It is one thing to know that education is now a weapon, and another to discover there has been an expensive, calculated frenzy in the last few years to use social science theory, specifically cited as sociology, anthropology, psych, and even political science, to “drive individual processes of change, as well as changes in social practices.” What? Just because someone is a tenured professor or a one-time politician? That enables them to recommend “transformative actions toward equitable sustainability at the local, community level” so that others can examine “how to speed and scale those up into processes of transformative global thinking?” Whoa!!
Welcome to the May 2012 prescription for “Transformative Cornerstones of Social Science Research for Global Change” as our Adaptation Means Each of Us From the Inside-Out Trilogy continues. Any concerns we might have that all this clearly constitutes “processes of social engineering” in order to mandate nonconsensual shifts toward “achieving alternative visions of the future” are supposed to be calmed by uniting these visions with “participatory approaches” at reaching a consensus. Right. At some point after the participants have been manipulated via education and the media. After all, these are transformationalists who KNOW that it is “interpretation and subjective sense making” that actually “confronts the personal and collective values, beliefs, assumptions, interests, worldviews, hopes, needs and desires that underlie people’s experiences of and responses–or lack of responses–to processes of global change.”
A mouthful of aims, but we get what is targeted now. The transformational schemers do not necessarily have a T-shirt or banner and include the greedy, ambitious, or naive servants in the school district or principal’s or even the Governor’s office. Anyone who intends to get at people’s mental models and values, attitudes, and beliefs to drive political change–both at the individual and societal levels. When I wrote my book, I spent years researching what happened during the Cold War and immediately afterwards as I kept encountering controversial US practices in education that had ties to Soviet psychology. The book explains the whys and recognizes that individual consciousness is always the ultimate target of anyone with aspirations of nonconsensual political control. After several days of wading through all the social science research surrounding Adaptation and how to use education to drive Global Change I have come to a definitive conclusion.
The desire for Planned Geoengineering survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and so did a desire to control people, places, and things in even more ways than I had previously documented. New methods, new excuses, and more parts to hide the coordination among political levels and regions. Another example also tied into the Belmont Challenge and Future Earth Alliance I first wrote about in June 2012 is called the Global Environmental Change (GEC) Design Project. No, it’s not about what kind of drapes you want in the sunroom. It is, however, all about deliberate transformation using the perception of human-caused climate change as an excuse and asking the “social sciences to take the lead in developing a new integrated, transformative science of global change.” And applying itself through preschool, K-12, and higher ed, which all make good prolonged tools when the aim is:
“Transformation is understood as a process of altering the fundamental attributes of a system, including in this case structures and institutions, infrastructures, regulatory systems, financial regimes, as well as attitudes and practices, lifestyles, policies and power relations.”
Whew! Now you don’t really think that alarming confessional is all I have do you? I thought not. Looking at a few of the Stanford profs involved with the IPCC Report led me to a January 2011 document Called “Knowledge, Learning, and Societal Change: Finding Paths to a Sustainable Future.” This was the Science Plan [notice bolding above] “for a cross-cutting core project of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change” or IHDP. Don’t get too excited but the social science schemers involved with IHDP see knowledge, learning, and societal change as being in a dialectical relationship where change to one affects and drives changes in the others. KLSC has since ensconced itself in Switzerland with its own website and probably lovely chocolates and fabulous vistas for all its employees, but in discussing it I will stick to the January 2011 declarations for education as well as a 2013 paper kindly laying out the history of IHDP.
We have speculated before on why what Edmund Gordon called “intellective competence” and that’s it, or what is being trumpeted as “equity and excellence” by those seeking economic justice for all, would be useful if you wanted political control, but the KLSC document removes all need to speculate on eliminating Axemaker Minds. Quite simply, we might not behave as desired and we might fail to act when wanted. To put it bluntly, the so-called “science of global change” and the education reforms pushed to accomplish it are all about “how to motivate and empower action by sufficient numbers of people with very different political and economic perspectives, ecological and physical conditions, and cultures.”
