Fracturing the Personal and Social Failsafes and Omitting the Most Pertinent Parts of the Plans

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Now don’t visualize Failsafe in the sense of Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove unless those graphics help with a proper sense of urgency at what we are facing in the name of ‘education’ for ‘our children.’ I actually am using failsafe in the dictionary meaning of “compensating automatically and safely for a failure, as of a mechanism or power source.” I would add people as well as we can adjust ourselves to thwart the reality of what is happening unless the offered narrative is false. Our ability to adjust our outrage is also offline if education has been changed to deliberately manipulate our emotions so certain responses and likely interpretations are neurally locked in in advance.

In the recent ACES post, I finished by saying we would turn to emotions and here we are. Carefully documenting the media manipulation and the parts of the story being ably omitted lest we become informed and outraged. If anyone thinks it is conspiratorial to imagine active coordination around deceit, last week the National PTA in a letter to fed ED on regulations on required parental engagement under ESSA, requested the use of “Leading by Convening: A Blueprint for Authentic Engagement.”  http://www.ideapartnership.org/documents/NovUploads/Blueprint%20USB/NASDSE%20Leading%20by%20Convening%20Book.pdf That way parents could be Delphied into useful beliefs about what ESSA does that have actually nothing to do with its mandates or shifts.

Remember sociologist Anthony Giddens telling us that behavioral scientists know that what guides and motivates behavior is not what is actually true, but what is personally and emotionally believed to be true? Let’s take a look at the organized media juggernaut on hyping emotion as the key to learning. On April 27, 2016 Education Week wrote a story called “Emotions Help Steer Students’ Learning, Studies Find: Scholar sees passion as mind’s rudder” which hyped the work of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her new book Emotions, Learning, and the Brain. Here’s the lead quote that should probably be read with a reminder that one of the definitions of using cybernetics in education is to create a steerable keel with a student’s mind and personality. One that is locked in neurally that the student is largely unaware of.

“People think of emotion getting in the way of cognition, but it doesn’t. Emotion steers our thinking; it’s the rudder that directs our mind and organizes what we need to do.”

Gives new meaning certainly to a declared goal of ‘standards-based reforms’ and competency-based education that seek to create Habits of Mind and desired Dispositions and Attributes to be deemed College, Career and Citizenship Ready, doesn’t it? That hyping article was followed by a May 4 New York Times piece called “To Help Students Learn, Engage the Emotions.” It also hyped the same professor’s work exclusively with more quotes that resonate with initiatives like Hewlett’s Deeper Learning (omitted from article) where “It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about.” Really? How about the insistence that it is the:

“emotional connection that can result when teachers make learning personally relevant to students is what differentiates superficial, rote, topical assimilation of material from a superlative education marked by deep mastery and durable learning.”

In other words, it is experiences carefully crafted for the classroom so that what will guide and motivate future student behavior gets practiced and then locked in at an unconscious level. Talk about bypassing any personal failsafe. And this is the kind of ‘meaningful learning’ that CCSSO, Linda Darling-Hammond and groups connected to her are calling for as the new form of accountability under ESSA. Oh the things that get left out when the article also hyped “the best, most durable learning happens when content sparks interest, when it is relevant to a child’s life, and when the students form an emotional bond with either the subject at hand or the teacher in front of them. Meaningful learning happens when teachers are able to create an emotional connection to what might otherwise remain abstract concepts.”

How did I ever pass the bar exam without this kind of instruction? Now before we get back to what else is being left out, let me assure you I have the 1979 book created from the February 1977 symposium titled “Toward the Human Use of Human Beings: A Cybernetic Approach to the Assessment of Children” held in Denver. I may be able to recognize a cybernetic focus by how it functions, but that is no where close to the end of my proof. I also have open declarations on this “interdisciplinary attempt to apply the principles of cybernetics, the science of control and communication, to certain issues of child development” via American education and needed reforms.

Also in my library of research for the sequel to Credentialed to Destroy was a 1994 book by a USC neurobiologist, Antonio Damasio, called Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Query: do Immordano-Yang and Damasio work together? Just imagine if the writers of these hyping articles had mentioned that Prof I-Y wrote the journal for the International Mind, Body, and Education Society (IMBES) I have alarmingly covered. What if the Brain Creativity Institute is involved in all this sudden BRAIN Initiative NSF and NIH gushes of federal money? Just a little digging an up came this joint published article “We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education” from 2007.

Now the first line of the abstract “highlighting connections between emotion, social functioning, and decision-making” should remind all of us that ACES theorizes that people are now to be Anticipatory Cognitive Embodied Systems and thus easily manipulable via education. Our transformative systems thinkers like Kenneth Boulding also wanted us to be reconceptualized as ‘goal-seeking, purposeful systems.” Is that also the vein of all this sudden hyping of the role of emotions in learning. Even if I did not have Damasio’s books, there are hints just in that article that all these pushes are consistent with professors who also want to see Values as the Drivers of Human History and education to create a new Science of Virtues because the article opens with a mention on:

“how culture shapes learning, and ultimately the development of morality and human ethics. These are all topics of eminent importance to educators as they work to prepare skilled, informed and ethical students who can navigate the world’s social, moral, and cognitive challenges as citizens.”

