Monthly Archives: January 2017

Butterflies of the Soul: Using Education Reforms as the Chrysalis for Social Reengineering

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I have to admit that the first part of that title is not my metaphor. It does, however, perfectly capture the true story behind of where education reforms, learning standards like the Common Core, SEL competencies, or School Choice, actually lead. The true story is found via a converging mixture of open declarations by insiders, coupled to deceitful narratives by people also tied to ‘public policy’. The False Narratives always seem to be trying to obscure the same actual goals as what someone else openly declares. Either that obstruction, as in “Don’t Look Here!”, or we get a deliberate misrepresentation of what something means or how it works (based on Robin’s handy Education Glossary of terms).

In other words, both shrouding something I know is there or misrepresenting a definition are telling facts of what the deception is about. Using my own metaphor now, if the Open Admitters of education as a transformational tool are Hansel, and the Deceiving Craftsmen (and women) are Gretel, the crumbs Hansel is leaving, and the areas of the pathway that Gretel’s crumbs never touch, are headed in the same direction. Let’s look there!

One of the documentable facts I have uncovered in the last few months of footnote tiptoeing and then reading is that in 2003 the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society was launched at a conference at the Vatican. At an opening session workshop, the Senior Scientist of One Laptop Per Child, Antonio Battro, presented a video called Mysterious Butterflies of the Soul, which was a metaphor for the neurons in the student’s physiological brain. The idea was how to transform education to target the ‘living brain’ so its structures reliably guide future actions and behaviors. This future activity is to be grounded in the supposed “spiritual roots of humanity.” That true neurobiological focus then gets obscured by frequently substituting the terms cognition or mind.

Linking up with the last post’s observation that all these aims, when uncovered or deciphered, turn out to be about the student’s decision-making capacities, Antonio Damasio, from the same conference (USC prof involved with BRAIN Initiative and author of Descartes’ Error) told us why SEL Standards are really so important. Hint: it has nothing to do with any government database of PII.

“We use emotions and the devices that underpin them every day of our lives, frequently as a helping hand in the conscious decision-making process and just as often to orient our behaviors and enrich our humanity. Creativity [one of the 4 Cs of 21st Century Learning] is not conceivable without emotion. Neither is moral behavior. As for education, it is difficult to imagine how to proceed without two of the leading consequences of emotion: engagement and attention. The brain uses emotional processes to identify salient features of the environment that are especially relevant to the management of life.”

When the think tanks, American Principles Project and the Pioneer Institute, decided to pilfer from the footnotes of my book Credentialed to Destroy, with neither proper attribution nor permission, to misrepresent the true focus of both Competency-based Education and Transformational Outcomes Based Education, the misleading pathway constructed led away from that very same Life Roles focus as what Damasio and IMBES were getting at. “After the Fall: Catholic Education Beyond the Common Core” made public education supposedly all about preparation for the workforce. It also alleged the Common Core was “devoid of any attention to ‘the true, the good, the beautiful,” and catered to “man with the soul amputated.” Well, that butterfly metaphor makes a mockery of that statement.

Plus, on the next page Professor Damasio told us that “the importance of emotion in education  is not confined to its role in engagement and attention. The role that emotions play in the construction of moral behavior and, by extension, building a citizen is just as important.” I bolded those phrases because when the Atlanta Classical Academy, which is part of both the Atlanta Public Schools and where the head of Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative, Terrence Moore, is the principal,  ran an ad in the local paper recently it touted its curriculum as building the basis for Virtuous Living and Good Citizenship. Sounds like synonyms for Damasio’s vision for MBE education to me.

Moreover, in following our trails of crumbs and no crumbs, an October 13, 2016 story in The Federalist entitled “Meet the Americans Revitalizing Freedom, One Child at a Home” on Classical Education and the charter schools opened under the Barney Initiative cited how Moore had spoken at “a summer institute dedicated to introducing new volunteers to the ideas behind the Barney initiative.” We can all decide if this seems to be a fact-based curriculum to us.

