We Now Know The Dangers In Today's Education-Time To Pray and Act

In 2010 the state of Alabama implemented what has probably been one of the most controversial educational plans into public schools and which has since proven to be disastrous.  Instead of helping Alabama school children excel in education, it has caused our schools to plummet to number 50 in overall assessment.  The federal program pushed by former President Barrack Obama has taken victory from our children’s hands and substituted utter failure and confusion.
            Under the guise of helping Alabama children relate to other children in similar educational levels throughout other parts of the country, Common Core (CC) has instead taken something which should have been simple and made it complicated.  Prior to CC, Alabama children were improving drastically in Social Studies after the school system adopted a new program implemented in junior and senior years.
According to a former Alabama teacher, in the 1990s American History was taught in eighth grade,  Alabama History and geography in the ninth,  World History (elective required for college bound) in the tenth, American History (more advanced and in depth) again in the eleventh, and Government and Economics in the twelfth grade.  Around the year 2000, Alabama changed their program of study and began teaching two years of World History in the 8th and 9th grades which was designed to bring students up to contemporary times.  American History was taught in the 10th and 11th grades and included Alabama History in relation to what was happening throughout the country.  Government and Economics was again taught in the 12th grade and was required of all students in order to graduate.  It was generally agreed by most professional sources that this new curriculum put Alabama at the forefront of the nation in Social Studies standards and became a model for other states, this former teacher said.  This course of study was scrapped when CC standards for Social Studies and English was adopted in 2012.
            Common Core math was adopted in 2010. Instead of teaching absolutes and rote memorization such as 1 + 1= 2, students were taught ambiguous formulas which caused considerable confusion.  According to a former Dale County math teacher, it caused students to work longer solving problems because they had to break down their work into minute parts.  “I have heard horror stories,” she said concerning the CC curriculum.  School counselors are seeing an increase of stress and anxiety in students struggling with the basic concepts of CC.  The counselors themselves are concerned with the increase in data collection and constant testing of students.  The data is fed into the federal system and goes into “protected” data banks but there is concern that some information is being shared to other entities and agencies without parental or student permission or even their knowledge.  By the time the student reaches the 8th grade, counselors guide students into predetermined career paths.
            Since the inception of CC in Alabama, the education system has gone south but why is this system causing such controversy?  At a time when our federal government and future of our country is becoming more obviously shaky, more cohesiveness and a rock-solid foundation based on proven standards are needed.  Our educational prowess should be excelling if we are to, indeed, draw business and commerce into our state and, thereby, creating financial stability.  Can incoming personnel expect the best education out of our current educational facilities?  Not while we are sitting on the very bottom.  In the past our students have done fairly well with the limited assets available to them.  The system prior to CC was not perfect but was improving as Alabama began to integrate more technology into the course of study.  Given the former standards and current assets our students have available now, a much more efficient system can be adopted.  In many ways our students had to catch up with other parts of the country technologically but not at the expense of the traditional system designed on more solid principles.  The problems with CC go deeper than just methods of instruction and styles of learning.
            Can more insidious plans be at the root of the CC curriculum?  Why is Alabama taking a back seat to federal directives?  When did the federal government decide what Alabama should teach in our own schools?  When did Alabama surrender States rights?  Has Alabama sold out to the federal government for federal monies? What has happened to our state government and more importantly, what is now happening to our children, our future? These are just some of the questions parents, grandparents, legislators, pastors, teachers, and others are asking.
“Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man,” attributed to St. Ignatius Loyola of the Jesuit Order and also to Aristotle, is an accurate statement showing the importance of early learning in the development of a person. 
Psychologists   agree that a child begins his or her education even while in the womb.  By the age of four, it has been said a child will have learned half of what he will need by the time he reaches adulthood.  By the age of four, children are beginning to develop socially and learn empathetically about others.  This understanding of the mental states of others helps with communication and social skills.  According to Dr. John van Bladel, assistant professor of Psychology at Fulton Mongomery Community College in New York, by the age of 6, a child will have learned more than 10,000 words and his brain will be about 90% of the size of his adult brain. Cognitive skills continue to expand and by 11 years of age children are learning past, present, and future concepts and are beginning to grasp complex math formulas and cause-and-effect relationships.  One of the most important aspects of a child’s development is a “secure base” or a parent who offers security while the child is exploring his environment.  The child knows the parent is there whenever he is afraid or insecure.  The child must be provided basic needs of physical safety, emotional comfort, and social security. 
