One of the Great Shibboleths of our culture is the obligation of “educated” people to have opinions about everything. Perhaps I’m dating myself by not saying “was” instead of “is.” Maybe the grand shrug “whatever” means the person has no opinion. Maybe it means it’s no longer cool (there I go dating myself again) to have an opinion. Maybe it means “My opinion is too nuanced and refined for a vulgar person like you to understand.”

Whatever.

Anyway, I’ve not been able to shed “you must have an opinion because you’re an intellectualoid” very well. (Sorry for the mixed metaphor of “shedding a shibboleth.” At least it alliterates. You did notice the antecedent “shibboleth” didn’t you?)

So I hereby announce my opinion about Common Core: I’m against it.

If you’ve been reading me for long, you’ll know this isn’t likely to be a partisan political position. I’m not even sure Common Core is a partisan issue, though it might appear such with a Democrat in the White House and Arne Duncan on the stump. But Republicans no less than Democrats, and perhaps even more, are likely to support “rigorous” standards for the most vulgar of educational workforce preparation goals.

I do not claim to have read widely and obsessively about Common Core. And I try to eschew conspiracy theories. But I’m not suggesting a conspiracy. I’m suggesting that our rulers are barbarians who can string platitudes together well enough to get elected, but who with precious few exceptions have no idea what it means to be an educated human being. Their honest, if stupid, reflex is that education is job training; that an “educated” person is a particularly well-oiled cog in the economic machine.

Here is what the Common Core folks reportedly consider an exemplary essay of a high school senior:

The modern world is full of problems and issues—disagreements between peoples that stem from today’s wide array of perceptions, ideas, and values. Issues that could never have been foreseen are often identified and made known today because of technology. Once, there were scatterings of people who had the same idea, yet never took any action because none knew of the others; now, given our complex forms of modern communication, there are millions who have been connected. Today, when a new and arguable idea surfaces, the debate spreads across the global community like wildfire.Topics that the general public might never have become aware of are instantly made into news that can be discussed at the evening dinner table. One such matter, which has sparked the curiosity of millions, is the recent interest in the classification of literature as fiction or nonfiction.

(Life Under Compulstion: The Dehumanities) The author who pulled that execrable passage for critique, Anthony Esolen, continues:

[T]he real problem can’t be cured by a visit to the English stylist.  It’s a problem that the authors of the Common Core Standards cannot recognize; just as a tone-deaf man cannot understand the beauty of the simple air that gives us Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.  The real problem is not technical, and is not primarily linguistic.  It is human.

A human being wrote that passage, but not as a human being.  He wrote it as a machine, as a Language Research Trainee, as a Prospective High-Prestige Academy Admission.  He wrote it as a boy-turned-ape, going through the English Language Proficiency Motions.  The passage is unrelieved by the slightest touch of beauty or elegance, of human feeling, of real address to a world of trees and dandelions and dogs.  There is one obvious observation – we have computers and the internet.  There is no wisdom, nor even the sprightly bravado of youth.  The writing is senile without ever having been young.

From political philosopher Patrick Deneen:

I think we can point to five “ascending” aims in the education of the young (while I’m sure there are more, I want to limit myself to five main aims), beginning from a more basic to the more ascendant, and that each have a corresponding end, or purpose. They are:

1. Education in basic facts or “figures” (math) …
2. A training in using these facts to more deeply understand things, especially provisional answers to questions that are not so easily achieved by simple memorization or “Scantron” answers …
3. Civic education …
4. The cultivation of character …
5. The highest attainment of education is one that has no further end outside itself: not knowledge that we use toward some end, whether political or social or private, but simply the act of seeking knowledge for its own sake…

… the first two—the learning of various “facts and figures” and their manipulation through “critical thinking”—when divorced of the last three (civic education, education for character, and learning for the sake of learning) are highly prone to being employed toward only one end or purpose—instrumentalism, or utilitarianism aimed primarily toward baser ends of acquisition, material accumulation, the pursuit of pleasure or hedonism, the conquest of nature, and the accumulation of power. Divorced of any higher end, they become tools for the fulfillment of our physical nature without the cultivation of their use toward a higher end involving our role as citizens or the full-flourishing of the human being in virtue and as a creature that desires to know for its own sake.

It is unmistakably the case that the most dominant voices in education today insist that education is or ought be solely about the first two pursuits—the accumulation of facts and “critical thinking,” divorced from higher ends ….

(Common Core and the American Republic)

Set the standards. Reward those who achieve them. What behavior does that “incentivize”? (Can you say “Teach to the test”? I thought you could.) What becomes of students who are capable of higher pursuits?

Whatever.

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Primary sources:

1. Life Under Compulsion: The Dehumanities, by claccisist and Dante translater Anthony Esolen, and also his other “Life Under Compulstion” essays: If Teachers Were Plumbers;  From Schoolhouse to School Bus;
2. Common Core and the American Republic, by Patrick Deneen.
3. This letter sent to all Roman Catholic Bishops by some of the living thinkers I respect most. If it’s bad enough to be rejected by Catholic Schools for the reasons adduced, Common Core is bad enough to be rejected by my state, too.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.