I always want to insert ‘comrade’ as an adjective in front of that kind of vision of the purpose of education to be a ‘citizen,’ but then gallows humor is a part of how I deal with all the open declarations I uncover. The GSV San Diego conference did not just tout the increased annual spending for the BRAIN Initiative. It also called explicitly for the Acceleration of Ideas that Address the Integration of Mind, Body, and Soul.” Sounds like values and emotions are to be neurally integrated via K-12 education practices is required federal policy and investors want to pile into tech companies with a means to do just that. Still all omitted from the official narrative unless we monitor these meetings and recognize co-partners of who is being officially touted.

Federally funded brain research and required education practices to foster and invisibly manipulate a hope that “our brains still bear evidence of their original purpose: to manage our bodies and minds in the service of living, and living happily, in the world with other people.” Now I would start to get nervous if I was constantly encountering attempts to enshrine a communitarian ethos in Positive School Climate Presidential Executive Orders or the actual definition of what Career Ready really meant. Now I would really get nervous if that 2007 article had a graphic of what it hyped as the desired Emotional Thought with this subheading:

“The evolutionary shadow cast by emotion over cognition influences the modern mind. In the diagram, the solid ellipse represents emotion, the dashed ellipse represents cognition. The extensive overlap between the two represents the domain of emotional thought. Emotional thought can be conscious or nonconscious and is the means by which bodily sensations come into our conscious awareness. High reason is a small section of the diagram and requires consciousness.”

No declarations that the small area of high reason needs to be smothered further via education reforms and required practices, but there is a hope to “produce the sort of automatic moral decision making that underlies intuitive notions of good and evil” that appears more social and political than “lying is bad and murder is wrong.” Let’s turn to Descartes’ Error and see what it tells us on why hyping and controlling emotion via education is so crucial. Well, consisting with taking the failsafes away from the steering of the student we have Damasio telling us that “emotion and feeling, central aspects of biological regulation,…provide the bridge between rational and nonrational processes, between cortical and subcortical structures.”

Just the thing, in other words, to be the openly declared object of required education practices and declared federal research priorities that then get deceitfully explained or not covered at all when talking to students and their parents. Damasio’s book laid out use of emotion to create what he called somatic markers and even italicized. Nary a mention though in either those Times or Ed Week stories. Now what happens when these carefully cultivated, emotionally-laden, nonconscious somatic markers neurally embedded and part of what is being assessed as Higher Order Thinking Skills and Understanding or Meaningful Learning was created to quietly acheive the declared goals of affirming ” a new level of being in which one can invent new artifacts and forge more just ways of existing”?

Now who would have suspected such nice stories could involve so much more? That the ‘learning experiences’ being loaded into the cloud or instilled in an adaptive, digital learning virtual reality game were created by developers hoping to create nonconscious somatic markers. That the developers and research profs knew that “most somatic markers we use for rational decision making were created in our brains during the process of education and socialization, by connecting specific classes of stimuli with specific classes of somatic state. In other words, they are based on the process of secondary emotions.”

All of this psychological and neuroscience research is being forced into required educational practices and no one is accurately telling us unless we dig as I do. Then we get to discover that those ‘secondary emotions’ being carefully hyped and manipulated are “those emotions and feelings [that] have been connected, by learning, to predicted future outcomes of certain scenarios.” Those were professor Damasio’s italics for emphasis in his book. Can the student know the future? No but they are being trained with Guiding Fictions ‘as if’ certain possibilities could be made true. Then the tasks are repeated until the emotionally-embued perception becomes a nonconscious Habit of Mind.

Just imagine making the definition of ‘success’ under the new federal education law or competency as about successfully planning and making decisions without adding that the decision making will be guided by instilled somatic markers. Those nonconscious emotions then become the ‘criteria…which express, at any given time, the cumulative preferences we have both received and acquired.”

Gives a whole new conception as to choice about what is ‘received and acquired’, doesn’t it?

Does ‘student-centered learning’ that is relevant and engaging still seem like a good goal to be blindly implementing for ALL students?

 

73 thoughts on “Fracturing the Personal and Social Failsafes and Omitting the Most Pertinent Parts of the Plans”

  1. Robin I am feeling triggered by this post feeling the need to push the button on the Chardonnay, not the ice tea….
    It’s the same ” practice makes perfect” repetition they poo poo for academics, applied to repeated messages cross curricularly endlessly repeated and role played all being of the social justice list… Using traumatic visuals and such like Movie mind control….

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    • I’m reaching for the Savvy Blanc.
      DA Comrade. Repeated practice with facts and figures is so tiresome but repeated consciousness raising social-emotional, sensitivity training, group process discussions around Harkness tables masquerading as English and History class are the way to go . For Best Citizenship.

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      • Look at the keynote speakers at this year’s ISTE conference in late June. https://conference.iste.org/2016/program/keynote.php?utm_source=SmartBrief&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Conference

        Just wow. They were just getting cranked up with Jane MacGonnigal in 2013.

