Monthly Archives: November 2017

Lemming Alert! Fomenting Hysteria to Hide Ubiquitous Targeting of the Internalized Subjective

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Ubiquitous is another one of my favorite words, ever since I took the PSAT in high school and failed to recognize that word as well as ‘usurp’. Looked them up when I got home and have used them ever since. Think of Ubiquitous as a shorthand way to avoid writing the phrase “everywhere we look” and its conciseness is apparent. Now this is a quote from an article called “Neural Plasticity and Human Development”:

“Neural plasticity can best be thought of as the subtle but orchestrated dance that occurs between the brain and the environment; specifically, it is the ability of the brain to be shaped by experience and, in turn, for this newly remolded brain to facilitate the embrace of new experiences, which leads to further neural changes ad infinitum.”

Learning standards such as the Common Core grounded in behavior or Competency Frameworks are simply a means of prescribing the desired ‘orchestrated dance’ of necessary experiences to get the desired neural changes. Preventing parents and taxpayers from grasping that essential fact appears to be at the heart of all the False Narratives. The most recent one hyping a supposed national database of PII pushed here https://truthinamericaneducation.com/privacy-issues-state-longitudinal-data-systems/stop-congressional-assault-student-privacy-parental-rights/ had my inbox busy yesterday and this weekend.

Now given the highly emotional language APP chose to use, parents are apparently to be driven to react from fury instead of to facts and apparently to defer to the fact that there are attorneys involved (as USPIE asserted). Because attorneys never misrepresent anything for the benefit of their paymasters. Someone doesn’t get out much into the real world. Anita Hoge also wrote a related article bemoaning a national data base called “Can the Motherlode of Federal Data Hurt You?”. So much of this psychological manipulation of children could be prevented if we could just eliminate the deliberately false narratives as well as the mistaken ones. When the purpose of education goals is neural rewiring, the national data base hype is a case of misdirection. Don’t look here!

Evidence-Based Policymaking in education is always neural in either its purpose or as a tool. Evidence-Based Policymaking is simply what the Russians called Upravleniye–the steering of people and institutions by government officials at every level according to prescribed goals and models. Governments want to establish the goals and then force all of us into compliance. No need for a national database to do that, education, especially when coupled to a False Narrative of what is really going on, will do fine. http://www.governing.com/col-pay-for-success-savings-trap.html from last month is a much better synopsis of Evidence-Based Policymaking and lets us have an honest conversation as to whether we want to be a society now organized by governments to be malleable and compliant. That’s the real authoritarian purposes.

I am going to go back to The Passion of the Western Mind book, because it appears to me that the much-misrepresented learning standards are an attempt to bypass this ancient debate:

“The true basis of knowledge was the natural world and the information it provided through the human senses. To fill the world with assumed final causes, as did Aristotle, or with intelligible divine essences, as did Plato, was to obscure from man a genuine understanding of nature on its own terms, solidly based on direct experimental contact and inductive reasoning from particulars. No longer should the pursuer of knowledge start from abstract definitions and verbal distinctions and then reason deductively, forcing the phenomena into a prearranged order [Remember Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete and Thinking like a Scientist, Historian, or Mathematician?] . Instead, he must begin with the unbiased analysis of concrete data and only reason inductively, and cautiously, to reach general, empirically supported conclusions.”

The opposite, in other words, to the Classical Education with its Good, True, and Beautiful being pushed by the same people who misrepresent SEL standards, competency-based education, and now this supposed national database. It’s also the opposite of where Conceptual Frameworks and Enduring Understandings and Disciplinary Core Ideas and Cross-Cutting Concepts and Themes take us globally. It’s not just this ideological training to think deductively from commonly prescribed ideas though. It’s the true reason for the SEL emphasis and once again it’s not about PII. This is from a book by Stanley Greenspan to make sure all reasoning is ultimately grounded in emotion so that the brain can be rewired accordingly. It’s called The Growth of the Mind and told me forthrightly that:

“Our appraisal of reality is in part, therefore, a subjective emotional operation in which we call upon our common biology and set of experiences to elucidate a shared sense of reality. This sense, supported by certain critical experiences, such as being part of various groups, in turn supports our social and political institutions.”

