Suffice it to say if someone was hoping that releasing a hugely troubling new transformative paradigm for P-20 during a holiday week would allow it to go unnoticed, the phrase “Not. Going. To. Happen.” would be my response. Changing the formal sponsors to other connected entities did not allow the “P-20 Schoolhouse for 21st Century Democracy” to avoid being tied, as it was intended to function, as actual components of what the Common Core looks like in the typical classroom. Even worse for those wanting to avoid scrutiny, the links to the global agenda being pushed particularly by UNESCO are what we could slangily refer to as Easy-Peasy to prove.
Welcome back in other words from our respective Turkey and Dressing Binges to the “STATE Civic Education Policy Framework” http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/01/16/12/11612.pdf . Now before any of us do precisely what it is hoped we will do and dismiss this as simply another attempt to make sure the next generation is familiar with the 3 branches of government at the federal level in the US, let’s look at the curious new definition of Civic Education. I’ll put it this way. Lenin could have worked with this definition and as we will see the communist Chinese are currently on board as well. My bolding.
“The term civic learning is used to emphasize the civic significance of preparing students with knowledge and for action. Today’s education for democracy needs to be informed by deep engagement with the values of liberty, equality, individual worth, open-mindedness and the willingness to collaborate with people of differing views and backgrounds toward common solutions for the public good. These qualities are not automatically transmitted to the next generation–they must be passed down through schools. Ultimately, schools are the guardians of democracy.”
Now, this is, of course, a much different definition of democracy than what we have traditionally reverenced in the US or anywhere else in the Anglosphere. We traditionally viewed the individual and the right to make our own choices about the future and live with the consequences. That Civic Framework is all about nurturing a collectivist instinct and an obligation to put the community and group interests first. As usual, I scampered over to my bookshelf for some insights into previous comparable attempts to use institutions to force such a collectivist mindset and obligatory new values on an unsuspecting free society. Economist Ludwig Von Mises in his Human Action book first published in 1949 when these visions were previously all the rage noted that when people are allowed to pursue their own ideas without permission:
“No dullness and clumsiness on the part of the masses can stop the pioneers of improvement. There is no need for them to win the approval of inert people [that is SO my new phrase since my college kid says mental midget is no longer an acceptable description] beforehand. They are free to embark upon their projects even if everyone else laughs at them. Later, when the new, better and cheaper products appear on the market, these scoffers will scramble for them. However dull a man may be, he knows how to tell the difference between a cheaper shoe and a more expensive one, and to appreciate the usefulness of new products.”
I am going to interrupt this excellent point by showing all the crony capitalist/We Just Adore Public-Private Partnerships companies who have ponied up to be formal sponsors of the Education Commission of the States. http://www.ecs.org/html/Sponsors/WebsiteForumSponsors.asp Notice how they say they want the business community to be actively involved in creating the new paradigm for education. Business executives at these companies hate Von Mises vision for new products and competition for that consumer dollar like what I just quoted. They love public sector contracts.
Now, if you are not familiar with ECS, they have meetings where the top legislator from the education committee of both chambers in each state plus someone from the Governor’s office all come to hear their pitches. It’s thus the perfect way to get coordination in each state that fits a national or global template. Meanwhile, the politicians can insist “it’s state led” or “this is what business says they want.” It’s what politically connected businesses who prefer cultivating lobbyists to satisfying consumers desire. The schools make a great vehicle for pushing changes in values because, as Von Mises noted in the next paragraph:
“it is different in the field of social organization and economic policies. Here the best theories are useless if not supported by public opinion. They cannot work if not accepted by a majority of the people.”
As we saw a few posts ago, the churches were originally seen as the avenue to get a shift in the prevailing public opinion to support a communitarian, non-individualistic vision of the future. Now it is the schools, universities, and the media which are to be the Handmaidens to this New Vision of Democracy grounded supposedly in economic justice. Let’s borrow one more insight from Von Mises that goes precisely to the reason for all this deliberate mind arson of our most talented minds in K-12. “Everything that is thought, done and accomplished is a performance of individuals. New ideas and innovations are always an achievement of uncommon men [and women too!!]. But these great men cannot succeed in adjusting social conditions to their plans if they do not convince public opinion.”
Now just imagine the dangers when we have active manipulation by the media, professors in certain departments, and K-12 administrators to push an entirely new paradigm for education precisely to shift that prevailing public opinion. http://www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/QuisumbingCitizenship.pdf is the link I promised to the global vision that ECS vision fits into. ECS is not going to be so careless as to pitch the Framework as “Citizenship Education for Better World Societies: A Holistic Approach” or hype the development of Conscience, Commitment, and Compassion for a “total ‘reeducation of humankind” but the language of that ECS Framework still fits with the UNESCO framework. It fits with the to be required “Sensitivities, Attitudes, Values, and Action Competencies” that are “Key Attributes of Individuals as Possessors of Intrinsic Worth and as Key Agents in the Creation of Better Worlds.”
