I have looked at the ready-to-go lessons on racism and hate and the attempt to make the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) Teaching Tolerance curriculum mandatory in all classrooms. In the comments to the previous post are plenty of links to the cited materials and one observant comment on how often the letters are signed with a reference to solidarity. If I go back and relink we will not be able to move forward into a unique discussion of how I believe this all fits together and how fall 2017 is more than the beginning of another school year. I have written about the UN’s Dignity for All by 2030 campaign that essentially calls on governments and institutions at every level to create and direct an economy and society based on meeting human needs. I usually shorthand it as the MH vision because it was Uncle Karl himself a long time ago who laid out the conditions for what he called little ‘c’ communism way back in the 19th century.
Guess What? Any student starting Kindergarten or PreFirst this fall with then 12 years of schooling will graduate in what year? I’ll admit I did a graph to doublecheck my calculation and the answer is 2030. How coincidental. What’s more we have the new federal education law kicking in with its prescriptions and most of the state plans are pitched in terms of what the personal characteristics of the student should be when they graduate from high school. Sometimes with the name of Learner Profile, Graduate Profile, or Portrait of a Graduate.
One of the articles being pitched for what Charlottesville should mean http://behavioralscientist.org/charlottesvilles-battle-human-nature/ was written by the editor-in-chief who just happened to now live in Charlottesville. He was previously at the same U-Penn hatching Positive Psychology and the PERMA Positive Education template we have covered. He even worked with psychologist Angela Duckworth in her lab. You know as in Grit and Perseverence, the Character Lab, the Growth Mindset Scholars Network, and the Science of Virtues?
That was just from the top of my head. Nesterak concluded that troubling article with this line: “In the battle for human nature, behavioral scientists have a pivotal role to play. They can and must help people understand the people we can be.” That’s certainly a reason for K-12 education to be about implementing the findings of the behavioral sciences, isn’t it? With nary a head’s up, much less actual consent. Let’s go back and discover that a 1998 book called Curriculum, Religion, and Public Education: Conversations for an Enlarging Public Square laid out the need for education and a new type of ‘democratic dialogue’ to create what it called the ethic of solidarity and italicized just like that. Remember this as you see constant references to #Charlottesville Conversations.
Also remember that just after that call for the ethic of solidarity we had this confession: “Education, like religion, is about the transformation of consciousness. Students entertain doubt, while teachers foster faith in human discourse and intelligence. In the process, individual and social transformation occurs.” Earlier in that essay, the author had defined something he called the ‘common faith’ and it is America’s ‘common faith’ that the curricula mandated after Charlottesville seeks to dramatically shift, to something more amenable to the desired MH society by 2030. The ‘common faith’ is “those beliefs, assumptions, and myths that provide the ‘glue’ for a society.” In other words, we mustn’t let the actual physical remnants describing in real time why the Civil War was fought and what its carnage meant to the survivors. The desired narrative should provide the ‘lenses’ or filters through which the past is seen. Notice that is precisely what all those letters and lesson plans intend to do. (My bolding)
“But what is to stop this ‘community of difference’ from devolving into warring factions? It is at this juncture that this ethic of solidarity enters the discussion. Solidarity has two essential features. First, it grants diverse social groups enough respect to listen to them and use all ideas when considering existing social and civic values. Second, it realizes that the lives of individuals in differing groups are ecologically interconnected to the point that everyone is accountable to everyone else. No assumption of uniformity exists here-just the commitment to work together to bring about mutually beneficial social and civic change.”
When I read an old passage like that and recognize it is currently being forced into reality, it’s hard not to imagine people who honestly do believe they have waited long enough for change they have been taught is their due. They must simply regard it as a burden others must now bear. In the last post we discussed how the City of Boston had laid out its intent to transition to the MH vision in the name of Resilience and Racial Equity. Another Resilient City, Dallas, helpfully mentioned its intention to adhere to the Kellogg Foundation “Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation” Framework. Since I happen to know that the new ESSA evidence-based regulations rely on a Kellogg Foundation Logic Model on Achieving Outcomes first created about the time of that 1998 book, I decided to locate the TRHT Implementation Guide issued in December 2016. It was the result of at least a 5-month process so President Trump is not the leader it hoped to have in the White House.
Before I start to quote what this vision is, I want to point out that SPLC is a listed partner of the TRHT so the Teaching Tolerance curriculum is a component and planned tool as well. On the Thursday, August 10, before the permitted “Unite the Right” march on Saturday, August 12, led by a former Obama Organizing for America enthusiast who had a conversion epiphany in January just after the publication of that Guide, the SPLC issued a Campus Guide to the Alt-Right. Really helpful and suspicious timing, huh? What is it that TRHT wants to do? Just what most college campuses, the Dignity for All by 2030, Resilient Cities, and others all say they seek as well. TRHT
“will help communities across the US embrace racial healing and uproot the conscious and unconscious belief in a hierarchy of human value that limits equal access to quality education, fulfilling employment, sage neighborhoods and equal housing opportunities, while honoring tribal access to equitable resources and quality health care. Unless the central belief system that fuels racial, ethnic, and place of origin inequities is challenged and changed, societal progress cannot be sustained over time.”
Changing that central belief in every US classroom is precisely what #Charlottesville Conversations aims to do and what learning standards like the Common Core make so much easier. Poor Heather Heyer. I wonder if she had any idea what the broader implications were of what was going on in Charlottesville that day or the powder keg that needed to be ignited. Nesterak after all stated that the “battle for human nature was about who we are and who we can be…it will continue online and in the streets, when Charlottesville is replaced by the next city.” The social trasformationalists need that next city to supposedly propel the Resilient or TRHT vision of “a new day, one based on a common humanity for all communities?” That vision needs a new form of education to get at “centuries of this [racial hierarchy] belief system [that] have consciously shaped our individual thought patterns.”
