Good afternoon on this warm and lovely day;
welcome, I'm Matthew Spalding, the associate vice president Dean here for Hillsdale College
in Washington D.C. Welcome to the Kirby Center. As a college, one that's been around for quite
some time, we have long been interested in education. With a graduate school, with undergraduates,
and with our Hillsdale Academy, and increasing numbers of charter schools we're involved
in. Education is our purpose and reason for being. As Constitutionalists, we have also
long been interested in the question of the government's involvement in education, and
indeed we've also long been concerned with and object to the federal government's involvement
in education. If there is one thing that is clear from constitutional history and constitutional
study it is that the federal government has no constitutional authority when it comes
to federal education. That is why as an institution, from the beginning, we decided we would take
no federal funds, and we would object to any federal requests having to do with the racial
makeup of our student body, or other information that we object to. As an institution, we will
continue to object to those things, and looking ahead, know that it is probably quite likely
that we will have to fight about some of those things. We are increasingly concerned, for
instance, about questions of accreditation. The federal government, for some time, has
used the accreditation process, the process by which universities and colleges are accredited
to teach, as a lever, using student loans to potentially go after colleges and universities.
That's one of the main reasons why we rejected those federal funds. With federal funds, strings
are often attached. The student loan program is one of those strings. That money costs
something. Usually through accreditation, the federal government will ask for information,
and get colleges and universities to do something in order to receive those federal funds. We
don't participate in those programs. But in the last administration and the current administration,
the rules of the accreditation process have changed, such that even though we do not accept
those federal funds, the accreditation process is increasingly looking to do things to Hillsdale
College through the accreditation process. They are currently looking at it in terms
of credit hours. Our concern is that farther down the road, those questions of accreditation
will get into other matters. Whether they will have to do with the racial makeup of
our students, which we think is not only constitutional but unjust, but also questions having to do
with the enforcement of other, social programs currently of interest to the federal government,
such as the definition of marriage, about which we object. So, with that, we have a
very important discussion today about curriculum. If there's one area of all areas of education
that the federal government should not be involved in, it's the question of curriculum,
and we are currently involved in this interesting debate about something called "the Common
Core." To introduce our speaker who's a very good, a friend but also a colleague at Hillsdale
College, is one of our students. Morgan Delp is a junior at Hillsdale College, majoring
in English and minoring in Journalism. She is captain of the women's tennis team and
sports editor for the Collegian, the college newspaper, along with being a member of Kappa
Kappa Gamma. She's originally from Toledo, Ohio, and she is here in D.C. as part of a
networking in D.C. program the college runs for students to bring them out to Washington.
Her father is a Hillsdale alumni and her younger sister is currently a student there as well.
Morgan. My most vivid memory of any one lecture I
have ever attended at Hillsdale College was in Dr. More's class, when he played the role
of Karl Marx for an entire class period, debating us on Marxism in a seemingly authentic German
accent. As an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College, Dr. Terrance More regularly
makes this kind of effort to inspire his students in class, and invites them to his home for
dinner to meet his wonderful family as well. A former Marine with a PhD from the University
of Edinburgh, Dr. More served as the founding principle of a top, K-12 classical school
in Colorado and advises Hillsdale's charter school initiative, providing assistance with
the formation of classical charter schools across the country. Dr. More is the author
of The Perfect Game, and The Story-Killers: A Common Sense Case Against the Common Core.
This afternoon, he will speak about how the common core destroys minds and souls. Please
join me in welcoming Dr. Terrance More. Thank you very much Dr. Spalding and Miss
Delp, "das is ver goot." And thank all y'all for coming out, and I hope we have a pretty
rigorous and thought provoking discussion today about the common core. Now, to realize
what is taking place in the nation's public schools today, imagine you are an average
teenager in high school. As such, you do not have the political insight and wisdom you
currently have. In fact, you do not know much about politics since your family does not
follow political events much. Your parents consider themselves moderates and not that
political. Nor do you have any particular moral convictions other than knowing that
murder is wrong, and a few other thou-shalt-not's, though not too many, because you don't go
to church that often or talk about moral philosophy or read Aristotle. You think people should
just be nice and get along. Most of what you know about the world comes from what you learned
from your friends, from the movies you like and the music, all of recent origin, and from
Facebook. In addition to lacking political and moral convictions, you're not what a previous
era would have called educated. Sure, you make good grades and you will go to college,
yet you have never studies closely any great work of literature or political event. Nor
do you know a foreign language, though you've taken Spanish for years. Nor are you even
that well versed in the grammar of your own language. Certainly you have read things in
school but nothing has really ever stuck in large part because you have never been made
to study anything thoroughly. In short, you are a typical high school student in America.
