After two days of how learning standards should not look, the question is, what should they require.

Learning standards should be exactly that, standards for learning. Currently our “Common Core” standards concern themselves with the assessment of what students should know without clearly stating how the knowledge should be imparted.

First of all, there is nothing standard about learning. Learning is as individual as the child and just as complex.

So, how should Federal Common Core Guidelines address learning standards?

Prekindergarten Common Core Guidelines:
Key Idea 1: Discovery
(a) Self respect and respect for others
(b) Citizenship
(c) Connection to the environment/world
Key Idea 2: Development
(a) Self respect and respect for others
(b) Citizenship
(c) Connection to the environment/world
Key Idea 3: Direction
(a) Self respect and respect for others
(b) Citizenship
(c) Connection to the environment/world

Assessing each child’s understanding of those concepts is easily accomplished by observing each child’s interaction with other children and the adults in their environment.

By concentrating on the child, every adult in the school environment can assess the educational growth of every child by holding conversations with them about what they’ve learned.

In a child centered learning environment, every child has the opportunity to “show what they know” in a myriad of intellectual and creative ways.

The Common Core is a useless “cut and paste” document that does nothing more than further the misguided belief in America than one human being is somehow better than another because of what they can do and having nothing to do with who they choose to be as a human.

As long as we, in America, continue to perpetuate the notion that there is and should be a “middle class” we must admit and agree to the notion that there is an “upper class” which most will never attain, and a “lower class” which most hold in disdain, Americans will always be enslaved to the corporate machine that keeps our children defeated, depressed and oppressed.

Our children deserve better than “middle class” status. They deserve to be Americans, powerful at every level.

Join the Movement to Save Our Children!