Here is an italicized MLK quote from the Implementation Guide which helps explains all the interest in turning students at all levels into Social Change Agents.
“Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. Human progress never rolls on the wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts…We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always right to do right.”
Charlottesville accelerated that timetable and is attempting to make the desired changes in individual thought patterns mandatory now for all students in all schools in every community. Just what the MH vision by 2030 needs to stay on its announced schedule. Poor Heather. TRHT Frameworks for Action and Guiding principles and Plans for Resilience probably thought they would get awful graphics from the tikitorch march and fighting to ignite the needed mandate. Now they have martyrs and students determined to Remember Charlottesville even though they are never to actually grasp its real significance or their needed role as change agents.
Or the function of time to implement all these plans finally.
It is so distressing to think how the manipulation has progressed over time. The thing about this continual push over time is that it never stops. When you think it might have been stopped or conquered in one place, up it pops in another. The river of change that seeks every opening it can find, moving ever forward toward oblivion. A poem a friend of mine wrote comes to mind; a few lines:
“And I see men, self sufficient men, learned men,
Declaring as they attempt to scrub the words from the wall,
‘There is no God,
Is there, God?’
As they run.”
One of the things that Implementation Guide called for is a new term for an old concept–“relational health.” Sounds so much better than the c word, doesn’t it, but mandatory altruism still fits.
“By relational health we mean our capacity as individuals and as groups to demonstrate empathy and care for each other. Healthy democracies require the capacity to relate with empathy and civility despite perceived differences. It is time for a Gross Relational Capacity (GRC) set of indicators that are monitored and reported at regular intervals, in addition to a GDP focused on the value of goods and services produced in each quarter. America’s relational health is as vital and critical as our economic health, especially in times of deep division.
One barrier to the relational health of this country is the antiquated notion of a taxonomy of the human family based on physical characteristics and ascribed traits. [You mean factual reality? I wrote in the margin at that point] The belief undergirds racism and sets the context for believing some are innately superior to others. [Not as human beings, but as resourceful or diligent people you want on your side, of course there are, even within families] Racism is alive today. [especially after Charlottesville Conversations gets done with our children’s minds and the images they will conjure up].
It is time to focus our energy, resources, and discourse on uprooting and eliminating the false ideology of a hierarchy of human value to grow what we value most–our common humanity.”
See how the Implementation Guide has to have education as well as an uproar to make it seem necessary. See how statues are only the outer manifestations of the desired transformation? This is the next line: “When our beliefs and understandings shift, our capacity for empathetic relatedness, civility, and progress toward achieving common interests will increase.”
See why I am so worried?
Hi everyone. The value of thoughts, concepts, conventions are a way for us to model our world, archive knowledge and experience and create a few systems for living on this earth as best we can. Social systems that dovetail as best as possible to human nature can be a force for good. It can provide the support and a multiplier effect to the good qualities of man. When man’s nature is exploited to adapt man to a social system then it must be coercive, abusive and in my view anathema.
The groups organizing change know that we are human and only institutions and institutions with a goal to act can succeed in the long run. The organisation is endowed with money, people have a purpose and livelihood by joining it and are sustained by the financial and goal directing aspects. It is a powerful way of encouraging and maintaining a ‘change oriented focus’ because of the multiplier effect of money. A few activists with their ability to support themselves is replaced by a network of institutions supporting millions of people to create and recreate themselves in perpetuity with the goals manipulated no doubt by those paying the money. Is it any wonder why we sometimes feel so outnumbered! Having said that, the internet is both a blessing and a curse (to us, not them) because it is available only because they wish to create and perfect it. Once created and perfected and the technology is so advanced and ubiquitous – it will, in my opinion, become a controlled system, where the knowledge we have attained and the freedom we have enjoyed will be controlled under some excuse or another.
We have a short time to learn and communicate as much as we can before that day comes.
To take your useful analogy a bit further down, Politically Connected Power wishes to turn the Internet as well as the human mind into a closed system. Digital Learning further enables this because it can only ‘teach’ what has already been effectively circumscribed in advance. That has been my internal conversation with myself over the last several years, especially as I have traversed what is a factual and documentable, but surely unapproved inquiry into what was really going on in the name of education.
One of the things I intended to include but ran out of time is from the book Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer by Edward Jay Epstein using the Soviet Archives after the demise of the USSR. There were several passages that reminded me of what we see now. The first fits with my consistent observation that people do conspire around using political and economic power that would be unpopular if readily acknowledged. This passage also fits the nonprofits and FBOs hoping to get revenue for meeting designated ‘needs’ under stipulated terms by being a government proxy. his term ‘concessionaire’ is so apt.
“Hammer brought back from Russia much more than the FBI suspected. He returned with an invaluable education. As Lenin’s chosen first capitalist, he had learned a mode of business very different from that taught in the West. It was not based on the concept of competition advanced by Adam Smith, according to which only the most efficient producer survives, nor was it even based on a free market. It was based on the Leninist concept that economic rewards proceed from the state. Rather than exposing businessmen to withering only-the-fittest-shall-survive competition, the state protects its concessionaires.
The chief skill, therefore, is getting a concession from the government–and holding on to it.”
The other point reminded me of the False Narrative surrounding the Common Core and how these other educational reforms really work. That’s apparently cranking back up in earnest in the US in later September. In honor of that current coordinated duplicity, let’ go back to what Lenin outlined back in 1902 in his essay What Is to Be Done?: “he had outlined a strategy by which a small cadre of professional conspirators would bring about world revolution for the masses. [I think ‘in the name of’ or as an excuse is more apt as with TRHT] Its success would proceed from secrecy, discipline, and deception.
The real would be hidden, the false displayed. Opponents would be confused, diverted, and ultimately misled into collaborating in their own destruction.”