But all of a sudden, out of the clear blue sky, comes a set of rigorous standards, as
the people in charge of your schools call them, that are going to make you college and
career ready, for a 21st century global economy. That is the promise. That is the rhetoric;
but what of the reality? Will these so called standards in the curriculum and teaching that
go with them really make you college and career ready? In greater concern, what will these
standards do for your mind and soul? Let's find out. Among the other things you will
learn in your English classes of all places is that the Constitution was written by a
group of men who did not really believe that the words "we the people" referred to women,
or black men, or men who did not hold property, or anyone in short who were not white, land-owning
men like themselves. For that reason, the Constitution must be "evolving," which, as
you learn from your science class, means always changing to meet the needs of the present
time. You also learn, in a lesson from the unit on the Civil War, that racism is still
almost as bad today in our times as it was in sojourner truth's time. And in fact, your
teacher gives you explicit instructions on what to do if you are the witness of a racial
incident: instructions that come straight out of her teacher's edition to the textbook,
that say, "Individuals experiencing or witnessing discrimination should record the name of the
person doing the discriminating and report the incident as soon as possible. Witnesses
should also do their best to take care of the victims if there is any physical injury.
They should also make it clear that they saw what happened and that it will be reported."
This is in an English class. More political lessons come in the English class. You read
a New York Times editorial from 1999, which states emphatically that Mikhail Gorbachev
almost single-handedly brought down the Wall, and ended the Cold War. You do read a speech
of Reagan in the class, but not his first inaugural, or his speech at the Brandenburg
Gate (that's the one in which Reagan said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."); in
fact, you don't even know that it's on YouTube, and could be shown to the class, but the teacher
doesn't bother to do that, because it's not in the standards. Instead, you read a speech,
a little-known one, given to the students of Moscow State University, in which the editors
of your literature textbook preface it with this statement: "Led by Mikhail Gorbachev,
the Soviets were blazing through the greatest changes they had seen since the 1917 Revolution.
Although reforms were rapidly taking route, they were not far enough from Communist ideology
for Reagan. In this excerpt [that is, the speech that follows], notice how Reagan restrains
his strongly anti-Communist sentiments, while still extolling the ideals he represents."
Now that's the Reagan you remember, right? Or rather, your grandparents remember, because
remember, you're all high school students. The Reagan who was always restraining his
strongly anti-Communist sentiments. Well, that's how it happened according to the public
schools, and the new college and career ready standards. So the lesson seems to be that
Reagan, at his rhetorical best, had to pull back on his strongly anti-Communist sentiments,
thereby not getting in the way of Mikhail Gorbachev and the Russian people blazing through
historical changes. You also learn from your English classes how and why to fill out government
forms. Your teachers are prompted by their manuals to ask these questions: What kinds
of information are typically sought be government forms? Why do you think governments require
this information? And you're given the example of a driver's license in order to show you
that filling out government forms is usually for your own protection and safety. Thus making
you all, I guess, willing bureaucrats. Because every teenager wants to drive, right? Another
lesson will be a couple of selections on the theme of World War II; well, not World War
II so much as Hiroshima, and Hiroshima told from the view of certain Japanese people who
were still in the city the morning the bomb was dropped. No other perspective on World
War II will be offered. No speeches of Churchill, or from Roosevelt, no reports of the liberation
of Europe, not even a word about how evil the Nazis were. And certainly not the fact
that hundreds of thousands of warning pamphlets were dropped on Hiroshima in an effort to
get people out of the city. All you will know is about the horrible killing that Americans
did on that forlorn group of people. But your English class will not just stick to the writings
of the past. Quite likely you will get to read recently written informational texts,
taken out of contemporary periodicals, as we shall see in a moment. Would you ever get
to read any, well, literature, in your high school literature class? Well, yes, sort of.
While the brave new standards which your teachers mention frequently do not recommend the reading
of any Mark Twain in the high school, and you never even see a copy of Huckleberry Finn,
your textbook does contain four different illustrations of Twain, that is, pictures
of him, a brief selection from his Life on the Mississippi, and the six page The Notorious
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, basically the shortest story that Twain ever wrote.
So you spend about a day and a half on Mark Twain. The treatment of that great American
author pales in comparison to the reading of The Crucible, which takes a hundred and
seven pages, in the course of which you will also learn about the evils of McCartheyism,
how there never really were any communists in Hollywood, and how right-wingers in general
are not to be trusted. After your complete reading of The Crucible, you would be given
the treat of reading a selection from that great author, George Clooney. Specifically,
part of his screen play of Good Night and Good Luck, about Edward R. Murrow, who was
taking on McCarthey. Now let's pause a minute; if you are a person who likes to put things
in the perspective of numbers, then you will want to know what the present score is. It's
Mark Twain's Jumping Frog, six pages; Arthur Miller's The Crucible, 107 pages; John Hersi's
Hiroshima, eleven pages (with lots of illustrations of the damage done by the bomb); and George
Clooney, six pages. That sounds about right, doesn't it? That's not the only literature
you will encounter. You will get to read two whole chapters out of the 135 chapters found
in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Unfortunately one of those chapters is the last, so if you
ever decide to read the whole book, the ending has already been spoiled for you. I believe
on Netflix they call that a spoiler alert. In accordance with the special standards you
hear so much, you're supposed to read Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice. In your textbook,
however, that great novel is only suggested for independent reading. No selection of an
Austin novel appears, but you do get to read a letter from Austin to her neice, a letter
which is interpreted by the helpful editors of your textbook as making her into a proto-feminist,
specifically an unconscious critic of her society. Now that's what Jane Austin was,
right? An unconscious critic of the society she so much loathed? Wow. You will get to
read a bonified feminist in the tale The Story of an Hour, by Kate Chaupin. In this story,
a woman, named Mrs. Mallard, is told that her husband died in an accident. After a moment
of grief, and just a moment, she is overcome by a sense of relief, and then a freedom.
