Readin’, Writin’, and Deconstruction

[Geee]

National Review:

This is the second part of an ongoing series on federal “Common Core” education standards and the corruption of academic excellence.

The Washington, D.C., Board of Education earned widespread mockery this week when it proposed allowing high-school students — in the nation’s own capital — to skip a basic U.S.-government course to graduate. But this is fiddlesticks compared with what the federal government is doing to eliminate American children’s core knowledge of English, language arts, and history.

 

Thanks to the Common Core regime, funded with President Obama’s stimulus dollars and bolstered by duped Republican governors and business groups, deconstruction is back in style. Traditional literature is under fire. Moral relativism is increasingly the norm. “Standards” is Orwell-speak for subjectivity and lowest-common-denominator pedagogy.

Take the Common Core literacy “standards.” Please. As literature professors, writers, humanities scholars, secondary educators, and parents have warned over the past three years, the new achievement goals actually set American students back by deemphasizing great literary works and focusing instead on “informational texts.” Challenging students to digest and dissect difficult poems and novels is becoming passé. Utilitarianism über alles.

The Common Core criteria in English and language arts call for students to spend only half of their class time studying literature, decreasing to 30 percent of their class time by their junior and senior years in high school.