COMMON CORE: HERE WE GO AGAIN!

(A post by Paradigm Company’s President Peter Watt)
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Do you remember Look & Say (Dick & Jane)?

Do you remember Whole Word?

Do you remember Whole Language?

Do you remember “New Math?”

Do you remember Outcome Based Education? (OBE)

These are a few of the many ideas cooked up by educrats in my lifetime which were going to “revolutionize” education and make every student in primary and secondary schools emerge as smart kids.

They and other such programs are on the scrap heap. And they all cost the taxpayer a bundle of dollars before they were laid in that educational junkyard. They did not improve things; in fact they made the product of public education incalculably worse.

Now comes Common Core (Curriculum) State Standards (CCSS). Never heard of it? Why, it’s the latest new wave in education which will solve all our problems in learning.

You, betcha!

A number of folks have been warning of the pitfalls of CCSS for many years. But the education experts, administrators and many business interests are charging ahead, implementing it all across America. The 2013-14 academic year is the first full year CCSS is scheduled to begin everywhere. So, those of us who did our best to warn America that this latest concept will utterly fail are now sitting back watching the launch of this latest blunder in education.

The educrats are forever trying to find the right way to do the wrong thing.

The motivation behind this, and all those other failed programs in education is this: the field of psychology began to take over education in the 1940’s. By the 1960’s it was in control. Why, you ask, did this make a difference? The explanation: Psychologists decided anything that needed memorization was equal to “cruel and inhumane torture” of students.

The psychologists (who by then were in charge of the colleges of education) announced that ways had to be found to allow students to acquire information (learn) without having to work at it. The centuries old method of memorizing facts, which the “experts” said is cruel torture, needed to be replaced by some sort of “osmosis” by which students would have information seep into their brains without any effort. Hence, they truly have been seeking the right way to do the wrong thing all these many years.

The only way to acquire facts (Which you must have for any hope of success in life) is by working at it. Dare I say that terrible word: MEMORIZATION. It is that simple.

We are now, in this new school year, embarking on CCSS. It is supposed to make kids critical thinkers, without first acquiring the tools needed to think. And it gets worse. All this CCSS is being implemented without ever having been field-tested. Believe it or not, billions of dollars are now being spent on this idea with no field-testing ever having first been tried.

The final nail in the education coffin for America is that CCSS will end up with kids worse off, not better. The guinea pigs are not in the laboratory; they are in your local classrooms.

In a few years, when CCSS is added to the education scrap heap, those like me will sigh and ask what will the psychologist/education “experts” think of next? And we will still be around to say: HERE WE GO AGAIN.