With more broken homes and lack of parental and familial structure, children have become more vulnerable to everyday pressures.  Social interaction, school work, social media, bullying, and striving to stay out of sight of anyone who would rock the boat are upsetting enough to a child.  Enter the new “woke” school system.  The new operating procedure is to become the “be all, end all” to every child…after all it takes a village to raise a child or in this case it takes a village to educate a child.  When a child enters school at the age of 4 years of age (Pre-K), he is being indoctrinated with certain standards which now align with the federal standards.  By the time that child matures and graduates from high school, he has had 12-14 years of programming.
Why is that bad? It depends on who is doing the indoctrination.  When one examines other states and their curriculums which embrace CC, we can see the horror story.  In many school systems, sexual awareness is taught to the point of teaching little Johnny he can change his sex, how to perform sexually, who is acceptable socially-people who believe in God are not socially acceptable, people who are white are not acceptable, and our Founding Fathers and patriots are now considered terrorists and are not socially acceptable.  School counselors can offer students information about where to go to for an abortion but are forbidden to inform parents of any of this.
In Texas, their educators decided to not implement CC but another system.  However, they hired the same people who developed CC to develop their new educational system.  Well, a rose by any other name….What happened next was appalling.  Teachers were forbidden by penalty of firing to divulge anything about the curriculum.  Students were taught world religion for a month but for an additional  month forced to study Islam exclusively to the point where students were required to wear burqas to school in order to understand and learn tolerance. They were taught the patriots who participated in the Boston Tea Party were terrorists as was former Pres. George W. Bush.  Once the word got out (many teachers left the school), the Texas educators booted the system and started again with something more traditional.
Why is this so dangerous?  Similar tactics were used in the early years of the 20th century in Germany.  First, the Boy Scouts which taught morals to boys in Germany was banned and then the children were forced to join Hitler’s Youth.  In January 1933, there were approximately 50,000 non-Jewish youth in Hitler’s Youth. By the end of that same year there were more than two million young children in Hitler’s Youth.  Hitler knew that by indoctrinating children during their most impressionable years, he could control and manipulate their minds into compliance.  It is very disconcerting to learn Minnesota is eliminating the study of World War I and World II from their course of study.  Is it because the events leading up to and involving what caused those wars and the history surrounding it are seemingly paralleling where America is now?
Let’s now fast forward to the mid-20th century and the rise of a “community-organizer” and atheist by the name of Saul Alinsky, who by any other standards would be a communist.  He wrote several steps to overthrown, infiltrate, or change current government to solve “issues”.  In his writings, Alinsky  said one step is taking control of the education system and controlling what children listen to and learn in school. It is a subtle indoctrination or brainwashing.  Other steps went hand in hand with changing the education process:  Control healthcare (Can we say COVID 19 and the fear mongering associated with it?); Increase Poverty:  Increase the welfare state-eliminate jobs, raise taxes unbearably high so that the populace looks to government for everything to live; Increase Debtedness:  Here again increase taxes and cost of living to an unsustainable level:  Control guns:  Remove the ability of the people to protect themselves from a police state.  Look at federal House Bill 127 written by Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee which would severally restrict gun ownership and also Pres. Joe Biden’s push for taxation on every gun no matter how old; Control Welfare: take control of housing, food, and income; Control religion:  remove God from schools and government. (Reference Madalyn Murray O’Hair who won her lawsuit and removed God from schools.  Since, government entities have followed suit.); Control and propogate  class welfare:  Look at  ANTIFA, BLM, racial unrest etc. currently raging in our country and threatening government personnel, judges, businesses, and private citizens.
Where are we going in the state of Alabama?  I am believing it is time to do what Nehemiah did and build the wall in front of us!----Elyse Wood
_______________________________________________________
John Van Bladel “Childhood Psychology”
Peter Gray Ph.D “The Age Four Transition to Responsible Childhood”
Lumen: “Introduction to Psychology”
WW 2:  The Holocaust Year by Year, BBC Teach
Middle School Suicides Double As Common Core Testing Intensifies, Huffington Post
Today’s Riot-Prone Mobs Are A Product of America’s Cult-Like Education System by   Stella Morabito
Hitler’s Youth:  The Duped Generation by H.W. Roch, published 1972.  Ballantine Books.
WND Truth Matters: State school standards banish lessons about World War I, II, Holocaust, Civil War by Bob Unruh