The school year is fast approaching. Young minds will soon have to give up long summer nights of playing, to be back in a routine of daily homework and early bedtimes. With that in mind, I want to touch base again about Common Core.
Joan Landes, a mental health therapist, is speaking out against Common Core, and details in the article below, some of the negative consequences on children. Coercion using punishment and reward, conditions of worthlessness, negative effects on cognitive and emotional learning, etc, are mentioned. The overall ineffectiveness of Common Core too are spelled out. The section on B.F. Skinner, one of the founders of the methods that Common Core at it's heart is based on, is especially alarming. Apparently, he kept his daughter in a temperature controlled crib to avoid having to use blankets to warm her. So, he treated humans, including his own offspring, like the animals he experimented with. This is the basis for Common Core, which ignores all rational research and theory in neuroscience, sociology, and psychology that could benefit children- instead it injures. To use an analogy, it is like Pavlov's and Seligman's Dog Experiments, well known experiments mentioned in social-psychology courses to show positive/negative and operant reinforcement theories in which dogs were used as guniea pigs. To some critics it was ethically flawed.
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| -Photo from mindsandmodels.blogspot.com |
In the case of Common Core, instead of a group of dogs, it's a government controlled experiment with American children as the test subjects. It has no benefit or reward for anyone, except those profiting off of it. They are not being treated as eager young minds. Nor as whole individual human beings with their own thoughts, feelings, upbringing, wants, or needs. How they deserve to be treated in a free nation is not what they are getting. This experiment is being used on American children, and there should be public education without fear of socio-psychological or biological harm of our children by using our public education system that our tax dollars pay for. The education system is instilling fear and helplessness into parents who want to stop these methods, while it is disturbing and harming our children. More need to speak out, including more educators themselves. Parents are speaking out, and hopefully we can help put a stop to this if we all stand together.
The nurturing and explaining of what has happened to education must be explained to children by their parents if they are in a similar situation, only then will they understand that they are not the problem, and that it is their schooling. This helps gives them confidence and in their parents to teach them what they have missed, catch them up, and give them that sense of wanting to learn again, which slowly diminishes once they enter the public education system I have found. Also, I have had to place less importance on grades, as many parents have, because I do not expect my child to get an A on a high school level math test at the age of 9. Nor, if my child is reading 2 grade years above level, I do not expect recognition for that anymore. The graphic here was my response when my daughter added numbers with little circles instead of numbers one night, and it made me wonder why on earth anyone would do this to a child's mind, and it motivated me find out as much as I can about what's behind Common Core.
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