This is just scratching the surface; the truth is that the 'education' that we all received was a Rockefeller indoctrination program, designed to dumb us down deliberately. John Taylor Gatto, former New York State Teacher of the Year, quit his 26 year public teaching career when he could no longer teach "a curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency, ... how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in." John Taylor Gatto has gone on to write several books about the power of education, including Weapons of Mass Instruction and Dumbing Us Down.

Common Core is currently being implemented all across America under the guise of grass-roots state-level action, but we can follow the money. Dr. Sandra Stotsky and Dr. James Milgram gave a speech on Common Core before the Alaska State Senate on January 7, 2014 that lays out a cautious tentative case, but it's simple to point out that Common Core is the next step in making mathematics unintelligible to the public.

Besides just absurd standardized testing as you mentioned, Common Core includes social justice activism indoctrination and increasingly hyper-sexualized agendas. Dr. Duke Pesta is an activist against Common Core specifically and you can hear him try to explain it in a few minutes or a few hours.

My children attend a private religious school that follows common core standards. It's very difficult even for private schools to opt out because the state ELA and Math exams follow common core principles, and at least in my city those scores are used to determine high school placement. The regents exams are also aligned to common core. Without a regents diploma state colleges will refuse to grant diplomas even to 4.0 students (this has been an issue for homeschoolers who attend state colleges).

My impression of the common core curricula is that it's poorly put together, riddled with typos and errors. This could be deliberate to make it unintelligible to most students, or maybe it was just rushed. For the first two years of its implementation, my girls weren't even given math text books because they were "in development." Teachers of 30+ years experience were being told to teach from a script. The math is fuzzy/ constructivist which will leave a lot of kids confused. The especially smart ones, or the ones with affluent parents, will figure it out or have tutors to coach them through it. And of course the elite will have their children in private schools that don't follow common core (i.e. I believe Obama's daughters are in a non CC school) and thus will be exempted from high stakes testing, at least until the SAT/ ACT.

The social studies is heavily SJW and there is frequent testing starting in kindergarten. And of course, prepping for testing. I believe the testing is a $$$ racket for the testing companies but also serves a dual purpose of demoralizing students,parents and sidelining non-conformist thinkers.

Did you know that in NYS the state tests are not disclosed to the public even after they've been graded, and teachers must sign non-disclosure agreements?

I have a daughter who despite all this consistently scores 4s on the state tests (only ~10% of students statewide score 4s) and she describes the questions as muddled and designed to confuse.

Thank you for sharing your experiences. We would all benefit if you continued to elaborate the insights you've gained from your personal perspective on this subject: there is not enough information on this subject right now.

It's very difficult even for private schools to opt out because the state ELA and Math exams follow common core principles... Without a regents diploma state colleges will refuse to grant diplomas even to 4.0 students

This is also how they are pressuring homeschoolers, and in California homeschooling just became the only option to avoid mandatory mass vaccination.

The math is fuzzy/ constructivist which will leave a lot of kids confused. The especially smart ones, or the ones with affluent parents, will figure it out or have tutors to coach them through it.

This was the state of calculus in the generation prior to Common Core. There is a clear delineation between those who can understand calculus, and those who have been convinced by a broken and confusing system that they are unable to understand calculus. Now Common Core again lowers the bar, introducing confusion to normal arithmetic and algebra, and we will no doubt see a new generation increasingly hobbled by their education.

there is frequent testing starting in kindergarten. And of course, prepping for testing.

The academic testing occurring nowadays is terrifying. The students sign non-disclosure agreements, swearing to never reveal the contents of the tests. There is no outside independent auditing of the content of these tests. Teachers have lost their entire careers over accidentally allowing tests to be revealed. And the more you can get children to talk about them, the more you'll hear examples of social programming interwoven into every question. But the children are very hesitant to talk about any of this, because we've installed surveillance cameras into most of our schools and it's become just another cultural joke that the government is always watching you.

