A concerned mother who immigrated to America from China spoke out against the federal Common Core standards being implemented in schools across the nation. During a recent meeting of the Colorado State Board of Education, Lily Tang Williams cited the troubling similarities she sees between the leftist-supported curriculum and the communist system under which she was educated.
“I do not buy into Common Core,” she asserted. “I’m here to oppose that strongly.”
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Williams affirmed that, under the Chinese form of education, students “are not trained to be independent thinkers,” but are instead shaped into useful tools for the government.
Important lessons in history, such as the student-led protests and subsequent military response in Tiananmen Square a quarter-century ago, are completely omitted or whitewashed, she explained.
“It this what we want in America?” she asked the board.
Similar revisionism is evident in Common Core lessons, Williams maintained.
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“Do you know what’s going to be on U.S. AP History tests?” she asked. “American exceptionalism is gone … capitalism is gone.”
Instead of equipping students for freedom, this big government system would instead stifle independence in much the same way as the education she received as a child.
“Common Core,” she insisted, “in my eyes, is the same as the Communist core I once saw in China.”
Students are brainwashed under such a system, Williams continued, admitting it took her a decade after arriving in the U.S. to shed the indoctrination she received.
“America is great,” she said. “Don’t compare yourself to China.”
Williams expounded on her concerns in an editorial that offered a deeper exploration of the indoctrination and authoritarianism she experienced as a child.

“From the NSA keeping records on us in massive databases to Common Core nationalization of exams and curriculum,” she wrote, “what is happening now is very unlike the America I came to find. The worst, I fear, is that Common Core could be used by the government and corporations to do data collection and data mining on our children.”