RED HOT CONSERVATIVE

By Danette Clark

For those who still deny the secular progressive agenda behind the Common Core State Standards, the American Humanist Association (AHA) provides a nice little check-list of ‘guiding principles’ they believe should be taught to all children in all schools.

AHA’s Ten Commitments: Guiding Principles for Teaching Values in America’s Public Schools express the importance of, among other things, critical thinking, global awareness, human rights (as set forth by the United Nations), social justice, and service to an interdependent world.

So how do our new standards and aligned curriculum resources stack up to these guiding principles? Not only does Common Core get an A plus, but Common Core developer, Linda Darling-Hammond, is an endorser of AHA’s Ten Commitments.

Although not dated, it appears AHA released the Ten Commitments less than a year ago.  Therefore, Hammond’s endorsement comes long after the creation and release of Common Core.

CCSSO created Common Core lesson plans and resources, by the dozens, fall right in line with AHA’s vision of morality in education, while the English Language Arts standards themselves, through the heavy use of informational texts (propaganda), lay the perfect foundation for social engineering as called for by John Dewey, the father of progressive education and a drafter of the first Humanist Manifesto.

David Coleman, dubbed ‘the architect’ of the standards, was in recent years a symposium speaker and participant in the IAS School of Social Science Dewey Seminar, where the impact of educational institutions on society, sociopolitical orders, and democracy were examined through a series of workshops and seminars.

The American Humanist Association, whose motto is ‘Good Without God’, makes clear their belief that it’s not just a school’s right, but its duty, to see that students develop the convictions needed to shape a ‘democratic’ and ‘just world’.

From AHA’s website:

“Many students spend as much or more time in school than they do at home. Therefore, the school must be a place that supports family and community efforts to build strong values.”

“This ethical mission is an essential part of all education, public and private, elementary through high school and university.  In a democratic and pluralist society, we believe that the values presented should be the moral foundation of education.”

For AHA to say they support family and community efforts to build values in one breath, then specifically lay out what those values should be in another, tells us exactly what we need to know – that AHA educators intend to teach theirvalues, regardless of whether they conflict with the values of the parent. But so it is and has always been with the secular progressive education movement…Constitution be damned.

See examples of Common Core lessons and resources that promote social justice, global awareness, and interdependence here and here.

Also, go to the Common Core / CSCOPE / CES Connection page to read about the Coalition of Essential Schools, the progressive education reform movement behind Common Core.