Draw 87 circles to figure out simple arithmetic. Common core is disgusting. Fuck you, Bill Gates. Stick to your population control using vaccine poisons. Leave education alone.

What reason could Bill Gates possibly have to dumb down the population or control population with vaccines? He's not of the old money global aristocracy types that might be into that, he's an successful businessman who, as far as I can tell, legitimately wants to make things better.
I would lend more credence to him being mislead by others, though at least in the case of vaccines, I think the ones he is implementing in Africa really are making changes for the good of people living there.

I've yet to see him make anything better. DOS included.

Oh hey, I almost forgot, John Oliver calls out standardized testing too.

I'm curious what kind of sjw things you found in the curriculum?

lol religious school

This is just scratching the surface; the truth is that the 'education' that we all received was a Rockefeller indoctrination program, designed to dumb us down deliberately.

Yep, following the Prussian system. We need to go back to the trivium and quadrivium.

Wow. The video on common core was eye opening. Thank you! It sounds like they're trying to normalize propaganda and the idea of community and union. Sounds like it's the liberal take over everyone said it wasn't.

Huh, sounds like Common Core's main purpose is to basically eliminate educational diversity.

picked a random video in that comment. Picked "mathematics unintelligible" and that shit is painful. I would skip any links to her in the future.

Here is something I just posted in /r/learnmath so I'll just post it here as well:

Let me tell you about how I learned how to love and appreciate the power of math. And math is super powerful, and it is one of the best things you can do to improve your life. Just so you know where this is coming from, I'm chycho.

• First, math is a language. It offers a perspective that you cannot have from any other source. This is very important to keep in mind.

• Second, even though I received my minor in mathematics I really didn't understand math, or have such an appreciation for it, until I taught math. When teaching math I would get bombarded with "why" questions, questions that I really didn't ask myself since I knew how to do something. When I started to try and answer these questions is when I really started to appreciate the power of math. So, if you want to love math, teach math. Doesn't make a difference what level. You will be asked why you do something. Try and find out why and that is when you will really understand math.

• Third, IMHO, math is not taught properly in schools by design. If we had a society that understood mathematics then our governments and corporations would lose power. They would not be able to do a fraction of what they do and get away with. It's as simple as that. Math education has been decimated because those in control cannot afford to have an educated populace. See John Taylor Gatto’s “Ultimate History Lesson” for more on this.

• There are a lot of shity text books out there, find the ones that aren't, and start with the level that you're comfortable with. Build from there. Read this to learn why schools are full of bad textbooks: “Judging Books by Their Covers” by Richard P. Feynman

• Here is a video I put together giving 5 reasons why math is important. You might find it useful: Five Reasons Why Math is Important ... edit: here is part 2: Why is Math Important? Because it's part of evolution, part of what makes us human

• What was missing from your education is love. If you want to know more read the following short book: Jiddu Krishnamurti’s “Education and The Significance of Life” (pdf).

• Here is an article I put together providing further info on what I just posted above: Paradigm Shift in Education: Krishnamurti on the Educator, RAW on Ignorance, Gato on the System, and Hamming on Learning.

• Keep in mind what you just asked is not just about learning math, it's about trying to learn anything in our current education system.

Let me know if you need clarification on anything.

Peace :)

Beautiful. Thanks for (re)posting.

My pleasure.

If math has been taught wrong, can you give us some sources to start relearning it the right way?

I'm working on it:

• The Language of Mathematics

• Math in Real Life

• ASMR Math

Thanks man I'm gonna watch all those. Hopefully I learn something I can share with my little brothers and sisters.

My pleasure, let me know if you need any help. Peace.

as a high school dropout and math class failure, ive managed to be a profitable poker player over the course of 4 million or so hands, which I entirely tribute to practical math that I learned on my own.

i now understand probability and other difficult mathematical calculations without the assistance of the public school system whatsoever.

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"Post how we request citizen, or you may mysteriously vanish from the site."

