Is There a "Hidden Agenda" Behind the Push for a Mandatory National Curriculum?

If there's one lesson that all of us Americans should've learned from political events in recent decades, it's that we cannot automatically trust the government to tell its citizens the truth about the reasons behinds its actions. Regardless of one's personal political affiliation, it's easy to find examples where those in power have behaved deceitfully. Power seems to corrupt those on both sides of the aisle, and in all levels from local to national.

There's a very interesting entry to the 96th Carnival of Homeschooling entitled "Define the government, don't be defined by it: 10 ways that schools shape students" from the "Culture Slave" blog. The author makes some thought-provoking points about how government-run schools control the population by their influence over children. He writes:

If the government shapes us as children, how can we be expected to shape the government as adults? When we give the government the power to determine our upbringing, we give the government the power to limit our understanding of the law.

A look at our society shows what happens when the government has this kind of power; we end up with a politically apathetic populace that is alienated from the legal system that acts on it’s behalf. Only a minority of people become politically involved — the vast majority passively accepts whatever nonsense the government spews out.

Pretty scary stuff, huh? In the U.S. the political agenda of government-run schools may not be as blatant as it was in the U.S.S.R. or what Hugo Chavez is attempting in Venezuela. But it's there nonetheless:

Schools teach students that it’s natural for authority figures to tell them what to think about. They have to study what the government tells them to study when the government tells them to study it. They have to read what they’re told to read when they’re told to read it. They have to listen to what they’re told to listen to when they’re told to listen to it. In this way, students learn that it’s normal to entertain the thoughts that government employees tell them to entertain. Schools give students tunnel vision. By controlling what students spend their days thinking about, they have considerable influence over what students don’t spend their days thinking about. The power of omission is a dangerous thing in the hands of the government.

I blogged last week about my objections to E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s call for a mandatory national curriculum. I touched briefly on the issue of control but the "Culture Slave" post has made me wonder about what hidden agenda may be driving the push to nationalize the curriculum. Is it really based out of a benign concern about varying quality of education or is there something more sinister going on? Who stands to gain from greater Federal government control over education? Is the next step beyond a mandatory national curriculum a mandatory international curriculum such as the International Baccalaureate program?

Consider the newly introduced IB theme "Sharing our Humanity". Sounds pretty innocuous, right? Well, consider the political implications of teaching impressionable young minds about the following topics:

• The fight against poverty
• Peace keeping, conflict prevention, and combating terrorism
• Education for all
• Global infectious disease
• Digital divide
• Natural disaster prevention and mitigation.

Now, nobody is in favor of poverty, war, infectious disease, natural disasters, etc. Obviously, we all want to eliminate these tragedies but the $64,000 question is how to do so. Do you trust some committee of educrats in Belgium to decide how these highly contentious issues are framed to young, impressionable minds? Somehow I don't think they'll be given a fair & balanced treatment so that children can carefully consider all competing viewpoints before deciding for themselves where they stand.

The ironic thing is that a common criticism of homeschooling is the belief that home educated children will not have an opportunity to learn about different viewpoints. Here's a quote from Professor Robert Reich of Stanford University from a segment last January about homeschooling on the PBS program Religion & Ethics Newsweekly:

If parents can control every aspect of a kid's education, shield them from exposure to the things that the parents deem sinful or objectionable, screen in only the things which accord to their convictions, and not allow them exposure to the world of a democracy, will the children group up then basically in the own image of their parents, servile to their own parents' beliefs?

One could just as easily substitute the word "government" for "parents" and make the exact same argument about traditional public schools. So the objection isn't truly about indoctrination, it's about who gets to have the control over children- their parents or the state?

It's pretty clear where God stands on the issue. The 4th Commandment (or 5th if you're Jewish or Protestant) says to "Honor your father and mother" and throughout both the Old & New Testaments there are numerous references to parental authority (Deuteronomy 6:7, Proverbs 22:6, Ephesians 6:1, and so on). The only reference I can think of to state authority is the famous "render unto Caesar" passage in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, & Luke. That passage specifically distinguishes state authority from God's authority and warns about the dangers of collaborating too closely with a godless government.

96th Carnival of Homeschooling is Up!

Spiritbee is hosting this week's 96th Carnival of Homeschooling: Yearbook Edition. Very cute theme!

My high school yearbook photo was taken at Glamour Shots (are they even still in business??) so I'm barely recognizable in it, LOL!

Will a Rookie be World Series MVP?

What a phenomenal night for the Red Sox rookies! Outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury had 4 hits and 2nd baseman Dustin Pedroia had 3. Between them, they went 7 for 10 and drove in 4 runs. Dice-K had his best postseason outing so far as a MLB player and even had a key 2 out RBI single.

If the Sox do end up becoming World Series champs and Pedroia hits well in the remaining game(s), I hope he gets voted MVP.

Science Nearly Eliminated from Bay Area Government-Run Schools

In a state where so much of the economy is powered by science and technology, California's government-run schools are abysmally failing to prepare the next generation in these domains.
California 8th graders scored 49th in the nation on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in science. On the 2007 state standardized tests, a whopping 63% of 5th graders failed to demonstrate basic proficiency in the subject.

The Lawrence Hall of Science, a science museum run by the University of California-Berkeley, recently surveyed nearly 1000 teachers at government-run elementary schools here in the Bay Area. According to the survey, the barriers to offering a high quality elementary science program include a severe lack of time devoted to science instruction, poor teacher preparation, and little administration & political support for teaching science.

80% of teachers surveyed spent less than 60 minutes per week teaching science and 16% did not teach it at all. This was particularly a problem in the early grades. Of K-2 teachers, 22% taught no science and another 21% spent less than 30 minutes per week on it. A mere 7% reported spending more than 60 minutes per week.