Here is one more link http://www.didactics.eu/fileadmin/pdf/1670.pdf that understanding how everything fits from my book as well as this blog lets me locate. UNESCO calls what is being touted in the US as College, Career and Civic Ready skills as Life Skills. They tie them to a global remake of high school that was outlined in a meeting in Peking we were not invited to back in 2001. If anyone thinks I like throwing out accusations of collectivism as if I am hurling insults instead of describing intentions, I am not the one claiming a desire for education in the 21st Century to emphasize “the need for collective rather than individual intelligence that supports the position that all are capable rather than a few; multiple perspectives rather than ability to solve problems with only one right answer, imagination and emotional engagement are as important as technical expertise, intelligence should include the ability to envisage alternative futures, to resolve open-ended problems as well as to exercise sound interpersonal skills.”
All these links I provided are about reengineering a personality that will act to bring about and then tolerate living in precisely that kind of “socialistic, communist society” that Soviet psychologist AN Leontiev wrote was the purpose for this type of education. Notice in any of these links that there is a stated obligation of everyone to meet anyone’s basic needs–a right of being human. That seems to be what Leontiev had in mind as ‘socialistic,’ when he always linked these two terms that we tend to view as synonyms or milder versions of the same basic political theory. The reference to communist is not just a tie to Uncle Karl’s ultimate vision although it is that. All of these frameworks seek to cultivate an obligation to, and responsibility for, the community. They say so repeatedly and we need to notice it.
Finally, there are multiple references to being a “member of society,” a “member of the community,” or “cultivating students’ care and concern for their communities.” We are not educating the individual to make their own decisions anymore. If they are able to do that, it is from a set of emotions, values, and beliefs that have primed a person to act in a certain way. Policymakers and their corporate cronies are prescribing a mandate of “inquiry-based instruction that results in informed action and demonstration of learning.” The action is not ‘informed’ by the individual except via the presupplied beliefs and concepts. The ‘learning’ being ‘demonstrated’ is someone else’s conception of what must now be valued, believed, or new behaviors to be shown.
When oligarchs outline the “shared beliefs that should undergird the educational system, its institutions, practices and outcomes,” it should not be slipped through during a holiday week to be imposed, like it or not, with no genuine notice of what is changing. Insisting that all students must now exhibit a skill to “plan strategically for civic change” with less notice to parents than what used to be required for a Field Trip permission slip simply reenforces the appearance that all these education reforms are really a Political Coup.
The fundamental fact behind true liberties is that they are not bestowed by government and they are not governments to take away. Yet that is precisely what all these education reforms amount to. No university should be able to grant a degree in any area, even a doctorate in Educational Leadership or Curriculum, that amounts to a license to be a taxpayer funded nonconsensual Change Agent. The idea that numerous sources openly decree that the students will be consciously turned into cultivated change agents is horrific.
As usual, there is actually not a dispute about the accuracy of what I am laying out. Calling attention to it is the only remedy I know of for what is being attempted.
Consider this post our Red Alert Notice. Flashing lights and sirens please.
The Humiliation Papers link was interesting. I always like the papers with “Our vision” and “Our goal”, etc. Usually, the goals and aspirations they seek are not on my radar. The whole emotions over knowledge theme just makes me want to throw my hands in the air. You’ve got to love how the environmental meme gets woven into the tapestry. Got to be sustainable! Even if the smart people say that path doesn’t work: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
“Universal Values” is a potentially interesting concept. I doubt that, on a global basis, a truly universal value exists, let alone a set of them. Certainly, most of the values this paper espouses aren’t mine.
I thought it was interesting the paper pointed out that some students would not fully believe. This was an interesting section:
“Above all, the learner exposed to the valuing process begins to master the art of
discernment. This means that the learner will be more able to live consciously
and responsibly. The learners in this approach have reportedly become more critical and independent-minded, more attuned with their inner selves and
empowered to do something about their conditions, rather than blame outside forces.”
I’m thinking this doesn’t play out like it sounds when implemented in Ferguson.
I think Ferguson and St Louis generally are still scarred by the K-12 experimentation that went on there when the ed lab, McREL, was based there. It then moved on to spread its perniciousness in Colorado.
On Universal Values, we met Quisemberg’s vision on behalf of the UN when they decided Baha’i made an excellent vehicle for their achieving social justice globally via education vision.
One of the reasons I write as you know is that Dystopia is the likely result of continuing to push these ideas and practices without the real intentions being better understood. Late in that report there is a mention of the need for the laid out vision of noetic/communitarian education as the new paradigm and pretending it is about civics because of described terrorist events globally.