That fits going back to the coordination around Closing the Door on Innovation in 2011 to the SEL letter to Congress to the PII hype to Opt Out, just to name a few. Except it is the destruction of what the child might otherwise become if education did not seek to manipulate and close the mind’s likely thought processes and guiding intuitions.
This article and where and when it was published https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/do-kids-have-a-fundamental-sense-of-fairness/ makes it crystal clear that we are arriving in an era of mandated altruism. As you may remember from my book, those who escaped the USSR in the 20s regarded that as a fundamental component of the mental shift the government was forcing on the people.
No wonder we have had the shift the ‘accredit’ preschools and add SEL standards.
This may seem a stretch but let’s for a minute assume that these people with trillions have a goal and are cunning enough to realise that they know their limitations and of their money as a direct weapon, so they create and use of think tanks to do their thinking, NGO’s to do their agitation and celebrities and authorities and ‘business’ and ‘social’ leaders’ to be their gatekeepers and sheep dogs. Given this background, my thesis will now seem quite plausible.
I believe that the altruism has been a slowly won goal that has as its aim, not the love of man but his manipulation such that they will accept an oppressive, world-wide system of control which is already being constructed for this purpose. That is the cunning of this whole enterprise.
The goal is acceptance of a premise: we are so technologically advanced that we are living too long and producing too many people such that we will put pressure on the world’s resources and thus destroy that world and us ultimately.
From this premise, comes a series of responses. We must ration resources, we must protect the environment, we must set up systems of governance, culture and social control that allow us to achieve these.
It is my belief that from these desired responses has come the myriad of cultural, economic and social changes at all levels. The most important in my view is the desire to destroy the family. That bastion of education, where all cultural, social, religious transmission occurred and where we learned love, sacrifice, history and were safe from things that would do us harm (most of the time anyway).
With the family minimized in favor of the state, external forces and increased the exposure and awareness of the lives and environments of other groups overseas whose lives and conditions were worse than our own. This was done by public education, national and international television, activist groups inside the country and external. We had our emotions and our motivations to action manipulated on a daily basis such that now we must feel a visceral response to the plight of a people that are not our family, group or nation and for whom we have no direct contact or means of touching. The aim was not to stimulate aid giving but a way of psychologically priming people to accept a series of propositions that would normally be antithetical to their interests. This was global development, globalism, the SDG’s, world governance. People now are told that we must feed the earth, clothe the earth and educate the earth because that is the way to create the system that would allow us to defeat climate change, save the environment and secretly meet their original premise. Altruism, feelings, togetherness: these are human virtues turned from being useful to small and isolated communities into catalysts for getting people to transform our world to the vision of these cunning men. In Greek ‘Poniros’ (close to “cunning” now, was used as a name for the devil.
So you see. People feel ill at ease about contradicting what seems to be a trend whereby the world is becoming kinder, more thoughtful and desirous of ‘peace’, equality, love. But they will not think or can’t think of the consequences. They only see things through their own narrow conceptions and will not contemplate alternatives. Those that can are frantic.
To show you how advanced this is I wish to draw your attention to the current move by the globalists. They now want us to think global and act local. We have absorbed the messages now about global justice, fairness, governance, we must now put their plans into practice at the local level and not just think about them. The internet has hastened this as well, I’m afraid. You see that they do not have to convince us any more.
A significant amount of what you speculate about is actually documentable. It can be hard to accept. I think I have said before as the whole “berlin wall coming down, how marvelous, here goes the ussr, we won” kept getting pearced as I was following the ed story I couln’t accept it. I put it away and it was only after it kept popping up without my looking for it, I said “that is it, isn’t it.”
Yes, the term used is Glocal. The global plan adapted to local conditions down to the very minds of the inhabitants.
And since I don’t speculate in writing, that’s unfortunately provable too.
From Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” (we’ll act in a way to set a good example for others, rather than thinking of our own interest) to GHWB’s “compassionate conservatism” (i.e. a muddled mess) it goes back at least to 1980, and Reagan was in office when the wall came down.
I graduated college in 1980. I went to school in one world, a better one, and had my working life in another, a very weird one, where all the weird things were weirdly bad, never weirdly good.
The 80s really were a transition time when the MH vision began to be pushed in earnest on the West, especially the US, but no one told us. I lost my Internet again from damage related to the storm, necessitating a new cable, but I started looking into something yesterday while I waited that really is combining so much of what we looked at in Credentialed to Destroy and are seeing now. In the mean time take a look at this article https://ssir.org/articles/entry/making_kids_into_makers#bio-footer and tell me if that last paragraph is not an illustration of how Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete theory is used now in the real world.
I also appreciate the admission that “project-based learning” is simply the real-world implementation of the constructionist theory of learning.
Did you see this $4 million grant Carol Dweck just got? http://news.stanford.edu/2017/09/19/stanford-psychologist-recognized-4-million-prize/ Love that admission that the Growth Mindset fits with a vision of education that “is transformative, sustainable and addresses the world’s needs as we look to the future.”
Now that I see how persistent these “resist” twirps are, just endlessly and relentlessly doing damage without consideration for what used to be the norms in our country (you let the winner govern or only resist in reasonable ways, and try to win the next election), well I think it’s because these people grew up thinking their idea is always valuable. Nobody can tell them no. They just push back harder with no respect for anyone or anything.
And helping them is the “growth mindset” which is about always finding a way forward. Now there’s nothing wrong with it per-se, because it’s just a tool of effectiveness for whatever challenge you’re facing in life. Stay humble, stay aware, keep learning.
But now that it’s a “thing” for more people, battles will be very bitter and essentially to-the-death now, because nobody will compromise meaningfully nor even give up exhausted and defeated, they’ll just find a way to keep fighting, and they’re never wrong.
There’s something Islamic about this relentlessness. Nothing they do is very special. But rather than respect space, they push and push and scream if you would dare to punish their indiscretions.
Last word should be “rub.”