She stretches out her arms to welcome the future, which will be "hers alone." To aid
your understanding of this story, the omnipresent editors of the textbook invite you to interpret
the action of Mrs. Mallord as a symbol of "the negative aspects of 19th century marriage."
Now wasn't 19th century marriage sort of like marriage? Recall what our scenario was at
the beginning. If you were a teenager in high school and went through this way of learning
literature, would you be college and career ready? Well I'm a college professor, and I
teach freshmen every year from all over the country, and I can answer that question with
an emphatic no! The students going off to college these days, at least those who come
from the public schools, for the most part cannot have a serious discussion about even
one work of literature. Not one. The freshman year of college -- and there are some freshmen
in here, or at least some sophomores, and they can tell you whether I'm lying or not
-- the freshman year of college everywhere in the country is a crash course in learning
how to read and write anything beyond a basic level. Learning, in short, what high school
did not teach you but should have taught you. And the new standards that we're talking about
are not going to help that; in fact, they will make it worse. A more important question,
it seems to me, is this: what kind of mind, indeed, what kind of soul would you have,
after going through this sort of stuff? Well you would probably think that your country,
the good old US of A, had been up to nothing but mischief in its almost 240 year history,
to say nothing of the awful Puritans who settled this land. You would think of the past as
living under one giant black cloud, and thus be under the impression that the past has
nothing to teach us. You would have little or no appreciation for beauty, or heroism,
or faith, because you would never have discussed such things in relation to a story. You would
not have too have of an opinion of the family as an institution, or even the love that holds
families together, because no such models would have ever been provided for you. Nor
would you have been invited to love the thing we call the good. Almost as bad, you would
not have been taught how to laugh, and how to find humor in the human condition, another
lesson conveyed by the great authors, such as Austin and Twain that is utterly lost on
the modern makers of state standards and the publishers of monstrous textbooks. In short,
your English classes would have taken you down one of two roads: that of utter boredom,
caused by all the nonsense you had to suffer, or, if you actually took these lessons seriously,
down the depressing path of a prematurely jaded, postmodern, antiheroic view of life.
In the latter case, you would have been intellectually and morally debilitated. In either case, you
would not have learned from literature the most important thing: how to be more human.
Stories, you see, are what shape our view of the world. As Plato told us long ago, whoever
controls the poets and the storytellers controls the regime. Whoever controls what today we
call the narrative, controls the politics, the economics, the family, the ways of thinking,
and the ways of believing. The most impressionable people, of course, are always the children.
So welcome to the world of the common core. The common core, at least as far as the English
standards are concerned, and as later will be the case with the History standards, which
are right around the corner, is the attempt to take away the great stories of the American
people and replace them with the stories that fit a progressive liberal narrative of the
world. As such, the architects of the common core are nothing less than story-killers;
and that's the title of my book, in which I lay this case out in greater detail. They're
story-killers. They are deliberately killing the greatest stories of the greatest nation
in history. Now if they are doing this, how are they managing to pull this off, right
under our very noses, you may wonder. Furthermore, why would any self-professed school reformers
and alleged conservatives have endorsed the common core? These are really good standards,
we are told. And besides, even if some of the textbooks get things wrong, we should
keep these standards, and allow the wizards at our state departments of education and
in our local school district bureaucracies to come up with some really rigorous curricula
that fit the standards. So, as we have been told by the nation's secretary of education,
we should stop listening to these Tea-Partiers, and above all, these suburban moms. I have
two responses to those questions, and we can discuss them at greater length if we need
to. First, the discussion over education in this country has been impoverished for so
long that anything proposed as a school reform can look attractive to people who are grasping
for any solution, any remedy. In a town that doesn't have a doctor, sometimes the snake
oil salesman looks pretty good. Second, the architects of school decline are not just
going to stand up and announce that they intend to take away your children's chances of learning
the great literature, and thus becoming more humane as well attack the foundational principles
of this country. Progressives in the old days were remarkably forthright about their intentions.
Today, sadly, that is not the case. So what would we expect to find are the real intentions
of such designs obscured in both veiled language and empty promises. To expect otherwise would
mean being the most naïve kid on the block: the kid who thinks that the neighborhood bully
will like you if you just give him enough candy. So let's do a bit of code breaking
and figure out what the authors of the common core state standards are really up to. To
begin with, the purposes of education advocated by the common core are insufficient, illiberal,
and covertly ideological. All we hear about from the common core is college and career
readiness for a 21st century global economy. You may be used to this rhetoric surrounding
education, and wonder what's wrong with it. Several things: first, the authors do not
show any study, or quote any college president, calling out for this kind of education. The
authors of the common core are simply asserting that their scheme will make students college
and career ready, with no proof to back them up. The plan has not been tested in any school
in the country. Now that is astonishing. As Miss Delp told you, I ran a successful school
for seven years. With Hillsdale, I help set up schools all over the country. I can point
to actual schools where incredible things are taking place in the classroom. I can tell
you the teachers, and the classes, and the books that you ought to go see. The common
core can't do that. It can point to no such successes. They cannot give you the address
of a single school of theirs, except the addresses of all the failing schools in the nation that
have been following the progressive blueprint for a long time. So in other words, the 45
states that have adopted the common core standards with little, almost no, public discussion,
bought the farm sight unseen. Second, let's think about the ends of education as being
college and career readiness. When was this phrase invented? When did you first hear it?
