Catholics Must Reject Common Core

By REY FLORES

I always found it amusing how the Archie Bunker character in the old All in the Family TV sitcom used to refer to the adherents of modernist culture as either a “pinko” or a “commie.”
The very liberal television producer Norman Lear presented the Bunker character as a bigoted and angry lout who represented the dying, intolerant, and ugly past, while his liberal son-in-law, the Meathead, represented a just new world, tolerant and diverse.
While the Bunker character was neither Catholic nor even a practicing Protestant, Lear presented him as an out-of-touch Christian who hated anyone who wasn’t a WASP.
While we are certainly no Archie Bunkers, the proponents of the new federal education curriculum known as Common Core might deserve to be labeled as “commies.”
Today we are dealing with President Meathead and a whole bunch of his meat-headed socialist-wannabe followers who paint anyone who disagrees with their anti-Christian agendas as a bunch of intolerant, bigoted, and out-of-touch Archie Bunkers.
Today, many parents who are still sending their kids to the indoctrinating institutions known as public schools are bedeviled by the devilish Common Core curriculum.
It used to be that “Johnny can’t read”; now thanks in part to updated curricula, it’s more like “it doesn’t matter if Johnny can read or not, what’s important is how he feels and whether he or she thinks he’s a boy or a girl today.”
Common Core recreates facts and numbers-based mathematics by twisting it around like a pretzel. Common Core math requires not the correct answer from students, but rather an explanation on how they came to their conclusions.
While it’s nothing new that many school textbooks have rewritten history, today’s Common Core books are also molding the future by indoctrinating the very malleable minds of children from kindergarten all the way through twelfth grade.
Common Core’s social studies curriculums deliberately push kids to sympathize with liberal agendas, painting any opposition to liberal social causes as obstructionist and detrimental to social justice.
In one Common Core grammar lesson, children are asked to fill in the blank in a sentence that reads, “My mother (fill in the blank) me to clean my room.” The choices are “asks” and “nags.” The worst part is that there is no correct answer, but instead this teaches kids to minimize and defy parental authority by encouraging students to disrespect their parents and see them as nags, rather than as the parental authority.
As with the pernicious taxpayer-funded Planned Parenthood sex-ed curriculums, the parental authority is undermined, allowing the governmental institutions to assert their authority over the child’s formation.
It’s no longer about reading, writing, and arithmetic in America’s schools. Today, it’s more about sex, statism, and Godlessness. We evolved from “No Child Left Behind” to “Brainwashing Your Child’s Mind.”
One more thing that should bother any parents who do send their children to these schools is that fact that Common Core has its roots in the school reformation efforts that Obama confidante Bill “the Mad Bomber” Ayers has been involved with for two decades. President Meathead worked closely up until 2001 with Ayers, as they both headed the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which funneled millions upon millions of dollars into radical leftist community activism (see http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/12/04/Roots-of-Common-Core-Lie-In-Association-Between-Barack-Obama-And-Bill-Ayers).
Any parents who read this article and still think it’s OK to allow their children near any of these leftist secularists at the public schools should seriously have their heads examined.

Catholic Schools
Must Say No

Why in blazes would any Catholic diocese anywhere even consider Common Core in its school system?
While public schools are of this world, Catholic schools are not supposed to be of this world. Yes, Catholic schools also teach kids to make it in this world, but the main purpose of Catholic schools is to form students to take their Catholicism into the world, and to prepare them for eternal life with God in Heaven.

When Did We Forget This?

The Milwaukee Archdiocese statement supporting its educational alignment with Common Core contains the following paragraph: “The work of the Common Core Identity Initiative is also aligned with The National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools, published by Loyola University last spring. The final document has been reviewed and endorsed by the bishops of all five dioceses in Wisconsin.”
A good Catholic friend of mine in Milwaukee responded with the following counterclaim:
“The fact is that these standards were reviewed but not finally adopted by all five Wisconsin bishops, and three Wisconsin dioceses have now issued explicit rejections of the adoption or adaptation of Common Core. So I’d like to suggest that the Milwaukee Archdiocese revise its statement to reflect the current reality. I think the archdiocese could say something like the following:
“Now that dozens of secular and religious educational authorities have ‘found out what’s in it’ (to paraphrase Nancy Pelosi), they have rejected Common Core for the dangerous and insidious movement that it is, and they have refused to give it credibility by associating themselves with it.
“However, the Milwaukee Archdiocese remains steadfast in its promotion of Common Core because, in the words of Sr. Dale McDonald, National Catholic Educational Association director of public policy: ‘While we do our own curriculum, we’re unique, we’re independent, we have our own culture, in a couple years it’s going to be very hard to buy materials; it’s going to be hard for our teachers to go to professional development that matches what they’re doing, so maybe we need to think about adopting the standards’” (visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laJsT0oiLRQ).
What a shame that so many malformed bureaucrats and clergy in the diocesan school systems are pretty much condemning so many children to this system!
There is a petition which you must sign to let Archbishop Jerome Listecki know we why object.
Find the petition here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/176/132/362/end-common-core-in-the-milwaukee-archdiocese/.

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(Rey Flores is available for fundraisers, trainings and other speaking engagements and can be reached at reyfloresusa@gmail
.com.)