Those would be the very same social and political institutions everyone wants to transform in this Upravleniye, Evidence-Based Policymaking future, where governments and politicians set the goals we are all to adhere to, preferably while remaining blissfully unaware of the neural redesign via education. We really need SEL Standards and new, non-cognitive definitions of success because we must believe, at an emotional level, that “all members of society bear mutual responsibility for the welfare of the weakest among us…innovative action is needed to stem the forces now undermining our society’s ability to foster the qualities we most value.” Not quite sure who that ‘we’ is, but this vision demands “an understanding that emotional life is the foundation of intellect and of the judgment and moral sensibility needed in a democratic society.”

Greenspan’s vision of ‘democratic society’ is, of course, what Uncle Karl called the Human Development Society and also little’c’ communism. It requires “a society truly committed to the centrality of affective interchange in development. The real reform must take place in the values that guide our decisions–that is, in the integration of human nature that we use to frame the discussion. {Remember this was also a critical component of the preplanned Charlottesville Conversations?] The false dichotomy between emotion and intellect, between education and interaction, underlies our neglect to provide social and financial supports for families.”

This new vision of what it will take for humanity to flourish is based on a vision of education where “affective experience constitutes the foundation of the human mind.” If the False Narrative was forthright that it, or its financial supporters, also wants to control the subjective, emotional mind and make it the driver of future behavior, people might have a chance to say no. Hence, all the deceit. Greenspan’s work, by the way, was funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health and, as usual, was linked to as support for a vision of education being quietly mandated and implemented. He was forthright that in his vision of education: “To feel successful, children must have standards to measure themselves against.” He also explained that “to be effective, educational reform must reflect the insights revealed by the new research on how the mind develops…First and foremost is the fact that affect and interaction, rather than the acquisition of specific information and skills, are the foundation of learning of every kind.”

That’s not really true, but if it is believed by teachers and administrators and put into practice in schools, the kind of mind a student has can be neurally rewired. I have noticed that the deceit gets fast and furious, just like the recent hysterics over the weekend, whenever the subject of neural rewiring gets broached. If we are to avoid the mass drowning in governmental controls of the Upravleniye/ systems science blueprint, that can happen to lemmings that react blindly to what they are told and believe, we should understand why the Subjective is under such an organized, but covert, attack. Greenspan once again told us while laying out what he regarded as “Our Human Imperative” in his Conclusion.

“if the split between, on the one hand, subjective, spiritual, and emotional and, on the other, objective, rational, and materialistic conceptions of human nature continues to divide us as it has long done in Western thought, we may well continue on our present course. We may look to mechanistic and materialistic solutions, such as tougher social policies and more prisons, instead of attempting to meet emotional needs in a framework of appropriate structures and discipline.”

Eliminating those dichotomies and putting those structures and disciplines in place is what is really going on with Evidence-Based Policymaking. Unless we want to have our children’s minds and personalities further remolded by this compatible vision of education and the planned public policy steering of our workplaces and cities to proceed, we need to discuss what is really going on in terms of the reality being put in place, not the Guiding Fictions created by False Narratives. The False Narratives simply try to prevent us from the panoptic vision of education and the desired transformations that actually fit into place at every level like finely crafted, meshing gears.

All in one view at every level. We need the panopticon of education reforms that started with Credentialed to Destroy instead of this planned shroud of deceit we were supposed to fall for like lemmings.