The answer is that the inner mental models and new values, attitudes, and beliefs will be carefully sculpted via “personalized learning” until students have different types of “knowledge and different core competencies.” That would be a “broad notion of knowledge that goes beyond a narrow notion of cognitive, science-based forms of knowing.” In fact, “knowledge can be conceptualized as any form of mental representation of the world,” whether true or not, as long as it either changes the student from the “inside-out” or causes him or her to take action.
KLSC is quite aware that “how issues are framed and the way they are communicated appears to influence people’s receptivity to the issues and possible responses” so of course we are in the midst of Curriculum Redesign with ties to IHDP to make students receptive as desired and responsive as wished. All those references to Enduring Understandings or Understandings by Design can be evaluated through this KLSC doctrine: “Knowledge is what empowers its possessors with the capacity for intellectual or physical action.” The KLSC view of the purpose of “education and pedagogies”? The aim is “the formal or informal intervention in an individual’s development to steer learning processes towards socially acceptable behavior.” Not just an intentionally created internal noetic keel then, but consciously aimed at behavior desired to drive transformation.
How do we get that kind of transformation? KLSC points to the “subconscious change of perceptions and [mental] terms of reference over time.” That would mean that the changes are designed to be not just nonconsensual, but at a level past the point of awareness. All the references we keep hearing to Positive School Climate or fostering Communities of Learners? Why “they help link individuals with a shared sense of purpose, so that individual changes are undertaken in the context of a wider social movement.” The KLSC project wishes to “promote research into understanding how to identify a tipping point in attitude and behaviors.” And all of this provides KSLC “with core approaches to understand the positioning of individuals in collectives.”
Oh, a firm knowledge of history gives me such a core understanding, but then I just write books and a blog instead of conducting “action research” on children and young adults for personal profit and professional advancement. KLSC admits that “by societal change, we mean large-scale behavioral change” by “individuals, groups and formal institutions.” And all the while plenty of people continue to believe this is just a good-faith discussion about the natural sciences and climate or how to best teach children for the 21st century.
Well, it is the latter, but only because the nature of life in the 21st century is being radically revised with little notice. I think that all this documentation makes it very clear that “humans” became embedded in “complex systems” according to the social scientists so that human behavior could be controlled and become subject to the “sphere of conscious political calculation.” It allows a shift in the very nature and purpose of governments all over the West without, once again, getting anyone’s consent. These “contemporary efforts to devise strategies for Earth System governance” truly do aim to place the individual chains invisibly within the mind.
The 2013 paper acknowledges that such “geoengineering remains a controversial stewardship ideal also in Earth System science circles.” Well, a touch of sanity at least. Since I am pretty sure I know which side of the debate will get the promotions, lucrative grants, and exotic invites, does anyone think this will remain controversial?
Well, at least before we went to the trouble of documenting Adaptation meant education and personal transformation. Let’s see if we can make this as controversial as it deserves to be.
Its a giant con. When i hear admissions directors and admin and teachers even parents using the edubabble terms they have no clue of their duplicity. The smokescreen is believed, because they all want to be for the good cause and they want to follow the herd and they want to appear excellent spouting things they do not even understand and never once thinking they are dupes in the big con, helping it carry on and build.
Democrats for example dont know they are now operating more like marxists because they dont even know what one is. As long as civil rights and greivance grabbers keep herding them they move to the pen.
The true proof of all of this is transparency of testing and all curriculum materials for parental scrutiny, by all the mom and dad lawyers, scholars and psychologists.
And the only reason they are not is because it would be very ugly. So they keep them secret and call us all names like suburban moms who think are kids are genius’.
By the way you back up the claims by those moms who have analysed the utah test question about books vs video games, by this post and all the other ones here.
Nice work robin!
Spreading The Word — I just posted the following to a Canadian blog:
Ideology — Whose Children Are They?
There is an immense power-play going on right now — a lot of jostling for which worldview will eventually dominate internationally. A question arises — Why should there be ONE worldview that wins this contest anyway?
These are some of the words being used — mindset, worldview, transformation, paradigm shift, Zeitgeist.
Education systems are seen as the method by which “transformation” will happen and that is why parents should be very aware of this background to experimentation and imposition of new styles of teaching/learning. Psychological and conditioning techniques — theories of the past — are now brought forward in “training” children. Yes, chimes, bells are being used.
