Agree! What were they thinking when they
chose to support this? Inquiring minds want
to know!!

AdmNelson, its been a while since I've seen you post and I'm glad you've returned. Also, glad to see you've avoided a place called Trafalgar.

Your words regarding your dissertation remind me of a book that was published in the mid'90s titled "The Bell Curve" where the authors performed a longitudinal study concerning IQ. Some of the data and their conclusions didn't set very well with established social protocol and the authors were hounded beyond reason. If I recall correctly, a great deal of genuflecting and careful apologizing took place, but in the end the facts could not be changed, just buried.

If you are familiar with Khan Academy, the free learning web site that a lot of home schoolers use, look into the fact that they support Common Core: https://www.khanacademy.org/commoncore

If you have Liberty minded friends that use Khan Academy, you should alert them to this.

Commie Core is an amalgam of the worst of John Dewey's Progressive Education, Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. It's simply the logical descendant of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America as described by Charlotte Iserbyt.

p.s., Doc -- if you can take Rush Limbaugh, his is an organic intelligence. hated school. dropped out and severely pissed off his family. kinda like my wife -- smart but no degree.

hey, Doc, you are right! I have 3 degrees and my wife has none ... and she can outthink me readily! me, with the 136 iq! I've always called it "organic intelligence", the means to the right ends which comes naturally. your writing shows that you have both -- intellectual training and organic smarts -- and it makes you fun to read! Thank You!!!

The rabbit hole runs deep. Charlotte Iserbyt is a woman who served as the head of policy at the Department of Education during the first administration of Ronald Reagan until she blew the whistle. Her father was in Skull and Bones, the group that the Bushes, John Kerry, and many other elitists belong to. Her perspectives will make your jaw hit the floor. She wrote the book "The Dumbing Down Of America" Here is a link to a search of YouTube videos about her: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_qu... Watch as deep or shallow as you can handle. The bottom line is that our education system is patterned after the Soviet system and is designed to corrupt the family and the young mind.

In an effort to free the highly intelligent students from the clutches of the collectivists in education, I earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology. The university I attended (sub-Ivy but not sub-par) had promised me that my dissertation could be on the difference between the truly gifted and the merely smart, i.e., that the truly gifted do not think merely twice as fast and twice as accurately as the putative smarties, but qualitatively as well as quantitatively differently. The dissertation and its research were essentially done but – as it offended the egalitarians – I was required to do an alternative dissertation to earn “the letters” (Ph.D.); the alternative dissertation was essentially a POS (a term widely used at Goldman Sachs, meaning piece-of-shit).
Much of education as practiced in this former Republic is the subjective denial of objective truth, e.g., “all children can learn,” as purveyed by those who claim that they can teach. Remember the old aphorism “those who can – do, those who can’t – teach”? There is a third clause, “those who can’t teach – teach teachers.”
The “Academy” has been largely rejected by the trades upon whose practice our life depends. The neurosurgeon and the guy-who-fixes-the-brakes-on-your-car each learn as apprentices to masters. The schoolmarm who teaches your kids – well intentioned though (s)he may be – is required to regale his or her students with stuff handed down from on high while attempting to keep the student inmates from taking over the school asylum. The difficulty of the teaching task is subsumed in the impossibility of the control task; the kids learn next-to-nothing whilst the hooligans enjoy the school “hood.”

The thing that boggles my mind is the number of people who, though I might not care for them or their politics all the time, I generally consider to be sufficiently intelligent that I would trust them with elective office, actually support Common Core: Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, Mike Huckabee and a few others. Have they read this stuff? Have they tried to understand the math? Common Core is awful! I just don't understand how anybody with any common sense can support it.

This article connects the dots and the people involved. Common Core has the goal of turning the US school system into training grounds for good little socialist, but not so smart that they can see through the garbage. Right now, locally, they are selling it to industry as a place where they will create future workers, but effective workers have to be able to think for themselves and in rational terms - these graduates will not be able to do that.
Why the ongoing surprise that Gates is involved? It baffles me. The man has stated in public meetings a desire to reduce carbon emissions via reduction in population, stating "vaccines are the way to go." Does this sound like a freedom loving, academics pushing man? This is a true producer, of software which will sell in Common Core schools, and an investor in mentioned vaccine company. Has anyone heard Gates speak out for liberty or freedom? The fact he associates and appears with Ayers at meetings says a lot. Then there is Huckabee and Jeb Bush, well the Bush family has been one world back to daddy. Remember Fred Thompson, running as a Republican, yet he is a member of the one world loving Council On Foreign Relations. Sadly, too many declaring themselves Republicans do not stand for past Republican ideas. As they communists predicted years ago, having infiltrated the Democrat Party of my early years, the line between the two has blurred and both have fallen for the collectivist line.

Thank you for that insight. I often relate to Dr. Michael Savage more than anyone else. Your keen observation of what are "deep people" is a result of a life lived in depths, breaths and heights.

Howard Gardner (Ph.D. & Harvard Professor) first postulated “multiple intelligences,” adding to the traditional mathematical and linguistic abilities – those most commonly measured and assessed. Like you, I have enjoyed the company of many inherently creative, self-made, and profound thinkers. It was from these friendships and observations that I postulated that such people think in sophisticated mathematic, linguistic, artistic, humorous, kinetic, analogous, and interpersonal modes – and do so simultaneously. By so doing, they achieve insights unattainable to the one-trick-ponies; the former are joys to behold, while the latter are hammers for whom everything is a nail. It is the difference between those rare persons know who they are as compared to those many who know only what they imagine themselves to be.

I am interested in your statement that the "truly gifted...think...qualitatively ans well as quantitatively differently". Could you elaborate on that? And do these characteristics sort independently, so that you could have someone who is not 'gifted' but who has a knack for thinking 'qualitatively differently'? (I do not have a PhD but I have observed people during the course of my life and your statement might delineate a useful parameter.)

Jan

Look up the ideas of John Dewey. You can find him in Wikipedia, which mentions his Hegelian roots. Look up Hegel, too.

Observe how Dewey had an immense influence on American education. When I took education courses decades ago, everything in them was based on Dewey, who was regarded as some sort of god in the education departments at Tufts and at Boston University.

Observe how the Wikipedia articles about Dewey and Hegel contrast many different views of epistemology and metaphysics held by the philosophers of Hegel's time, Dewey's time, and the present. Rand and her ideas are never mentioned. Not even a hint.

As for Dewey, we learned that one of his ideas was to get people to reject the idea of "independence" and substitute "interdependence."

Some person in Washington recently said, "You didn't build that." I don't think he was suggesting independence as a virtue.

One is reminded of non-architect Ellsworth Monckton Toohey educating the public on the collectivist merits of architecture.

Folks gave Obama and Bill Ayers a pass. Now it's biting us in the butt through our kids' education.