Yes this is sadly very much a thing. A result I think of too easy lives and no real engagement with fundamental physical and political realities. That or GM foods.

That is to say, I don't think morality should be described as fact, as it varies from person to person and culture to culture, with one's personal morality revealed to oneself through life experience. But we should be teaching everyone recommended values and encouraging self-cultivation of ones own morality as something very important. It's very apparent that many people today are absorbing no moral lessons whatsoever.

Anyway, what the hell do you think diplomacy players are: moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the Word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not. They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in the cell balancing right against wrong?

Yesterday I would have killed Norway because I thought him evil and an enemy. But not today. Today he’s evil and my friend. London needs him. They need him so that we can sleep soundly in our flea-bitten beds again. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me.

There are no moral truths, though there are values. Sanctity of life and other things are values, but can't be absolute. Absolute rules are dangerous and easy to manipulate.

No, the lack of absolutes is dangerous. If there is no moral truth, then there is only power.

.... and those to weak to use it :-)

"Anyway, what the hell do you think diplomacy players are: moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the Word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not. They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in the cell balancing right against wrong?"

Hahahahahaha

Nothing is true, everything is permitted...

Not by me, nor any number of law enforcement agencies.

"Hahahahahaha"

hmm sarcasm or not, the credit for that paragraph belongs to a slightly famous writer called John LeCarre.

fiedler: "Not by me, nor any number of law enforcement agencies." That was a reference. The phrase was originally recorded some time ago, but it gained its most popular embrace in the Assassin's Creed series. The nothing is true bit is easier to understand and is actually applicable. The everything is permitted part is less easy. "To say that nothing is true, is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile, and that we must be the shepherds of our own civilization. To say that everything is permitted, is to understand that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic." -Ezio Auditore
"Our Creed does not command us to be free. It commands us to be wise." -Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad

An earlier version of the phrase, namely "If there is no God, then everything is permitted," goes back to Dostoevsky.

While I believe moral absolutes are necessary, I don't think that the issue this post is posing is one that stems directly from the Common Core Standards. I have heard of problems with CCS, but most issues I hear of it are one of two camps:

(a) people that are uneducated in what CC is about and instead rely on others to tell them what the standards mean or imply or
(b) people familiar with CC that fail to understand the purpose behind it.

Don't get me wrong, I do feel there are things to iron out from CC, but these issues arise most frequently at the elementary level.

The ultimate goal of CC is (at least where math is concerned and where I believe Science is headed when it is completed for the most part) is to grant more freedom to the educator to teach concepts and get students to dig deeper into Bloom's taxonomy where they analyze/evaluate/create--meaning "critical thinking" as opposed to being more rigid like Quality Core that tends to direct learners to the lower end of Bloom's toward remembering/understanding which relies more on rote memorization and short-term memory retrieval.

No offense toward elementary school teachers, but most of them don't have the ability to get young children thinking critically, and merely focus on memorization. Some do, and it's seen in exceptional students at the higher levels.

When teachers have students memorizing information with low - application based on such memorizing, then the results are what the article is showing: students that cannot see where belief and fact coexist, or the existence of moral absolutes - such as in the case of laws, codes of conduct, etc.

Where the article is correct is in this facet--students are asked (at young ages, unfortunately) to base an answer to fact/opinion by verbage rather than by justification via evidence or counter-example.


Educationally, there has been a decline in morality views and the increase in "gray area truths" like cheating, fighting, theft, dishonesty, etc. and they have been increasing prior to the induction of CC. It just happens to be that CC doesn't quell these ideas.

Actually, semck, it traces a much more direct path to Nietzsche's "Nichts ist wahr, Alles ist erlaubt" which is translated to be the exact phrase, and is just as old as the Dostoevsky phrase. And it makes more sense for what he was referencing to come from Nietzsche because Assassin's Creed was based on the novel Alamut by Vladimir Bartol, and Bartol was very much influenced by Nietzsche.

Actually, TrPrado, it's such a basic idea that probably every second cave man had it before he was eaten by velociraptors. Your education via videogame is cute though!

Congratulations, again, on misunderstanding the phrase as employed by Marquis for a second time.

Oh do explain how i have misunderstood. Im on the tenderhooks!

DINOSAURS SUCH AS VELOCIRAPTORS LIVED IN A DIFFERENT TIME THAN THAT OF HUMANS STOP BEING YELLOW BELLIED PEANUT BRITTLE AND GO TO BED

also I am God, and I will destroy you

and no, have you ever heard of 'basic christian morals'??? well that is ONE TYPE OF MORALS. morals are made off of base beliefs, and if my belief is that murdering is good, then saying "Murder is good" is a moral fact. And since technically there are an infinite number of possibilities for morals, it is easiest to call them opinions, since they apply on individual bases

That op ed is crap. The Common Core State Standards which he takes issue with are not a curriculum which is professing to have the monopoly on "moral facts", whatever those are.

CCSS are there to provide a framework for analysis of reading passages to understand *IN THE CONTEXT OF THE PASSAGE* whether a statement is fact, opinion or reasoned judgment.

Yet again someone misses the educational point and tries to make some reactionary hay out of it.

derailed then rerailed

I hear you Jeff Kuta, +1 earned

Go to bed? It aint even 6 here. How dare you lecture me about the crustacean period when you cant even tell time. Marmalade!

Fielder, you should know it only really matters where I am

But ure fricken everywhere!

Awaiting your kind instruction TrPrado. Dont dissapoint. Maybe you can get some philosophical tips from Sonic da Hedgehog.

http://www.metrolyrics.com/new-math-lyrics-tom-lehrer.html

This is what happens when you try to teach with a concepts approach without first giving a foundation in rote learning of facts -- you get New Math.

Lucky me got to learn the rote approach before the schools started pushing New Math. At least it didn't last back then, but it created students that couldn't do basic math until the electronic calculator came down in price.

All shall bow to me, unless you're crippled. They go straight to the camps.

That would not help. Sonic was an unapologetic Kantian transcendentalist and who really understands any of that?

Jeff,

"CCSS are there to provide a framework for analysis of reading passages to understand *IN THE CONTEXT OF THE PASSAGE* whether a statement is fact, opinion or reasoned judgment."

Well, that's still nonsense, because as the article points out, fact and opinion are not exclusive of each other.