With the national uproar over the Obama administration-backed “Common Core” nationalization of education reaching a fever pitch from Florida and Louisiana to New Hampshire and Wisconsin, education expert Dr. Duke Pesta is now speaking out in an exclusive video for The New American about the looming nationwide school standards for history, science, and sexuality. The goal of it all, according to Dr. Pesta, academic director at FreedomProject Education and an English professor at the University of Wisconsin, is social engineering while denying truth — an argument that numerous other prominent experts and educators across the country have also made.
“Many states across the union are having second thoughts,” said Pesta, who oversees academics at FPE, an online K-12 school offering classical education to students across the country. “They see the English and the math standards that are already in our schools, and they’re just a heap of trouble. The math standards aren’t real math. The English standards are involving all sorts of things that aren’t really literature — all of this tangential political material.”
Indeed, it started as a mere handful of states that refused taxpayer-funded bribes from Obama’s Department of Education in exchange for adopting the deeply controversial standards — Alaska, for example, and Texas. As the public slowly learns about Common Core and what it means, however, outrage is boiling over all across the country — and the pro-Common Core establishment is frantically trying to clamp down.
In multiple states, official hearings in recent days and weeks have drawn legions of furious educators and parents demanding an end to Common Core. A recent hearing in Wisconsin, where Dr. Pesta testified against the scheme, featured testimony from a member of the Common Core Validation Committee who refused to sign off on the English standards. Now, however, as information about the bid to nationalize education in other fields emerges as well, the picture is not pretty — and resistance is expected to intensify.
“We have word of a pending danger,” explained Dr. Pesta, a contributor to The New American magazine, in an in-studio video about the future of Common Core and related efforts. “We now have a sense of what the health standards are going to look like, what the science standards are going to look like, and what the history standards are going to look like. They are as bad, or worse, than what we already have.”
As an example, Dr. Pesta cited the national so-called “health” standards, developed largely by tax-funded abortion behemoth Planned Parenthood, “which advertise teaching our kids health and sexuality skills from kindergarten to 12th grade,” he explained. “I don’t know about you, but the idea that we’re going to send our kids to public schools to learn sexuality skills is very disturbing.” One of the numerous complaints is that children will be required to “identify different kinds of family structures” — read: homosexual and transgender — and “provide arguments as to why all different types of families are equal.”
The consequences of the radical “health” and “sexuality” schemes being foisted on impressionable young children “are grave,” Dr. Pesta said, noting that only the government’s view would be taught. “No longer do moms and dads get to educate their kids at home about their views on sexuality,” he said, citing Christians and members of other faiths. “The state standards mandate that every kid in kindergarten, first, and second grade engage in these exercises.” By the time kids reach third grade, he continued, they will have to make arguments explaining why “there is no such thing as gender biology.”
Speaking about the standards on alleged “world history,” financed by billionaire globalist Bill Gates, Dr. Pesta noted that it is broken into two sections — and the first half has nothing to do with human beings. “It is a pseudo-scientific overlay that is designed to make your kids atheists and materialists, to promote an absolutely materialist paradigm when it comes to globalism; it’s highly environmentalist,” he said. “This is what’s going to pass for history.”
Gates, the key financier behind Common Core as well as a strong supporter of the United Nations and Planned Parenthood, has also been funding Orwellian technology to monitor and track students for data-mining purposes — all of which will be shared with government. The most recent controversy around Gates-funded technology aimed at your children: so-called “Galvanic Skin Response” (GSR) bracelets, which track physiological reactions to “measure engagement” of kids in the classroom.
In the short video, Dr. Pesta also addressed the deeply controversial so-called “science” standards. As The New American has previously documented, the “Next Generation Science Standards” are filled with unscientific propaganda on everything from United Nations “man-made global warming” theories to evolution. “Human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming),” the elementary-school standards claim, despite the fact that even climate alarmists admit there has been no “global warming” in over 15 years and that CO2 released from fossil fuels represents a fraction of one percent of the greenhouse gases present naturally in the atmosphere.
For Dr. Pesta and other experts, the trends and the real agenda behind the nationalization of schooling are clear. “It is an education that fundamentally denies truth, not just in the humanities and history, but alarmingly, as we’ve seen, in science, math, and biology,” said Dr. Pesta. “It’s all done for social engineering aims,” he added. “This is what’s coming. Common Core is bad now — it’s going to get a lot, lot worse.”
However, despite the progress Common Core plotters have made, analysts say the tide may be turning — and that the pushback is set to accelerate as Americans learn more. In testimony before an official Wisconsin committee investigating Common Core, Dr. Pesta and other experts slammed the controversial standards and urged lawmakers to reject them. What would happen if rather than Bill Gates, conservative billionaires had instead dumped hundreds of millions into developing national standards, backed by a right-wing presidential administration, he asked rhetorically.
Pesta also noted that both of the subject-matter experts on the Common Core Validation Committee — one of whom, Dr. Sandra Stotsky, also testified against the standards at the same hearing — had refused to sign off on the scheme. Meanwhile, Pesta’s own experience teaching high school students as a volunteer who later wound up at the university where he teaches shows that Common Core standards are having a negative effect on students and learning, he said.
The New American has written extensively on Common Core, including keeping up with the latest developments and two in-depth articles on the standards, the agenda, and the accompanying data-mining programs. To watch a recording of Dr. Pesta’s most recent testimony at the Wisconsin hearing, click here. Dr. Stotsky’s recorded testimony can be accessed here. A detailed presentation on Common Core by FPE can be viewed here. Finally, watch Dr. Pesta’s latest video commentary for TNA about the radical “science,” “history,” and “sexuality” standards below: