Category: Society

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The Common Core Standards – Keeping Our Kids Dumb

It may be a knee-jerk reaction on my part, but I’m suspicious of political efforts in education. Fundamentally, I don’t think the real intent and motivation is to help children. The quote from the Standards web site brings up a number of questions and thoughts.

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.

From: http://www.corestandards.org/

  • Why do we want all students to learn the same things?
  • Do children who are homeless need to learn the same things as others?
  • Do children living in big cities need to learn the same things as others?
  • How can the same content be relevant and meaningful to all students?
  • Why is content (information) the most important thing to learn?
  • Shouldn’t we be teaching children how to find and evaluate information, rather than having them learn this content?
  • Shouldn’t we be valuing children’s diverse styles, interests, individual personalities, contexts, etc?
  • Why is certain knowledge (and there’s a lot) not addressed in the core standards?
  • Who decides (I couldn’t find the list of people involved in developing the standards, but the “voices of support” are politicians and business people with one exception) what content to include?
  • What is their agenda?
  • Who is going to benefit from demanding one set of standards for all children?
  • What are their philosophical orientations?
  • What is the depth and extent of their experience and knowledge of child development, child psychology, learning and cognition, teaching, curriculum theory, cultural epistemology, and so forth?
  • How can anyone think that they know what is “good” for all children (seems like an error of hubris to me)?
  • While stating a desire to help children succeed in “college and careers,”
    • how do they know what each child needs to succeed (whatever that means)?
    • why is education about “success”; what does “success” mean?
    • why is education about careers and what careers are valued? Is waste disposal (garbage collector) a valued career
    • why should all children go to college?
  • What would happen if all kids were “successful” at the school game? What would this look like? Who would benefit?

The key to understanding this effort is found in the last sentence. The entire political motivation is about money, about economic competitiveness, or about economic domination. The whole approach is based in a global corporate agenda. I couldn’t find any reference to social justice, ecology, or the environment. These ideas are not of concern to the corporate agenda. In fact, they are a threat to this agenda.

The approach is mechanistic (as if children were little non-human robots) and positivistic. We’re in the middle of a revolution as the worldviews of positivism and mechanism, having created life-threatening and culturally disconnecting problems, are being challenged by more holistic and complex worldviews. We’re witnessing the kicking and screaming of positivists and mechanists as their materialistic and narrow views of power and control are being undermined. It’s the middle of a revolution. Our consumerism is eating back on itself. Within the context of economic growth, consumerism, and materialism, we’re destroying families, cultures, and the environment upon which we depend for our very survival.

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More on Hierarchies and Holarchies

Layered systems are supposed to create stability. However, most hierarchies in the social realm seem to create instability. Those at the top are faced with struggles to maintain stability, while those at the bottom feel disconnected and marginalized.

As a hierarchical nation, the bottom layers of American society — the homeless and impoverished — are not active participants in the running of the country. In fact, most of the layers below the very top — the middle classes — are not engaged. The grand illusion is that we are all part of the democratic process, but it is just that… an illusion. Even though people may vote, participate in local political parties, and so forth, the real decisions are being made by those at the top. The top layer of decision-making and control are the wealthy, the corporate CEOs, and the wealthy elected officials and their appointees. Even though our elected officials are supposed to represent the people, they don’t. In fact, they can’t represent us. By voting, we disenfranchise a certain portion of the population. There are always losers. And, with the way elections are run with intense negativity and aggression, the losers are always resentful, at the very least. Our whole system seems to be built on the notion of divide and conquer. Keep people fighting amongst themselves and they won’t join forces against the power-brokers. Lie to the masses. Stir up their emotions. But, never get the people to think rationally.

On the other hand, if we were to move towards holarchy, control and power are distributed. The layers are layers of participation, not layers of power and control. Voting is for consensus, not for majority rule and the resulting disenfranchisement and marginalization. Attacking others with lies and partial truths (as is the norm in during election years) is not tolerated, since such tactics do not allow people to negotiate, compromise, and, more importantly, think clearly. Hierarchies promote aggression, distrust, and self-centeredness. Holarchies promote compassion, reciprocity, and what’s good for others. Hierarchies disconnect, while holarchies connect.

For how long are people going to put up with the insanity propagated by our out-of-control political-economic system? For how long can we live in a world marked by aggression, distrust, and massive disconnection?

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The Problem with Hierarchies

We live in a world of hierarchies… that top-down organization with a few powerful people at the top along with progressively larger numbers of individuals at each layer as we move towards the bottom. Our political structures, the military, the organization of businesses and corporations, the organization of schools and universities, and all sorts of other groupings tend to be hierarchical. Even most families tend to be organized as hierarchies. Such organizational schemes are so pervasive that most of us have no clue how to organize groups in any other way.