Some of the criticisms of Common Core Curriculum in the US are worth exploring. Discovery Math is one mind-scrambling technique, amateurishly implemented, contributing to dumbing down of whole populations. This is some of what is worrying parents about math these days.
The UN is heavily involved in “Capacity Development” for “new consciousness” and usually around the topic of “sustainability”. There is no ONE place or book I can point to at this time that provides an easy starting-point.
The main division is about individualism versus collectivism. The Nanny State, Central Planning worldview, is epitomized by what has just been legislated in Scotland — a state guardian assigned at birth for each child — the best place in the world to live is the sloganeering. http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/17748-citing-un-treaty-scotland-assigns-overseer-to-every-child
This collectivist worldview is being preached in our teacher training faculties. Here is an incredible report from an ex teacher in Georgia, USA:
“I am a senior in age. I attended the University of Georgia in 2012/13 and am at Georgia Southern now. I enrolled to revalidate a 35 year old teachers certificate in History. No university charges – free tuition at 62. I was in a senior education class for future teachers at UGA. The two female professors were solid Marxists. We had a polite battle. I am a practicing political conservative. I sent the copies of the Marxist propaganda to the Senate. The professors used no texts, the subject matter was too radical.” (April 05, 2014) Teacher training contrasted between then and now.
That anecdote was relayed to the blog — Invisible Serfs Collar — where a lawyer is studiously laying out the evidence of the gathering forces to shift parent duties to central planners to produce compliant citizens for a new world direction. VERY complex scenario. And wouldn’t you know it, “complexity” just happens to be one of the code words frequently used in trying to persuade us to get on board. World changes are too complex to understand — so trust us.
Meanwhile, folks, hold on to your individuality, your sanity and your children. And cherish what freedoms we still do have.
So last week were the second year of the CC-aligned NY State ELA tests. My 7th grade son took them.
He reports that the reading comprehension questions were vague, it was the vaguest test he’s ever seen. Rather than questions like “what does this mean” or “what mood is the character probably in when she says X”? it was all questions like “why did the author do this?” or “why did the author include that?” Who knew that when reading the text we were expected to divine the author’s state of mind? What if the author is a fruitcake?
There are reports that teachers and admins are protesting, saying the reading comp. questions did not test reading comprehension, but they could say no more for purposes of test security. Well, I am not sworn to uphold test security, and this is what my son reports. I have no idea why such stupid questions dominated the exam, unless they are trying to narrow the achievement gap by using questions with effectively random answers. 🙂
The US-controlled Qatari news organization Al Jazeera opines that our NY state tests and CC curriculum aren’t learner-centered enough.
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/4/common-core-standardsnewyorkstateandrewcuomo.html
Maybe ISC is being read by some of those people behind the scenes that the editorial complains about, those who are bravely resisting the slide into new age oblivion.
David-ask your son if the questions were essentially asking him to role play-“what do you believe motivates the writer?”
What is his state of mind?
Remember a huge part of Robert Kegan’s Stages, which without his name or with it, are everywhere in K-12 and higher ed, is “learning to take the perspectives of others?” It teaches the kids to try to get at others’ conceptual models so they will be more likely to change theirs a la Dweck’s Growth Mindset.
That Al Jazeera comment reminds me of something. I’ll be back.
I can ask him later what the precise words were, but regardless it seems that the questions do ask him to role-play.
This is a highly incorrect sort of question. It encourages a sort of “argumentum ad hominem” — we’ll categorize these responses into those who care about the environment and those who don’t, and we know of course which side is good. Rather than allowing anything to be presented and judged on the merits.
But that’s the whole point of everything Kegan stands for.
Big change from last year, the first year of “common core aligned” state tests, which were rigorous and academic and the complaints came because it was too hard and the scores were too low. This year the scores will probably be better and also more “fair” to “underrepresented” minorities, and it will be announced that we’ve fixed the exam or are at least heading the right way. Parents whose kids did better this year will support the move. Last year was a psyop.
Am curious how the state math exam will be at the end of April. Last year math also was hard but fair.
