lies about the Confederacy that are still under discussion now. He said that for several years in a row, every fall the entire school would watch Gone With The Wind and teach that as the truth about history. Yeesh. I can't stand that movie*.


Later, while driving home, I realized something interesting:

All the squawk you hear against "Common Core"...the problem for the folks who oppose it is that teaching the same thing everywhere would mean they would no longer be able to teach the false narratives about all the causes of The War to Preserve Slavery--no longer able to teach the lies.

Don't know why that hadn't occurred to me before. But it's clearly the root cause of the complaint about teaching all our children the same thing.

Do they want to also teach some invented math? Who can invent a math that is properly consistent and completely new and different? No? Yeah, that wouldn't work anywhere. Want to invent some new science-y stuff? I know, let's redefine chemistry and physics, the combination of that plus a new math could probably prove that the Earth actually IS flat, IS the center of the universe, and that the Sun revolves around it.

I can't see that working, although they probably think the metric system is kinda like that. Well, ok, I do too, still have to think carefully about conversions every time.

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*I love movies. I have watched A LOT of movies in my life. Thousands. But GWTW...Clark Gable played a riverboat gambler in every movie he ever made. Including the ones where he was NOT a riverboat gambler. Gag. GWTW is Part Two of the bullshit film rewrite of US history that began with Birth Of A Nation. Not actually sure if I've ever seen that all the way through; perhaps curious because as a student of film history, I do watch plenty of silent films.

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