I remember each of those incidents and they all have a common denominator in the group whose vision was being advanced by terror techniques. This vision of education has the effect of surrendering to that vision which is so fond of submission anyway they have special terms for it. It’s the West surrendering the concept of individualism and its legitimate centrality and the primacy of reason at least as something we try to nurture in the non-‘inert’. It is hard not to remember that it was the Current head of UNESCO, Bulgarian Irina Bokova, who brought the UN’s Alliance of Civilzations to my attention after she said UNESCO and it were working closely together on their ed vision. I brought up her nationality because of complaints that UNESCO’s conferences are no longer being conducted in English. She speaks Russian and would have access to all the untranslated sociocultural and cybernetic research that is so central to these vision for the future.
That’s what this framework is by the way, whether it’s calling itself metacognition, Skills for Success, 21st century skills, civics education, future-oriented education, Excellence, etc. I may not have my hands on that $800 book yet, but I have now tracked down more than half of what’s in it because those individual essays were mentioned in bibliographies. With that info, I am discovering them online. I wish we could leave Uncle Karl out of this, but he remains front and center to the expressed vision tied to this classroom focus per the creators of the theories and practices.
Speaking of Uncle Karl, the Aspen Institute is hosting a program this week on creting a new workforce for the sharing economy as if that new ‘lens’ of ownership and the economy is now a given. This article http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/2014/11/27/collaborative-economy-a-transformative-lens-not-a-start-up-trend/ makes it quite clear that this is a move toward hostility against any ability to say “this is mine, leave it alone whether I am using it or not.”
School to Work indeed. http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2014/12/01-german-career-building-liu
One of the things I have noticed in Atlanta is all the signs directing people to the closest Chamber of Commerce. Just as I suspected this regional CoCs are touted as anchors of the vision of business partnerships/skills focus for K-12/planned Corporatist economy. Nobody would be so ‘selfish’ as to plan to invent something in their garage anymore.
The German commenting on that article was pretty blunt. It really doesn’t work that way and the article was just wrong. Reality is probably a blend.
I think the German companies used to hire the apprentices, but now with economic stagnation and contraction, the model is broken and existing “tenured” workers occupy all the good slots.
As Robin warns, when the economy fails, no theories work very well.
He’s not happy with successful sharing ideas that are happening now, and he has his facts wrong.
Cousera courses are sometimes free and they are sometimes facilitated by universities where the faculty members work. I think those should be at least “usually” but I don’t know everything on their site.
Anyway, I will be taking a course on chaos theory taught by Cvitanovic at Georgia Tech. I can take it at home, so Robin I’m sorry I won’t be visiting Atlanta for this or I would definitely say hello. I didn’t have to pay either Cvitanovic or Ga. Tech anything; it’s FREE. I decided to pay $50 and get personally identifiable so I could get academic credit (thru Coursera, not Georgia Tech). It is free and it is certainly facilitated by his institution — both things that the article claim are untrue of Coursera. There are lots of courses on Coursera and EdX, and probably other platforms too, that are free or cheap, taught by senior faculty at the finest universities.
In fact these universities are paying good money to set up these platforms and put on these courses, to give them away free. If that’s not sharing, I don’t know what is.
But I guess this guy doesn’t want sharing, he wants to take.
Good for you.
I completed a Coursera Python class and the Machine Learning Class. WOW. Why should students pay a fortune to listen to some bored,bad, and boring professor teach the same subjects but worse?
A story in the spirit of “follow the money”. There seems to be corruption in Los Angeles Unified School District’s student ipad project. Documents have been subpoenaed.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-fbi-agents-take-ipad-documents-from-la-school-district-20141202-story.html
Have you ever seen the link to the Common Core Technology Project that LAUSD was/is piloting? http://achieve.lausd.net/cctp
Bad ideas, of course, simply mean to hit the accelerator. No rethinking of the flawed premises.
“Insisting that all students must now exhibit a skill to “plan strategically for civic change” with less notice to parents than what used to be required for a Field Trip permission slip..”
We need to insist on proper notification and permission slips signed by parents for all field trips to alternate realities, of course that would require an unsustainable amount of forest.
In the really cannpt make it up department KnowledgeWorks has a new report laying out 10 Innovation Pathways to Transformative Change in Personal Learning. http://www.knowledgeworks.org/sites/default/files/innovation-pathways-transforming-learning.pdf?utm_source=Active+Contacts&utm_campaign=64165d1d2c-News+Digest&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_7d6ccb1dbf-64165d1d2c-129663017
Obviously printed before this post, but corroborating the deliberative creation of students as change agents. It ties into the Recombinant Education vision we found so troubling.
