OPINION

Common Core Teaches Second Graders to be Good Union Comrades

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Aside from the obvious objections of allowing the creators of Healthcare.gov to get more involved in the education of America’s youth, a new reason to resist the creepily altruistic “Common Core” curriculum has surfaced. New Common Core teaching materials instruct second graders that land owners are intrinsically evil, that business owners are inherently greedy, and Saul Alinsky radicals are the saviors of the everyman. (Besides – and I know this should seem pretty obvious – do you really want the architects of a 17 trillion dollar debt teaching our kids things like basic math?)

According to Fox news, a textbook company contracted to produce materials under Common Core State Standards is trying to teach students as young as second grade about economic fairness by praising unions, protests and labor leader Cesar Chavez, according to an education watchdog group.

Cesar Chavez is one of the liberal movement’s most recent heroes to be considered “in vogue”; as was evidenced by Google’s decision to honor the Labor activist instead of Jesus one Easter Sunday. Chavez’s Saul-Alinsky-inspired-radicalism should put him firmly on the fringe of mainstream Americanism. (A great read on Chavez can be found here.) But, believe it or not, the textbook’s mention of Chavez is only a minor portion of the indoctrination “lesson” plan.

In addition to reading a glowing biography of the Marxist labor leader, students will be asked to evaluate the “scales of fairness” between wealthy landowners, and lowly [non-union] workers.

“Fairness and equality exist when the scales are balanced,” teachers are prompted to instruct the students. They are then supposed to ask the students whether both sides, as presented in the plan, are equal, providing a correct answer of “no” in the teachers’ guide.

See? According to Common Core standards, the fact that wealthy business owners have more than the people they hire, is “unfair.” (Although, in all fairness, second grade might be the right age group for liberals to share their ideas. This could be an honest attempt to keep the left engaged with a demographic that has an equal grasp of market forces and economic theory.)

Although I have not yet been granted access to the comprehensive list of teaching materials tied to this disturbingly Leninist interpretation of economic “fairness”, I can make a safe assumption that the impressionable second grade economists will not be taught about the prosperity generated by business owner’s wealth; or the natural fairness of private ownership and free market.

After all, it’s kinda tough to get a job from a poor farm worker who rents his property.

Economic theories, wealth creation, the concept of private property, market forces, and Chavez’s radicalism aside. . . There is still a pretty big question regarding why second graders would need to wrap their young brains around the concept of labor unions and so called “scales of fairness.” Quite frankly, putting any organized bureaucratic government agency in charge of disseminating such information to young children is chilling. And given the government’s tendency to view wealth creators merely as untapped tax-revenue sources, it’s unlikely that such lesson plans would be presented without anti-capitalistic bias.

Once again the common core standards illustrate a decidedly creepy intrusion of politics into education from the highest levels. While education has been largely consumed by leftist philosophies for some time, the danger of Common Core is that this absorption of political activism in the classroom will now be pushed from the Federal level. . . A painfully intense infringement on local control will await any districts that decide to adopt the Fed’s centrally planned concept of “education”.

While Karl Marx is not yet required reading under the Common Core curriculum, this latest example of the Fed’s ideological intrusion into education should set off some alarm bells. Aside from the laughable notion that a greater Federal influence in local schools will benefit the system, it makes the perversions of our kids’ worldview that much easier.

And this, comrades, concludes today’s lesson on Common Core radicalism.