..."but it's not required"

"Silence and acceptance is always accepted"

The education system is designed, either purposfully or not, to produce exactly what they want.

A few geniuses to run banks A few dumb asses to join our "volunteer" military A HUGE group of people who will shut up and pay taxes without question.

The one benefit of the forced poison vaccinations in CA is going to be an increased number of parents who opt out of the joke that is common core public schooling.

Page 180 of 'All our Children Learning' by Education-Designer Benjamin Bloom:

“The purpose of education and the schools is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students.”

From inside the system, I can tell you it isn't just standardized testing but the whole structure and curriculum. It is designed for misinformation and an ignorant population.

The system is designed to create followers. it's created an entire new religion known as statism - the belief that humans will always need leaders and government.

And it's one big lie....a very popular one as well.

Common sense, critical thinking, and intelligently observing how this civilization actually operates can indeed count as valid evidence - indeed, sometimes it's literally the best form of it - so don't say you don't have any evidence, because all you need to do is actually look at the world around you (and this country in particular) and one will understand that what you are saying is valid, and more likely true than not.

True. I honestly feel sorry for a lot of the younger generations. The ones brought up basically bathed in antibacterial cleansers? Holy fuck, I can only imagine how little their immune system can handle. Least the medical industry's also progressing incredibly fast.

Interesting time to be alive, really.

Flouride, gmo, antibiotics, TPP, common core... I couldn't bring myself to bring a child into this world.

17yo male here. Got my tonsils taken out when I was 10, and I really only get sick once or twice a year. Not trying to disprove you, just offering my experiences.

Were you vaccinated?

Do you drink fluoridated tap water?

Do you eat macdonalds or other fast food?

What about GMOS?

There is a lot of factors that go into making the sick kids you see walking around today.

Not sure if vaccinated. Most likely I was. I do drink tap water. I do occasionally eat fast food.

Look into cutting that fluoride out. I pay 30 or so a month for distilled, and keep away from soft drinks and other bottled/canned poisons. It's worth every penny.

Do you feel any better or different?

Yes. It took roughly two months to feel an appreciable difference. Primarily noticed initially with dreaming and clearer thoughts.

Would drinking from a refrigerator help at all? Or is that still tap?

Fluoride is very challenging to remove through filtration. RO can do it. Distillation can do it. I've found it most economical and easy for me to purchase the large water cooler jugs of locally distilled water. Sadly, since my water is fluoridated, I'm still exposed to fluoride with every shower/bath. It's disgusting they can force drugs on people, that aren't properly dosed for the person. Rather the dose is entirely dependent on the amount of water consumed. It isn't even medical grade sodium fluoride. It's literally a waste chemical byproduct of aluminum processing, dumped wantonly into the public water supply.

Cooler showers help

You ever see the culling: our water? http://youtu.be/P7BqFtyCRJc

You don't NEED any evidence. Sometimes assuming you're correct is the best evidence.

It would seem that at least some evidence is needed in order for a person to feel that any particular idea they have is true or justified or not. This evidence might be physical and external and able to be seen by others, or it may be personal and internal and specific only to the person in question. However, epistemologically-speaking, even on a subconscious level, the human mind seems to require some sort of validation upon any particular action or thought before the individual in question moves forward for or against a thing. Even if that particular validation is mistaken, it seems it must be taken as valid by the individual in question at the very least.

I may be mistaken in this, but this seems to be the way things are as far as I can see.

So don't say you don't have any evidence, because all you need to do is actually look at the world around you (and this country in particular) and one will understand that what you are saying is valid

Politely, that explanation would not be accepted as a correct answer for a question about valid evidence for science on a standardized test, unit test, or final exam.

Good science always begins with good observation, so whatever exam wouldn't accept that isn't itself an acceptable test.

/r/C_S_T is calling your name. Come check it out!

If you were "educated" in the USA between 1965 and 1985, you were part of a psychological experiment, according to whistleblower Charlotte Iserbyt.

