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Why is a second grader "comparing and contrasting"? Because the Common Core is designed to preserve education as a self-contained hazing ritual for wealth and power maintenance. From the start we are preparing students to write the worthless five paragraph essay, so that those who comply best succeed best.

It is, of course, within those "extras" that the human spirit lies. Why learn to read if you cannot read about the things which matter most to you? Why learn to write if you can not write a song? Why learn to count if you do not appreciate the value of what you are counting?

The reason we must abandon "core subjects" and embrace Passion-Based Learning is that today we give students absolutely no reason to learn anything. We have turned school into a series of chores with no purpose. Eight-year-olds hate books and reading because they've spent three years drilling in decoding - literacy is pointless effort, not a path to passions. Sixteen-year-olds hate mathematics because they've spent eleven years drilling with numbers, x-s and y-s - maths are totally irrelevant, not a link to a magical world of real and virtual construction.

Socialism, until recently, was supposed to connote political democracy, social equality and internationalism. There is not the smallest sign that any of these things is in a way to being established anywhere, and the one great country in which something described as a proletarian revolution once happened, i.e. the USSR, has moved steadily away from the old concept of a free and equal society aiming at universal human brotherhood. In an almost unbroken progress since the early days of the Revolution, liberty has been chipped away and representative institutions smothered, while inequalities have increased and nationalism and militarism have grown stronger. But at the same time, Burnham insists, there has been no tendency to return to capitalism. What is happening is simply the growth of "managerialism", which, according to Burnham, is in progress everywhere, though the manner in which it comes about may vary from country to country.

Burnham does not deny that "good" motives may operate in private life, but he maintains that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else.

Lenin, indeed, is one of those politicians who win an undeserved reputation by dying prematurely.

Associate'sdegree

Of course, one of the givens of professional life is that one never reveals one's fears! But everyone who teaches knows that fear abounds in the profession—from the fear of not knowing the answer, to the fear of losing control, to the fear of never knowing whether one's work has made a difference. All these fears are worth exploring, and some of them reach deeply into our souls. But there is one fear that most teachers feel, though few ever name, a fear that reaches more deeply into our adult lives than any of the others. It is our fear of the judgment of the young. The daily experiences of many teachers is to stand before a sea of faces younger than one's own, faces that too often seem bored, sullen, even hostile. Even when one knows that these visages merely mask the fear in many students' hearts, it is still disheartening to stare into so much apparent disconfirmation day after day after day. The message from the younger generation that many teachers take home each night runs something like this: "We do not care about you and your values…You have been left in the dust by a culture whose words and music you don't even understand…You and your generation are on the way out, so why not just step aside and give us room to grow?" It is a difficult message to bear—especially in a profession where one grows old at a geometric rate, while one's charges remain young, year in and year out!