“Moore playacted the part of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists of the American Revolution, illustrating ways to engage children in Western civilization’s great ideas. The seminar’s whiteboards proclaimed: ‘I will learn the true. I will do the good. I will love the beautiful.‘”

I bolded that because we are going back to what Antonio Battro of the Mysterious Butterflies of the Soul metaphor wrote just before he described the IMBES launch from the Vatican. In his section called “Truth, Goodness, and Beauty,” he latinized these tenets everyone seems to be using to make education about transforming the emotional bases, values, and beliefs that guide future behavior. Just like what the Barney Charter initiative says it wishes to do and which is also supposedly the purpose of the new Catholic Curriculum Framework. What are the odds of such consistent similarities if not outright congruence?–Quoting Battro: “In the words of the old scholastic dictum, Verum, bonum et pulchrum convertuntur (Truth, goodness, and beauty are interchangeable.)”

At this rate so are the visions of the schools being created by School Choice advocates and public education generally. The pro-Common Core and Anti-Common Core organized forces are also headed in a common direction when we delve far enough. Interchangeable is truly the perfect word if we pay attention to function and not slight differences in phrasing or supposed purposes. I am also sure it is totally coincidental that the same day the Catholic Curriculum Frameworks rolled out with its admitted aims that somehow tie to the same behavioral science template as what Tranzi OBE and Competency-Based Ed really mean, the Center for Assessment in Dover, New Hampshire rolled out its Framework for what would constitute innovative, student-centered quality assessments under federal law.

Headed to the same place with measurable results of what is being internalized, in other words. Apparently no one is ever supposed to recognize all this commonality as long as different talking points are used in the official descriptions we are just to accept demurely.

One more example of all that can be learned about the real agenda from affiliated think tanks and the desire that we all accept analogical thinking using the presupplied metaphors that take us in a non-factual direction. This one seemed to be about once again wanting us to misunderstand the Common Core and ‘standards’ generally. We are also supposed to move on. First, the Bradley Foundation-financed, Harvard PEPG publication, Education Next, went with the story “Lessons on the Common Core” by Robert Pondiscio on January 5, 2017. The next week the PEPG partner and Education Excellence Network absorber, Fordham Institute, republished the same article. Later, that week, my local School Choice pusher think tank led its Friday Facts newsletter with this quote:

“to be upset by academic standards is to invest them with a power they neither have nor deserve. In my five years of teaching fifth graders, I never–not even once–reached for English language arts standards when deciding what to teach. I would wager that when I.M. Pei was commissioned to design the Louvre Pyramid, his first move was not to reach for a copy of the Paris building codes for inspiration.” A clever, but totally inapt metaphor, for the purpose of ‘standards’. They are not ‘academic standards’ in the historical sense of that term as transmitting a fact-based curriculum. A better metaphor would have Pei mulling over the laws of physics governing the desired design. True ‘learning standards.’ like the Common Core or Competency-Based Education, are always so interested in neurons and biology after all.

And why are everyone’s learning standards so focused on transmitting knowledge in terms of concepts, instead of building up from known facts and cause-effect relationships? Our IMBES template again had Vartan Gregorian, the President of the hugely influential Carnegie Corporation, telling us that “concepts are far more important than facts and the ability to analyze and synthesize has much greater value than the ability to memorize. In short, school may be multiple choice but real life is all essay.” All this interest in pushing concepts, categories, themes, topics, and ideas as the essence of Knowledge makes more sense if, like Gregorian said, there is now to be “no boundaries between learning and life.” Just like in Tranzi OBE, Competency-Based Ed, and apparently Classical Education too, once properly understood without deceit.

An admitted Marxist poli sci prof, back in 1996, laid out his vision of the future and what needed to be altered in italicized, reconstructive terms, in a way that someone writing about just education reform for an audience of parents, politicians, and taxpayers is typically unwilling to do. That does not change the fact that the desired poli sci or economic transformations can only occur with a certain type of change in the nature of education. Education reforms, to be deemed effective or what is now called ‘evidence-based’ should be gathering student data studying “mass dispositions and capabilities and associated discourses of democracy. Reconstructive science is concerned with the social competences of individuals and the corresponding grammars of human interaction. Its categories are sought in how its subjects apprehend the world.”