This is another article from http://behavioralscientist.org/enemies-human-thats-want-kill/ whose editor-in-chief lives in C’ville. It too wants to get at what controls morality insisting that “Could an excess of morality–morality that could only be satisfied by punishing a fellow human being–instead have driven the violence in Charlottesville?” First, it’s not clear to me you can get the necessary mens rea for the crime in dealing with a troubled schizophrenic in a car being hit by protesters’ bats. Whatever led to the poor woman’s death due to being hit by his car, which is for a jury to say with facts being barely reported, let’s look at the history of the abstract of what is cited as “research we published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
That “research” was published online on August 8, 2017, 4 days before the March. It was approved for publication on June 22 and received for review on April 5, 2017. The link of one co-author to MIT Sloan takes us straight to the partnership with Pavel Luksha and GEFF 2030 as well as MIT’s partnership with the UN and the OECD over the Earth Systems Science agenda set out in the Belmont Challenge. Co-author Piercarlo Valdesio is a Prof at the Dept of Psych at Claremont-McKenna College that would seem close by to the Claremont Institute Larry Arnn headed before shifting to Hillsdale to be their President.
Do we think he is then familiar with their Moral Emotions and Trust (MEAT) Lab? Maybe, but this from January 2016 http://emotionresearcher.com/on-emotions-and-their-role-in-morality/ fits right into the false narrative on SEL as well as the use of the behavioral sciences in templates like the Catholic Curriculum Frameworks that Pioneer then touted as also suitable in Jewish schools. It would also explain why that roadshow from the APP/Pioneer paper then moved on to that Baylor Forum John Haldane was putting on now that it turn out that Baylor is creating the Robert P George Initiative in Faith, Ethics, and Public Policy.
I guess the desired transformation in consciousness is easier if the parents and students do not recognize what is really being shifted or who all are actually allies in creating the new kinds of social institutions needed.
I found this shared values list. Is this list complete or are there any items that don’t apply. I think these items conflict with each other: “OUR VALUES
ANTI-RACISM – ANTI-FASCISM – ANTI-PATRIARCHY – INDIGENOUS
RIGHTS – GENDER SELF-DETERMINATION – WOMEN’S LIBERATION –
TRANS LIBERATION – ANTI-RAPE-CULTURE – REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS –
SEX WORKER SUPPORT – LGBTQIA RIGHTS – ENVIRONMENTAL
PROTECTION – RELIGIOUS FREEDOM – IMMIGRANT RIGHTS –
ANTI-WAR – ANTI-CAPITALISM – DISABILITY JUSTICE – PRIVACY
RIGHTS – WORKER’S RIGHTS”
I am not sure where that list came from apart from being a means to mobilize a certain percentage of the population around a need for transformational change. Let me go back to the ending of the 1998 book in a quote from UCLA prof Peter McLaren and the italics are in the original quote. remember too how much the word inquiry now gets used in the classroom rather than transmission.
“The issue is not finding a common culture but rather creating a common ground of struggle. There is a powerful difference between the two. Let me say this: Unity is not born of common culture, but rather of collective endeavor. A collectivity is all the more powerful because of its differences and the creative tension produced by them. We live at the time of fertile ideas, at a time when we can imagine new social arrangements that will take us through the new millennium. We need not judge these new social arrangements by their ‘sameness’ but by their commitment to justice and an ethics of hope.
To what degree do they speak to the nameless, the forgotten, the excluded? Hope and freedom do not spring from agreement and consensus; they emerge from struggle.”
There was a need for the graphics and the rhetoric from an incident like Charlottesville to move this agenda along. Poor Heather Heyer is just a tragic bonus that can now fire this planned narrative further. What you are quoting are labels and categories that will drive many people to act from emotion, just like the link I out up above about moral emotions and their effect on future likely action.
Dear Robin: Thought your readers should take a look at the possibility that the recent failures of the Pacific Naval Fleet are not just technology based. I believe the Military is dealing with the first (second?) generation of students not able to take directions, assess a situation, or make decisions based on analysis of the present conditions. The death of these 17 sailors in my mind is totally a result of the last 25 years of failed education–blame the NEA and the AFT.
Just a thought!
A good example of deceipt and internet control:
Compare the Wiki page with the .gov page and see what’s missing? Wiki conveniently left off “sex behavior and attitudes” in its page for the
Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, PPRA or called the Hatch Amendment. How conveniently this serves the lgbtq agenda. All it takes is somebody to throw this word change into the trunk of a bill and its gone poof! Like FERPA changes. O Google helps by making the Wiki page come up at the top of the search, above the .gov page. So we have Wiki and Google collaborating collectively on this.
I am not a Luddite, but the march of science can be good if in the hands of benevolent individuals but history has shown it will not be. The ideas expressed in the links below are not new, but the sense that they are closer than ever is.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/preserving-the-right-to-cognitive-liberty/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaTbISZPlMQ
https://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/2014/07/
Robin,
Sending a link to The Chiefio, E.M. Smith. Your research into
the ‘mind arson’ march through the education system by those
seeking to subvert western democracies need to be widely
disseminated.
beth the serf.
Thank you. I agree. It’s tragic to know what is intended, can be proved, and to watch the False Narratives trying to obscure parents and taxpayers attention all over the world.
Serge Latouche, the face of the DeGrowth movement. Comment on John’s long post, Aug. 25, 6:32.
https://makewealthhistory.org/2012/11/08/farewell-to-growth-by-serge-latouche/
Thanks Deborah. This is not a new movement. They have been theorizing and still do (I first found it mentioned by the Club of Rome: http://clubfordegrowth.org/resources/).