I never really heard it until a couple of years ago. But now it is all the rage. Now
you may say without reflecting that college and career readiness are aims of a K-12 education.
We want our children to go to college, don't we? We want them to get good jobs. But those
are byproducts of education, not the essential aims. What are the essential and traditional
aims of education? Truth, beauty, goodness, virtue. What about inculcating virtues, such
as courage, justice, industriousness, and prudence? For almost 400 years in this country
and for over 2,000 in the history of the West, truth and knowledge and beauty and virtue
were the aims of education. Our founding fathers, in particular Benjamin Franklin and Thomas
Jefferson, both wrote on education, and they both said the same thing about the fundamental
aim of education. Do you know what it is? Happiness. The end at which all other things
result in. Where is that in the common core? There is no happiness in the common core.
Now you may think that this is a remote professorial point, but it is fundamental and has practical
significance. If an important aim of education is beauty, then you will have a robust program
in music in art. If your aims are college and career readiness, where does art fit in?
The dirty little secret is that art and music are dying a slow death in our schools. Furthermore
literature, the discipline next to art and music that speaks most directly to the human
soul, is seen as increasingly dispensable. But let's ask ourselves a simple question.
Do we in the 21st century require less beauty than they did in the 18th, or the 19th? Have
we got beauty down pat? Is the new app called self-control enough to give our young people
self-control? The authors of the common core want us to believe that everything must change
in order for education to keep up with the times. They use alluring statements such as
21st century literacy. Now think about that. This is the phrase that's on the second page
of the common core state standards, 21st century literacy. When Y2K came, did you automatically
become illiterate, because you had learned to read and write in the 21st century? I think
what's more likely is that the children of the 21st century who grew up on texts and
tweets and three letter codes such as OMG and TMI are struggling to acquire that long-lost
20th century literacy, to say nothing of how people spoke and wrote during the age of the
nation's founding. Moreover, one of the major components of the common core is to put children
behind computers for hours of the day, as though they do not already spend enough time
behind computers when they're not at school. By trying to educate young people mostly for
jobs and increasingly through the use of the computer, we fail to understand two aspects
of the human mind. First, jobs do not make the human mind; the human mind makes jobs.
Second, children are human beings, they are not machines. They can be taught; they cannot
be, or at least they should not be, programmed like machines. Under the cover of college
and career readiness and 20th century literacy, the common core diminishes substantially the
amount of literature read in English class. The authors of the common core are actually
up front about this. On page 5 of the standards, they say that students in elementary school
should read 50% of what they call informational texts and 50% literary texts. That number
goes up to 70-30 to the disadvantage of literature by the time they reach high school. So what
ends up going away? The great stories. What does this mean in practice? It means that
students will no longer be reading, or reading complete, works of literature, especially
since the format of standardized testing results and drive-by's of the literary curriculum,
rather than the close, patient following of a complete literary work. Furthermore, it
means all of a sudden that obscure writings of modern authors, many of them simply journalists,
will have the same status as Shakespeare. Now how does the common core pull this off?
Why would we throw away great literature and replace it with common articles from periodicals
or worse. I'll give you an example of one of these periodicals. Atol Gwandes, the Cost
Connundrum: Health Care Costs in McAllen, Texas, published in the New Yorker in 2009.
That's supposed to be in the students' English curriculum. Now, why are we talking about
health care in the summer of 2009? Does anybody remember? So how do they pull this off? Well,
it begins with these things called standards. Don't be fooled by the word "standards." Although
this is a word that we love to throw about in education circles, these standards are
essentially meaningless. Let me give you an example. Here's a standard, RL2-9 -- standards
for literature, second grade, standard 9 -- reads as follows: "By the end of the year, read
and comprehend literature, including stories and poetry, in the grades 2 through 3 complexity
band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range." Sounds impressive,
right? Well if you actually translate that standard, especially if you get to the word
"scaffolding," which essentially just means, it's the metaphor of the scaffold, that which
you have to build up a building and then it goes away, it could be retranslated as help,
or teaching. If you translate that standard, which I will read again: "By the end of the
year, read and comprehend literature, including stories and poetry" -- of course, what else
would literature consist in? -- "in the grades 2 through 3 complexity band proficiently with
scaffolding needed at the high end of the range." Or, "Students in second grade should
read and understand more difficult books at the end of the year than at the beginning.
They may need help though." Now I wish all of the people who've lauded these standards
all over the country and talk about how rigorous they are, I would like them to explain where
the rigor is in that piece of obvious drivel and semi-common sense. This bit of absurdity
is actually worse when we follow it to its conclusion. I have looked at these recommended
second through third grade books. They have mostly been written in the last ten to twenty
years, there are no classics, no fairy tales, no tall tales, no works by famous authors.
