The Rotten Core of the Common Core: Part Eleven

The Rotten Core of the Common Core: Part Eleven

 

Our daughter and our two teenaged granddaughters shared Easter dinner with us a few weeks back.  Both Abigail, the elder teen at 16, and Madeline, 14, were a delight to talk with, especially over dessert when we learned something upcloseandpersonal about the Common Core State Standards Initiative, aka the Common Core, aka the Rotten Core.

(Yes, teenie girls can be delightful even to their grandparents–once they’re fed, relaxed, and mature enough to engage in intelligent discussions of  current events.)

Anyway, we’re very proud of both Abbie, a pretty and ultra-busy high school junior and Maddie, a pretty and equally active 8th grader, for their many accomplishments in life so far, for their remarkably high grades, for just being who they are.

However, we feel a little sorry for our Madster.

You see, with only sixteen months or so away from semi-adulthood and college, Abbie will pretty much escape most of the onerous dictates of the Common Core while Maddie will have to endure them for four more years, assuming that misguided brainchild of the liberal-left survives that long.

Over dessert, I asked their mother and the girls what they thought of the Common Core curriculum.  Our daughter was emphatic in her distaste, Abbie was typically ambivalent, and Maddie nothing short of disgusted, especially over being forced to read–as a 14 year old eighth grader–”So Far from the Bamboo Grove.”

Set in the waning days of World War Two in Nanam, now part of Communist North Korea, and in Seoul, Pusan, and finally in the protagonist’s homeland of  Japan, the book is a semi-autobiographical, war novel by Japanese-American writer Yoko Kawashima Watkins, originally published in the United States in 1986.

Banned by the government of South Korea soon after its publication there in 2005, Korean-Americans subsequently campaigned for its removal from school curricula and reading lists in America, and succeeded in large part, until the book was resurrected by Common Core zealots and deemed worth reading by kids aged 12 and up despite its excessively unsavory scenes and one-sided, negative depictions of Koreans.

Prior to that campaign, the author had been presented with the Literary Lights for Children Award by the Boston Public Library and the Courage of Conscience Award by the Peace Abbey and a Japanese version of “So Far from the Bamboo Grove” soared to the top of Amazon’s “Best Sellers in Books in Japan”.

The Peace Abbey is a non-denominational organization in Sherborn, MA which in its own words is “dedicated to creating innovative models for society that empower individuals on the paths of nonviolence, peacemaking, and cruelty-free living [that seeks to] inspire and encourage one to speak out and act on issues of peace and social justice. Faith in action is the cornerstone of our fellowship and activist pacifism is our creed.”

(Cynics have suggested that the Peace Abbey is nothing more than a radical leftist group posing as a semi-religious organization solely for tax purposes, which would explain its enthused endorsement of Watkins’ “So Far from the Bamboo Grove.”) . . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=36946.)