The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) is a state-led effort that established a single set of educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics that states voluntarily adopt to standardize and strengthen educational standards and expectations. The nation’s governors and education commissioners, through their representative organizations, the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), led the development of the Common Core State Standards and continue to lead the Initiative. The mission of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) reads as follows:

The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy. (emphasis added)

The Common Core Curriculum is divided into two main sections: mathematical standards and English language arts standards (ELA). Mathematical standards appear very straight forward and of little cause for concern. Standards set for the ELA are not as straight forward. Standards are set for the ELA but also for literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Quoting from the ELA standards, “As a natural outgrowth of meeting the charge to define college and career readiness, the Standards also lay out a vision of what it means to be a literate person in the twenty-first century.”

This all sounds very noble and progressive. But for many in and out of the educational realm, there is a general Trepidation or uneasiness when it comes to embracing curriculum standards fabricated by a centralized quasi-governmental authority or coalition of authorities. A thoughtful examination of the mission statement of the Common Core State Standards Initiative reveals three significant concerns.

First, who decides what students are expected to learn in the areas of English language arts, history, social studies, and science? These subjects by their very nature deal with worldview and yield themselves to both political and cultural manipulation. To whom do we entrust to define the standards that lay out the vision of what it means to be a literate person? To defuse resistance in adopting the standards, the CCSSI states:

It is important to note that the 6–12 literacy standards in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects are not meant to replace content standards in those areas but rather to supplement them. States may incorporate these standards into their standards for those subjects or adopt them as content area literacy standards.

But a close reading of the CCSSI statement does not diminish those concerns of political and cultural manipulation in spite of assurances otherwise (e.g., radical interpretation and application of the so-called separation of church and state directives). Effectively, participating states must add the core curriculum standards as a supplement or adopt core curriculum standards as a replacement. But what if core curriculum standards are contrary to the existing standards desired by the citizens of that state? There appears to be no choice for states but to introduce standards that are in conflict with existing ELA standards (including history/social studies, science, and technical subjects) chosen by the citizens of that state. How long will it be before “supplement” becomes “replace”? Certainly the states do not have to participate in the CCSSI, but as we have seen in many areas of disagreement between federal and state authority, the federal government has the power of the purse strings to enforce their demands on rebellious state governments even though a state’s participation is supposedly voluntary with regard to participating in the Initiative. In addition to federal pressure, additional pressures will be applied to non-compliant and non-participating states from the educational and business organizations that substantially align themselves with the dominant progressive education juggernaut within those states.

Second, the standards are to be robust (strong) and relevant to the real world. This assumptive language is loaded with meanings that may not be fully comprehended by or acceptable to most people. For most educational professionals the reference to the “real world” means the humanistic progressive philosophy of education in which children are taught that morality flows from reason (based on experience) and science and that there is no one morality good for all societies. John Dewey summarized the essence of this philosophy, “The religious is emancipated from religion by transferring the object of our ‘idealizing imagination’ from the supernatural to ‘natural human relations’ or the ‘comprehensive community’.” In Dewey’s religious framework, value and meaning exist in humanity and does not flow from a transcendent God. Dewey’s religion focuses on humanity rather than God, and the goal of that religion is not a relationship with God but individual and collective self-realization through civilization. [Thomas et.al., pp. 375, 377, 380-381, 386-387.] It will be the educational professionals indoctrinated with the humanistic progressive educational philosophy who will craft and implement the common core curriculum standards and not the governors or legislative bodies of the participating states. After a mere glance at the existing standards and policies of the educational hierarchy, it becomes a foregone conclusion that the new CCSSI standards will not include a biblical worldview.

Third, the entire scope and purpose of education is directed toward “the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers”. But one must make a distinction between instruction and education. A body of knowledge may be known by simple instruction, that is, the transmission of facts and principles. But historically education encompasses a far broader mission. Education should not only contain instruction but training for a way of life. Training for life must involve recognition of the central authority—the central vision—the collective consciousness in which the world is viewed. In America up until the beginning of the 20th century, this meant a central authority derived from a biblical worldview. Therefore, the goal of education should involve far more than preparation for college and careers. The common core curriculum standards will not only perpetuate exclusion of the biblical worldview from education but in the long term result in even greater if not open hostility to that worldview as a basis for training for a way of life.

As America moves toward adoption and implementation of the common core curriculum standards, we must realize what the future holds. Schools will be required to teach things that are in opposition to the worldview of our Founders and most Americans today. That is happening now to a great extent, but there is still some restraint exerted by the states and local school districts. As national core curriculum standards are implemented, those restraints will be gone and the humanistic worldview of society’s “conditioners” (as C. S. Lewis called them) will reign supreme in bureaucratic halls of the state capitols and Washington, D.C. infested with these conditioners.

The loss of state and local autonomy in education was predicted long-ago by H. Thomas James of Stanford University:

As the states have denied, first to the family and then to local communities, the right to make decisions on education contrary to staff defined policy, so the nation may be expected to deny the states the right to make decisions on educational policy that are not in accord with the emerging national policy for education.” [Reagan, p. 186.]

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

“Implementing the Common Core State Standards, Common Core State Standards Initiative, http://www.corestandards.org/ (accessed June 25, 2013).

