Ashton Kutcher’s thank you speech at the Teen’s Choice Awards went viral.  Kutcher shared three life lessons for achieving success in today’s world.  The first lesson was about opportunity – “I believe that opportunity looks a lot like hard work.”  The second was about being sexy – “The sexiest thing in the entire world is being really smart and being thoughtful, and being generous.”  It’s Kutcher’s third life lesson that I want to delve deeper:  build your own life – “You are told the world is the way that it is and your life is to live inside the world…  But life can be broader than that.  Everything around us that we call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you. And you can build your own things.  You can build your own life that other people can live in.  So build a life. Don’t live one, build one. Find your opportunities, and always be sexy.”
How does this life lesson relate to Common Core?  The goal of Common Core is to narrowly train students to become mere functionaries educated solely to live their life inside the world someone else built.  Extinguished is the flame to find one’s own opportunities and build one’s own thing.  How ironic that Common Core was funded by Bill Gates, a college dropout, who seized the opportunity to think outside the box and build Microsoft.  Gates funded the creation of an educational model that stifles creativity and entrepreneurship. I suppose then our children are to live inside a world built by Bill Gates.