The advocates were the most eager to move to a post fossil fuel world but their time hadn’t arrived. It will bleed into the mainstream very soon once we have that three way chaos they are planning. First, we have no manufacture – only service jobs. Second, technology, AI and advanced mechanization, means only a minute fraction of jobs are available. Exacerbate this with increased populations from abroad. Finally, increase the price of money when people are indebted to the hilt and need more just to survive. At that point it will be a miserable place with most people incapable of supporting themselves. Add a war somewhere in for good measure and wham – not degrowth, but some new term dare I say sustainable prosperity for all? They have invested so much into it.
There is another book you might like to read by Peder Anker (https://www.amazon.com/Imperial-Ecology-Environmental-British-1895-1945/dp/0674005953/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8). You might also want to look at this. This program is brilliant if you can get a hold of it.
Apologies. This is the link that comes with my last comment. It refers to an interview that Peder Anker had (is a professor – historian of environmental sciences) with Adam Curtis, a BBC (?) journalist. It is very revealing. It also has a link to Adam Curtis’ videos. It brings in cybernetics, ecology, environmentalism and control.
https://pederanker.com/2011/06/03/peder-anker-in-the-use-and-abuse-of-vegetational-concepts/
Thanks, John.
Notice the consistency of the coordinated drumbeat and the remedies offered http://missourieducationwatchdog.com/walking-out-on-public-school-and-into-classical-education/
Get parents outraged. Check. Tell outraged parents x is the remedy. Check. Never bother to tell parents that the offered remedy is actually an update, with a euphemistic name, of Theodore Brameld’s vision for Reconstructionist education and the Group Mind as laid out in the book that must only be mined, never quoted by name–Credentialed to Destroy. The Curriculum, Religion, and Public Education book cited in a footnote to a Brameld book from the 50s that actually ties directly to the aims of the coordinated False Narrative today.
Today I am cross-referencing to a different book from 2001 while I dot my i’s and cross my t’s to what is both being sought and lied about in the name of education. Fascinating actually how tightly it all fits.
It is interesting that there have been some internal debates about “worldview” education in “classical-classical/Christian” ed circles. For example, Andrew Kern, founder of the Circe Institute, posted this in 2009. I’Il pull out a few salient comments:
“I have a little problem with the current obsession with “worldview thinking” in Christian and classical circles. I believe that it subtly moves us from a framework that was used from creation until the mid-19th century…
“The concept of worldview finds it origin in the German concept of Weltanschauung – a word literally meaning “world view”. The concept arose from a problem. See, what modern man needed was a framework that would tie everything together, that allows him to find meaning in the world, and his place in it – that could help him make the purposeful decisions. In fact, that is absolutely what the modern world needed! However, modern philosophers tried synthesize the wisdom gathered in the different scientific disciplines, philosophies and religions – that is when the trouble began.”
“The worldview thinker is tempted to look at world through a system. Isaac Newton once described God as the Great Engineer. At first, that seems like a very Christian statement and Newton intended it to be. However, if God is the Great Engineer then the universe is an engine to be viewed in terms of mechanistic cause and effect. Is that how we want our students to view the universe? Is this how God views that universe and nature? I’ve also seen the tendency in students to view others and their beliefs in terms of “worldviews”. The result is attempting to fit others in philosophical view of the world – to reduce others into a system to be refuted in order to fulfill a mandate. Life and people come at us for the most part in narrative – not propositions and syllogisms.”
It would appear, however, that these reservations did not stop the juggernaut of systems thinking in these circles.
Yes, everybody but me and you writing or speaking in this area seems to want to control the concepts and categories of thought used to perceive and interpret the world. The book the Christian Reconstructionists under their variety of names (Betsy DeVos and husband appear to be involved) who also seem gung-ho on the Classical vision and specifying the Good, True, and Beautiful all seem to point to a book by David K Naugle called Worldview: The History of a Concept. The new Catholic Curriculum Frameworks are also tied to this same vision.
It keeps asserting that the heart and its content is the “single root of all thought and action–the bottom line, the very key to existence.” That’s the real reason for the ubiquity of SEL Learning now and the fight over it back in Pennsylvania in the 80s, however, it was understood at the time by participants. That new “Child Abuse in the Classroom” coordinated narrative to mislead parents to control their consciousness and likely future action just like the children really does want to control Worldview as well, doesn’t it?
I think that is probably why they want to assert things as “illegal”, whether they are or not, even when the assertions are not even factually true. Anyway, the Naugle definition of Worldview that everyone aims to control was taken from a 1985 essay by James Olthius in Christian Scholars Review in case anyone still believes it is only the admitted Progressive and secular Left who wants social, economic, and political Reconstruction using education and media as the predominant tool.
“A worldview (or vision of life) is a framework or set of fundamental beliefs through which we view the world and our calling and future in it. This vision need not be fully articulated: it may be so internalized that it goes largely unquestioned; it may not be explicitly developed into a systematic conception of life; it may not be theoretically deepened into a philosophy; it may not even be codified into a creedal form; it may be greatly refined through cultural-historical development.
Nevertheless, this vision is a channel for the ultimate beliefs which give direction and meaning to life. It is the integrative and interpretative framework by which order and disorder are judged; it is the standard by which reality is managed and pursued; it is the set of hinges on which all our everyday thinking and doing turns.”
Controlling, especially invisibly, either a child or adult’s Worldview provides remarkable power. I believe it’s the reason for all this organized deceit around first the Common Core, then SEL Standards, and also the hype that it is the feds that are the drivers and that local communities want a different direction. Such manipulative bS being foisted on parents and children these days. If life was the story of Pinocchio so many of the well-known voices in this area would be unable to lift their heads for the weight of their lengthy noses.
Nothing Good, True, or Beautiful about all this organized deceit. But then again unrecognized control over the mind and heart is quite powerful, when someone wishes to remake culture itself. One mind at a time.
