What are conservatives to make of the Common Core State Standards? As we’ve seen, some conservatives hate them. Some don’t mind them. Today we see a plea for conservatives to embrace the new standards as the best hope to fulfill long-held conservative school dreams.
In the Burkean pages of The Imaginative Conservative, Kevin T. Brady and Stephen M. Klugewicz argue that the new standards hold promise. Forget threats that the new standards are a new federal power grab. Forget worries that the new standards will water down our cultural heritage. Forget predictions that school children will be forced to memorize Maoist proverbs.
Take a closer look, Brady and Klugewicz write, and conservatives will see plenty to like about the new standards. The suggested readings include conservative favorites such as TS Eliot, Patrick Henry, GK Chesterton, and none other than Ronald Reagan.
Though some on the political Right have created a “straw man” out of the new standards, Brady and Klugewicz argue that the standards will actually serve to weaken the power of the political Left. After all, the authors say, “teachers and educational bureaucracies already tend to lean Left.” Too many teachers are woefully ignorant of true history and traditional literature. The new standards will force such ideologically slanted teachers to explore the real cultural heritage of Euro-American civilization.
For instance, in order for a teacher to teach students Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” teachers will need to connect with their heritage. “In order for [teachers] to understand what King is writing about,” the authors contend,
teachers need to know who the 8thcentury B.C. Hebrew prophets were. They need to know a little about Paul of Tarsus, the Macedonian call, Socrates, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Roman persecutions, the Boston Tea Party, Hungarian freedom fighters, Jesus, Elijah Muhammad, Amos, Martin Luther, John Bunyan, Lincoln, Jefferson, and T.S. Eliot to understand King’s meaning. King spoke to an audience of clergymen and to many others who shared a common educated culture. If teachers do not know these references, they cannot teach this landmark document accurately. Moreover, teachers in Catholic schools are free to ignore the exemplars entirely and use Christian/Catholic texts: Thomas á Kempis, Thomas More, even papal encyclicals. Such a text-based approach ought to please conservatives, who have complained about the trend of “deconstructing” texts and promoting the idea that it is how the student “feels” about a text that is important, not what the text actually says.
We must note that one of the authors seems to have more than academic interest in the success of the new standards. Kevin Brady owns a company that sells Common-Core aligned materials to schools. The success of the Common Core will help his own wallet. That said, the notion that all of America’s schoolchildren should learn a common core of knowledge does have long roots among American conservative educational thinkers. Long before ED Hirsch, prominent conservative reformers such as Max Rafferty insisted that the way to fix American education is to give every student and every teacher a healthy dose of a common core of cultural knowledge. And a generation before Rafferty’s leadership, curmudgeonly conservative Albert Jay Nock insisted that real learning should include the “Great Tradition” of learning first and foremost.
For almost a century, then, conservative thinkers and activists have yearned for a common core for America’s school children. Is the Common Core the fulfillment of these conservative dreams?
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