Don’t do it, Phyllis Schlafly warned states recently. Don’t fall for the hoopla about the new Common Core State Standards.

Schlafly is often best remembered for her successful campaign to block the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. But as historian Don Critchlow has argued, Schlafly’s career was about much more than just the ERA.  An examination of Schlafly’s activism can tell us much more about the changing face of “conservatism” in the twentieth century.

Image Source: Christian Post

Now Schlafly has joined the chorus of conservative anti-CCSS voices.  As we’ve noted earlier here at ILYBYGTH, conservatives join many progressives in lambasting the new unified state standards, but usually for different reasons.

Writing in the pages of the Christian Post, Schlafly offers conservative parents and voters solidly conservative reasons to get up off the couch and take an interest in their local schools’ new curricular guidelines.  “Common Core,” Schlafly warns, “means federal control of school curriculum, i.e., control by Obama administration left-wing bureaucrats.”

The standards will not improve students’ academic performance, Schlafly argues. Nor will they achieve their trumpeted goal of making all students “college ready.”  Rather, these new standards represent only the latest left-wing drive to transform the United States into a “totalitarian government.” In Schlafly’s words,

Common Core means government agencies will gather and store all sorts of private information on every schoolchild into a longitudinal database from birth through all levels of schooling, plus giving government the right to share and exchange this nosy information with other government and private agencies, thus negating the federal law that now prohibits that.

Everything about the standards is “encrusted with lies,” Schlafly insists. The suggested content itself predictably indoctrinates students toward leftist ideas and policies. As conservatives have warned for decades, the suggested readings even veer into the “pornographic.”

So what is a conservative to do? According to Phyllis Schlafly, the new Common Core State Standards represent only the latest effort by leftist federal bureaucrats to seize control of children’s minds. Any red-blooded American must shudder at the implications.