Speaking of the local and the much touted Massachusetts standards. http://www.heraldnews.com/news/20170825/fall-river-area-educators-get-lesson-in-teaching-whole-child
The original MA standards (1990s), although they included plenty of blarney, also included content scope and sequence. (So, this part of the “standards” wasn’t really standards at all. Standards are content-free.) For example, under Guiding Principles for History and Social Science, you have the statement,
“PreK-12 instruction in history and social science is made coherent by teachers from all grade levels working together to achieve a properly sequenced course of study. Such a sequence prevents major gaps and needless repetitions.” This is straight out of Core Knowledge, as acknowledged in the section referenced here:
Section IV. Core Knowledge in United States and
World History, Geography,
Economics, and Civics and Government contains a bullet by bullet list of every piece of content to be covered, from the geography of North America through post-WWII modern history.
This more than anything is the reason why MA test scores were so astronomical within a few years of the implementation. They were a perfect demonstration of the decisive role of content. What they have now is an empty shell that has succumbed to the typical Whole Child template.
Was it that or the fact that NAEP is tied to conceptual frameworks and so was the focus of what was to constitute content to “fill those gaps”?
So the content in Massachusetts shifted from the historical transmission of knowledge to the transmission of desired concepts to create a desired worldview. NAEP then looked for the presence of just such earmarks that the student builds up not from facts, but Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete. Because that is where NAEP seeks to drive curriculum as well, MA does well.
It also explains why the APUSH narrative never wanted to explain how conceptual frameworks really work or what cultural ‘lenses’ are. Stanley Kurtz has a PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard. He understands this, but always treated APUSH as if it was about what body of facts to push in the classroom. Yet his employer, the Ethics and Public Policy Center. is yet another signatory to that Williamsburg Charter.
I can’t answer definitively, of course, but the “gaps and repetitions” statement is straight out of the Core Knowledge scope and sequence. Although I definitely did not agree with the CK presentation of all history topics, the kids who learned that material were vastly better informed than their peers. Without seeing the textbooks and sitting in on teacher pre-service sessions or sitting in the back of a classroom, it would be hard to know what was really going on.
My research shows Hirsh was always involved with the conceptual frameworks vision of content and Massachusetts one of the earliest implementers.
That doesn’t mean that an individual teacher or school did not still have a more traditional orientation. Only that nAEP was driving what we now call Disciplinary Core Ideas and that MA was among the earliest to adopt. I will pull the Rockefeller F language from when they began to push this vision back in 1980. remember Bradley F then joined in almost immediately with that history commission in 87 or so.
Diane Ravitch was involved with creating a comparable vision for the CA frameworks. Now we are nationalizing in in the HOTS language in ESSA that must be assessed at least annually. It all fits with my worldview definition above.
The “Happiness Ofsted” approach https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2017/aug/25/childrens-mental-health-its-time-to-put-wellbeing-on-the-curriculum
Catching up and thought you might find this interesting. From the original leading district that hosted the 1st Oregon education symposium with the Soviet guests who ushered in TOBE here and where we can find Mr. Conley too.
http://nehs.4j.lane.edu/portrait-of-a-graduate/
Also, take a look at this version.
http://veritasschool.net/our-school/about-us/portrait-of-a-graduate/
This is for you in return. Look at the definitions of SEL skills used here https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_social_emotional_skills_can_fit_into_school_curricula and then think about the database of PII the False Narrative has people, and Congress for that matter, believing is the issue.
Speaking of False Narrative did you see it suddenly cares about CASEL and personality manipulation years after I documented it? https://truthinamericaneducation.com/social-emotional-learning/schools-implementing-government-sponsored-personality-manipulation/ Brought to us by the very same people who just love to rip off my work and then lie to parents about the Common Core and did that paper that lied to parents about Tranzi OBE and competency-based ed in order to lay the groundwork for the Catholic Curriculum Frameworks.
Since the financial sponsors of all these FBO visions are A-OK with personality manipulation to make someone a “good citizen” and “virtuous”, that article, its timing, and the fact that Donna Garner in Texas pushed it a day or so after pushing the “Child Abuse in the Classroom” manipulation of the truth basically confirms that it is an attempt to drive parents into thinking Classical ED, parochial schools, ESAs, and homeschooling are the answer.
All these books keep making the point that it’s not coercive when mediating structures engage in such planned noetic manipulation. After all, it creates a ‘well-ordered soul’ and makes one a faithful servant of humanity.
Happy holiday weekend to you too.
By the way, did you know the Institute for Positive Education calls their blog “Learning to Flourish”? https://www.ggs.vic.edu.au/institute/blog/blog-posts/mindfulness-education-in-early-years is on your favorite topic from last week.
So the founder of APP writes a book in 2015 on Human Flourishing and had previously written a book called Making Men Moral but suddenly in late August 2017 it is the government wanting to manipulate personalities? Plus we keep having Princess Puddinghead, Betsy DeVos, lecturing us on our moral obligation in language straight out of Positive Education. But then DiIulio said that in Godly Republic, didn’t he? That these religious can be equally effectively framed through Positive Psychology.
Well now that’s a fine article to read with my morning cup of coffee. Certainly does frustrate me. They just cannot stop. Now we need yo manipulate preschool children. That certainly aligns with the Oregon superintendent stating education reforms are now a prenatal – college effort.
As I have mentioned before many parents are not willing to see that a parochial school would be manipulated in the same way. They think they are safe from it because it supports their inner core values. What better way to say that the entire world has the same values toward humanity no matter color, religion or lack thereof. We are all really no different right? So why not level the playing field. I know that is incredibly oversimplified but so many can or will only see it that simply. If Truth in American Education never brought up the occasional possibility that there is such manipulation it might really be seen as one sided.
