Common Core and Other Fantasies

I used to believe that curriculum was an objective thing. I assumed that smart people got together and concretely put together a list of things that one should learn to be educated.

I could not have been more wrong. For example, Gary North enlightened me as to the genesis of a four year college education:

In the twelfth century, the University of Paris developed a four-year undergraduate curriculum, and nothing since then has shaken that decision. There is no particular technical reason today for a four-year curriculum, but it has always been the worldwide standard for undergraduate education. Similarly, the basic structure of the university's pedagogy has not changed. Professors still lecture to students, still grade examinations, and still exercise almost total autonomy within the classroom.

Common Core, now fashionable in the US because of the federales in DC, is also purely an invention. The educrats in those 10 square miles on the Potomac do not and cannot know what your child should learn. Most likely, Common Core will teach kids the proclivities of the educrats themselves, or other damaging baloney.

My beef with public schools is not a beef with education, but with who controls education. Schooling can never be neutral. What is taught is engineered to the desires of those paying the bills. He who pays the piper picks the tune.

As the US and world slip into another recession (or an extension of the 2008 recession), we desperately need more entrepreneurs and creative people, two things most definitely not taught in public schools and more likely stamped out by public schools.

Each child's parents are in a far better place to develop a curriculum individualized for that child than any educrat.

Maybe the mother of a modern Moses or another Newton will read my blog and become convinced that she will direct the learning of her child and not defer to a system that doesn't have the best interests of that kid in mind. She doesn't need to be a genius or even formally educated. She just needs to be tenacious, like most mothers are.

What is the alternative to public schools? There are a billion alternatives, each one tailored to the individual needs of a child by the parents. Homeschooling, online schooling, apprenticeships, self directed learning, infinite combinations of each and so many more that haven't even been thought of yet.

Catch the vision.