David–
This is something Grant Wiggins, the co-creator of Understanding by Design, wrote today: “The whole point of a test is to see if students have internalized and can transfer their learning – in this case, about writing. The test should NOT cue the writer on process. By test time, the process should be understood and used by students who learned it. That is precisely the point of an education, hence the right move in assessment: what can you do when NOT prompted to do everything?”
Internalized and transfer. Has student taken on desired conceptual model of concepts, images, and associations and will they apply them to an untaught or ambiguous situation? Will they take a concept from physics and apply it to human systems as a lens to perceive through? Has this become a general problem solving strategy?
With your son’s questions, what is being billed as reading comprehension sure does provide some excellent insights into what his default assumptions are about people in general and what motivates them. The idea is that if you can come to see what people’s conceptual models are, you become more willing to revise yours in ways that transform how the world is perceived. It always comes back to shifting that, the Growth Mindset, and prompting action for change.
I agree with the angle on data collection. I’ve suspected that simply, children are likely to project their own personalities into the otherwise unknowable mind of the author, and hence mirror their own tendencies in their answers.
To connect it to what you say, well if by some miracle the wonderful school curriculum has molded their minds in the desired way, they can prove it on the test. Or if not, they’ll prove themselves guilty of that too.
My son was able to narrow a lot of the questions down to two answers that were hard to choose between. Perhaps if one gets to that point, the safe choice is the one showing more politically correct thought. We can train our kids in countermeasures, at least for the test we’ve already heard about. We also need to train kids to report back all the quirky things they feel and notice about these tests, even if they think “it’s not important”.
Next year the curveball may have a different spin. Or maybe they’ll “waste a pitch” with a straight academic test like 2013, or an easier one so that schools can show improvement relative to that year.
David-This is the write-up with graphics of where all schools are going. http://www.digitalpromise.org/content/uploads/All-Summary-Document-4.9.pdf
It is from the League of Innovative Schools spring conference in Tucson I wrote about.
So much there, but here’s the aspect that really crystallizes how out to lunch and pea brained these intended ideas are. With our money.
On page 5, it asks “Can we create incentives for local companies to hire students and make that into a revenue stream for a school community? Companies want to partner and collaborate. Districts must be willing to let businesses get involved more deeply in the schools–ie, more than a transactional relationship. Can we make companies a part of the community and generate revenues from those partnerships?”
I am not sure what these morons thought the Civil War was fought over and I am deeply upset that property taxes are going to finance second order change in the student. The student’s need to work and be productive and that can be used to bring in more revenue to the district?
Don’t miss the graphic on page 4 either on “Dealing with People who aren’t believers.”
Hmm, that digitalpromise link was interesting. One of the graphics stated the need for “second order change leaders”. Like many of the terms these guys come up with, it seemed meaningless to start with. A quick Google search and it turns out there’s nothing like a little second order change:
“First-order change is doing more – or less – of something we are already doing. First-order change is always reversible.
Second-order change is deciding – or being forced – to do something significantly or fundamentally different from what we have done before. The process is irreversible: once you begin, it is impossible to return to the way you were doing before.”
Yes, I have written about second order change http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/second-order-change-why-reform-is-a-misnomer-for-the-real-common-core/ back in August 2012.
I just love these declarations of transformational intent. Plays well into next post too. These spring break weeks make my life unpredictable but it should go up tomorrow. I outlined it today and then had to play chauffeur to teenagers for a while.
Mike-I am struck by how much the directions of change laid out by the RSA in this post fit with the three spheres of transformation intent we encountered as this Trilogy began http://www.rsablogs.org.uk/2014/socialbrain/dimensions-social-change/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rsaprojects+%28RSA+blogs%29
The schemers all know this is all the same second order change, coming from every direction.
Robin, on that digitalpromise document, on page 2 they talk about “easing seat time requirements” so students don’t have to stay in school longer than needed to master competencies.
Seems like they want “education” to be nasty, brutish and short.
Well they want it to be lifelong so they keep getting revenue from everyone over many years.
Do you remember in the book where I talk about learning progressions and trajectories? That’s the desired concepts that then serve as lenses for perceiving reality plus the skills to act within it and especially to change it. When people have the desired lenses, skills, and new values and attitudes they are to move on. Think of it as programming the mind’s information processing system much like you would a computer program. I have thought that is what was going on for a while, ever since I read Galperin. Going through NCTM’s new Principles to Actions document the other day plus a book on cultivating intelligence Edmund Gordon mentioned I am now sure that is what is going on. Khan Academy has the same function as does a MOOC if you listen to Daphne Koller in her TED talk.