The problem with hierarchies is that they tend to set up dysfunctional relationships. They are not based on “seeing relationships” or on establishing effective relationships. Of course, some hierarchies may be necessary, such as with the military, where functioning is based on having centralized control. In most cases, this centralized control and power at the top is problematic for some of the following reasons:

  • Many of those who occupy lower layers tend to compete with their “layer-mates” in order to rise to the top. This competition can be ruthless and without concern for the well-being of others.
  • Those at lower layers tend to distrust and/or resent those at higher layers in the hierarchy.
  • Feelings of inadequacy and apathy are fostered.
  • People who occupy the lower layers tend not to have a stake in the organization and do not take the work seriously.
  • An attitude of going-through-the-motions is promoted.
  • The “look busy” technique is standard practice.
  • The top and the bottom are disconnected.

The alternative approach to organization is what I refer to as holarchy. Holarchies are embedded layers, where there is no top or bottom, but rather center and periphery. Control and power are distributed among the layers. Holarchic social structures are based on participation and shared “governance” among all participants. Some examples of such organizational structures include: (a) original tribal organization, where the “chief” or elders are at the center as models of leadership and wisdom, rather than as those in absolute control; (b) the Dalai Lama as model of enlightened leadership and manifestation; and (c) a few businesses where power and leadership are distributed, such as with W. L. Gore. In fact, the ideal of democracy is modeled as a holarchy with involvement and shared governance among all members.

Holarchies are based on establishing relationships and on shared power and control. Participants in holarchies operate through negotiation and consensus. The major question is: how can we move towards holarchic organization and away from hierarchy?

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In the Heartlessland of America

Sometimes we get so caught up in the speed of everyday life, we don’t take the time to ponder what’s happening around us. As for me, I feel like I’ve been going about my everyday business with blinders on. It’s embarrassing. I feel like I’m extremely slow on the uptake.

Maybe this time too many things happened on too many fronts to ignore the message:

Our society is becoming increasingly heartless.

It’s becoming so bad, I cringe when I listen to the radio, watch TV news, or pick up a newspaper. But, it doesn’t stop there. Events at work and encounters with a variety of people all demonstrate a huge disconnect with heart… with our basic humanity.

As a golfer I’ve followed and admired Tiger Woods. Now, he’s been crucified. A simple story on his screw-up would have sufficed, but the drive for headlines, money, and recognition, reporters have lost their hearts and lynched Tiger for their own benefit. Of course, the same sort of lynching took place with President Clinton, but not so much with the governor of South Carolina and the many others who have made some sort of “social transgression.”

Buddhists have a slogan, which goes something like this:

“don’t seek benefit from the misfortunes of others.”

This slogan has to do with how we can practice being compassionate or how we can practice living with heart. I wonder how many of these same journalists have had affairs or have acted in ways that may have been inappropriate, hurtful, or unethical?

At work, many of my colleagues were becoming increasingly alarmed and worried about one our colleagues. He wasn’t showing up to teach classes, wasn’t turning in final grades, and became impossible to contact. Then, the administration stepped in and fired him. When some colleagues pleaded to have him put on sick-leave and to get him help, the response was basically “we’re following policy.” As we found out later, he was suffering from severe depression and the medications were adversely affecting him. His wife (from a very different culture and with little English language ability) could not advocate for him. He, his wife, and his children are now without income and health benefits. How does “policy” address the needs of human beings? In this dramatic case, five people were treated with heartlessness and damaged in ways we have yet to see.

At the scale of our government and probably more significantly at the scale of corporations, we see huge collections of heartless people running the show. These people make decisions and take actions based on self-interest, money, and power, not for the good of people struggling to survive in an increasingly complex and challenging world. In fact, the policies created to run a society or corporation serve mostly to decrease flexibility in dealing with individual human beings. “Zero tolerance,” “cell phone service contracts,” “disclaimers,” “photo radar,” “Roberts rules of order,” and the millions of others all serve to create a rigidity that doesn’t allow for exceptions or for individual circumstances. It’s the “letter of the law,” not the “spirit of the law.” Neither the individual nor the society as a whole is valued. Only the “good” of the rich and powerful is considered.

This neglect of the individual and of the society has resulted in our inability to care for our poor and sick, for our children, and for our elderly. This neglect also has produced an education system that serves as political capital for leaders at all levels of scale, yet fails to meet the needs of most of its students. Even those who score well on tests are left without self-confidence and feelings of self-worth, without essential social skills, without abilities to think deeply and critically, and with little if any creativity. From a very early age, children adeptly observe and learn about social interactions. They are tremendously curious and think in surprisingly complex ways, while being unboundedly creative. By the time they reach grade 6, their self-confidence, social skills, curiosity, complex thinking, and creativity have been reduced to little more than memories of the adults who knew these children 6 years earlier. By this time, heartlessness has begun to take root, as modeled by a system of schooling steeped in heartlessness within a society without heart.

We care more about the “material goods” than about human beings. These “material” goods range from the ephemeral, such as test scores, achievement, power, our own self-images and desires, stock market “indices,” and ratings and statistics of all kinds, to the more concrete but “immaterial,” such as money, houses, cars, and goods of all kinds. In this materialistic world, there is no room for making connections to oneself, to others, to the delicate environment in which we live, and to the wonderful world of ideas.

(originally published December 30, 2009)