        Black to the Future. So helpful. One point I did not get a chance to put in this post but that is hugely important is that Damasio redefines what thought is to be ‘everyday cognition and problem-solving.’ Here’s an example: “First, reaching a decision about the typical personal problem posed in a social environment, which is complex and whose outcome is uncertain, requires both broad-based knowledge and reasoning strategies to operate over such knowledge. The broad knowledge includes facts about objects, persons, and situations in the external world. But because personal and social decisions are inextricable from survival, the knowledge also includes facts and mechanisms concerning the regulation of the organism as a whole. The reasoning strategies revolve around goals, options for actions, predictions for future outcome, and plans for implementation of goals at varied time scales.”

        What a pathetic vision of what we are ALL now to be so we can have Equity and Equality as one of those keynoters wanted. Fit for a malleable comrade who likely cannot even spell Axemaker Mind and will want to just substitute an icon for such a concept anyway.

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        • Yup. And Icons in Lieu of Words as acceptable full- literacy is a coming. Perhaps you have seen a national tv ad campaign for a particular car brand where the panelists are asked to provide an Emoji to describe what they love about the car ???

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          • Looks like this Personal Democracy Forum in about two weeks in NYC is about much more than personal democracy. http://go.personaldemocracy.com/

            Look at those sponsors. Microsoft. Fits right in with what the Gates Foundation pushes in education, doesn’t it?

            And this Artificial Intelligence for Social Good with the ‘Executive Office of the President” as a sponsor. http://cra.org/ccc/events/ai-social-good/ What???? What kind of separation of powers is that? Is that why we run govt by continuing resolution?

          • Philly is one of five cities to be pushing Racial Equity Now in employment and education. http://www.routefifty.com/2016/05/living-cities-evaluate-systemic-racism/128589/?oref=rf-today-nl

            Take a look at those other listed supporters, but also remember I have written about Living Cities and just about every major commercial or investment bank has ties to it. In addition it was created from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations’ urban renewal work back in the 60s. It is covered in the tribute book created commemorating 150 years of the Rock F.

          • Oh Joy. Jobs for All. Because Equity.

            So as I checked out at the supermarket today a young mildly autistic-type man was rang up my order. He took a while. I purchased 8 items. But you know …because fairness.

            And last week at the drugstore a 6 foot 3 inch tall 250 pound trans- man2woman rang up my purchase for me but not before he lectured my 15 year old on the dangers of crystal meth.

            But you know its all for Equality and shared understandings so who am I to question any of it. Must be my privilege clouding my perceptions.

          • http://www.nesta.org.uk/sites/default/files/how_innovation_agencies_work.pdf is the new paper on how government agencies can foster businesses to solve societal problems. Says the same people whose policy on minimum wage is driving fast food operators to robotics. Decreeing by fiat really doesn’t work too well.

            Graduation is over and I had a family of screeching owls behind me that left my hearing numb afterward. Literally painful. It has been very stressful to have kids in K-12 given what I know. Glad that is behind me.

          • Target’s red bullseye, Walmart has a yellow sun on blue background. The ” whole persons” will be able to locate the places to use their EBT card to get their supplies.

          • Today is my youngest’s first day of working and I need to get her off, but one of those things I have researched but not yet written about is David Staley’s touting of computers and substituting icons for print fluency.

            Instead of turbocharging the mind, it hobbles it. Thanks for the hhs link. It seemed to fit right in with what LL noticed in Hawaii last week.

            Also, remember when no one would talk about passing WIOA or claimed it was about helping the disabled? Not anymore. http://www.nationalskillscoalition.org/resources/publications/file/PoliciesthatWork_WIOA_May2016.pdf

            And with everyone behind the Common Core now insisting that the shared vision now “aims to transform all education-with CTE as a driver of this transformation” Robert Beck must be quite pleased that his machinations have finally come true. Whereever he is and 25 years late. See why Chapter 4 is so prescient?

            Especially with this http://www.nationalskillscoalition.org/news/blog/federal-agencies-issue-joint-letter-of-commitment-on-career-pathways

          • I understand now much better why so many brand name stores, both old and new, have shortened their names to become alphabet acronyms . It was driving me around he bend for years but knowing now how fluent reading is to become passe it all makes sense.
            ex; Kentucky Fried Chicken -KFC, American Eagle-AE, Dairy Queen-DQ, etc….

  2. EXCELLENT. I had a conversation yesterday with a state legislator who was concerned over reading material given to his young child. Many of the things you discussed her I discussed with him. Of course not as astutely as you but the meaning was the same. He got the point and he is putting his child in private school next year. A TRULY private school.

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    • What makes something in your mind a “TRULY private school”? Most of the privates are further along on this vision that even many public systems. Does the state legislator really understand that fact and what terms they need to be on the look out for?

      Plenty of the parents who comment here most often actually have children in private schools. Many who thought they had found a port in the storm discovered they were just one principal retirement from losing all the protections for their children they thought their tuition had purchased. In Georgia private school teachers told me that the state, take part of what you would have paid in state income taxes and pay it into a fund for vouchers with a set cap, was what gave the state the leverage to shift the privates to a largely SEL and digital learning template. Would love to know what you think can keep a private truly private. As my book detailed any need for accreditation amounts to a poison delivery system for genuine academics.