My next book will explain that in detail and how I know it’s the same template and how it has been around in precisely its current form since the late 1980s. I am finishing up another one of the cited in the footnotes books. It is called Building a Healthy Culture: Strategies for an American Renaissance and was edited by Don Eberly who was involved with Bush 43’s Faith-Based Initiatives that he brought from Texas to the federal level. It was published by Eerdman’s in Grand Rapids where the DeVos/Prince homebase is and where the Christian Schools coalition is also centered. Also where the Acton Institute is based and this is what they wrote about two weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal. Notice the reference to virtuous and the view of capitalism as fitting with what Bernie Sanders supporters want.
“Thank you greatly for your support of the Acton Institute and our mission to advance a free and virtuous society.
There’s still a lot of work to be done, and I’m excited about what the future holds for us.
Blessings,
Rev. Robert Sirico
President
________________________________________
The Acton Institute’s Moral Capital
Economic liberty may be unfashionable, but the think tank hasn’t given up on it.
August 17th 2017
Mene Ukueberuwa
American Christians may have more in common with Bernie Sanders supporters than you think. A slim majority of self-identifying Christians hold an unfavorable view of capitalism, according to a 2013 Public Religion Research Institute survey. Pope Francis, the world’s most prominent Christian, consistently critiques free-market economics. Today millions of well-meaning Christians worry about capitalism’s compatibility with Christian values. What’s a committed Christian capitalist to do?
For a better sense of how the Christian social vision can work alongside capitalism, look to the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. The Grand Rapids, Mich., think tank remains confident in the American economic system, researching ways to restrain its worst qualities while promoting its best.
This task hasn’t gotten easier with time. When the Acton Institute was founded in 1990, America was in a heyday of harmonious thinking about capitalism and Christian values. Catholic intellectuals such as Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel gained renown for defending economic freedom. Novak described the ideal Christian economic creed as “ordered liberty”: a system that acknowledges the risks of consumerism and competition and mitigates them with a moral culture rather than state regulation.
This cohort influenced Acton Institute co-founder and president Father Robert Sirico. His ordination as a Catholic priest in 1989 followed his conversion from the leftism that marked his early career as a Pentecostal minister and political activist. One year after the think tank opened, Pope John Paul II published his encyclical “Centesimus Annus.” The document rejected socialism and embraced private property. Father Sirico calls it a limited but explicit blessing of the union between faith and economic freedom.
This school of economic thought transformed politics in the coming years. Jack Kemp, the Republican vice presidential nominee in 1996, argued that limited government would help lift up poor Americans, a direct appeal to the needy largely missing from the middle-class orientations of the Reagan and Bush administrations. In the same year, Congress enacted welfare reform that brought millions of Americans back to the work, guided by the premise that there is more dignity in a job than an endless stream of checks.
Two decades later, the capitalist consensus has begun to crumble. Pope Francis often urges audiences to consider the harm free markets can wreak upon the disadvantaged. Even right-leaning commentators have joined the choir of capitalism’s critics. First Things editor R.R. Reno warned in 2013 that because “economic freedom creates social and therefore political problems,” conservatives should be willing to limit it.
Far from the Christian capitalist caricature—ignoring the Gospels while clamoring for top-bracket tax cuts out of sheer self-interest—the Acton Institute is engaging the skeptics on economic and philosophical grounds. Recent issues of its journal, Religion & Liberty, have included essays about income inequality and millennials’ growing fondness for socialism. In June Father Sirico took on a pair of critics in a debate about the best way to serve the poor at the annual Acton University conference.
Despite these efforts to dispel the mounting Christian critiques of capitalism, the organization has carefully avoided taking an openly polemical stance. “We’re not here to lobby the Vatican,” explains Kishore Jayabalan, director of the institute’s outpost in Rome. Acton’s values have lost ground in the Francis era, but Mr. Jayabalan demurs at the thought of “turning back the tide.” Instead the group remains focused on its own activities. For Mr. Jayabalan, this means organizing economics seminars for priests studying in Rome—a program Acton hopes will improve the clergy’s grasp of the financial and political issues that shape parishioners’ lives.
For Father Sirico, maintaining a local focus has offered an ideal opportunity to put Acton’s values to work. In 2013, he embarked on a mission to revitalize the then-dwindling Sacred Heart Academy, the school at the Grand Rapids parish where he serves as pastor. He instituted a classical curriculum and boosted the amount of regular prayer while weaning the school off all government support. The reforms have driven a fourfold increase in enrollment in as many years, a small but solid victory for the mixture of faith and unencumbered industry Father Sirico preaches at Acton.
The same mixture is working wonders on a larger scale throughout Grand Rapids, where Acton has chosen to remain despite temptations to relocate to Washington or New York. The Michigan city’s robust industry and its residents’ Calvinist work ethic have helped preserve its culture of philanthropy—anchored by Acton supporters like Dick and Betsy DeVos.
A generation ago more Christian commentators sought to redeem rather than renounce capitalism. They worked to turn their conclusions into policy. But even as this vision has lost favor in some Christian circles, the Acton Institute has kept up the mission, spreading the word about the uplifting potential of a free economy to believers and skeptics alike.”
See what I mean? It’s Marxist Humanism married to a vision of FBOs providing the welfare and stipulated needs and the demand gets stimulated by all these False Narratives about the COmmon Core, PII databases, SEL, the feds as the ogre and the local as the solution.
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Building a Healthy Culture is just full of references to the “true, the good, and the beautiful” just like the Classical Education the False Narrative purveyors keep hoisting as the panacea for the concerned parents being misled. This is from the Foreword to a book that also has Amitai Etzioni as a contributor in the year before his New Golden Rule I covered. Also Mary Ann Glendon who is involved with pushing the Catholic Curriculum Frameworks as a panacea for angst over the Common Core. Senator Sam Brownback wrote the Foreword I am quoting from.