The personalized, individualized aspect is taking people wherever they are and trying to get them to common conceptions, associations, ways of perceiving, and then the omnipresent “values, attitudes, and beliefs.” Education is less about “nasty, brutish and short” than the great equalizer within society. If you have a bright kid, it is brutal because who they are and how their mind naturally wants to work is under intentional attack for deliberate reorganization.
Remember Professor David Perkins who developed CORE-Cognitive Reorganization that I wrote about? He gets cited a lot. So does Robert Sternberg who is also in the book and Resnick and Dweck.
Moving on when ready is how individual differences get handled beyond group projects. You do not get real Algebra anymore as an intellectual exercise. Algebra or Geometry or Physics become a means to illustrate real world problems. Or to deliberately misperceive as with CAGW and biodiversity.
We just have to protect our own kids, even if it is paying for a tutor to provide an old-fashioned intellectual discussion grounded in knowledge once a week. That can be the lifeline the bright child needs.
Robin, also for a document that’s allegedly about the benefits of digital technology, there’s an awful lot of stuff in “handwriting” in images that won’t get indexed by web crawlers like Google.
Generally speaking, a lot of these “action” documents are written in an intentionally primitive way. Non-indexable text in images, the appearance of crayon art, etc. Kinda annoying. But then I guess they don’t mind at all if we don’t look.
They say the changes are “necessary”. Communist-speak right there. need, must, words like that. Not words like should, propose, offer, examine..
This is all intended to become a fait accompli while even an informed person is wondering if national standards are a good idea or why the climate models do not reflect actual demonstrable conditions. The whole you can’t stop us just radiates from all of these documents. I keep thinking of the irony of trying to force communitarianism by people being deceitful, living at public expense and hoping to for the rest of their life, and being willing to harm children whatever the protests from parents.
Then you read the idea that this time we won’t be selfish and want to gag. Every one of these documents in the Quartet applies directly to education and comes out of the bibliography or subsequent ones. This is what the support for ‘best practices’ looks like. This is what I mean when I say there is no ambiguity on intentions, just intervening change agents possibly unaware of the extent of those intentions.
The Great Transition as the Tellus Institute so graphically laid out is all about Marx’s little c vision as if that is actually workable. It is a prescription for a kleptocracy and lots of very expensive dashed expectations. It’s not even sustainable in the short-run. The FuturICT plans around Big Data will line a whole lot of well connected pockets and create much mind arson, but those are not viable societies. In the short term as these plans become more and more widely acknowledged as devastating and interconnected though, it is knowledge of the long term intentions that lets us protect our own children from the worst of the intended effects.
I am reading yet another MIT Press book Disclosing New Worlds today from 1997. It could not be more applicable to what is intended for today, which is why it popped up as a cite. I just came down to check what Charles Spinosa and Fernando Flores were up to now.
http://survey.perts.net/share/toi is the survey Stanford and U Chicago developed to gauge students’ mindsets.
Look at the title.
Hmm, the video says you can set up a site link for your “students” and see if we have a growth mindset. Could be interesting to try…
Mike-It truly is hard to make this stuff up. http://www.teachthought.com/technology/difference-gamification-game-based-learning/
Computer games are appropriate to engage those otherwise not involved. What a mindless pursuit education is coming to be. Aspen Task Force pushing this vision.
Bingo, Al Jazeera is a media partner of WISE–World Innovation Summit in Education with UNESCO and the Qatar Foundation. http://www.wise-qatar.org/content/wise-initiative
Notice Exxon Mobil as a corporate partner. Not related in the least to their aggressive commercials touting the Common Core.
http://www.wise-qatar.org/content/wise-initiative shows the Rand Corporation is also a partner.
