I made my five year old daughter laugh tonight. Hard. For some reason, when I told my girls that We The People are the masters and the government is the family dog that needs to be properly trained, it tickled Jillian's funny bone. I'm not sure how much of my explanation she actually understood, but it made sense to my 12 year old. So, let me backtrack a bit, and I'll share it with you.
We don't have a DVD player in our car. My kids don't put earbuds in the second they get buckled in and tune out, either. Sometimes we'll leave the radio on or put in a CD, but mostly, we talk. And I'm glad we've made that choice as a family, because otherwise, we'd miss out on all sorts of incredible conversations. Tonight, was one of those discussions. I was driving my eldest daughter, Erica, to Sign Language Choir, and the conversation turned to personal strengths and weaknesses. Erica has a tendency to devalue the things that come easily to her. I told her that different things come easily to different people, which brought the conversation to academic subjects and school...and Common Core.
At that point, I said something I've said frequently. I do not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach to education. (Incidentally, that is a big part of why my husband and I homeschool our children.) Human infants, toddlers, and preschoolers do not master physical, mental, emotional, or social milestones at the same time or to the same degree, nor does anyone (sane) expect them to. No one, regardless of whether they spent the last 12 years in a classroom run by standards-based education or not, arrives at adulthood with the same information and the same amount of information tucked away in their mental files. How do most adults and children (before they are shepherded into one-size-fits-all classrooms around the age of five or six) learn? They learn by recognizing a desire or a need to know something. With that need or desire in hand, they go about locating the resources to learn said material. With the resources located, they hunker down and learn it. They stick with the studying and/or practicing until they have reached a level of knowledge or a degree of mastery that is satisfying for them.
That was nothing new for either of my girls. That is how their educations have been directed their entire lives. My end goal for my children's education is threefold. One, I want to preserve my children's natural love of learning. Two, I want them to have the time, freedom, and flexibility to explore their interests as widely or as deeply as they desire. In other words, they know best what they "need" to know at any given time. Three, I want them to know how to learn so that learning is a natural extension of daily living throughout their entire lives. But, as I explained to them, that mode of education is not possible in a traditional classroom for a variety of reasons, nor does the institution of public education share my same goals.
Note there that I said the institution of public education; I have a tremendous amount of respect for most teachers in public schools. Most of them care very deeply for their students. Most of them want amazing things and have big dreams for their students. Most of them dig deep into their hearts, souls, and wallets to provide their students with the best they can offer. I have very little respect for the institution of public education, though. It long ago ceased to be about enriching the minds and lives of the children entrusted to it. I have long suspected, and what I am learning about Common Core is confirming those suspicions for me, that the institution of public education has two end goals that I am diametrically opposed to: undermining the family and indoctrinating "worker bees" whose allegiance is to the government.
The mission of centralized government, regardless of which political party is currently holding the reins, is to preserve the power it currently has and expand it from there. How does governmental power expand? It expands by swallowing the freedoms of the people it is supposed to serve. If you are seeking to control someone else, how do you do that? Can you control an informed, well-educated person who is able to evaluate things critically? Can you control someone who is able to think "outside the box" and examine issues from all sorts of perspectives? Can you control someone who fully understands how our government is supposed to work and what his or her role in that process is supposed to be? Of course not.
At that point, our conversation shifted to the idea of self-governance. I asked Erica, "What would happen with an informed, engaged citizenry?"
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