Many of the books are written at a level far below that of a third grader. One of the books,
called Tops and Bottoms, is actually listed on the Amazon page as being intended for four
through eight year olds. That's not the top end of the range. Another, called Cowgirl
Cate and Cocoa, is a monosyllabic story about a girl who wants to herd cows with her horse,
but the horse keeps telling her that she is thirsty or hungry, and there are a lot of
pictures to go along with this story. Cute for a four year old, perhaps, but nothing
as exciting and multi-layered as Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, which does not appear in the
common core documents. Therefore this standard that seems formidable by the way it is written
is just either common sense, or its an empty promise. You see, the emperor really has no
clothes; but I can't use that allusion, because no Hans Christian Anderson appears in the
common core. None! No Little Mermaid, no Little Match Girl, no Ugly Duckling, no Emperor Has
No Clothes., or no Common Core with No Clothes -- which would be an awful sight, if you think
about it -- and therefore no lasting memories of great stories in childhood, thus attenuating
the child's soul. How does the common core justify the erosion of great literature, and
its replacement with simplistic stories, and forgettable journal articles? That's where
Appendix A of the standards comes in. And I'm telling you this to save you having to
read Appendix A, which is a mind numbing journey into obscurity and psychobabble and educational
nonsense. Appendix A does not simply say "read the classics." That would be too easy, and
that's not what they're about. Instead, what they do is come up with this idea of text
complexity, and they make the astonishing statement that students, as they grow older,
should read more and more complex texts -- as though that was ever questioned. But to make
this text complexity effective, they create this thing, or they have this thing, called
the lexial framework, which measures a text complexity based on a computer mathematical
model, basically. So you churn in a text, and out comes a text complexity rating. Now,
that's stupid to begin with, because when I look at an algebra problem, I don't ask
of the algebra problem, "You know, this doesn't quite have the sense of humor that Mark Twain
has?" So why should we try to apply a mathematical model to a story? Even so, the lexial framework
is woefully inadequate. It ranks, get this, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath -- all 581
pages of it -- at a second to third grade level. Hand your young child or grandchild,
who is eight -- and I have a son who's eight -- a copy of The Grapes of Wrath, and see
what he does with it. Meanwhile, forgettable journal articles like the one we talked about
in the New Yorker, they get bumped up to the high school level, because they're exceedingly
complex. Now let's think about this. If you were to churn Appendix A of the common core
state standards into the lexial framework because of all its jargon, it would get bumped
up probably to the college level. Meanwhile, Huckleberry Finn, which is not recommended
by the common core, would probably be what, at a fourth grade level? It's artificially
elevating these so called informational texts above great works of literature, and it's
doing it for a reason. Appendix A is mainly spent on this complexity business, but they
do have another category in there that they like, and that's called range. They say that
there must be a range of authors. What do they mean by a range of authors? Well for
the most part they mean post-modern authors, multicultural, in other words, other-that-traditional
authors, because they want a lot of those put into the curriculum every year of the
class, every year that literature's taught. So if you were trying to spend an entire year
on the classics in the freshman year, and then another year on British literature in
the sophomore year or something like that, you would be violating one of the fundamental
principles of the common core, which says you always have to have a range of authors.
And guess what? Standardized tests are going to require that you have a range of authors.
At any rate, let's get to the red meat of the actual classroom lessons. And before we
do that, which I want to do through the textbooks, I want to say something about Appendix B.
A lot of people have really spend some time on Appendix B, because that's this long list
of exemplar texts that you're given. And I've had state legislators for example say, "Well
there are good texts listed in here. Shakespeare is listed," so on and so forth. First of all,
Appendix B is window dressing. That's the first thing. The second thing is Appendix
B basically sets up these drive-by's of literature that I was just talking about because they
cram in too many authors. There is an overwhelming number of Post-Modern authors in Appendix
B. But then on top of that Appendix B is lacking in certain things, which as soon as you think
of them, then make common sense. So for example, there are no texts inspired by religion that
I can find in Appendix B. Obviously you don't find the Bible anywhere written. Why would
you have the opening chapters of Genesis, which is probably the most formidable and
formational story in all of Western Literature. Of course you wouldn't have that, because
it's public school, right? And then, on top of that, they don't have anything inspired
by the Bible. So there's no Saint Augustine, though they like autobiography. There's no
Milton, there's no Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which is a sermon that used
to be read in every American literature class in the country. There's nothing inspired by
the religious tradition. No why does this matter? Well, we used to speak of our culture
in terms of being descended from two parents: Athens on the one hand, Jerusalem on the other.
What's going on in the common core standards is they've killed off one of the parents,
that's Jerusalem, and the other one is ailing. So pretty soon we'll be cultural orphans.
On top of that, here's another egregious example that I find. There's no Benjamin Franklin
recommended anywhere in the standards. Now in the old days, almost everybody in high
school, I know this from looking through my grandfather's books, almost everybody read
Benjamin Franklin's autobiography -- at least a big chunk of it. It's not even recommended
by these wizards who are behind the work group that put these authors forward. None of his
satires, such as Edict from the King of Prussia, even though the common core standards claims
to like satire, and says that it needs to be taught. Why is there no Benjamin Franklin?
Is it that they didn't think of it? That's possible. Or it could be that they don't want
Franklin in the common core standards because what it Franklin? He's the anti-bureaucrat.