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      • It’s all still schooling, with private schools sometimes being milder in the damage they inflict upon education and values. Parent-led, home-based education is the best solution to the valid issues that are raised here, which minimal research will show as reality.

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        • Joel,

          I can say with certainty that in my experience as someone who was the recipient of Independent secular education in the 70’s and 80’s and now as a parent who has sent three children through the independent school system that the damage inflicted by private schools is anything but mild.

          It took me a while to catch onto what was happening. My first clue was when my youngest child was not learning to read in kindergarten but was memorizing words. My second clue was the constantly iterated pablum from my kids Head of School that ” Every Child Is Equal ” and noise about ” Why do we even need grades? ” . All this was over ten years ago and the deterioration of education in private schools has increased exponentially since then.

          From iPads in elementary grades for ‘coding “, to non academic Maker Spaces, Whole Word reading now the norm, to white privilege group processes assemblies, the traditional private academic education is almost dunzo.

          And the school my kids attend(ed) has been one of the LAST to fall into line to the new definition of learning in my tri-state region. I stay because I have been lucky to know a few remaining true educators who have taught my children to write and who allow for actual dissemination of facts and not simple ideological frameworks and lenses, as well as, the extracurricular sports and Arts opportunities they probably would not get in the public schools in my area.

          But with my youngest child now entering 10th grade in the fall I can see that the school will be unrecognizable by the time she graduates from what it was just 6 years ago when she began there. I work daily in ways big and small, obvious and not so obvious, to deprogram my youngest from the worst of what the educators now offer her as learning.

          I expect with Cruz and Co.’s pending legislation home schoolers will be brought to heel as well. Since many homeschoolers already do their work online they are effectively captured by the standards and competencies already to think like the borg whether parents understand that or not. No Child Left Behind may no longer be the title of renewed ESEA but the goal still stands. Must Have Fidelity.

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  3. Robin, you use the word “proof” in this piece. I am curious: to whom are you trying to prove your thesis, and for what purpose? What are you trying to accomplish? And given that you have already proven so much, what purpose will additional proof serve?

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    • I swore I would not publish another book while I still had a child in the K-12 system. When I wrote Credentialed to Destroy I knew what Georgia had been pushing, but my local school system had not yet become “cutting-edge” and a member of the League of Innovative Schools. As far as I know it had just started taking grants from the Spencer Foundation to pilot behavioral science experiments in our schools.

      That would not be true with the sequel. I had the knowledge from the first book that allowed me to recognize what the Super who has now moved on to Pam Beach and his cronies were actually saying and what the implications were. He has moved on to be one of the first district supers selected for Chiefs for Change. His successor came from Green Dot Charters and he too and others said things no one would admit to if they had any idea just how much these terms were graphic admissions for me. Mean time the open declarations still roll in. Talking with the people who helped me last time and others I am looking at early 2017 to roll out the rest of the story. All of this is in overdrive now so I take aspects of my mound of evidence and use it now. Plenty of people know what I have carefully pulled together because they were in the meetings. The question becomes “how much does she know and what can she prove?”

      The answer is virtually everything that has happened, but that is what a book does best. Cybernetics does not belong to Robin’s collection of nerdy terms. Project 2061 makes far more sense now that I know about that American Association for Advancement of Science symposium. The cybernetic means of assessment fits with the formative assessments now in use as well as the HOTS mandate under ESSA.

      There is no such thing as freedom in the vision I will be able to prove with cites, quotes, and footnotes. It’s quite a story and in every instance it ties back to the mandated implementation. Just because it is no longer my own children at risk does not mean this is an acceptable aim for anyone’s children. We did not fight tyrannical monsters in foreign wars to have education be used to foster the same kind of psychological control in favor of federal, state, or local politicians either. We have an election here tomorrow and I know precisely who not to vote for because of which politicians have phoned here asking me to vote for someone in particular. This is a dark vision of an America that sickens me and telling the story of what is being attempted is the only way I know of to have a chance to beat this back.

      After Romney lost what should have been a winnable election in 2012 I wrote this post explaining http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/building-a-compelling-future-political-coalition-around-advocacy-for-keeping-the-axemaker-mind/ that there is a Bipartisan, across the political spectrum coalition of every race and ethnicity that is not OK with these aims once they are accurately explained and recognized. That’s still true. I am not a fan of Trump’s but I know Hillary and Bill are running a huge larceny scheme through that foundation. I know she lied to the faces of parents whose coffins she stood in front after Benghazi and she deserves every form of evil imaginable as a result. Shame on her.

      But even if Trump means well and could win the White House, no one in his circle knows what is really going on via education. I know it and can prove it. If someone wants that explanation before I can bring the next book out, we all need them to know there is accurate information available. It’s not subject to dispute. ESSA was created to push the cybernetic vision and it has been hoped for for decades. I have to hope I did not uncover all this in time for there to be no way out. I have thoroughly uncovered it though at a level and with a myriad of authoritative sources that is almost unfathomable.