 

Cannibals of the Mind: the Emancipatory Epiphanies that Must Not Be

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Epiphany has long been one of my favorite words because it captures that moment of mental illumination when everything suddenly clicks into place in terms of connections. The sudden manifestation of the meaning of something though is a private affair and the connections I see, while real, may be inconvenient to those hoping for “shared meaning” as so many classroom mandates now require. It is also inherently “old brain thinking” instead of the desired “new brain thinking” that will be widely shared and politically approved. Even though most people are unaware of how learning standards like the Common Core or a Competency Framework really work, we are going back in time to a world where religious bodies and political authorities literally had an ability to rule “the activities and beliefs of its citizens.” That real effect gets hidden by what K-12 schools pretend they are really pushing. Meanwhile, school administrators, especially district supers, lie to parents and the public about it.

Since “New Brain Thinking ” is the true aim, let’s look into what is being eliminated. “Old brain thinking is characterized by the limited capacity to contemplate only those innovations that might logically evolve out of the current system. The old brain seems incapable of considering a radical change in the system itself–that is, the possibility of operating under a different set of rules.” No one is going to talk that explicitly in public of course. I only found that quote following the thread of Fostering Communities of Learners in schools to its US beginning, a book called The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace. Parents, of course, would become rightfully alarmed if they traced the required obligations of collaboration and shared meaning back to a forthright statement of a required “psychological death” of their child.

See why there is such a fondness for euphemisms? Sometimes when I write I do mull over what would be a catchy metaphor to illustrate my point, but that is not where the phrase Cannibals of the Mind came from. Remember the famous phrase about being able to see the soul of certain people through the anger, joy, or flashes of brilliance firing through their eyes? Last week three different area School District Supers appeared on local TV. The first two, from the City of Atlanta, famous for its cheating scandal, and Fulton County, proud to be a national exemplar of competency-based learning, were in a local court fighting to be able to begin collecting property taxes, however confused or in error, the underlying tax digest was. They were very angry, not about the children, but about the ability to pay their loyal apparatchiks pushing these lied about visions.

If that seems cruel, so is area supers insisting they will use Kurt Lewin (by name)’s famous Freeze, Unfreeze, Refreeze social psych techniques on any teacher wanting to continue to make the transmission of a body of knowledge the point of school. Suddenly seeing the highly emotional anger in those eyes and hearing about their loyalist employees “right to be paid” and knowing what is actually being pushed and what it really intends to do, that phrase “Cannibals of the Mind” just came to me. Boy, does it fit. The other Super on area TV had issued a district ruling that none of the sports coaches in the districts could participate in any player-initiated prayers. I don’t think that is a valid interpretation of what Con Law requires, but what I noticed in this super’s eyes was not anger. Instead, he talked and his eyes simply looked vacant as if there was no synaptic firing.

Given what these Supers and their admins want to be paid and how they typically move from district to district pushing neural rewiring for ever increasing amounts of money (hence my phrase Gypsy Supers) as well as my personal experiences with what drives them, I think we have Greed, Chips on the Shoulder, and Downright Ignorance driving these Cannibals of the Mind. Since they will not truthfully tell us what they are doing, let’s dig into what is really being put in place and why. Otherwise, we are about to get a society inhabited by highly emotional people whose “New Brain Thinking” is not thinking in the traditional sense at all.

Scott Peck admitted in his book calling for “New Brain Thinking” and required practices that now “our individualism must be counterbalanced by commitment”. He was writing in the 80s when nuclear war with the USSR was still a real threat, but his required practices that would be “the only way that human evolution will be able to proceed” survived the USSR and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Now they are inserted in learning standards or characteristics of each Learner or future Graduate. Peck knew, and now educators globally are using, the fact that “the most salient feature of human nature lies in its capacity to be molded by culture and experience.” This is what the Cannibals of the Mind and their Loyalists rely on to drive another revolution 100 Years after Lenin and the Bolsheviks commenced the last one on November 7, 1917. They are using psychological techniques and learning theories that were initially hatched in the USSR and this time they hope the revolution will take.