“English Language Arts Standards,” Common Core State Standards Initiative, http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy (accessed June 25, 2013).

George M. Thomas, Lisa R. Peck, and Channin G. DeHaan, “Reforming Education, Transforming Religion, 1876-1931,” in The Secular Revolution, ed. Christian Smith, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 355-356, 362, 365, 377.

Ronald Reagan, The Notes – Ronald Reagan’s Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom, Douglas Brinkley, ed., (New York: Harper, 2011), p.186.

As we have seen in Part I, education in North America at all levels was an indisputably Christian enterprise from the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620 to the early part of the 20th century. The Bible and other books reflecting a biblical worldview were the foundation of American education, that is, the original common core curriculum. In Part II, we will describe the destruction of the original biblically-based common core curriculum by the humanistic progressive education philosophies of John Dewey and others.

The churches were the principal founders of the first colleges and universities in the American colonies and whose purpose was for the training of pastors. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, colleges and universities expanded their academic portfolios, and the cultural ties between the Church and higher education gradually weakened. However, the weakening ties generated little cultural controversy because the explicitly Christian and generally conservative ends of education were understood by the great majority of Americans. Nevertheless, as the end of the nineteenth century approached, “…the breach separating the universities and the churches widened suddenly and culminated in the extraordinarily rapid and dramatic ‘disestablishment’ of conservative Protestantism from North American academic life from about 1890 to 1930.” [Gay, pp. 204-205.]

John Dewey’s admirers called him the greatest American philosopher and the philosopher of American democracy. His views and teachings during his exceptionally long career would influence many facets of American life—art, knowledge, education, morals, politics, science, and religion—and publication of his writings spanned seventy years. The breadth of change during Dewey’s lifetime is astounding. Dewey was a grocer’s son born in Burlington, Vermont, on October 20, 1859, while James Buchanan was president, a year and a half before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration. With remembrances of the Civil War, he would live to see two world wars and the atomic age by the time of his death in 1952, just five years before Sputnik would herald the beginning of the space age.

Dewey’s progressive educational agenda was framed by child-centeredness and psychology. Children were taught that an understanding of morality flowed from reason based on experience and that there was no one morality good for all societies. Reason through science became the determinant of what was good for society and replaced character education as modeled by Judeo-Christian morality. In other words, the standards of the new morality flowed from the dictates of science and reason. In Dewey’s philosophy, there is no absolute, no transcendent being, no room for supernatural religion, and nothing beyond the possibilities of concrete human experience. Value and meaning in life exist in humanity and flow from individual and collective self-realization through civilization.

Psychology, published by Dewey in 1896, was the first American textbook on the “revised” subject of education. It became the most widely read, quoted, and used textbook in American schools of education. Beginning with his twenty-five-year affiliation with Columbia University’s Teachers’ College, Dewey’s “…writings shaped the 20th Century U.S. curriculum…” [Iserbyt, pp. 5-6, 345.] His ideas on education would extensively permeate American education, and the devastating results are still being felt today.

One measure of John Dewey’s impact on American education can be judged by the level of criticism that was provoked by his teachings. In March 1959, President Eisenhower severely condemned Dewey’s philosophy: “Educators, parents, and students must be continuously stirred up by the defects in our education system. They must be induced to abandon the educational path that, rather blindly, they have been following as a result of John Dewey’s teachings.” [Hook, p. 3.] For an individual deceased for seven years to have his work and philosophy receive the stinging rebuke of a sitting president, that individual’s influence on American life, for good or ill, must be viewed as substantial.

Richard Weaver succinctly and superbly describes the disastrous consequences of progressive education’s revolt against the traditional idea of education.

Knowledge, which has been the traditional reason for instituting schools, does not exist in any absolute or binding sense. The mind, which has always been regarded as the distinguishing possession of the human race, is now viewed as a tyrant which has been denying the rights of the body as a whole. It is to be “democratized” or reduced to an equality with the rest. Discipline, that great shaper of mind and body, is to be discarded because it carries elements of fear and compulsion. The student is to be prepared not to save his soul, or to inherit the wisdom and usages of past civilizations, or even to get ahead in life, but to become a member of a utopia resting on a false view of both nature and man. (emphasis added)

For almost one hundred years, a major conflict has grown between the dominant American culture including the beliefs and values upon which the nation was founded and the ascendant progressive theory of education and its proponents. This conflict arose because of a systematic and successful attempt by a radical minority of educators and their allies to undermine through the educational system American society’s traditions and beliefs. Of all American institutions under assault, the subversion of American culture through the humanistic educational establishment’s progressive movement represents the greatest single threat to the central cultural vision upon which the nation was founded.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 21-22, 24-25, 289, 291, 304.

Craig M. Gay, The way of the (modern) world, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998), pp. 204-205.

Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, the deliberate dumbing down of america, (Ravenna, Ohio: Conscience Press, 1999), pp. 5-6, 345.

Sidney Hook, John Dewey – His Philosophy of Education and Its Critics, (New York: Tamiment Institute, 1959), p. 3.

Richard M. Weaver, Visions of Order, (Wilmington, Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1964), p. 117.