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  4. hi Robbin,
    Of course you have the accurate facts. Its too bad you are not a practicing attorney for the resistant. The Universities seem to be so paranoid that they are known to have detectives following suspected credible students capable of writing about their socialist university experiences. No student has to be guilty, only suspected of being resistant to the Marxist agenda. Georgia universities are using buckets of tax payer money toward keeping the radical agenda…quiet. I am searching for a constitutional attorney now. Too bad you are not practicing in that field. Any suggestions.

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    • In Georgia the association of attorneys who can represent school districts is a subsidiary, literally, of the Ga State School School Supers Association. They get their CLE at programs that are part of the annual meeting that only they can attend so it is unclear what they actually know about the underlying theories their documents and drafted legislation force. The charter schools nationally have now done something similar. The definition of education law is what is required to implement education policy. Since education policy is declared to be about creating a certain type of consciousness amenable to being a Marxian actor in changing history it is all a bit circular. What we would never consent to and what no foreign foe could do to us being forced by legislation, regulations, and legal documents like charters.

      Again my only suggestion is to factually discuss the current nature of education law. That is our tax money paying for this obscenely lucrative area and frequently also headhunting fees as the lawyers recruit the next amenable change agent super. This is not name calling and it is something as a taxpayer I had wondered about. Why didn’t school board members accurately understand the meaning of the charters they had been urged to adopt. Why are they being so brainwashed that they would tell me “you don’t have an education degree.” That might be pertinent if we were talking about how to teach, but it’s not the least bit relevant to what these terms mean or the background of these theories or why the creators came up with the current constructional practices being required. Most edudoctors do not know these things and they tend to read only what they are assigned. I have read it all. The AAAS book said it was use at the graduate ed level. I read all of it this past week and plenty more. As I said, damasio’s declared reasons matter to what he is pushing even if no ed school assigns his books, only neuroscience programs. It reminds me of Dewey.

      Several years ago a State Board member told me in outrage to others that I could explain more in three minutes than anyone she had ever heard and it went to precisely what she had been asking. I have had higher ed deans come up to me after cle programs where I asked questions wanting to know how I knew there was such a problem with accreditors dictating what can no go on in any classroom. Again the way out here is a factual discussion as to what is unquestionably transpiring using people’s own declarations. No speculation.

      Don’t forget Von Glasersfeld was a UGA prof until the blowup in 1987 I described in my book. Radicals have long thought Georgia made a good testing ground. Wish they didn’t.

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  5. Interesting tidbit, the Dr. That was hired to implement the IB charter (k-12) in my district was hired from Dublin. I reckon he’s pushing this plan full steam ahead.

    I too am experiencing a quick change in a private school directio due to change in administration. The new guy is not bad but just doing what he was trained to do. I’ve asked enough questions to get on the ‘continuous improvement’ team. I about gagged over the group name but it will shine a light on direction and intent.

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  6. Congratulations on graduating out of the “system”! Though nowadays the “system” works hard to not let us go, no? I appreciate so much your work these past few years. This blog has helped me to understand so much behind transformations happening around me. A small number of us in our community are working as pins to prick the bubble that urban planners from outside our community have constructed. ISC has been part of my education in getting the background info to prick with. One term you introduced on this blog is cybernetics. Low and behold, when doing research last week to sharpen the pen, I came across this: http://www.academia.edu/11810987/THE_IDEAL_COMMUNIST_CITY
    Cybernetics is mentioned on page 17. Reading this, I can see a lot of similarities between the plan to implement communism and the current land use plan our city has adopted. I continue to learn from you, Robyn-keep up the good work!

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    • Hi Smithee and thanks for the kind words. Cybernetics just came up by name in a book from 1983 translated from German that I am working on that was explaining it as THE ‘technology’ to control the future.

      This post from March 2014 was one of my first on cybernetics as I was first coming to groups with its central role and its part in why I found what I documented in my book Credentialed to Destroy.

      http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/imposing-cybernetics-control-theory-on-students-while-pretending-the-impetus-is-equity-for-all/

      Your land use plan, consistent with the upravleniye steering of society, is consistent with something I saw last week out of the Council of Europe explaining that the purpose of the law was to allow the regulation of society. I also think it fits with this piece yesterday from the Council for Foreign relations urging Speaker Paul Ryan to effectively set up a competing government-in-exile to push desired policies if Trump were to be elected President. That would be a paradigm-shifting election of titanic proportions, but apparently we the people are to be governed now, like it or not, by our political class. http://blogs.cfr.org/renewing-america/2016/05/26/why-paul-ryan-should-not-endorse-donald-trump/

      No right to use the ballot box to reject upravleniye I guess. Note that your link fits with what I have called the lower ‘c’ version of communism also known as the Human Development Model. Getting to it is why so many education graduate degrees are explicitly grounded in providing a means to serve as a Chane Agent.