The elementary teachers surveyed felt the least prepared to teach science of all the core subjects. While only 4% felt unprepared to teach reading & math, 41% felt unprepared to teach science. This was particularly a problem for inexperienced teachers, who comprise 1 in 7 of Bay Area teachers. Many districts had rates approaching 1 in 3. Few teachers had the opportunity for professional development (PD) in science. 71% of districts offered less than 5 hours' worth of science PD and 28% offered none whatsoever. 92% of the respondents wanted more PD in science.

The LHS survey also found a lack of administration support for teaching science. 52% responded that their districts did not offer any support for science education. Nor is there much funding on the state or Federal level for science education. Of the $325.4 million California spent on teacher PD in the 2006-2007 school year, a mere $1.2 million (0.37%) was for science. Notably, the funding for the California Science Project has been cut by 75% since 2002 (the first year the No Child Left Behind act applied). Of the $342.8 million in Federal funding, only roughly $9 million (2.6%) was for science.

As someone who studied biology in college, I find these numbers extremely depressing. Yes, the primary focus in the earliest grades will be the 3 R's, but science still has an important place in the curriculum. Some parents (typically affluent ones) will be motivated to "afterschool" their children in science to make up for deficiencies but what about all the rest who are too busy and/or disinterested? Their children will grow up at a major disadvantage when it comes to competing in the global economy. Particularly since we all know the premium that Asian cultures place on achieving scientific and technological prowess.

This survey is just one more reinforcement that we made the right decision to homeschool our children.

An Oldie but Goodie

I happened to stumble across a link to a really funny piece called "You Know You're in San Francisco When..." via "The Homeschooling Revolution". Be forewarned that some of the content is a bit on the risque side. I'm no Republican, but out here I might as well be Ralph Reed.

Some of the highlights:

• Huge traffic jams are caused not by vegetable-oil-powered cars but by thousands of bicyclists intentionally messing up traffic just to irritate the Neanderthal motorists.
• There is an extreme housing shortage, but the political establishment responds by not allowing builders to build.
• Your family is making more than $125,000 a year, but you can't find a decent apartment, and you can't afford a house.
• The only flags being waved by marchers at parades have rainbows on them.
• Each morning, while drinking a latte at Starbucks, you review a complete list of companies you need to boycott.
• You lament the negative impact of those awful big-box stores on local mom-and-pop hardware stores while you're complaining to the cashier at Home Depot.
• You enjoy books about the struggles of smaller, independent bookstores that are systematically being taken over by huge corporations -- and you buy them at Barnes and Noble.
• You won't cross a picket line, and you proudly display your "Buy Union" bumper sticker on your imported car.
• You're not snobbish -- you just happen to honestly think it's only San Franciscans who know anything about politics, literature, love, food, fashion, culture and art, except for that high-brow director Michael Moore, of "Roger and Me" fame, who hails from Flint, Mich.

Too funny!

Carnival of Homeschooling #95 is Up!

"At Home With Kris" is the host for this week's 95th Carnival of Homeschooling: A to Z Edition. Cute theme!

One Size Does NOT Fit All When It Comes to Education

Almost 2 decades ago, E.D. Hirsch, Jr. wrote an expose on how "progressive" ideas in education are creating cultural illiteracy among Americans. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know spent 6 months on the New York Times best-seller list and Hirsch went on to found the Core Knowledge Foundation. Now Hirsch has written another excellent and thought-provoking book entitled The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Gap for American Children.

This book provides an answer as to why Americans fall further behind their international peers the longer they have been in school and why the racial test score gap widens in each successive grade. Hirsch makes an excellent argument that success on reading comprehension tests depends on having the background knowledge assumed by the author. The job of schools, therefore, should be to help students build up a broad factual knowledge (i.e. cultural literacy). Instead, schools have been focusing on teaching "all-purpose" cognitive strategies in the belief that they are universally applicable to all subjects. Hirsch shows how this "formalism" is a waste of instructional time.

Where the book misses its mark, however, is in Hirsch's call for a mandatory standard curriculum set at the national level. He wants a "one size fits all" detailed list of specific topics to be taught to every single child in every single school at exactly the same grade without taking into account the tremendous diversity both of vastly different communities in the U.S. and of cognitive abilities among children. Do parents really want some committee of bureaucrats in Washington D.C. to decide what their children should learn or do they want their child's teacher to be able to tailor instruction to his/her individual ability and their community's values?

Hirsch's "Core Knowledge" model reminds me of chain restaurants. A patron can walk into any Applebee's anywhere in the country and he/she will get essentially the same meal. It will be adequate, but not remotely as good as what the best local chefs offer at the little mom 'n pop restaurants.

Instead of requiring a standardized "menu" with no deviations permitted, why not come up with general guidelines similar to the food pyramid to make sure all basic needs are met but allowing individual consumers the freedom to fulfill them however those consumers deem best for themselves? The end result of basic competency is what's important, not how that competency is achieved.

The National Education Association, the largest public schoolteacher's union in the country, recently updated its position on homeschooling and reaffirmed its belief that homeschoolers "must meet all state curricular requirements". While most homeschoolers do take those requirements into consideration as general reference, we reject the idea of an impersonal "one size fits all" top-down mandate. I don't want Big Brother controlling my child's education any more than I would want them to control his/her diet. I'll certainly take their recommendations into consideration but ultimately it's my decision whether to accept, "tweak", or reject any given recommendation. If I'm lactose intolerant, then I'm not going to eat 3 servings of dairy just because the government says I should.