In the rush to align curriculum to the Common Core, Pearson came up with a real doozie: A third-grade lesson tells students that “the commands of government officials must be obeyed by all,” and that “the wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation,” reports EAG News, which links to MinutemenNews.
The unit on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War – “Hold the Flag High” – doubles as an English assignment on possessive nouns. Students are told to make sentences “less wordy by replacing the underlined words with a possessive noun phrase.”
All six sentences are about the president.
It starts: “The job of a president is not easy.”
Students are supposed to write: “The president’s job is not easy.”
Problems start with the fourth sentence: “(The president) makes sure the laws of the country are fair.”
That’s the judicial branch’s job, notes EAG News.
The president – as head of the executive branch of our government – is only charged with administering the laws passed by Congress, the legislative branch.
The Pearson Education lesson leaves students with the mistaken idea that American presidents have king-like powers, a concept our Founding Fathers would find abhorrent.
The indoctrination continues with sentence five: “The commands of government officials must be obeyed by all.”
That’s a chilling concept, one that any constitutional attorney would be quick to take issue with.
Sentence six states: “The wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation.”
Perhaps Mr. Spock would agree, but a constitutional lawyer might wonder what happened to the Bill of Rights.