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  7. Robin,

    Andrew Bolt has a couple of interesting Ed links from down-under: http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/marxist_safe_schools_revolutionary_quits_under_fire/

    and

    http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/coaching_year_12_into_believing_hitler_was_a_conservative/

    These things that you discuss are really, truly international in scope and appear to be effecting or directed at the Western World.

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    • Yes, they are Mike and thanks to Andreas Schleicher of the OECD and ‘Sir’ Michael Barber of Pearson I have the documentation to show just how.

      Consistent with that we have this post involving the Netherlands http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.com/2016/05/how-can-netherlands-move-its-school.html yesterday that shows one cannot do well on PISA and the international ratings as long as there remains an academic orientation for even some students. Equity of the skills for all is the hallmark of being internationally competitive.

      The sequel to Credentialed to Destroy will be able to show how the implementation and reasons for it laid out there in detail is actually the global template. As I understood when I wrote it the Common Core was really about pushing all students toward a poorly understood vision of what Competence would be in the future. Last week Schleicher’s description of PISA 2018 and what is was assessing for, when tied to my documentation, made it crystal clear that the internalized Simplex we covered in the Mind, Body & Education Science of the Individual is precisely what the OECD has deceitfully redefined ‘Competence’ to mean.

      Quite traceable once parents and taxpayers know we are no longer dealing with dictionary meanings or a desire to be able to think logically from your own store of facts.

      Hope you have a lovely holiday weekend. http://philpapers.org/rec/CHONOS is the kind of implications of these theories I am dealing with. The psychological is termed ‘endogenous’ and the rest of the ‘systems’ are visible. The era of rational planning unfortunately consistently acknowledges the need to first control the psychological that guides perception, controls the interpretation of daily experiences, and motivates behavior. These planners must have assumed no one would learn all the different disciplines needed to piece together the consistent aim over the decades going back to just after WW2.

      They would be wrong.

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  8. Congrats on K12 being in the rear view mirror. I’m jealous, though the drive to standardize our colleges is progressing quickly. If the OECD gets its way, college students will need to pass competency exams their junior year to graduate. Can’t have our universities undo the all those years of conditioning.

    Came across this yesterday after a bit of digging into ProExam, who developed Tessera. The network is developing competency based assessments for colleges. http://www.cbenetwork.org

    You’re right about our private schools, too. Unfortunately, there are a lot of well-intentioned educators embracing pedagogies that are really PR campaigns for ed tech companies. More than anything, the reformers have thus far been successful at marketing the shift and controlling the narrative. Pushing back with knowledge for knowledge’s sake will seem radical to many who are fooled by the empty promises of the equity for all education sham.

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    • I have mentioned the Bologna Process launched by unesco and covered higher ed’s links to Competency in Chapter 5 of my book. Here’s an update since the book came out but building on what we are talking about from unesco. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002206/220649e.pdf

      This should also help. https://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/bologna-policy-forum-keynote/

      Yes, it was extraordinarily stressful for me to understand what was intended so I had largely stayed away from the school buildings over the last two years. As all of my children have reminded me over the last ten years of this journey, they are fine except when someone is vindictive. I try to make sure there is nothing to be vindictive about because it was never about a particular school or its policies. I did see the mom at graduation who insisted on diverting required PTA dues to financing Spence Rogers’ PEAK–Performance Excellence for All Kids–after parents began to recognize it was driving away the good teachers and was glad I would never have to see her deluded countenance ever again.

      The grad was her oldest and it is her younger kids who will really reap the harms she so earnestly pursued. Professional development from someone who praises Mao. I am sure the former Beaverton, Oregon super coming to Fulton will accelerate the psychological orientation. Based on what my youngest and her friends were saying over the last several years, this template is attracting high school teachers who are psychologically unstable themselves.

      Reply ↓

        • I watched the Capitol Memorial Day concert on PBS that I had recorded and the surfers on china beach in vietnam in 1968 made me cry too.

          Take a look at this http://www.routefifty.com/2016/05/fishers-indiana-mayor-fadness-21-century-government/128690/?oref=rf-today-nl

          I was at a program on Inclusionary Zoning this morning and they kept referring to the need to be able to live in zones of opportunity. Yet what you and I know is that those schools are to no longer be about academics either in the traditional sense. So the only opportunities to be created will be those governments try to create by fiat.

          My brain is fried as I got up early to read a paper I recognized as seminal only to get to end and have a shout out to the CIO of the school district, Fulton, which I finally have all my kids out of. I knew they were pushing a cutting edge, change the child model, that was equivalent to my cybernetic template but now I can prove it. Also have the title for my sequel picked out. I was reviewing my 2015 posts over the holidays and something Norbert Weiner wrote was the perfect title.

          I think tomorrow will be back to normal. I also know precisely how IMS Global fits in too. When the Californians and Texans are ready to listen, I have the full story.

          Reply ↓

          • I’m ready to listen…CA is a hot mes but few realize it. After Duckworth backed out of CORE’s pet project to assess psychological factors, you’d think we’d have armies of angry teachers and parents. But no. Hardly any one realizes that we are redefining what constitutes a quality school based on faulty social science. These changes will legally bind schools to “change” students’ perceptions and beliefs. You wouldn’t believe the email exchange I have going with a supervisor at CORE. They are banking on our collective ignorance.

