Cut everything off the worm except its head and it survives.
Tufts biologist Michael Levin peels open a rectangular Tupperware container to show off his babies: a dozen or so flatworms of the genus Planaria. They don’t look like much. Brown and about an inch long, they appear almost featureless as they swim around in spring water. But inside those little worms, says Levin, are surprisingly advanced brains. “They have most of the same neurotransmitters we do,” he says....
And planaria have an ability we humans may never have—they can grow their brains back. “This is the only model species that enables the study of memory and brain regeneration in the same animal,” says Levin, a professor and director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. His lab has been studying regeneration for years in animals.... [Keep reading HERE]
NOW read "Common Core May Persist, Even in Opposition States," By Andrew Ujifusa, Ed Week, July 30, 2014. Read that title again "Common Core May Persist, Even in Opposition States"and then read the excerpt below:
The early pattern suggests that the common standards could undergo some relatively minor changes but still persist in states where opposition has led to high-profile bills and big headlines....
...so far there is little sign and not a great deal of precedent that the states backing away from the common core, or considering doing so, will ultimately produce anything that is truly different from those standards.
“The common core is not a yes-no,” said Michael McShane, a research fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute. “There are shades of gray in there.”...
“It’s what I call Repeal Lite. You get to pound your chest and say, ‘I threw out the common core,’” said Bob Wise, the president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based group that supports the common core, and a former Democratic governor of West Virginia.... [bold added]
This article from Ed Week illustrates the main point of this post: Education reform is like an earthworm. Cut everything off the worm except its head and it survives, survives even the multi-million dollar neoconservative Common Core assault bandwagon, numerous anti-Common Core films (most recently the Glenn Beck extravaganza), slick websites, and inflammatory books. All of which deal with "standards" (that un-sexy word that in truth, is un-sexy.)
The sexy stuff (I call it education's "pornography" -- the brainwashing methods) is ignored -- for example, the stuff Betsy Kraus has been writing about in recent blogs such as her "Tools of the Mind," etc. )
The people fighting Common Core are basically ignorant regarding "the methods" forged by Skinner, Bloom, Goodlad, Sizer, Marzano, Wagner, Vygotsky, Luria... the very nasty methods which will enable whatever Common Core standards "they" detest to be imbedded in children's young minds/souls. The Marxist methods devised by these men are being used to brainwash your child, in order to see that their "new" way of thinking remains a part of the child's approach to life.
So...
How much time has our Constitutional Republic lost, how many freedoms (our representative form of government) are being washed down the drain, due to time spent on attacking Common Core's evils? Especially at the exclusion of fighting the Trojan Horse, tax-funded school choice? How many public schools with their elected form of government have been closed? How many teachers have been replaced or fired from their jobs? How many children have no school to go to due to the greed of the corporate tax-funded school choice/charter school-to-work (limited learning for lifelong labor) combine -- all headed up by the left and the right in bed together? (Read MORE)
Education Week should get a "thumbs up" for this article. Good job.