Everyone cited in this post, whether being honest or providing a metaphor or narrative to mislead, appears to be interested in providing the basis for how we ‘subjects’ in this 21st Century Age of undisclosed collectivist Politicalism–‘apprehend the world’.

In the next post we will cover how someone with ties to virtually everyone cited in this post wants education to be about practicing the desired “internal acts of reason and will.” A vision incorporating “the moral norms available to guide choice and action.”

I guess we will call the next post the End of the Trilogy laying out the Deceit surrounding Manipulating Each Student’s Personal Decision-Making Capacity, with neither notice nor consent.

Can anyone tell I do not like any vision of education that regards us as anyone’s ‘subjects’?

Controlling Consciousness and Planning Society Via Politicalism-a New Helpful Description is Born

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Before I turn the term-Politicalism-into the most apt metaphor since Axemakers Mind for describing the true intent behind K-12 education reforms, let me offer up some timely quotes on controlling consciousness. The first is from a December 20, 2016 report called “Behavioural Insights at the United Nations–Achieving Agenda 2030.” I will be bolding or italicizing the passages or phrases I most want everyone to remember.

“Agenda 2030 can only be achieved if we critically examine the behavioural factors that lead people to utilize programs effectively and efficiently. Research in behavioural science–regarding how people make decisions and act on them, how they think about, influence, and relate to one another, and how they develop beliefs and attitudes–can inform optimum programme design. Behavioral science research reveals that even small, subtle, and sometimes counter-intuitive changes to the way a message or choice is framed or how a process is structured, can have an outsized impact on the decisions we make and the actions we take.”

So the areas aimed at by what is now called competency-based education and that used to be called Transformational Outcomes-Based Education (both covered in depth in my book Credentialed to Destroy) are the areas the UN believes are crucial to achieving its agenda of Equity for All globally by 2030. Let’s use a shorter quote from another paper released by UNESCO yesterday from the WEF in Davos, Switzerland. The report on the vision for education needed to achieve that 2030 Agenda was called “Partnering for Prosperity: Education for Green and Inclusive Growth” and its section on the Social Determinants of Health and Inequity led with this quote from Professor Bell Hooks:

“There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.”

If that seems vague please search out the papers on Equity and Empowerment Lenses from Multnomah County, Oregon that public health policymakers are now quietly nationalizing. Many of the links are in the most recent comments to the previous post. Finally, we have a quote from a 2013 edition of the book Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Before I get to that, I want to reiterate how I research at this point in my work.

I am literally working off of footnotes where people with money and political power are confessing what they intend to do with the models and theories they are creating. One of these books cited a Professor Douglass North and that he had been a Marxist and then laid out a quote from that book that struck me as still thoroughly Marxian in its view of the mind and molding consciousness. That’s not an insult, but a shorthand phrase for a particular view of history and how it can be used to mold consciousness deliberately. When a used copy of the book arrived, the authors thanked the Hoover Institution profusely as well as the Bradley Foundation for its financing of the project of a “new framework for the social sciences.”

So the Hoover Institution behind the Koret Task Force and what I regard as an attempt to create a deceptive narrative around the Common Core in the 2011 paper Closing the Door on Innovation, which is also one of the named partners in the PEPG–Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Kennedy School of Government we have covered, wanted this new framework. And the Bradley Foundation behind that concept-based approach to History from the 80s that also finances PEPG’s publication Education Next and many of the think tanks and other entities pushing School Choice and that owns the book publisher, Encounter Books, financed the framework. Let’s take a look at what it aims at.

In the chapter entitled “A New Research Agenda for the Social Sciences,” we find an explanation for what I keep finding when I dig behind the facade of the ‘School Choice’ slogan.

“A full account of human behavior would begin by asking how the mind deals with the process of change. A necessary preliminary is to understand how the brain interprets signals received by the senses and how the mind structures the results into coherent beliefs. ..How do we think about social processes when individuals, at best, have a limited understanding of what is happening to them as they continue to confront new experiences and novel situations that require an awareness of the dynamic nature of the process of change in which they are participants? How do we deal with the novel problems that emerge as humans reshape the human environment in ways that have no historical precedent?”