Oh, and apparently John Gppdlad passed away at 94 on November 29. He lived long enough to see his lifelong vision coming true. He really made no bones about his agenda or UNESCO’s. It simply needs to be better known. A good day to reread that part of the book.
This lends a view to the truth from another angle, nytimes the other day.
Hello margaret sanger, hello joseph mengela, belgium calling…
BEHIND a half-century of policies to promote child development, there lies an assumption: that children are essentially equally affected by the environments they grow up in, and that positive interventions like preschool education should therefore help all children. But what if this isn’t true?”
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/opinion/sunday/the-downside-of-resilience.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1&referrer=
Hmm, wonder if they’ve seen the movie Gattaca?
This is a good example of what performance assessments really look like. http://www.p21.org/news-events/p21blog/1554-21st-century-transformation-part-i-a-different-kind-of-learning
It is not clear that anyone will want to hire the student who “demonstrates their learning in unconventional ways,” but that is why the nature of the economy is supposed to change too. If only we could suspend gravity.
P21 certainly lied when they left Tucson to join up with the CCSSO in DC and said they were winding down. Baloney. Like so many of the other sales pitches and explanations involving the Common Core and the related transformations.
Mike-talk about not taking no for an answer. http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/climateed-dec-3-2014.pdf
You will believe!! He is turning this over to John Holdren’s division too. That also means Digital Promise. A little virtual reality immersion to create new mental models.
That entire document is just sad, although it does look like the whole climate indoctrination thing is going to kick in big time. Didn’t see a reference to the Google RE<C review: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
Even the IPCC avoids linking climate change to individual weather events. Another two years of these guys.
Here is a 15 minute podcast of Vicki Phillips–that world-class global change agent now with Gates http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/b/8/7/b87e4b23a8e6bc48/Vicki_Phillips.mp3?c_id=7983172&expiration=1417695538&hwt=1170d18f5682c74ccfcc4fab8b3549e6
Remember she wrote Irreversible Change with Sir Michael Barber and was in Helsinki for GELP?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/12/02/the-concept-education-secretary-duncan-has-entirely-missed/
Well, that was rather disingenuous although I would agree law school is not practical. Duncan simply wants the ed school emphasizing the sociocultural practices and the teachers doing the same in their classrooms. It’s not just student behaviors in the spotlight. Teachers must change theirs and their mindsets too or find another profession.
I have been in meetings the last several days basically doing what I do. Listening in the audience and corroborating what I know from all the reports I have. The Emory poli sci prof who also heads the Community Partnership really did say that the focus needs to be on community engagement with real problems rather than lectures and book knowledge now. Why anyone would pay $250K for that is beyond me once parents begin to recognize the paradigm shift on many campuses.
Yesterday I was corroborating the links of economic development and workforce development with Common Core as the mere excuse for the shift. I need to examine the implications with where we were already going next. It will definitely not be a ‘nuanced’ post. I do not think JoeJoe appreciates just how much fun it has not been to figure out the framework and details and turn them into a blueprint without having so much as a land survey when I started this journey.
I too am looking forward to the day I can stop reacting to the implementation as it rolls out and just Backward Map from the end game at a variety of detail levels and from the various needed angles. After yesterday we are a lot closer. I can also see in my mind how what I heard yesterday fits with what Anita Hoge is uncovering and complaining publicly about in Pennsylvania. It’s the same endgame.
Did you see anything about this?http://newpittsburghcourieronline.com/2014/11/25/court-rules-michigan-has-no-responsibility-to-provide-quality-public-education/
I had not. Usually states have been more amenable than that ever since SCOTUS held in the 1973 Rodriguez case that education is not a fundamental federal right.
Of course you and I know “quality basic education” does not have the meaning a dictionary would give the phrase. It is hard to imagine the court knew that though.
http://knowledgecenter.completionbydesign.org/sites/default/files/424%20Carnevale%202012.pdf shows just how determined Anthony Carnevale, the Gates Foundation, and the Lumina Foundation all are to shifting us away from academics to a polytech vision.
Makes so much more sense now that we know of his involvement with the Carnegie funded Center for Education and the Economy back when it was created in 1985 and still based at Columbia. That would have been about the time Robert Beck’s grants were funded.
Look what came out yesterday from the World Bank. Mind, Society and Behavior. http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/Publications/WDR/WDR%202015/WDR-2015-Full-Report.pdf
No wonder they are involved with ATC21S. Look how they want to target our ‘mental models’. How very special.
The overview says our former regulatory czar Cass Sunstein was involved. http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/Publications/WDR/WDR%202015/Overview-English.pdf
And the Gintis is the co-author of the book on ed that hoped that the Marxist revolution in the US advanced through education would prevent a need for violence. Really hard to make this up.