Common Core – Standardized Reality and the Slow Kill of Divergent Thinking

by Nathaniel Mauka, Staff Writer | Waking Times

We’ve come a long way in education since the 1960s, but not necessarily in a positive direction. The psychologist J.P. Guilford once drew a distinction between two forms of thinking: convergent and divergent. One produces alternative theories, creative ideas, and useful solutions, the other, the dogmatization of information and a ‘single’ correct answer which can be force-fed to students on standardized tests and in common core classrooms.

Divergent thinking is done by a mind that is turned ‘on’ and engaged in the constant questioning of reality, instead of passively ‘dumbed down’ by rote solutions force-fed through memorization and shallow learning. Divergent thinking creates fantastical worlds such as those imagined by the likes of Nikola Tesla, Buckminster Fuller, Beethoven, Einstein, Pythagorus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Marina Abramovic, and similar personalities.

Standardize Everything

Standardized education in America causes the slow death of divergent thinking, in its aim to create psychologically muted and Pavlovian-trained followers who won’t buck the system.

Dr. Joseph Farrell, and Gary Lawrence, authors of Rotten to the (Common) Core, state:

“Standardized Testing in America has a troubled history. Its agenda has long remained veiled behind “expert opinions” and “latest studies.” The future of American education stands in a tradition of social engineering, data mining, pseudo-psychology, and dumbing down classroom strategies.

Common Core promises great advances though its true benefits are monetary ones for software companies and partner politicians.

It it is our contention that the goal of Common Core, or rather, of its assessment process, is nothing less than a massive addition to the power of the surveillance state, to the privileged corporations destined to manage it, to the further drastic curtailment of our civil liberties, and to the eventual inhibition of any individual creativity, genius, responsibility, and any general or popular intellectual culture resulting from them.

Our argument is different than that leveled by many critics against the Common Core standards, for our focus is thus not upon pedagogy, or content but rather upon its assessment process and its implicit consequences for parents, students, and the teaching profession.

Our goal is to stimulate not only discussion of Common Core’s radical agenda for the consolidation of the surveillance state, but for its ultimate rejection.”

Education as Social Engineering

The common core curriculum is anti-human, and arguably not educational in any regard, unless of course you are educating future slaves. As Dr. Farrell explains, it is simply another form of social engineering and elite mind control. He believes the problem with common core is so significant that a ‘black market’ in education will be created whereupon someone who actually understands a subject will be paid to tutor our children, though they’ve just spent eight hours being drilled with useless information.

[More…]

Philosophers stone – selected views from the boat http://philosophers-stone.co.uk