So we know that both Hoover and the Bradley Foundation are quite interested in consciousness, how it works, and its use for examining and driving cultural change. Before I get to one more quote, let me go ahead and define Politicalism. Politicalism is how politicians at all levels of government, public policy think tanks across the spectrum, academics, and others believe they can use the law and education to force the transformation by 2030 to what Marx called his Human Development Society where human needs are supposedly met. Politicalism feels empowered to ignore the prohibitions of the First Amendment where governments are rarely allowed to restrict speech and go straight ahead to restricting thought by using education reforms to control consciousness. That’s why the phrase ‘decisionmaking’ just keeps coming up.

Politicians and public policy think tanks have a political, social, and economic vision for the future that requires the monitoring and control over the internalized basis of individual action in order to work effectively. If that aim does not justify a special Proper Noun descriptive term like Politicalism then what will? Not wanting to get called out in advance and have this behavioral science technique prohibited, we get all sorts of euphemisms like competency-based ed, Tranzi OBE, Higher Order Thinking Skills, or School Choice to name a few. The Hoover Framework, with Bradley financing, actively seeks to alter social science research by targeting institutions, which it italicized and defined as follows:

“…the rules of the game, the patterns of interaction that govern and constrain the relationships of individuals. Institutions include formal rules, written laws, formal social conventions, and informal norms of behavior.”

In other words, institutions are not necessarily physical things, but also the values, attitudes, beliefs, ethics, ideas and concepts, and desired behavioral norms we have come now to associate with social emotional learning or Positive School Climate, for example. Anyone sensing why a Bradley Foundation funded think tank would want to misrepresent targeting these areas that govern future action and decisionmaking and pretend it’s about Personally Identifiable Information or a Student Unit Record controversy? Before we leave that book, there was a statement that “we do not have a general theory of belief formation and human cognition,” which strikes me as absolutely not true. If it is technically true, go have lunch with your colleagues at CASBS in Palo Alto or the MBE professors at the ed school at Harvard or the constructionists in the AI work or Media Lab at MIT. They certainly do.

The rest of the statement though suggests our authors do know what their colleagues would pass on. “…we have tried to come to grips with two aspects of beliefs. First, beliefs about causal relationships ultimately affect people’s decisions. Second, the cultural environment–the political, economic, social context–fundamentally influences beliefs.”

That would explain why so much of the actual research at Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and other places goes to using education to influence both those aspects of beliefs. The new federal education legislation, ESSA, even calls for assessing for this at least annually. Note that changing these beliefs or any of the other internalized bases for decisionmaking is what is now called Learning. The reason Learning must be standardized, monitored, and regulated by governments is to get to a broader vision of how society and its people and their relationships are to be structured (both the regulation of Learning and the restructuring and planning are covered by the term-Politicalism).

There was one last recent report we need to cover, released yesterday, called “Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity.” It is intended to bind the federal agencies and governments at all levels to the UN’s 2030 Agenda and what is also called Marxist Humanism, whatever President-Elect Trump’s wishes. Apparently, his confirmed political appointees were never to even know. In this vision, ‘quality education’ is simply one of the Social Determinants of Health and public policy and regulation needs to be used to restructure “the conditions in the environments in which people live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. For the purposes of this report, the social determinants of health are: education; employment; health systems and services; housing; income and wealth; the physical environment; public safety; the social environment; and transportation.”

So first we had to wade through all the false narratives surrounding education reform and then accept that ‘quality education’ is a defined term tied to an all-encompassing plan of transformation. A plan that we are neither supposed to recognize in time nor object to. See why everyone involved wants to target consciousness? Now the reason I think it is not only us normal taxpayers and parents being snookered is that late in that report, we get the revelation that about one week after the Presidential election shocker, President Obama signed an Executive Order establishing a Community Solutions Council on the importance of equity and the determinants of health and well-being to foster “collaboration across [federal] agencies…to coordinate actions, identify working solutions to share broadly, and develop and implement policy recommendations that put the community-driven, locally led vision at the center of policymaking.”