He's the great American. He's the man of self help. He has a scientific mind, and a rigorously
scientific mind. You would think that this would be the example of somebody who could
explain college and career readiness. He invented, he created a college, called the University
of Pennsylvania. Why wouldn't we have him as a model of this new kind of person who's
going to go out and who's going to make things and create things? Because that's not the
model that they're actually after. So there's no Benjamin Franklin in the standards and
there's no apologies about it. But there are plenty of Post-Modern authors that do make
it into the standards, so that should raise question marks. Well, let me give you a couple
of examples of some of the things that I'm talking about. Because when you actually get
into the textbooks, you descend into the world of absurdity and bias and lost opportunities.
Now I'll give you two examples. One comes straight out of the common core standards
themselves. You can find this in Appendix B. In the sixth through the eighth grade range,
a portion of the Constitution is recommended for reading. That portion specifically is
the preamble to the Constitution and the first amendment. Not the second amendment, not the
tenth amendment -- too much for middle school students. But you're just told, okay, so read
part of the Constitution. What they don't tell you, is that also in Appendix B on page
95, is they have a reading to go along with the reading of the preamble and the first
amendment. This is straight out of a modern commentary by Linda Monk called Your Annotated
Guide to the Constitution, which goes like this: "The first three word of the Constitution,"
that's what it says, "The first three word of the Constitution are the most important.
They clearly state that the people, not the king, not the legislature, not the courts,
are the true rulers in American government. This principle is known as popular sovereignty."
Okay, so far so good, except that I would point out that in 1787 there was no longer
a king in America to be referred to, but we'll leave that for another time. "But who are
'we the people'? This question troubled the nation for centuries. As Lucy Stone, one of
America's first advocates for women's rights, asked in 1853, ''We the people'? Which 'we
the people'?' The women were not included, neither were white males who did not own property,
American Indians or African Americans slave or free. Justice Thirgood Marshall, the first
African American on the Supreme Court, described the limitation:" here's Marshall: "'For a
sense of the evolving nature of the Constitution,'" can we turn up the sound? "'For a sense of
the evolving nature of the Constitution, we need look no further than the first three
words of the document's preamble, 'we the people.' When the founding fathers used this
phrase in 1787, they did not have in mind the majority of American citizens. The men
who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted
that the document they were constructing would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to
which had been appointed a woman and a descendant of an African slave.'" Now we don't have time
to go into all the errors and inaccuracies and half-truths of that statement. If you
want to, then read my colleague Tom Wes' great book Vindicating the Founders. For starters
we could start out by saying that Article 1 Section 2 of the Constitution turns over
the franchise to the states to decide who could vote. At the time of the ratification
of the Constitution there were actually women and black men voting in this country. That
is not pointed out. But the point is, "we'll let the students read a little bit of the
Constitution," if you open up Appendix B and you're a state legislator you think "oh, they're
going to read a little bit of the Constitution, that's great." What's actually happening is,
this outside expert is going to be brought in in one of the students' textbooks, and
the founders are going to be trashed as racists, as chauvinists, as extremists, as hypocrites.
That's what happens. And I'm not making this up, this is straight out of the common core
state standards. Let me give you another example. This one's a little bit funnier. Let's say
that you were told that your students were going to spend a week or so on Frankenstein.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. What would you think that would entail? The reading of Frankenstein,
right? Wrong! You're not operating according to the logic of the great arch testers. Instead
of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's actual words, what you would have are three and a half pages
of Mary Shelley's actual words -- not from Frankenstein the novel, but from her writing
about what it was to write about Frankenstein. You would have 5 pages of a modern author
telling about scary stories that she had when she was growing up, and how scary they were,
in no reference what so ever with anything having to do with Frankenstein. You would
also have a scary picture, or really a hokey picture, of Frankenstein himself out of a
1950's movie, and there would be a discussion in the class about why the monster looked
so scary in this 1950's movie. You would be given assignments such as "Write an autobiography
of a monster." Alright, now think about that. You're writing an autobiography of a monster,
you're being asked to become a monster and write your own story. Why? Well you're told
it's because monster stories are always told from the perspective of the humans, and we
need to gain greater insights into monsters, and how they must feel in being called monsters.
I am not making this up, this is true. Even better, five and a half pages, more than the
actual words given to Mary Shelley, are given to a script, live from New York. It's Saturday
Night Live. A Saturday Night Live skit on Frankenstein, from which I will read you a
portion. Villager 1 to Head Villager: Maybe you're
the monster! Head Villager shakes his head: I'm not the
monster. (points to Frankenstein's monster) Look at him! He's got a square head and green
skin! Frankenstein's Monster: Oh great. Now it's
a racial thing. You know what? You guys are a bunch of fascists. In case the students don't understand what's
going on here, the teacher, in the margins of the teacher's edition, is asked to explain
the term fascist, point out the use of the term fascist, explain its traditional political
meaning, and how it has been extended to refer to any right-wing extremist group. Does anybody
in here belong to a right-wing extremist group? Because you may be a fascist! So, the scariest
thing about the common core, though some of the things I've said are scary, or in some
cases just ridiculous, the scariest thing I actually think is written on the first page
of the introduction to the common core English standards. And I will read that. Right after
we've been told that we need college and career readiness in a 21th century globally competitive
society, this statement appears: "The standards are intended to be a living work. As new and
better evidence emerges, the standards will be revised accordingly." Isn't that sort of
like the living constitution we currently have, which is revised according to whatever
Supreme Court Justice wants to construe it in light of socioeconomic factors? Are we
to have a living curriculum to go hand in hand with our living Constitution? Who's going
to get to decide what constitutes better evidence? And what is the new evidence that's going
to emerge? Do you think any of the new evidence will tell us that studying Latin actually
improves vocabulary and studying grammar actually helps with understanding the English language?