She is long-winded, but backs what she says with top-level, Dept of Edu published documents. Hard to ignore.

Oh yes. I was there when the "new math" was introduced. The most important change that brought about was that parents couldn't help with home work anymore. That was a major shift in society.

Pretty sure being brown, poor, and female was the reason why a TON of my teachers told me not to try hard in school, and to enlist in the military when I graduated. None of my rich, upper-class friends were ever told this. Had this revelation the other day when talking to a few old classmates.

Wow, that teacher. Just... just wow.

People with great influence over the lives of others, just the idea of having such ill-contempt towards a person's upbringing.

How do these people sleep at night?

Not just teachers, a lot of administrators and especially class counselors. My class counselors were the worst-- whites were the minority, so a bunch of the counselors played favoritism against the bulk of the student body. Edit: Wanted to clarify, I do not think they are "the worst" because they were favoring the minority(white kids), I think they were the worst because they legitimately did things like allow those students to spend hours of their day with them in the office, and would rush other students out ASAP whenever we would come to them with our issues.

No problem, I knew where you were coming from.

Kinda sad, isn't it? We live in a day and age where every statement we make has to have disclaimers.

I was awaiting the hellstorm of PMs, thank you for knowing what I meant. Hahahaha, I've already been downvoted into oblivion on Reddit for saying much less.

But to the topic at hand, as a 28 year old college student working my way through a degree, I am infuriated to think that adults point blank told me to "give up" in high school because I had lukewarm grades. Looking back, I see that it is a complete disservice to say such things versus something more along the lines of, "You know, your grades aren't that bad. If you work a bit harder, and I know you can, you can definitely make it into college." Not that I don't take responsibility, but I can't help but feel that I was convinced by multiple adults not to even bother.

This is likely the purpose of this game. They don't want intelligent critical thinkers. They want soldier souls to sacrifice to the almighty dollar.

I'm glad you didn't fall for it. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience.

There is a trap in even expecting hormonal teenagers to be focused and on track fully. Mostly the ones who do well in school at that age are submissive people pleasers. I'm SO glad to see you are in collage now. Wonderful.

=) Thank you. My outlook on life changed drastically when my S.O. believed in me and encouraged me to go back to school. We met when he was in grad school working on his Dissertation for his Physics Ph.D, and I was working at a Valero for $8/hour. I had never met someone that intelligent who believed I could be where he is with a few years of hard work.

That's beautiful. I'm delighted to hear it. Give them a big hug for me. :D

"With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still other, equally disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of people,” given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy. "

From an article I found after googling the sentence "they go after the intellectuals first"

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1967/feb/23/a-special-supplement-the-responsibility-of-intelle/

Control is an issue, but so is detection. Like an independent thought alarm- we have so much surveillance that somewhere there may be a computer model showing who has the most will to make changes that the system would want to prevent.

Then Apple advocates revolution with its slogan "Think Different".

Hah, that adds a whole new level of conspiracy to this.

Programmed to follow the Apple.

And with some nice eschatological "biting the fruit of the tree of knowledge" symbolism built right in as well.

"The answer to this question is one of four choices that everybody else has to choose from. No I don't care if none of them fit perfectly or you have a better option of your own, it's either A B C or D, goddammit"

There is some truth. Here's one example.

Very interesting. On this line of thought about sculpting a culture by the disruption of war, the two WW's also changed the family structure by taking Mothers away from their children and sending them to work. This is how you kill off empathy from a culture. Take away their major attachments.

Yes. Destroy what makes us human. Family. Empathy. Logic. Only then, do we become manageable animals/cattle for the tax farmers (government).

Well said.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Just like putting the natives in public school was about assimilation and wiping out their culture and language. How can you tell people what to think if they don't understand what you're saying? Better teach 'em English. How can you keep track of what people are saying if you can't understand them? Better punish them for speaking Cherokee.

