Common Core – Standardized Reality and the Slow Kill of Divergent Thinking

 Common core is simply the absurd extension of  testing which by its nature promotes memorization even when that is not the best methodology.

Children do need to memorize certain difficult patterns in order to be useful in society. What this means is that the information is internalized until it is second nature.  The times table is the most enduring example.  Speed test allow the mind to become faster as well.  Repetition and speed surely enhances the brain.  The same must apply to other skills.

Yet memorizing mere facts is counter productive and generally impossible for actual development.  Better yet it would be better to train in methods allowing one to recover data carefully reviewed and understood.  That is actually difficult because your brain must clear the registers and go hunting for the keys.  

A good way is to focus on sentence recall.  Text is reviewed  for meaningful sentences and the mind focuses on those sentences.  Those sentences are doors to developed thoughts that then can be readily recalled.

Thus you are also thinking in terms of thoughts open to review and criticism.

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 Common Core – Standardized Reality and the Slow Kill of Divergent Thinking

By WakingTimes October 13, 20164 CommentsRead More →

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2016/10/13/common-core-standardized-reality-death-divergent-thinking/

We’ve come a long way in education since the 1960s, but not necessarily in a positive direction. The psychologist J.P. Guilford once drew a distinction between two forms of thinking: convergent and divergent. One produces alternative theories, creative ideas, and useful solutions, the other, the dogmatization of information and a ‘single’ correct answer which can be force-fed to students on standardized tests and in common core classrooms.

Divergent thinking is done by a mind that is turned ‘on’ and engaged in the constant questioning of reality, instead of passively ‘dumbed down’ by rote solutions force-fed through memorization and shallow learning. Divergent thinking creates fantastical worlds such as those imagined by the likes of Nikola Tesla,Buckminster Fuller, Beethoven, Einstein, Pythagorus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Marina Abramovic, and similar personalities.

Standardize Everything

Standardized education in America causes the slow death of divergent thinking, in its aim to create psychologically muted and Pavlovian-trained followers who won’t buck the system.

Dr. Joseph Farrell, and Gary Lawrence, authors of Rotten to the (Common) Core, state:

“Standardized Testing in America has a troubled history. Its agenda has long remained veiled behind “expert opinions” and “latest studies.” The future of American education stands in a tradition of social engineering, data mining, pseudo-psychology, and dumbing down classroom strategies.

Common Core promises great advances though its true benefits are monetary ones for software companies and partner politicians.

It it is our contention that the goal of Common Core, or rather, of its assessment process, is nothing less than a massive addition to the power of the surveillance state, to the privileged corporations destined to manage it, to the further drastic curtailment of our civil liberties, and to the eventual inhibition of any individual creativity, genius, responsibility, and any general or popular intellectual culture resulting from them.

Our argument is different than that leveled by many critics against the Common Core standards, for our focus is thus not upon pedagogy, or content but rather upon its assessment process and its implicit consequences for parents, students, and the teaching profession.

Our goal is to stimulate not only discussion of Common Core’s radical agenda for the consolidation of the surveillance state, but for its ultimate rejection.”

Education as Social Engineering

The common core curriculum is anti-human, and arguably not educational in any regard, unless of course you are educating future slaves. As Dr. Farrell explains, it is simply another form of social engineering and elite mind control. He believes the problem with common core is so significant that a ‘black market’ in education will be created whereupon someone who actually understands a subject will be paid to tutor our children, though they’ve just spent eight hours being drilled with useless information.

Farrell points to the habit of the ‘elite,’ who send their children to very expensive schools in Silicon Valley. These children aren’t learning on computers, nor with all the latest technology, because it would rob them of the chance to develop higher levels of learning. You can know a million facts, but creativity is still the highest form of intelligence. It is what you do with all those ‘facts’ that matters. Common core divests our children of this innate skill, slowly killing their creative urges, and the development of this quintessential skill.

Absorb and Synthesize

For example, Beethoven was very strict with himself about his ‘absorb’ and ‘synthesize’ states of learning. This allows abstract ideas to marinate and then be fleshed out in the world as something more succinct and tangible. He took long walks through the forests of Vienna in order to let deep, subconscious ‘eureka’ moments percolate to the surface of his mind.

Common core children are not allowed to synthesize latent creativity, and they spend little time in nature. They also are not given an inspiring human mentor, as much as a by-the-book curriculum regurgitating ‘teacher’ who has also been dumbed down by the educational system. This person is more concerned, through their own educational brainwashing, to apply the latest psychological theories, without truly teaching a child to be on fire for learning.

As Farrell says, “We get teachers who spend more time learning about psychological flap trap and edu-blither than learning the very disciplines, that supposedly they are teaching.”

Deep State Training and Mind Control

It goes one step further. As our children go from young to old, and enter into college, some of them very prestigious, they are not allowed to graduate with a degree until they attend lectures by homeland security. Once again, a creative mind is subtly influenced through the militarization of ‘education,’ from kindergarten through University.

Intelligence agencies also infiltrate the educational system in order to train and recruit future elite personnel. People are chosen based on their ability to follow orders, not diverge from the transhumanist agenda. Common core is a massive take-over of the educational system, similar to the takeover of the agricultural system, our water, our banking system, etc. In short, it benefits the military industrial complex and a handful of corporations, not your children’s budding intellectual genius