That new evidence is not going to be there. The standards are a living work, which means
they will be rewritten and rewritten again, and that even anything that might be good
in them currently will be a forgotten memory ten years from now. What state legislators
have signed on to, they have no control over whatsoever. Well this is I think the way that
the modern progressives are controlling the narrative, the story telling, in our nation's
classrooms. And they pulled it off -- at least they had 45 states adopt it really quickly
with almost no public discussion. But I think they overshot themselves, and they made two
fundamental mistakes. One is, they didn't think that the American people would want
to fight for its stories. They thought that the American people, with the promises of
a globally competitive society -- as though we've never seen that before -- somehow would
embrace computers and new technology or every newfangled idea in education, and forget the
fact that we as a nation understand what it means to be a globally competitive society,
and what we should be doing in the classroom is forming the minds and souls of the nations
youth. And therefore we need our stories, because the stories are the things that form
and educate the heart. The second thing that they overshot and did not expect is that they
did not, or they simply underestimated, the suburban mom. There is nothing that a suburban
mom, or any mom for that matter, cares more about than the heart and the happiness of
her children. And when that comes into danger, suburban moms, who vote and who know how to
organize themselves, as two ladies in Indiana do, named Heather Crossen and Erin Tuttle,
and who can form societies like Hoosiers Against the Common Core, they will mobilize people
and they will take action. And state legislators then have to listen. So what we're doing right
now, what is going on in this country and I don't know how much Washington D.C. understands
this, but the issue that's boiling right now, other than Obama Care, in the country itself,
in the states, is common core. And this is a fight over our schools, and ultimately the
souls and the minds of our nation's young people. And so I would say to you, and I would
say to the folks who are listening to us today, that this is the time to take our stories
back, and that after we do that we can take our schools back, and once we have our schools
back, we're on the road to taking our nation back. Thank you. We have time for a few questions, I know your
time is brief here. If you would identify yourself and keep your question brief and
to the point so we use our time wisely. Hi, I'm Deb Ray from Maryland. One of my biggest
concerns is, I understand about the standards, and our school district is all about the standards.
And then when we question the Maryland Board of Education about the curriculum, they say
the curriculum is written by the local schools. So could you maybe touch on that a little,
because I guess I'm a little confused about that. Well it's deliberately confusing I think.
So first of all you have these things that are talked about all the time called the standards.
And the standards are just educational jargon, as I showed, and I do this in more detail
in my book. I would suggest going in and looking how these standards can be translated. And
so what a lot of these state legislators and local districts will say is, "Well the standards
we'll keep, but we get to decide at the local level what the curriculum is." Number one,
when has a school district ever stood up and said "we're going to get rid of these awful
textbooks and we're actually going to have students read complete novels." Has any district
in the country said that? I haven't heard it. That's the first thing. The second thing
is, who controls the curriculum nowadays? Well, whoever controls the testing controls
the curriculum. Because every teacher knows, and the districts will swear this is not the
case, but the teachers know that they're going to teach to the tests, and they panic until
they're given a class in a box in the form of a teacher's manual and all this other cutchermol
that now goes with the textbooks, and they're going to teach to that. And the textbooks
publishers are writing exactly what's going to be on these tests. So whoever controls
the testing controls the curriculum, period. That is the reality of public schools these
days. And since the tests are flawed, the curriculum is going to be flawed. So then the curriculum is really coming down
with the standards. Absolutely. We just found out that they're going to be
eliminating MSA's, this is their last year, Maryland State Assessments. Do you know what's
going to happen next year? You mean in Maryland? Yeah. Well, what's happening in most the states,
and I don't know the specifics of Maryland, is that there are one of these two testing
organizations, one's called Park and the other's called Smarter Balance, and those are going
to be the test makers. And certain states are saying, "Well, we just won't use Park,"
or, "We won't use Smarter Balance," but the folks who are behind this common core, they're
not dummies, and they can create another shadow organization to come right back in and give
a similar sort of test that's going to be exactly what you would get out of a Park or
Smarter Balance test. So as long as you have adopted as a state these standards, there's
going to be some testing that supposedly mirrors these standards, which is just the way, it's
the hammer to enforce the kind of stuff that's going on that I just was talking about. Hello, Scott Walter from Capital Research
Center. You've done a great job of explaining that this type of education form is not at
all desirable, but what I'm curious about is how do you think public schools can in
fact be reformed with any of these problems? Okay that's a great question. The best remedy
right now for the public schools is school choice, because it breaks up the monopoly
and gives the chance of independent people, sometimes parents, to come together and make
a school that's good. Now not every charter school or every school of choice ends up being
great, because a lot of them are just purely progressive, some of them are worse than regular
district schools. But it gives the opportunity to form more traditional, I would say classical
school that then come in there and do a great job and show what you can actually do with
public money. Now why this is important at this moment is, at the very moment where we're
seeing really great things happening with school choice, particularly with the classical