Standardized testing would just be more of that.

We have standardized testing here in France. Here are the questions from 2015,

• Should we be able to understand art?

• Is our conscience just what society makes us believe?

• Is it moral to respect everybody?

• Am I a just product of my experiences?

• Does art make sense?

• Is truth relevent in politics?

I'm intrigued by the questions given. It makes a person actually question themselves, and discover who they are, rather than who they're being told to be.

I like it. More philosophical type stuff :)

Those of us late Gen X'ers watched as the school system was dismantled under our feet replacing critical thinking with a feels and standardized testing curriculum, this is why millenials are so easily lead by the nose.

Hence why Finland was number 1 in the world in education and hardly tests its students ever in their lives. We aren't teaching people to think openly to promote innovation and creative thinking. We're raising them like robots to regurgitate what everyone else does.

Huh, also kinda works with the "no child left behind" thing, too.

Standardized testing was initially created as benchmarks to evaluate efficacy of education standards for core subjects like math, science, and critical reading.

The morass of standardized testing ballooned with legislation like NCLB.

Don't forget it is compulsory!

edit: Schule: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb7iR3JgoOo

Not first time it would have happened

Thralldom-Based Education is a documentary which explores the origin, purpose and contemporary manifestation of government-controlled education.

Public schooling that is an absolute joke. Making the next generation of idiots to rule over without much complaint. Glad some parents out there still don't let "formal" education get in the way of their children's learning.

The problem isn't in the testing but rather the teaching.

For some reason, when I saw this post and the mention of the bathtub, I thought /r/Showerthoughts

Am I the ultimate sheep then if I scored in the 99.9 percentile?

Wow... your username...

No man, I think you scored the jackpot somehow.

BOW BEFORE ME, SHEEPLE

Subtle, bro. It sounds like it worked perfectly for you. Keep smoking those drugs and calling out the "sheeple." Classy and intelligent.

They want everyone to think the same and follow orders. Nothing is school allows you to go beyond what they "train" you in. What they end of creating are rebels wanting to buck the system of order! Order will never win on this planet or anywhere else!

You act like the government has made these tests.

No. People like me make these tests.

The people who design tests are psychometricians. We have to try to figure out how to put people in a line based on their knowledge of abstract concepts like "math ability." In fact, we call these "constructs," because they don't actually exist. What is "math ability?" What is "reading ability?" We all think we know, but just try writing it down. Pretty soon you'll realize that everything is confounded and confused. Everything is connected.

The challenge of the test designer is to cut out as much "noise" from the scores as possible. We need to make sure that if you got this history question right, it's because you know the answer, not that you are just really good at reading or guessing. What this does, though, is end up requiring very dry, very narrow questions that end up asking things that are maybe not even that important, simply because the item stats work well.

This is the failing of basing an "education" system on standardized tests. Standardized tests are really only good for getting a quick snapshot of the overall comparative ability of the group. At the individual level, they don't really tell us that much. If we really wanted people to demonstrate the skills we say we value, we would go back to writing a lot of papers and doing large projects and things like that. Highly integrated tasks that draw from the whole person's abilities.

Those are just phenomenally expensive to do at scale. Fine for a teacher with 30 kids (although if you've ever had to grade even 30 short papers, you might disagree with this), impossible for a school district with 30,000 (and that's a pretty small one!). So what do we do instead?

Multiple-choice, discrete-point tests.

They are the best value for time/money. It's just that the value isn't that high, and gets lower the moment you give them more than once a few years, or base funding on them, or prep the students for them. Any test will only be a test of the test. We try to divine meaning from the 1s and 0s that come off of them (through some pretty cool stats), but at the end of the day, that's all we really know. This student got this item "right." This one didn't. When they have prepped for the test, we don't even know why.