The UK and Qatar are extremely close chums. There is evidence that they actually turned the cash flow through Barclay’s and speculation to a river flowing to Qatar and they of course want to rule the global Islamic caliphate, but then again, I encounter about 97% propaganda in my research. There’s a funny video where they sing about how rich Qatar is now and they have a private Islamic Texas A and M because heaven forbid the Muslims have to go to classes with the Kufar. Al Jazzera is Muslim Brotherhood TV, they were banned it in Egypt, yes we have a huge Muslim Brotherhood central core group in the US with lots of money. They were supposed to have been shut down after the Holy Land Foundation trial of 2004, see US vs the holy land on you tube, but they really keep raising money. Their largest group is CAIR and their most dangerous operative is in Chicago. Their second group is ISNA run by Ingrid Mattson (Obama’s friend) and they came out in favor of Common Core.
I confronted Ingrid in St Louis. It was fun. 🙂
Liz-do you have a link to the private TX A&m? That is interesting.
What I have noticed in talking to high school students is a belief that wanting to talk about something like what the MB says there intentions are is to be bigoted against a religion.
Instead of a free exchange where you say this is what I am not comfortable with, It’s not OK to be uncomfortable at all.
But wait. It’s the US. Shouldn’t we be able to disagree as long as we are specific and respectful? Can’t we discuss it then?
Yes. Education, mind control crept into the UK parliament, which then went “global”, byebye patriotism. We now have a school in Leeds where English is the 2nd language. It seems to me that “they” want a top lot, rich, powerful (they) in control, and we the rest, plebs, obedient, illiterate and unable to defend our minds or our children’s minds, so the bottom lot vote only to support allowances, money from government. Now there is an added ingredient to wreck our culture – Islam, the spread of muslims throughout the world.
I will be glad to leave this world!
Mona Mcnee
Mona–I take it you are referring to enclaves in the UK where the officials are treating sharia law as outranking English law?
You might want to take a look also at the WISE links I just showed David in connection with Al Jazeera’s interest in the US Common Core. They, unlike the typical American, are aware this is a coordinated effort to attack well-stocked with accurate facts rational minds in the West.
Given that so much of the Belmont Challenge and Resilience and other social science research mentioned in this post is going on in Sweden, it is interesting that there was a story over the weekend that multiculturalism is destroying Sweden.
Have you ever noticed that when the actual results of action research and putting theories into practice and social engineering reality turns out to be bad, the academics and public officials do not want to jettison the theories that were unsound in the first place?
Mona-this is very good. You live in an unarmed country. Do you feel safer as a result? http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/04/government-power-and-evil.html
I would extend the comments about unarmed as in lacking a means of protecting against unauthorized force and extend it to governments intent on disarming the human mind’s ability to notice and object.
Islam trumps Communism, the elites have no idea, they think the Muslims they deal with love money like they do, but they have a different mindset. Communists have no god and desire power, control and money. They will be in for a shock when their utopia becomes a caliphate. They have no mental skills to comprehend nor stop the revolution for Allah. I am sure they have failed to study it. I see it as their Achilles heel. Mostly they feel superior and arrogant. I think even Blair was shocked at the public beheading of a soldier in the UK.
I think what’s going on is the middle and lower classes are being merged. Middle class life in the US used to be pretty darn good, practically upper class. 2 cars, one income, house in the suburbs, kids in good schools — you might not eat much caviar but you’ve got all the same important things as the wealthy, just in a simpler way. So the middle and upper classes were substantially merged.
Now the middle class is being ripped away from wealthy-like “entitlements”, like choosing your doctor and rational schooling, and economic security, and merged with the serfs.
David-
Bingo.
That is the play. And really…when the middle is merged with the lower economic class it effectively stops existing as a middle at all.
Just pledge fealty to your overlords.
So good to know the Great Transition now has a website by that name to commence the shift to serfdom. http://greattransition.org/
But they mean well and that supposedly makes all the difference?
The WSJ had an interesting article recently on the declining middle class in the USA. Much along the lines you’re thinking.
Mike-
A UK reader just sent me this report on Brainwashing with the Green Agenda in UK schools http://www.bishop-hill.net/storage/Education-reducedportrait.pdf
It was written by Bishop Hill’s Andrew Montford.
Mona-looks like the UK is really covering the Greenwashing in your schools now http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/04/08/Schoolchildren-terrorized-and-brainwashed-by-green-propaganda-says-damning-survey