Hello again. When your livelihood is figuring things out and then explaining them and a doctor tells you to quit typing so that an injury can heal, it can feel a bit like being a Mute. I noticed though that False Narratives in print and video proceeded in earnest while I was forced to be silent. I got to recognize precisely where the attempts to lead parents and the public astray were so let’s get started back with some Fake News busting. Since I get no money from any think tank or foundation, I get to tell people what is really going on. Because I may at this point have the largest library tracking what is and has been going on in the name of education of any private citizen in the world, I have the ability to accurately tell, with backup documentation, whatever story I aim to lay out.
Given the nature of the discussions on this blog and my book Credentialed to Destroy, we all have plenty of reason to wish that I am wrong. But I’m not and if I don’t keep plugging at these stories as all the plans are increasingly put in place, it appears no one else either can or will. I will keep things shorter though as none of us wants a relapse. If I told you I can trace the hype over Classical Education and School Choice as well as many of the published False Narratives about the Common Core and Competency-Based education to this just released graphic http://www.jubileecentre.ac.uk/userfiles/jubileecentre/pdf/character-education/ModelOfMoralDevelopment_JubileeCentre.pdf it would certainly make the rationale for the deceit much clearer, wouldn’t it?
We can also tie that graphic and those aims to control the internalized bases of future behavior to what is being called 21st Century Conservatism and the organized desire to mislead from 2011 called Closing the Door on Innovation. Should local governments and principals have the ability to create an educational environment and learning experiences that have a primary purpose of creating the kind of adult each student will be hardwired to become? Do officials get to lie to parents with impunity that that is precisely what they plan to do? Do we really want education to be about how “to cultivate the kind of kids you want to live next door to”? That last quote was from Henry County, Georgia and was touted recently as a national model by the Education Reimagined Initiative of the Convergence Center.
In mid-June the ultra well-connected entity Knowledge Works published “The Future of Learning: Redefining Readiness from the Inside Out”. Now each state in the US has to file a plan showing that it has goals for education that will create students who have certain characteristics of how they think and what they can do. That’s what Success means and such a student will be described as on track to be College, Career, and Citizenship Ready as an Adult. If that Readiness requirement though is actually about using education and required learning experiences to reshape each student’s “inner human core” then all the false narratives about supposed databases of Personally Identifiable Information or whether coursework is really getting students ready for textbook Algebra again make far more sense. Parents are worried about the wrong things and unaware of the true aims.
Let’s keep remedying that. Knowledge Works has a perfectly explicit graphic called “Shifting Principles in Education” that states that the previous emphasis (as CtD readers know) on Mastering Content is over. In its place the current emphasis is on “Thinking and Doing”. The desired new emphasis, however, of education is to be on “Feeling and Relating”. So your hypothetical new next door neighbor will not know much, but he will feel deeply, show empathy, and be compassionate towards others. There’s no mention as to whether they will hum Kumbayah when going down the driveway to get the mail. Keep the following passage in mind when you notice your state ESSA Plan to be filed with Betsy DeVos in DC keeps hyping the Whole Child or a desired Learner or Graduate Profile of desired internalized characteristics. No wonder Every Student can Succeed.
“Leveraging the emotion system to interface with the world and to connect deeply with other people represents the uniquely human capacity that people bring to work…Establishing a new focus on feeling and relating will help education institutions and systems align with a future of readiness in which the core social-emotional skills and foundational cognitive and metacognitive practices that we have described in this paper will be more important and enduring than specific content or job-and task-related skills.”
Children are now just another system to be rewired from the Inside-Out based on assumptions that the 21st Century globally needs a new kind of person with a different kind of mind and supposedly Virtuous Characteristics of what they believe and value and how they are to act towards total strangers. Since that kind of neural manipulation might not be popular if known, we get it lurking in misunderstood definitions like Readiness. How many people will look at the Further Reading bibliography and recognize that this new definition of Readiness and purpose of education is tied to this aim:
“rather than restructuring capitalism yet again, it is time to transcend it…[as part of] a broad-based shift to ecosocialism…Moving beyond the nightmare of barbarization and the limitations of the reformist path requires a redistribution of power downward and transformation towards a system in which social, economic, and rational planning trump private profit and the anarchy of market forces.”
Remember what I said about a big library of read resources? Knowledge Works called that desired planning “Coordinated Social Innovation” and describes a world of coordinating “organizations” like “partnerships across employers, communities, and state and federal agencies [that] use predictive analytics to project workforce needs and to provide timely skill development through adaptive career pathways. This coordinated approach helps individuals develop mosaic careers and find their niche in a constantly changing labor market.”