As is often the case, I'm sorry to disappoint, but this can be chalked up to incompetence, not malice. It's not like the psychometricians lobbied for the current state of affairs. In fact, many letters were sent warning policymakers of exactly what has happened. But politicians like to pretend to care about education, and want to be seen doing something, so they just cooked up this nonsense of giving multiple choice tests all the time because it was the cheapest possible way of pretending to address the actual problems. Oh, and the test publishers are making bank, so that helps, too.

Every test developer I know (and that's a lot) knows this is all bullshit. So why do we do it? Basically, here's what everyone decided: The government and the publishers are going to go ahead with this no matter what. At least if we do the work we can try to mitigate the worst effects of these policies. We can at least try to make these things as fair as they can be. We can at least do damage control.

If I had kids, I'd home school. And that's coming from a guy with a PhD, who has always enjoyed school and feels like he has gotten a lot out of it. The system I see my friends' kids going through is alien to me, and seems to strip the very things that ended up benefiting me the most.

I encourage you to follow the links several have provided in this thread. There is intent with malice behind this crazy system that, as you clearly see, doesn't work. You are not at the top of the ladder so you also suffer the results of someone else's decision.

I LOVE that you see everything is connected and that compartmentalizing topics the way we do takes something important away from the learner.

Not, of course, so that groups taking the test could be fairly compared. Granted, it doesn't seem justified to overdo this testing.

Huh, sounds like Common Core's main purpose is to basically eliminate educational diversity.

My children attend a private religious school that follows common core standards. It's very difficult even for private schools to opt out because the state ELA and Math exams follow common core principles, and at least in my city those scores are used to determine high school placement. The regents exams are also aligned to common core. Without a regents diploma state colleges will refuse to grant diplomas even to 4.0 students (this has been an issue for homeschoolers who attend state colleges).

My impression of the common core curricula is that it's poorly put together, riddled with typos and errors. This could be deliberate to make it unintelligible to most students, or maybe it was just rushed. For the first two years of its implementation, my girls weren't even given math text books because they were "in development." Teachers of 30+ years experience were being told to teach from a script. The math is fuzzy/ constructivist which will leave a lot of kids confused. The especially smart ones, or the ones with affluent parents, will figure it out or have tutors to coach them through it. And of course the elite will have their children in private schools that don't follow common core (i.e. I believe Obama's daughters are in a non CC school) and thus will be exempted from high stakes testing, at least until the SAT/ ACT.

The social studies is heavily SJW and there is frequent testing starting in kindergarten. And of course, prepping for testing. I believe the testing is a $$$ racket for the testing companies but also serves a dual purpose of demoralizing students,parents and sidelining non-conformist thinkers.

Did you know that in NYS the state tests are not disclosed to the public even after they've been graded, and teachers must sign non-disclosure agreements?

I have a daughter who despite all this consistently scores 4s on the state tests (only ~10% of students statewide score 4s) and she describes the questions as muddled and designed to confuse.

This is just scratching the surface; the truth is that the 'education' that we all received was a Rockefeller indoctrination program, designed to dumb us down deliberately.

Yep, following the Prussian system. We need to go back to the trivium and quadrivium.

Wow. The video on common core was eye opening. Thank you! It sounds like they're trying to normalize propaganda and the idea of community and union. Sounds like it's the liberal take over everyone said it wasn't.

picked a random video in that comment. Picked "mathematics unintelligible" and that shit is painful. I would skip any links to her in the future.

Well said.

Fluoride is very challenging to remove through filtration. RO can do it. Distillation can do it. I've found it most economical and easy for me to purchase the large water cooler jugs of locally distilled water. Sadly, since my water is fluoridated, I'm still exposed to fluoride with every shower/bath. It's disgusting they can force drugs on people, that aren't properly dosed for the person. Rather the dose is entirely dependent on the amount of water consumed. It isn't even medical grade sodium fluoride. It's literally a waste chemical byproduct of aluminum processing, dumped wantonly into the public water supply.

That's beautiful. I'm delighted to hear it. Give them a big hug for me. :D