“If we are to renew our culture, we must restore the culture-shaping, value-making institutions…reforming these institutions is essential to preserving both a civil society and a free and democratic nation. A healthy democracy requires self-government on the part of its citizens; self-government requires virtue, self-restraint, and adherence to a moral code beyond the letter of the law…Because self-governance can only be cultivated, not coerced, it has been the work of culture-shaping institutions to encourage and equip individuals and groups to, on the one hand, exercise self-restraint and self-discipline, and on the other, show concern and compassion for others.”
See how the deceit is a necessary component of driving the demand for this remedy and the MH vision being implemented without it being readily apparent, except to me with my book collection?
USPIE’s work now hyping the abhorrent federal role even while quoting state measures and the Closing the Door On Innovation attempt to mislead on the Common Core back in 2011 and “Child Abuse in the Classroom” misleading on ESSA as it makes it the primary villain all fit with this quote that is also in the Foreword. Notice the allusion to Antonio Gramsci and his March to control culture to ignite a Marxian revolution in the West.
“Ultimately, our greatness as a nation depends more on what happens in America’s communities than in America’s Capitol. What goes on in our families, churches, schools, and neighborhoods is a far more important indicator of our national character and civil health than what goes on in the corridors of Congress. Communities make America. The march through the institutions will be a long march, no quick fix will do, no shortcuts exist. Reform cannot and does not occur without dedicated reformers, energized social movements, strategic plans, and a coherent philosophy. The creative and innovative capacity of the American people is, I believe, unparalleled anywhere in the world. The United States is, and may long remain, the world’s leading cultural exporter.
To ensure that these cultural exports take our nation in the right direction requires the strategic thinking and committed efforts of dedicated, thoughtful individuals in every sphere of cultural life.”
It’s just that the parents being moved to act based on these False Narratives have no idea they are part of a much larger transformative agenda that they are not be told about. Well, except here at ISC.
This is also consistent with this intersection of government, religion, psychology, and economics that standards-based education and competency-based ed are tied to when accurately understood.
“Order your copy of Independent Institute’s thoughtful and timely new book, Pope Francis and the Caring Society!
“We are all called to serve and care humbly for others, especially those most in need, but how we do so is crucial in guiding our moral responsibility. Firmly rooted in our Christian tradition, the incisive and timely book, Pope Francis and the Caring Society, carefully examines this vital issue by applying natural-law ethical and economic principles. Instead of command societies, cooperative, virtuous systems of enterprise, creativity, and charity are crucial to uplift people out of poverty, marginalization, and hopelessness; dignify people as purposeful beings through work and families; protect our environment for future generations; and bring us all into closer harmony with one another and to God.”
—Michael C. Barber, S.J., Bishop, Roman Catholic Diocese of Oakland, California
“At a time when those today most responsible for transmitting Catholic social teaching need urgently to be reminded of some cause-and-effect realities essential to it, Pope Francis and the Caring Society provides us with many necessary reminders, readably and soundly.”
—John M. Finnis, Biolchini Family Professor of Law, The Law School, University of Notre Dame
Pope Francis and the Caring Society is a thoughtful and in-depth exploration of the Pope’s earnest call for a dialogue on building a truly compassionate society. Francis’s fervent support for uplifting the poor and protecting the environment has inspired far-reaching discussions worldwide: Do capitalism and socialism have positive or negative social consequences? What is the most effective way to fight poverty? And what value does a religious perspective offer in addressing moral, political, and economic problems?
Pope Francis and the Caring Society is an indispensable resource for consideration of these vital questions. Edited by Robert M. Whaples, with a foreword by Michael Novak, the book provides an integrated perspective on Francis and the issues he has raised, examining the intersection of religion, politics, and economics. Readers will discover alternative solutions for environmental preservation, a defense of Francis’s criticism of power and privilege, a case for market-based entrepreneurship and private charity as potent tools for fighting poverty, and more… Pope Francis and the Caring Society is essential reading for anyone interested in creating a better, more caring, and prosperous world.
Buy your copy today!
Hopefully I will be back today. Daughter having unwanted complications from the car accident in July. Heartbreaking and distracting too. I also see how this Charlottesville Conversations is needed to commence the so-called Battle for Human Nature. It’s what both Democracy, the 21st Century, and Pope Francis’ Caring Society all require apparently.
Look at the facial expressions of these kids taking formative assessments https://www.districtadministration.com/article/k12-makes-assessment-shifts
Yikes! Remember too how the False Narrative anti-CC crowd really bored in on high-stakes testing so that the formative assessment that gets at what has been internalized is tracked in real time.
From 3 separate eyewitness stories, and reading between the lines on other accounts, this video is an excellent summary that the entire event was staged including people with kkk t-shirts and blm-t-shirts piling off the same bus caravan equipped, hired, commencing to brawling and chasing anyone not part of their group (not holding a shield or bat, etc). This caravan of brawlers came from the same source as the “Southern Poverty Law Group”; it is a network of tag-teams, a huge hub being academia and the teacher’s union. Note the articles on teacher’s involvement in “Antifa” coming out of the woodwork, including the Antifa Bike lock attacker identified was a college Professor. Anyone dismissing this as “conspiracy” is either part of it, or an intellectually lazy dupe and suck-up, giving cover to this bent bunch enabling them to take such a stronghold over education and society. You can figure all this out by reading Zygmund Dobb’s “The Great Deceit” (entire text is posted online). The interviewer here knows this eyewitness personally and it is obvious she is telling the truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpVuhJyd4uA
Charlottsville was a complete psyop. The same actors in fact were used as in other national hoaxes. I wondered what this false flag was about – what “solution’ they would bring forth . . . now I know. Thank you for putting the pieces of the puzzle together.
You are welcome. It is fascinating that such old sources on the need for such an emotional and visual reimagining align so well with what was to occur.
Take a look at that “creating Change Agents” link I put on the next post yesterday that was published August 28, 2017. There is a point blank statement “If in the future we are going to unleash change agents in our world…” We talk about unleashing animals, not children, but the focus is on the desired social changes unfortunately.