How do Common Core Standards oppress children, their imagination, and their education?

This question suggests a very strong bias against Common Core Standards, and I am aware this subject has become highly politicized.  There may very well be some value to the standards, depending on how they are used. Nevertheless, it is possible to provide some support for these characterizations of the Common Core Standards. 

In the early years, K-3, it appears that the standards are particularly oppressive and harmful to children's natural tendency to be imaginative, and if this is the case, it clearly harms their education.  Children learn best by playing in the early grades.  This is how children get to exercise their imaginations and how they learn.  Inquiry is to a large degree imagination-based. A child wants to know something, hypothesizes some possible answers, and tries them out in play. These standards do not allow for this. Furthermore, children's development is strikingly uneven in the early years, such that some four-year-olds are ready to read while some six-year-olds are just getting ready to do so.  This is not accounted for in the Common Core Standards. This is oppressive, of course, trying to force very young children into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.  According to the Washington Post, early childhood experts were not consulted in the formulation of the standards, and this is what we have reaped as a result.

Once children are reading for themselves, what I find of great concern is a focus on non-fiction instead of fiction in the language arts. I am guessing the intent was to make students more job-ready by forcing them to focus more on how to gather, analyze, and judge information.  That is a fine goal, but there is great value in teaching texts of fiction, value that teaching non-fiction can simply not replace.  Even older students need to develop imaginatively, best done with fiction, and studies have made clear that reading literary fiction socializes us and develops our empathy, both attributes all students need to develop to succeed in their professional and personal lives. 

I have read numerous criticisms of the math standards, which seem to be based more on process than product.  But I suspect the primary problem is that children are being taught math in a different way than their parents were, and this makes parents confused, unhappy, and defensive.  It certainly does matter in math, though, that one get the answer right, and no matter how well one understands the process, it seems to me that an elevation of process over product could easily have planes falling to earth and two sides of a bridge not meeting in the middle.

Should there be standards? Certainly. Should there be uniform federal standards? That is not so clear. In a small country like Japan, with a homogeneous population, this is not a controversial idea. But in the United States, with a very delicate balance between states' rights and the power of the federal government, with so much diversity in its people and even its geography, it is possible that this is not the best idea.