[Vision2020] More on the Core

[Ron Force]

>From Paul Krugman:

August 19, 2013, 9:48 am 31 Comments
Stupid Is A Strategy
Bill Keller has a strong, stinging column about Republican attacks on the entirely praiseworthy, up to now bipartisan effort to create a Common Core curriculum. But I think we need to say more than this:
But more and more, I think Gov. Bobby Jindal, Louisiana’s Republican rising star, had it right when he said his party was in danger of becoming simply “the stupid party.”
First of all, right-wing leaders don’t strike me as being at all stupid (although I have to say that I’ve never understood why Jindal himself has a reputation for brilliance). Incurious, maybe; not given to self-analysis; but not stupid. I never even bought into the notion that GW Bush was dumb; he always struck me as anti-intellectual, but very cunning in his own way.
Now, you might argue that the leaders are catering to their base. Brad DeLong likes to remind us of John Stuart Mill’s dictum:
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
Even that, however, doesn’t get you all the way there, because there are many things one could pretend to be stupid about,so you need to have some notion of why certain subjects become the subject of dumb conspiracy theories, while others don’t. And I think that the best model is, as I said the other day, the Corey Robin notion that it’s about preserving hierarchy. The idea of a common core disturbs a lot of people on the right not because they fear that it will lead to left-wing indoctrination — it’s far too bland for that — but because it could get in the way of right-wing indoctrination, which is what they believe schools should be doing.
In any case, the fight over the core is, as Keller says, telling — not just about the state of mind on the right, but about the state of America. There is literally no such thing these days as a nonpartisan agenda. No project, no matter how worthy and blameless, can escape becoming a target for orchestrated rage.
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