school movement, and I could point you to the states and the schools, Colorado, Arizona,
this is going on. At the very moment when that's happening, in comes the common core
and universalizes, nationalizes his uniform curriculum which will have the effect of stamping
out school choice. See what I mean? Because everybody's got to conform to the test. Even
more frightening, it's making inroads into private schools. Most of the moms around the
country who are upset had their kids in private, parochial, or Catholic schools, and it's taking
over those curriculum as well. Homeschoolers are worried because there's a lot of talk,
and this is probably going to happen, that the major testing industries for getting into
college, the college entrance exams, are going to be aligned with the common core. So everyone
is affected; nobody is out of this. But going back to your regular question, let's have
school choice, which allows parents to see what kind of great schools can be set up,
and then it's a matter of parents taking action to get enough of these kind of schools. And
either the districts reform themselves or they go the way of the dinosaurs -- which
wouldn't be a bad thing. Name is Nelson Keef. Isn't the problem the
mind of that freshman that you spoke about early in your lecture, and the ability of
that mind to critically analyze and think about what questions to ask in the pursuit
of truth, beauty, happiness, and virtue? Isn't it therefore an issue of how do you open and
teach that mind to think for itself rather than substitute one stream of narrative for
another stream of narrative? I think I understand your question, but let
me give you an example of what you're talking about. Will students have the capacity to
think, and a lot of thinking occurs through asking questions. Two things are not to be
found in the common core standards, one in math, the other in literature. In the math
that's taught in common core, in the geometry classes, proofs are not taught. Euclidian
proofs. Everyone says what? It's the obvious answer! What is geometry without proofs? Well
it's not geometry. It's not the geometry that we've had for 2000 years, it's not the geometry
that Abraham Lincoln learned in a log cabin, which taught him how to think through from
first premises. That's gone. You know what else is not in the common core? Plato. There's
no model of a Socratic discussion. Now if you open up the standards, you'll have, "Oh,
and students should raise their hands in discussion and be able to compliment their neighbor on
the ridiculous thing that he said" and so on and so forth. There's all that kind of
stuff in the common core. These standards are this long, and they're actually supposed
to be written on the board, a lot of principles are making their teachers write them on the
board, so the students know how boring life has become. All of that verbiage could be
replaced with one word: Socratic. But to make that word viable, to make it mean something,
you'd have to have a Platonic dialogue, such as the Apology. That's not in the common core,
and they don't want it in the common core. Because I don't think they want those kind
of minds that you're talking about. Nat Nasworth with the Christian Post. So if
I understand you correctly, you're saying that the common core is being used as a vehicle
to bring liberal ideas and philosophies to students, and I wonder if you think that's
an intentional thing, or if it's simply the people who came up with the suggestions, suggested
readings and so forth, just pick things that they liked, and so it kind of turned out that
way. That's an interesting question, more of a
psychological one, because it's a chicken and egg argument, right? Did the people who
made the common core standards, do they think like this? Yes. So it may not be that they
consciously thought, "Okay well let's just give them the liberal progressive narrative."
That's just the way that they think. But I read the results, and when I look at the results,
they're crystal clear. The things that I've found in these textbooks and in the standards
themselves are just appalling, they're obvious, they're blatant. And it takes a real art to
write such a confusing document that most people can't interpret it, I give them that.
But that's just to say that they're extremely bad writers. So why would we put them in charge
of the nation's writing? My name's Steve Allan, I'm a farmer from Iowa,
and I have grandkids back there. And you mentioned during your speech you're working with schools
around the country. Do you have a list of schools that you're working with say in Iowa
or elsewhere that we might channel our kids in that direction? As far as Iowa, I don't know of any classical
school movement going on, I could be wrong, maybe private schools there are, among the
charter schools I don't know of any. One of the funny things about Iowa is, you've had
the Iowa Test of Basic Skills for so long, that's what I took when I was a kid, which
are not curriculum tests, they're basically logical thinking tests with language and math,
which are perfectly inoffensive, by the way. That's the great thing about them. They don't
tell you whether students have been taught the knowledge they should have gained, but
at least they measure people's understanding of language and math without an objective,
without an agenda. But Iowa has been I think a little bit on the complacent side, and many
states in the Midwest are this way, in thinking "well, the public schools aren't as bad here
as they are everywhere else, and besides that we have this Iowa Test of Basic Skills which
other states use, so we must be doing something right." So I would actually like to see a
more aggressive classical or charter school movement taking place in Iowa. But, it may
be and I just haven't gotten wind of it. I will say that education, and this is what
Dr. Spalding started out by saying, education is and ought to be a local issue. And so this
is one that everybody should be involved in because you're citizens and you pay taxes
into your local school district. And so if your taxes are going towards creating a kind
of citizen and even a kind of human being who's very unlike what the Founding Fathers
had thought this nation ought to be, and very unlike, frankly, what nature says we ought
to be, then you have a dog in that fight, and you need to fight that issue as hard as
you can. And that I think is what is happening in the common core. It's galvanizing a lot
of people who weren't in the fight, and that's a great thing.