As far as I can tell then all these changes started by President Obama that Hillary Clinton would have continued are still to roll along under President Trump unless he and all his appointees know of their existence and how they work. They simply cannot rely on anyone in Congress to tell them because they benefit from all this intended geographic redistribution and mayors, governors, or school boards will not tell either. The think tanks all seem to think pushing this while misrepresenting it to their readers and petty amount donors is why they exist.

It is up to each of us to appreciate that Politicalism targets all these different levels and sectors of society, down to the neural networks and emotions internalized in our students. Anything that an individual uses, consciously or unconsciously for decisionmaking, is regarded under Politicalism as fair game for manipulation and monitoring. Because the vision of Equity and Empowerment for ALL apparently justifies even the most Preemptive Authoritarianism.

Let me end with a tip to Ms DeVos after yesterday’s testimony. Please read up on Teaching for Competence and Teaching for Growth. When you said you were not familiar with either, you were saying you are unaware of the very tools being used to control and monitor what students internalize as the basis for decisionmaking. If everyone involved in education policymaking wants to target consciousness, best to know now the how and why.

Also, please be careful about throwing out Local Control as the panacea. That would be the Briar Patch in our Glocal, Community Solutions Council world, under Politicalism.

 

Preemptive Authoritarianism: Governed by Our Monitored and Redesigned Brains

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I almost added “21st Century” to Brains in the title, but it made it too long. Please do me a favor though. Every time a politician or anyone else mentions the need to transform K-12 education because the current vision is based on an outdated factory model, or any other justifying statement, to mask what is in fact a desire to control how our minds work for political purposes, remember this post. If anyone was worried I was missing in action or had finally decided to simply shut up about the real intentions behind education reforms, no such luck. Some posts though have no business being written during the traditional period of joyful merrymaking and family gathering. With the confirmation hearings for the proposed new Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, being in two days and her repeated statements and connections tying her vision to what I am about to lay out, it is time to get going again.

Back in the late 1980s the ASCD (tied to NEA) created a framework for what would become better known as Outcomes Based Education, “standards-based reforms,” or “brain-based learning.” Turns out these terms have always been interchangeable if we cut through the deceit and go back to the creators of these theories for educational change. The intent was to link education to what was known about human neurobiology. The framework would have ‘bottom-line integrity”, which today we euphemistically call evidence-based policymaking in education, effective schools, or just research on best practices. To qualify the education practices mandated “must integrate human behavior and perception, emotions and physiology.”

Remember astronomer Carl Sagan? The ASCD quoted him to provide the reasons they wanted to “significantly reprogram and redirect old brain propensities…the potential of the neocortex is that it can find new ways to survive because it is capable of profound learning. And that, we will see, requires us to use our brains in ways that they have never been used before on a large scale.” See what I mean about waiting to write this post out of fear some of us would be tempted to try to drink the entire punch bowl of spiked eggnog? Sagan’s 1977 book The Dragons of Eden is then quoted at length. No solar systems or stars are involved here:

“As a consequence of the enormous social and technological changes of the last few centuries, the world is not working well. We do not live in traditional and static societies. But our governments, in resisting change, act as if we did. Unless we destroy ourselves utterly, the future belongs to those societies that, while not ignoring the reptialian and mammalian parts of our being, enable the characteristically human components of our nature to flourish: to those societies that encourage diversity rather than conformity; to those societies willing to invest resources in a variety of social, political, economic and cultural experiments, and prepared to sacrifice short-term advantage for long-term benefit [whose?]; to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.”

It’s about redesigning existing institutions and systems via changes in how the student’s mind works and what motivates him or her to act. No wonder there has been so much deceit around education reform and a desire to pilfer from my book Credentialed to Destroy, while also repressing its central insights. Let’s go over the Atlantic to see what the UK meant by “high standards” and “raising standards” in the early 90s. Instead of using the graphic term “brain-based” changes to the neocortex, we get regular references to altering how the “central cognitive processor”  or the “central processing mechanism of the mind” works. No mention that this physical target belongs to someone’s children.