This time the revolution is at the neural level of the mind and personality with educators relying on what Peck called the “capacity for transformation. It is the capacity for transformation that is the most essential characteristic of human nature. And again paradoxically, this capacity is both the basic cause of war and the basic cure for war.” As I have noted, this real target and the reason for targeting it and methods used are all the source of a great deal of organized deceit. Teachers aren’t assigned Peck’s book and any references to the Soviet psych origins of classroom mandates are usually in a footnote. Fortunately, I have typically read the books being footnoted and can recognize the same or equivalent theories even when there are no footnotes at all.

In another book, The Personal Intelligences, promoting that teachers use social and emotional learning in their classrooms, we get an open admission in italics that Experiences wire the brain. And those Gypsy Supers and their loyalist employees can be wiring “New Brain Thinking” while parents still erroneously believe their child is learning science, history, or reading Shakespeare. As the book’s author put it in a chapter ironically called “Nurturing Independence” (the illusion of it would be more apt):

“I teach reading. I teach math. But I don’t think of myself as a reading/math teacher. I like the title ‘specialist in developing children.’ I help brains grow. I nurture new dendrite connections in all students.”

These teachers do help brains grow and these learning standards lay out and then use assessments to check for how those brains are growing and which dendrites are developing in what areas of the brain. There is no desire for a logical, fact-filled, independent mind capable of the kind of epiphany described above. Think of it now as prescribed epiphanies delivered via virtual reality and ed tech experiences that can be manipulated as desired to create “New Brain Thinking” and imagining new human systems like cities with new sets of rules. Remember how we keep coming across the phrase “self- regulation” or its cousins self-government or self-discipline instilled in all students? Is it about knowledge of the world as it exists and what got us here and what didn’t work? No, here is an example from that same book. This is what Student Success, Growth, or Achievement now mean:

“She’s thinking about herself rather than simply going through the motions. Self-regulating learners make plans, they watch their progress, ask for help when appropriate, and relate new learning to what they already know. This makes active inner speech.”

It also makes fully controlled inner speech, especially as teachers are advised to help students learn the vocabulary of the desired emotions they are to develop through school. The author wants “self reflection to guide their lives, supporting their growth toward positive goals.” Essentially education decides what goals and characteristics it wants students to internalize and then activities and experiences are developed until these traits become internalized Habits of Mind, neurally instilled. And lied about constantly. Does Cannibals of the Mind still seem harsh?

In thinking about the actual effects on students minds and similar attempts through the centuries to control what the individual mind may know, I pulled a book called The Passion of the Western Mind. It described the four “technical inventions” that played such a vital role in the birth of a respect for Individualism at the time of the Renaissance and the launch of Science as a means for understanding the natural world. It seems to me that learning standards in general and social and emotional learning in particular, under its variety of names, is an attempt to undo the emancipatory effects of these inventions by using a new vision of education as transfomation. Best we know what these inventions were:

“the magnetic compass, which permitted the navigational feats that opened the globe to European exploration; gunpowder, which contributed to the demise of the old feudal order and the ascent of nationalism; the mechanical clock, which brought about a decisive change in the human relationship to time, nature, and work, separating and freeing the structure of human activities from the dominance of nature’s rhythms; and the printing press, which produced a tremendous increase in learning, made available both ancient classics and modern works to an ever-broadening public, and eroded the monopoly on learning long held by the clergy.”

These kind of aspirations should not be implemented in the proverbial dark of night by Cannibals of the Mind overpaid to direct activities to rewire our children’s brains. These go to some of the most fundamental questions any civilization ever addresses.

See how dangerous it is to put school board members through psychological team training of the type Peck advocated so they will come to believe that what the Supers tell them is true? They also seem to be trained to believe that no one without an education degree is allowed to know comment on what educators can do in the classroom.

How convenient for the Cannibals of the Mind and the politicians, institutions, and theories they are installing and reenforcing. No scrutiny, no effective protest. No recognition that this was how dire times began in the past.