Hampshire College, the ultra-progressive institution that has previously made headlines for flying the American flag at half-staff after the election of President Donald Trump, is now on the receiving end of a backlash over its decision to rescind its speaking invitation for Antonia Okafor, a pro-Second Amendment black woman.
Meanwhile, Okafor's speaking engagement at nearby Mount Holyoke College — titled "Female Empowerment and the Second Amendment" — is slated to go forward Thursday evening, although administrators have taken steps to provide "alternative spaces" for students intending to protest her talk.
Common Core supporters have been asserting that before Common Core's emphasis on skills, all our teachers did for 50 years was ask kids to memorize facts. So implies Alfie Kohn in The Schools Our Children Deserve, in arguing that students didn't understand what they used to be taught in arithmetic: "Drill does not develop meanings. Repetition does not lead to understandings." Kohn's version of the past was echoed and carried to its seemingly logical conclusion in Constance Kamii's well-known assertions about "The Harmful Effects of Teaching Algorithms to Young Children."
Common Core supporters also charge that pre-Common Core standards amounted to little more than fact-memorization. We find a recent version of this charge in a quoted comment that appeared online about New Hampshire's previous science standards:
