Core Words

This song is an emergent property of:

1) my public declaration of my disinhibition; and

2) professional discussions about the use of “Core Word” programs, which I have started discussing elsewhere.

The underlying issue is that written material is being used to decide what children should learn to say. What’s worse, those restricted sets are controlled by the dominant paradigm.

So I give you a song that expresses how I feel about two things: 1) curricular design decisions made in ignorance, and 2) the critical value of supporting individual creativity of expression. Upon reflection, this suggests that this is my spiritual kin of Chapin’s “Flowers are Red,” which (you’ll be relieved to know) had a much happier ending in the concert version.

Let’s see these renditions of time honored, traditional nursery rhymes make it into privileged corpora, where I’ve just warped the ‘butt’ statistics (in support of children’s freedom of creativity, as other artists did for me when I was young).

Here are the lyrics.