Common Core State Standards Analysis

Despite all the good that may come from having nationwide standards, there are some concerns, specifically with the Common Core State Standards. If the goal is to prepare students for college or for a career training program, preparations for becoming a virtuous person comes into question. In the interview with Jennifer Gessley, she comments it is purely up to the teachers to decide when and how lessons on patience, kindness or temperance come into the classroom; the Common Core State Standards do not deal with those sorts of life-skills. Maybe the only reason that a parent sends his children to school is to teach them the mathematical or reading skills needed to receive a diploma, and thus get a high paying job; that parent could not care less whether their children's teachers guide them in how to be a responsible functioning person. Terrence O. Moore believes this type of thinking is completely corrupted; he presents a counter-argument: …show more content…
. . . we should pause to notice that the aim of “college and career readiness” turns education into an instrument rather than an end in itself. . . . Saying that the aim of education is college and career readiness implies that once we have gone to college and gotten a job, we have practically done with our education. This is tantamount to saying we have done with our political, moral, aesthetic, and, in general, human lives. We are now just cogs in a machine called the twenty-first-century global economy. And, as mere workers, we have no business in the politics and culture of the nation, except to receive what others have thought and done and written for us. Maybe that is exactly what the Founding Fathers meant by