Lowest Common Denominator: A Common Core Story

Plus: A Substack Update and Books to Get Excited About!

Welcome new subscribers! I’m hard at work on an exciting opportunity so posting here will be uncharacteristically light for the next few weeks. I hope you will find the payoff worthwhile. In the meantime, a short but illustrative anecdote and some exciting book news.

I used to be friends with a prominent teacher who designed some of the Common Core standards. I knew him to be an unconventional, challenging, imaginative teacher – everything that the Common Core is not. I’ll never forget the talk we had when he was in the final stages of hammering out the Core guidelines. What he was developing was such a polar opposite to his own classroom approach; I just didn’t understand what he was up to. His answer was that great literature, deep thoughts, creative teaching – that was suitable for him and his elite students at their tony prep school, but not for the masses. As he put it, some of his high school students were undoubtedly smarter and better read than the typical public school teacher who’d be implementing his classroom standards. As for the public school students, well, per him, practically a lost cause – expecting them to genuinely interact with literature was misguided, the best we could hope is for them to gain some measure of literacy before graduation.

So that was the true motivation behind national academic standardization, in case you were wondering; funny, “your kids are idiots and need to be spoon-fed mush” was not a highly-publicized talking point from school leaders at the time of implementation.

I was reminded of that conversation this week as I read the outraged reaction to the latest Republican debate. I’m not going to get into the politics, and long-time readers recall the only debates I care for are the Lincoln-Douglas ones. The people I saw weren’t mad about the various political issues, but about the absolutely stupidity of the debate questions. Of course any debate with a stage full of participants limited to talking over each other with thirty second soundbites is going to, er, underwhelm anyone wanting to hear serious discussion of the issues, to put it mildly. But it seems even within those low expectations, Fox dramatically underperformed, with the moderators asking questions based on Survivor catch-phrases.

Here's the thing. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’m willing to bet that the debate organizers are not themselves dumb as a bag of rocks. It’s just that they think you are. I suspect, in private, they’d ask more meaningful questions of potential future leaders of the free world. But, like my onetime Common Core friend, they think such thoughts would fly far over their audience’s head.

Perhaps they’re right. But judging by the furious mockery of their embarrassing twaddle in the days after the debate, I doubt it.

Recall that low culture once was the highest culture – and as late as 1951 an opera biopic was the biggest box office smash of the year. Was it the people who changed – or the movie makers? They looked at us and thought, ‘meh, opera’s too good for them, let’s give them CGI explosions.’ Then, after feeding us nothing but dumb superhero movies for a few decades, they think to themselves, “well, all these morons watch is CGI explosions, they won’t understand questions about the Constitution!”

Perhaps our leaders are right, perhaps we and our children live up to their low expectations. Yet something – the explosion of homeschooling and classical schooling, for one – tells me it is they who may be in for a rude awakening.  

In other news, since you won’t have much of me to read for a while, I thought I’d share some exciting news of new books coming out, from two of my favorite writers. Tom Holland’s latest Roman history, Pax – following up on the masterful Rubicon and Dynasty – is now available. Here’s the Federalist podcast interviewing him about it.

Abigail Shrier, whose book Irreversible Damage is as important as it gets, has a new one coming out next year, available for pre-order now. As she explains:

A single question motivates BAD THERAPY: Why does the generation that received the most therapy, the most mental health diagnoses, the most psychiatric medication also seem to have the worst mental health? How did a generation raised so gently come to believe it had experienced debilitating trauma? And when faced with tasks teenagers a generation ago handled with ease, why are so many of today’s young people falling apart? Why are they not able to do for themselves? Why are they not growing up?

BAD THERAPY is the product of hundreds of interviews with parents, teenagers, child psychiatrists, academic psychologists, sociologists, parenting coaches, teachers and school counselors. And what I learned is this: The experts are a big part of the problem. For more than a generation, our mental health experts have been treating healthy young people, making them sick, feeding the well into an unending mental health pipeline.

Sounds right up the Unofficial Pediatrics alley; do head on over and subscribe for updates.

Thank you for your time, and happy reading!