            And collective ignorance is exactly why this garbage from FrameWorks Institute gets folks to buy in. Here’s the latest from VT, which Emily T is writing about.

            https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/file/Vermont%20Communications%20Plan.docx?token=AWxdIXI5Dnj-JQfqFPPjjFgyIe5St-VcXEG_B3vyOExLHXzsh7uh4UJhxW-TmvM-pt2Mb8JTAx1542KhI0umIv2UP8hywQJE6rWb49ToxxedioVSAgh69fc3Faej-5Nczat0TFGjbm3uJ_d8rbDiKKGOE-Zm4_-g-uIB5ytlz2okhQ

          • From Jt’s link “According to scholars, frames are basic cognitive structures that guide the perception and representation of reality. Frames are ‘principles of selection, emphasis and presentation composed of…tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters’ (Gitlin) To frame is to ‘select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation (Entman)'”.

            So governments at all levels presume to have the right to mandate (via HOTS in ESSA), monitor, and manipulate this internalized framing in order to get the malleable, compliant citizens needed and parents and taxpayers are still being actively misled. I noticed my local, League of Innovative Schools conversion charter district has a new mission statement to end this school year. “Our mission is to Educate Every Student to be a Responsible, Productive Citizen.”

            Fit to be a comrade in other words. Responsible to whom? The admins from the district office lie about what they are doing and then turn around and cooperate with iNACOL on the cybernetic model complete with explicit graphic drawings. Thanking the districts Chief Information Officer by name down to her middle initial Sarena E Sacks. Thanking, Scott Muri, the former Deputy Super of Academics who has since moved on to be super of Spring Branch isd in Texas. Thanking a Vice Chancellor of USG system. Mercy me. No wonder I know so much. We really have been thoroughly immersed in practices created to develop the new Soviet socialist man. Is that what it means to be a ‘productive citizen’ in Fulton County?

          • http://www.districtadministration.com/article/online-course-control-education with respect to Houston ISD and its shift away from textbooks to digital content for high school mentions our friends at IMS Global you and I know Fulton has also been working with. Notice this article uses ‘standards’ properly and no longer pretends it has anything to do with transmitting knowledge.

            Of course Houston ISD is also thanked in that same iNACOL report as Fulton and Muri and the Gates Foundation. It has been one of those days that the fact that it is now 5 o’clock in Bermuda should at least merit a Bloody Mary.

          • The UNESCO doc couldn’t be clearer in terms of the agenda. I’m still amazed by the marginalization of academics. As Robin said a while back, the only local control in this reform is the power to implement the global agenda close to home. This doc refers to this as “glo-local.” Education for the common good isn’t going to end well.

          • Did you notice that paper got pulled up in the first place because it referred to the same 2007 I-Y/Damasio paper that I cited to in this post?

            It now turns out that the uptick in education I am picking up on ties to the Human Brain Project having shifted from the planning stage to the operational stage in April 2016. It commenced in 2013 and the University of Southern California where both Damasio and I-Y work is a named official partner of the supposedly Euro-based HBP. This morning I was reading the programme from the September 2015 3rd annual meeting in Madrid and found the list of all the partners. It also listed the Board of Regents of the entire University of California system as well as Yale University and U of Tennessee.

            Our next missing invite is the 4th annual meeting this October in Florence, Italy. On the HBP Ethics Map I located as part of that programme they have Changing ‘self-understanding’ and ‘human identity’ as high priority for action. So much has come together in just the last two weeks since I originally wrote this post. I had to have a certain based of knowledge where I can recognize that what I am reading is a Guiding Fiction created to mislead or functions to give cover to ideas that are expressed elsewhere more explicitly and with all the radical intentions.

            Damasio’s 2010 book Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain strikes me as Idea Laundering what Paul Ehrlich’s psychologist buddy Albert Bandura expressed far more radically. The false statements about the brain not working like a computer are aspirational because Axemaker Minds catch this nonsense and inapt metaphors pretending to be true theories. I also had to look up what the term ‘neuromorphic’ meant.

            Remember when we found those troubling documents on education out of U of Waterloo in Canada? turns out the same place houses SpiNNaker, one of two HBP neuromorphic computer platforms used to simulate human cognition. I am guessing they are simulating pre-Competency based learning human cognition and not the byproduct of Tranzi OBE, Whole Language, and conceptually-based math and science human cognition.

            Do you think some of us could get paid work to illustrate the firing of an Axemaker Mind in areas it knows well without having all thought guided by emotion? We could be the comparison against what they are now doing.

  10. All caught up on the activity here. Had a nice break. Actually read a non education related book for a change. I did pick up during my time that the ‘citizenship’ aspect is being pushed harder on the islands. Even running commercials on the school system and it’s 21st century citizenship values that includes healthcare and mental health.

