The Best Argument Against Common Core

This may be one of the most important posts I have ever written. If you are reading this and have school-age children, please, for the sake of their souls and yours, pay attention. 

Instruction is NOT education. I wish I had found Cardinal Manning 9-14 years ago, when I was giving talks on education, from 2000-2005, concerning formation as the real reason for education. For years, I spoke of the great evil of the Bismarck take-over of education and the establishment of the “gymnasium” over the “academia”.

Cardinal Manning, referring to the Syllabus of Errors, in his chapter on the gift of understanding, writes this:

“The persecution of the Church which we see at this moment in Germany is nothing more than a revenge of the mortified pride of the men of culture and of the philosophers who are deposed from their seat of error by the Vatican Council. They were one by one put down. They were suspended by their bishops, and finally, because they would not obey, were put out; and being put out, they gathered themselves together to head against the Church of God. But their end is sure. They will be scattered from before its face, as all heretics have ever been.  The Holy see has always laid down this great and vital principle—namely, that secular and religious instruction shall never be parted in education. It has laid down the principle not only for the schools of the poor, but for the universities of the rich. It has ever wavered; it has never receded, and it ever will; and that because education is not the mere teaching of intellectual opinions. Education is the formation of the whole man—intellect, heart, will, character, mind and soul. Whether it be the poor child in the parish school, or the son of the rich man in the university, it is all the same. The Catholic Church will accept as education nothing less than the formation of the whole man. Therefore, when doctors and politicians talk of this separation of the religious and the secular element, the Church will have none of it, and that for this plain reason—instruction is not education.”

This one section reveals the great evil of the American Common Core Curriculum. In my opinion, any diocese which accepts the CC is in disobedience not only to the long tradition of the Church regarding education as formation, but the more recent guidelines regarding the heresies of Modernism.

Imagine explaining to a diocesan school system, which has caved in to secularism, these words of Manning. If I were invited (lol) to a meeting in the chancery office concerning Catholic education accepting CC, I would read this.

“Secular teaching, without the light of faith and the gifts of the Holy Ghost, not only cannot form the man, but they deform the man. The form the man upon a false model; they unshape him from that original reflection of the image of God which is in him. First, they deprive him of light; and where light departs, darkness comes. The human mind, once deprived of the light of revelation, is filled with the clouds of unbelief or of credulity. It can give no account of God; it has no knowledge of His character or of its own nature.”

Manning continues…”Is this education? Though a man were a professor or seven sciences, without the knowledge of God and of himself what is he?  In the sight of God he is like the men of the old world which knew not God. He may be as wise as Empedocles or Aristotle, but he is not a Christian. He is not formed upon the type of Christianity: he is not after the example of Jesus Christ.; he is not after the example of Jesus Christ.”

What should be the purpose of education? Formation, not instruction….

“Lastly, where the mind is deprived of light it is perverted. The whole intellectual and moral nature loses its normal shape. It is perpetually conceiving and giving out erroneous judgments, erroneous principles, erroneous maxims, which issue in erroneous and dangerous actions. The separation of religious from secular education wrecks altogether the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost in the souls fo those who have been baptised. Is it a wonder, then, that the Catholic Church will never consent that its children shall be reared without the knowledge of their faith, or that education shall be so parted asunder that secular knowledge shall be made the subject of daily and earnest inculcation, and that religion should be left out as an accident, to be picked up when and as it may?”

Anyone who sends their child to a school incorporating CC or one which is Catholic in name only will have to answer before God as to the loss of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, in their baptized children.

I knew years ago that most Catholic and all secular education deformed the child, which is why I began home schooling in 1991. Formation of the virtues is the number one goal of any teacher-parent.

That the Cardinal speaks of the loss of the gifts is so serious that all parents must examine what is happening daily to their children.

Manning notes that we all have the gift of understanding if we are in sanctifying grace. Please read both 2 Corinthians 2:4-6 and Ephesian 3:14-19 today and ponder the great gift of understanding given to each of us, not to be squandered or lost to the darkness.

To be continued…