See now how WIOA fits in and needed to precede the new federal ed law? For this desired coordination of all of our lives and future livelihoods to succeed without effective protest in time, deceit is needed, neural rewiring is necessary, and the emotional part of the brain is to be trained to be the driver of future behavior. When we can see through the deceit though and recognize that Readiness does not mean what we assume we find the quote I will end on. We all have this kind of common core too.
“The core of the new foundation for readiness lies in developing a strong inner self that is resilient, reflective, and able to develop positive connections and relationships. Our emotion system is an important mechanism for sensing, interpreting, and communicating information about the world and other people. It affects our executive function–our decision-making, focus, and attention–as well as our memory, our relationships, our physical and mental health, and our learning. If we cannot manage them, our emotions can sabotage our goals and relationships.”
Kind, sweet, government and politicians of both parties, just wanting to control what guides our “decision-making, focus, and attention”. Lying to us about that aim and then pushing for neural rewiring to create Habits of Mind so the effects need not be immediately obvious. No wonder another book cited is on the history of artificial intelligence.
No computer has ever been programmed any more efficiently than what this definition of Readiness aims to do to our children.
Inside-Out should be Out of Bounds in a Free Society.
What I don’t get is how they square socialism with the materialism that the mega retailers and the multinationals have promoted in the last couple of decades. It will be interesting to see how they feel about the ‘planned economy’ when their sales start plummeting. Just take a look at the struggles in some of the European countries….
There were a couple of references in the KW paper to this. First, there’s an assumption that the purchasing base will widen via “experiments in universal income taking place all over the globe.” Also, the assumption is that the consumer oriented economy will give way to what the report itself boldfaced as a “new human-centered economy, driving growth in the caring professions, the arts, and civic projects.”
This really is the Marxian Human Development Society, even though his name is not used. I simply know the template. Here’s the description: Universal basic income programs, automation efficiency taxes, and other mechanisms for funding social supports and redistributing resources differ by state yet share the goals of buffering people against changing family and economic conditions, liberating human potential, and creating productive opportunities to carry out meaningful work with social purpose.”
If the aimed for purpose is anathema or impossible. we need to step back from this new type of education that is simply a tool to get there.
Vivian: They don’t know where wealth comes from. They think they can will it into existence. They want stuff but they have no idea how it is made or where it comes from. Educators (to use an example) want to invest pension funds in profitable companies who make things in China and they want to buy iphones and many other things made in China. They want to be paid money so they can buy stuff.
They just want to turn out students who cannot design or make stuff. They want to turn out ‘college ready’ students who require a year of remedial education in college. They want to turn out students from HS ‘STEM’ programs who are a year behind their foreign counterparts and require remedial education just to take first year calculus.
eclectic-to your point, take a look at what is involved in this point called “Designing Provocative Experiences” and tell me this is not a desire to reengineer the mind and personality.
https://whatedsaid.wordpress.com/2017/06/30/the-power-of-a-provocation/
This is from New Zealand so it is difficult to locate a country in the Developed World now not targeting the internalized level of the student for manipulation. Do watch that Jubilee Centre video I put up on flourishing as it was pushed by the same Angela Duckworth connected IPEN who released the Positive Education template at theat conference in Dubai I wrote about as a global template pushing PERMA.
The same Templeton Foundation that funds that Jubilee Centre is funding this work in the US as both Prospective Psychology and Positive Neuroscience. http://behavioralscientist.org/risks-ignoring-brain/ came out this week
Neuroscience dispensed via education is how public policy gets effected in the 21st century. The international comparisons ranking students are actually a means to get countries on the behavioral science/neuroscience bandwagon without parents and taxpayers protesting.
How timely, I just heard Amazon is offering Prime membership to people on welfare or some indicator of poorness. While we can still afford to buy from mega retailers, they can control our purchasing habits through product selection they offer and pricing. If they want you to become more ‘climate sensitive’ they can cut the margins on green items to get you hooked…or at least feel better about yourself.
This announcement confirms what I warned about in this post.
“Pediatrician Priscilla Chan and her husband, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, want to merge two competing approaches to education as part of their charitable efforts. Those approaches are “personalized learning,” which involves an approach to teaching and software designed to meet students’ individual learning needs, and support for the “whole child,” which prioritizes students’ physical, social and emotional wellbeing. They’re prepared to pour vast resources into the effort through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic LLC launched in 2015.