    Did you see this?
    http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/proposed-essa-regulation-supports-well-rounded-education-protects-all-students

    Reply ↓

    • It actually does end once it is accurately understood. Then it begins to feel like a california highway some how once again headed to the same interchange you have been through from three different directions before. Suddenly you realize you need to take a step back and look at anything else connecting to the same interchange.

      Reply ↓

      • Hold on one cotton pickin’ second Ms Immordino -Yang. She states here as evidence for emotions being the driving force in learning:

        “Take the math problem 2 + 2, for example. To solve this, a student must first recognize that this is something she has seen before (she has an “aha!” emotional reaction when she accesses the relevant cognitive knowledge). Then, she must call up the memories for previous experience with similar problems, as each of these memories contains cognitive information that is emotionally tagged. Next, based on this information, she acts on the numbers (a cognitive process). Finally, she evaluates the solution emotionally (Does this seem or feel right?). The chain of mental and neurological events—these small emotional “jolts” that are generally non conscious—steer the student’s actions to help him solve the math problem.”

        DOES THIS SEEM OR FEEL RIGHT? Puleese. That alleged “FEEL” is based on an understanding of facts and RULES that make up the tools of Addition. It is right or wrong not based on FEELING but the comprehended and applied FACTS.

        What a distorted and disingenuous example this is. Of course it HAS to be in order to perpetuate the mind control emotional hustle for 21C teaching and Learning but JEEEZE. This is really, really vapid .

        Reply ↓

      • Sorry. AND THIS????

        “For instance, for a student to learn from a teacher, the student must internalize the teacher’s mental actions as if they were his own. This kind of imitation forms the basis of social learning and, critically, plays out on a student’s own “self.” The student learns how to solve 2 + 2, in part, by internalizing the teacher’s actions and then playing them out as if they were his own cognitive and emotional actions and evaluations.”

        BOLLOCKS. But a perfect example of how the planners want our children to acquire new communitarian comrade serfdom.

        Reply ↓

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    • Glad the blog is back up. Interesting that this particular post and the comments for it coincide with sudden attacks on the blog.

      I used the time this morning looking at programs like this one in Boston http://www.learningandthebrain.com/Event-340/Empowering-Student-Minds/Program which boldfaced its purpose as follows: “By moving away from high stakes testing and toward student empowerment and character, we can create the engaged, ethical students and citizens we need to change the world.”

      No mention as to precisely who the ‘we’ is or why the students do not get a say in being transformed at a neural level to act on someone else’s new ethics and vision of what a 21st century citizen must be.

      My home district continues to create powerpoints and videos for programs on Personalized Learning in other states they would never show to Fulton parents or the Board. Located the powerpoint from a May program in San Francisco where Mahnaz Charania, PhD. Fulton’s Director of Research and Evaluation, had a slide that stated that the data on students would be used to “monitor changes over time in student’s perceptions, experiences, and outcomes.”

      Another slide said “What we evaluate must reflect what we want to change.” Then the internalized change gets counted as Growth, success, achievement, and Learning. You would think parents would begin to notice that the high school students hyping personalized learning at their schools have unfocused eyes in the video.

      Reply ↓

      • You would think wouldn’t you?
        I noticed their eyes and affect.. They are on auto pilot advocating for their “DEVICES.”
        Glad the blog is back up too. Such a coinky dink that it went down given the material being discussed. Only I tend not to believe in coincidences this well timed. Not at this stage of the game.

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        • The video we are referring to is number 1 at this link https://www.tes.com/lessons/VGV6zxFRaa_MUw/the-future-of-personalized-learning-in-fulton-county-schools

          It can also be found at slides 5 and 6 of this slideshare. http://www.slideshare.net/DellWorld/future-ready-education-unleashing-innovation-to-the-enterprise

          Serena Sacks was also the shout-out on the iNACOL paper I have referenced above.

          Centennial High is a newer high school in a high-end area with ambitious parents. Unfortunately the school board member for that area, who I know, insists that the Super would never lie to her even while the one who has now moved to Palm Beach Florida let the false explanations fly. I told her once as she sat next to me at a public meeting that his definition of rigor was not what the term actually meant. She told me I did not have an education degree.

          True, but I will put my knowledge of pedagogy and what these theories actually entail against anyone anywhere. It exceeds virtually everyone insisting they be called ‘Doctor’ and living off the hard-earned tax receipts of Fulton County. Honestly most of the Fulton admins I have met in recent years have the intellectual acumen of an amoeba.

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        • Here is another source for that video along with even more pride over neurologically scrambling children’s brains without disclosure http://www.cio.com/article/3002698/cio-role/how-one-cio-leverages-technology-to-transform-education.html

          That UNESCO link above from August 2015 called “The Curriculum in Debates and Educational Reforms to 2030” beyond showing the deceit surrounding the false narrative that the Common Core and Competency-based education are not about prescribing a curriculum (it is just curriculum gets redefined going forward) makes it crystal clear on page 16 that it is NOT personalized learning if the neurological is not the bullseye. Let me quote: “the personalization of education…entails activating the learning potential of the special being of each pupil while respecting his or her pace of progress and making effective use of the advances of cognitive psychology and the neurosciences.”

          My italics for emphasis.

          Reply ↓

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