What Might Einstein Say About Common Core Standards?

The description of common core standards and who we are becoming as a society....predicted by
Einstein?

 

How Albert Einstein might possibly react to the "one-sized fits all" curriculum and high-stakes assessments beginning in kindergarten:

I have been asked to examine the New Jersey Core Curriculum Science Content Standards, and am amazed a child manages to get to Kindergarten without hating science. The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives--and you've managed to create little adult clones......

....Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.  What has happened to the concept of kindergarten, literally the "garden of children"? Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

 He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. Look at the madness of your standards.  It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

Read more on Einstein's "common core" theory at doyle-scienceteach.blogspot.com

The Good Life does NOT include Common Core Standards

This is a perfect post explaining why common core standards are not in the interest of students.  Common Core standards are to prepare students to promote the global economy; it's not for the education of the student as a person to develop his/her innate talents and gifts.  Remember, students are "capital", not "human beings".

Send this post to your local and State Board of Education:

From doyle-scienceteach.blogspot.com:

Saturday, April 28, 2012

The good life

We have never worked harder and have never enjoyed work more, because, with rare exceptions, the work was significant, self-directed, constructive and therefore interesting. 

Helen and Scott Nearing  

The Good Life

Grown by a student in B362.

 
Our children are not working for themselves. They are working for the global economy, for corporations, for efficiency, for tests scores.

This is not an idle thought. Our Secretary of Education has stated that the purpose of art in school is to promote the global economy.

Money is indeed a powerful thing. In our culture money gets you food without dirt, water without lifting, a roof without hammering.Science and art are pushed by Mr. Duncan because they contribute to the global economy.

If I'm a kid, this is what I am hearing: the only kind of work that matters is the kind that makes money, usually more for someone else than yourself. We're asking them to do things in school so that they can "compete" in a "global economy"--what does that even mean?

You know what my students are most proud of in school? The kind of pride that has a kid come to me before class and say "Look at this!"?

• A shirt designed, cut, and sewn by her own hands.
• A cookie mixed and cooked by his.
• A silly riff on a ukelele composed while meandering between classes.
• A simple paper certificate for winning a drama competition.
• A carrot grown in class.

 Significant. Self-directed. Constructive.

My students are younger than the idea of a global economy. They're still genetically human, and they behave, for the moment, as humans have for thousands of years.

Learning about levers back in '75

How much longer will we keep trying to tear the human out of them?

 

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Do you remember our posting on the young girl being tutored on her math facts and the last sentence she uttered in the youtube video?  Does she say this because she wants to be "globally competitive"  or is it because she feels competent and proud?  Is she exhibiting pride because she wants to be a cog in the economy or because of her human emotion of accomplishment?