I was prompted to this musing from perusing a thread elsewhere in which the parallelism and confluence of interests of teachers and those of right-wing/religious opponents to the Common Core was the topic. It is interesting to consider the variety of opponents to CC as a case of strange bedfellows. Teachers, and supporters of public education and all that it implies, oppose it because it is the technological rest of the camel, following the camels IT/connectivity/Google-nose into the classroom. Its not a benign technology, it is aggressively encompassing and compulsory. Its not insignificant that Bill Gates/Microsoft is in the forefront of the classroom and teacher reform invasion. Hes after proprietary rights to the curriculum. The other opponents are the religious/socially conservative wackloons who object to the close encounters with scientific rigor to which the proposed standards so hesitantly aspire. Issues like evolution, (no, really), climate science, genetics, in science, and things like fairness and justice and a realistic portrayal of the Murkin Story in history/soc.Studies, and pretty much all reading thats not what Rosenblatt called efferent. The two forces may be enough to repel at least THIS effort at standardizing teaching and finally creating the factory school.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 17:39:28 +0000