Last night I made this presentation in Draper. One of the things we need to get away from when talking about Common Core, is the standards. People are getting bogged down in the standards and educrats keep asking parents if they’ve read the standards and which standards they disagree with. These are pointless questions. IT’S NOT ABOUT THE STANDARDS THEMSELVES. Well, maybe 10%. They’re not great standards and several states had superior standards before Common Core. The real problem is the loss of privacy, data collection, loss of sovereignty, and a centuries old agenda that has been pushed at us to destroy the family, destroy religion, and embrace moral relativism. In this presentation I attempt to pull back the curtain and expose that agenda. In one hour there just isn’t time to do justice to this topic. There are so many statements and so much evidence of this it just can’t be fit in, but I do hope this presentation gives you a strong enough witness that Common Core is just the latest idea in the culture war we are engaged in, and isn’t the true problem at the root. We need to get back to local control and sever the ties that bind us to these people.
Here is a pdf file of the presentation.
Excellent presentation! Thanks for posting this. I’ll be sharing it lots!
Funny. When I first started doing presentations on CC I tried to pull back the curtain (so to speak) and was told it was all too much for folks to handle and to stick to the facts about CC. So I changed my approach. I guess for the time it was necessary and maybe now that more people are paying attention I need to go back to how I first began. I have always believed that in order to truly understand what is happening today we must understand how we got here, the people behind it and why. Thanks for sharing your presentation with us. I try to share a piece of history each week on my TNACC (Tennessee Against Common Core) as my way of spreading the word about the history. I include Norman Dodd, Charlotte Iserbyt (a lot) John Gatto etc and hope that people will listen to what the old timers had to say. Norman Dodd is a MUST listen to if people want to know why Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie are so involved with funding education.
I agree Karen. Maybe someday I’ll do part 2 but there just wasn’t time in that presentation to cover Dodd’s work and go into other topics.
Dear Karen,
I am a recently retired teacher here in SLC who has taught CC. I knew what I didn’t like about CC as a teacher but had no understanding of why and where it had come from. I was invited back to my school to give a presentation on Literacy Night and afterwards had parents of former students come up to me and ask what in the world was happening? I decided at that point that I had better find out.
I found your presentation a year ago April on You Tube. I had been studying and had attended several presentations, but still didn’t totally understand until I watched your video. You connected the dots for me and I finally understood what this all was about. Since last year I have become actively involved with the people fighting the cause here in SLC and have recommended your video many times. Thank you so much for helping me understand when I was just beginning to learn. I was privileged to be present at Oak Norton’s excellent presentation that he has posted here. I agree he is an excellent presenter making the complete picture of CC very clear.
Wonderful! Thank you Oak for educating the public, educators, and politicians. Posted it and hope more parents, educators, and politicians will join the fight. Even though we homeschool, we feel strongly that cc will affect homeschooling soon because the point is to control the masses. Thank you for all the work and endless hours you put into helping us.
A classic, landmark presentation. “It’s not about the standards” was an aha moment for me. Thank you, Oak.
Amen. The problem is not the gilding or “standards” inside the cage, the problem is the cage.
Thank you for this wonderful presentation. I will be sharing this with my wife who homeschools our children and friends at work that know about common core through the garbage that their children bring home as homework and completed assignments.
Just wanted to say thanks for that excellent presentation. I have posted it on our web site and on FaceBook. FB shows 496 views from this afternoon. Great job, Oak. This helps so much with our efforts to educate others.
Thanks Angie and everyone. I hope it’s helpful in letting people see this fight isn’t just about the quality of the standards, even though they aren’t great.
Excellent presentation. I am from Louisiana and we may very well be the next state to get out of common core. Thank you for your work on this issue.