I wrote on this theme here, but this kid really gets it:
See also Patrick Denneen's eloquent speech at Notre Dame against the Common Core. Key grafs:
I began by suggesting that it was in the very absence of any national standard for education, and the strong tradition of local control of education, that we could perceive, in fact, a pervasive historical commitment to the aspiration of republican self-government. Because humans in their social and political communities are various, it was understood by our Founders that the way that these educational purposes to be achieved would be various, and so the commitment to local control of education was not born of a resignation in the absence of a strong central government, but a positive embrace of variety and multiplicity. Because there is likely to be debate and disagreement in a pluralistic society over the nature of our civic ends and the nature of a good character, it was understood that only in more local circumstances could the highest aspirations of education be pursued, even if that would be various and multiple. In our modern insistence to standardize and equalize, we necessarily discard any higher aspiration of education’s end in an embrace of a widely-secured agreement about lower, debased ends: an education based upon a lowest common-denominator, “career-readiness.” Our civilization thus shows its ultimate commitments through how it educates its young—that we think them incapable of anything higher than being workers in a deracinated globalized economic system, neither citizens nor, in the fullest sense, humans.
At the same time, we condemn ourselves, betraying our ancient faith in our own ability to educate and cultivate our young, handing over our final and most basic liberty to a distant power. Contained in the very act of handing over the education of our young is the self-indictment of a decaying Republic, a future feared by, among others, Tocqueville, as a possible path that America might take, since it is one that all republics heretofore have taken, and is an inevitability once a people has lost the taste and the art of ruling themselves.