Augustine and the Common Core Experiment

“We are building the plane as we fly it, but let’s be clear our passengers are safe.”  Baltimore County Superintendent Dallas Dance articulated this metaphor last week at Baltimore’s forum concerning the newly implemented Common Core federal education program.

This unnerving metaphor captures the horrifying essence of the Common Core program, a federally controlled education experiment based on the utilitarian progressive paradigm.  This new educational push includes the unhappy hypothesis that schools need more technology and nonfiction reading to produce “successful” students. With Common Core, federal control replaces all curriculum decisions by state and local school board.  Instead, national tests based on the specified common core curriculum measure ‘success’ in elementary, middle, and upper school students.

Already, this experiment seems to be another failure of bureaucracy. As the wheels come off the Common Core program in states like California and New York, teachers in cities such as Baltimore express concerns as they scramble to implement obnoxious, tedious mandates for their class rooms. Additionally, many English teachers express concern that students read too many journal articles and not enough fiction. For example, reading a list of plants is advised, while many classic texts of literature are dropped.

Common Core commodifies students in a educational plan which leaves human experience and human love out of education. In this newest ‘solution’ to illiteracy, standardized textbooks and newspaper articles replace novels and literature. Civics will not be tested, and what will not be tested will not be taught. This mass model of directionless education lacking any reverence for truth or love, puts education in a dangerous state as schooling becomes little more than a utilitarian endeavor for worker drones.

One of the most prominent voices against this type of education is the 4th century philosopher and theologian St. Augustine. He experienced firsthand the perils and consequences of a relativistic education whose purpose is fame and social status. Although Augustine’s relationship with his education and learning was a complicated one, he did eventually find some meaning in his misguided youthful education by relating it to a fuller vision of enduring values.

Augustine once said in a sermon, “Put love in all the things that you do and they will make sense. Take love away and they become worthless and empty.” At the heart of Augustine’s educational philosophy is the primacy of love–love of learning, love of writers, and love of truth, goodness, and beauty. Perhaps Augustine has much to offer students and teachers floundering in a Common Core curriculum void of classic literature, love, or education in virtue.  The hodgepodge of information available to us today can be ordered and anchored by an understanding of these enduring realities.