“We would rather aim for an even higher road, the unconscious development of a central cognitive processor that would produce far-transfer effects by a mechanism invisible to the learner (perhaps we should say ‘developer’) and thus far more powerful and generalisable than anything restricted to conscious processing.” Monitoring and manipulating the operation of the human mind via K-12 education at a level invisible to the learner sounds rather authoritarian to me, but we cannot rebel against what we are unaware of, can we? In November 2016, the publication Neuron published the article “Neuroethics in the Age of Brain Projects” that was, unfortunately, quite upfront that the BRAIN Initiative (now funded for ten more years by legislation passed by Congress in December supposedly about opioid addiction) and learning standards generally “have the potential to affect the essence of who we are as humans.”

Apparently though we no longer have a say in that fundamental arena of what it means to be human. That article mentioned that one of the funded research grants had gone to a Professor Nikolas Rose. A little research uncovered a 2013 book of his published by Princeton called Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind. My copy showed up just in time to be read while I ate my good luck black-eyed peas, which I knew would be especially needed this year with the book’s ubiquitous references to “governing through the brain.” The planned and taxpayer-financed “conversations between the social sciences [like education] and the neurosciences may, in short, enable us to begin to construct a very different idea of the human person, human societies, and human freedom” ought to be something discussed openly with taxpayers and parents.

I am not sure who ‘us’ is, but giving Congress, a state legislature, or even a school principal such transformative power to transform the human mind and how it works on a biological basis is not a hallmark of a genuinely free society. Especially when the vision is brought to us by professors who are looking for “the basis of a radical, and perhaps even progressive, way of moving beyond illusory notions of human beings as individualized, discrete, autonomous, coherent subjects who are, or should be, ‘free to choose.'”

“Acting on our brains,” “this new topography of the human being,” and the touted “passage of neuroscience from the seclusion of the laboratory to the unruly everyday world, and the new styles of thought concerning the intelligible, visible, mutable, and tractable brain that characterize the new brain sciences are beginning to reshape the ways in which human beings, at least in advanced liberal societies, are governed by others” should all be front and center for discussion in a free society. Instead, we get the deceit surrounding the real purpose of School Choice and misrepresentations on what competency-based education is really intended to modify and change.

Back in December, Jeb Bush had the Director of the Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) Program at Harvard as one of the keynote speakers at his annual summit, sponsored by his foundation (that Mrs DeVos was on the Board of prior to her nomination). I happen to have a copy of an MBE philosophical paper downloaded from Harvard’s website on the morality of the MBE methods and theories. It calls for public debates on the “ethical limits that should be placed on use of biological and psychological technologies in education” and the “kinds of communities and individuals that ought to be fostered.” That Bush foundation states that competency-based education, School Choice, and educational technology are its priorities. Which of these does MBE relate to then or is it all of them is a fair question to ask a Board member at the time the invitation to speak went out.

That cannot happen though because of all the organized misrepresentations that have surrounded learning standards like the Common Core, what its true purposes and history are, or what practices get hidden behind titles like School Choice, high-quality assessments, charters, or classical education. We went back in time and overseas precisely because I wanted to show that this shrouded neurobiological bullseye that the law and ‘public policy’ seeks to invisibly impose is both global and longstanding.

Everything is now in place, except a genuine public recognition of just how much we have all been lied to about what is really intended for our children in the name of education. In the Foreword to the GEM 2016 Report released in early September, the head of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, stated:

“Lastly, we must fundamentally change the way we think about education and its role in human wellbeing and global development. Now, more than ever, education has a responsibility to foster the right type of skills, attitudes and behavior that will lead to sustainable and inclusive growth.” That openly declared repurposing of education cannot be discussed when a false narrative pretends that School Choice and competency-based education does not have the precise same aim. Did you know that the term Neuroethics does not necessarily mean the ethics of using a transformational vision of education to redesign how the mind work and then lock it in biologically? It actually also means how to use Neuroscience and brain-based to impose an internalized ethical vision that puts the so-called common good and responsibility for others above individual choices.

Isn’t that something that should at least be discussed if we are still in fact a free society? Is the vision of the future that Marx called the Human Development Society really something that deceitfully imposed educational changes and legislation and regulation can impose as long as the enacters are “duly elected” or appointed?

Is my term “Preemptive Authoritarianism” just a pithy way of getting attention or the biggest understatement so far in 2017?