– Jim Shelton, former deputy secretary at the Education Department, is leading the effort. “We’ve got to dispel this notion that personalized learning is just about technology,” Shelton told Education Week. “In fact, it is about understanding students, giving them agency, and letting them do work that is engaging and exciting.” The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative doesn’t disclose the amounts of its philanthropic grants, raising transparency concerns. And CZI isn’t ruling out playing a role in politics, for instance, by donating to candidates or launching a PAC. CZI won’t commit to disclosing that political activity”
Hi Vivian.
I too have wracked my brain trying to think of an answer to this.
Such a system, as already mentioned by Robin several times before, is already being developed and perfected and is Agenda 21 or its more refined modern version, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s). But how do we accept these and start to follow it as a whole? It seems too far fetched and Utopian.
The only logical way I see people opting for a planned economy and a substantial reduction or minimal income is if their is a ‘war-time’ scenario, a physical catastrophic or the total destruction of our existing economic and social systems (my money is on this one), such that it will require rationing of energy and resources and the re-thinking of our social systems to require ‘cooperation’, ‘inclusiveness’, ‘common good’, ‘problem solving’ and the cultivation of ‘virtues’.
Does all this sound familiar? The young are trained for this new world and the old will, by necessity for survival or patriotism, buy the manufactured crisis/es as well.
The outcomes of current and future education will tell you at least what the desired mindset is needed for the early phases of this new system. The young must be given this mindset and abilities and leadership challenges because they must fit in and do the behaviors and work for this new system. Thus, we can see ‘now’ what the future world they are creating. Does it mesh with the SDG’s or some other model? What are the flaws in my thinking?
So much is out of sight and locally implemented via mandates about Equity or Social Determinants of Health. This should help as well as the emphasis on students learning to use data to “solve real world challenges”.
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/using_collaboration_to_harness_big_data_for_social_good
Remember too those AISP Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy links I put up from UPenn. Those integrated data systems at the state or local level are being used to direct policies in non-visible ways unless you know they exist.
I think you have nailed it John.
You’ll love this. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-07-03-new-pbs-show-will-teach-preschoolers-how-to-think-like-computers
No wonder I can see so much of AI in how competency-based education is to really work.
Hope you had a happy 4th.
But I like that one! The devil is in the details and implementation, and whether elementary school teachers can deliver such a curriculum of course …
We should have been doing that all along, teaching kids logical thought processes. And computers enforce logic, because the computer does what you tell it exactly, not what you sort of wanted it to do.
Say what you want about Boston (WGBH is the educational channel there) they have some good intellectual resources and good ways of thinking.
But what if thinking like a computer means supplying the schema, concepts, connections, and ontology for the student to internalize just like a computer you are teaching semantic understanding to? Do you want governments doing that so the child will have the desired malleable mind?
How about using Minecraft to teach SEL? http://www.gettingsmart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/How-Minecraft-Supports-SEL.pdf
Remember UNESCO is hyping that “Now, more than ever, education has a responsibility to foster the right type of skills, attitudes, and behavior that will lead to sustainable and inclusive growth.”
I read Cesar Hidalgo’s Why Information Grows while I was ailing. He is a prof now at MIT and it is quite clear he intends to use ed now to “replace the software and rewire the hardwire” of the student’s brain. What MIT or Harvard previously sought and what they are pushing now seems to be heavily influenced by all their work for the UN. remember MIT is a partner in that Earth Science Partnership created by the Belmont Challenge I covered in the early days of the blog. It was my horror at what that entailed that caused me to initially put the completed CtD manuscript aside and start this blog.
Robin you’re probably right. As an MIT alum I am very troubled about the current anti-science administration. They’ve never had great leadership since I’ve been aware, but Rafael Reif’s approach is the antithesis of what I learned about science. He says MIT has a view on “climate science” while ignoring tenured faculty at his institution with very serious disagreements.
And while elementary teachers can’t deliver true computer-science training, they can deliver an indoctrination. It could be the same sort of misdirection that confused me a few years ago with Bloom’s Taxonomy. It sounds like it could be great, should be great, but the implementation is junk and false.
The bottom line is that we can’t trust much, and almost everything is a threat, because we have the wrong people in almost every position. Drain the Swamp!
Do you think most people will see the SDGs being implemented when the vehicles are these public-private partnerships https://www.sdgfund.org/sites/default/files/business-and-un/SDGF_BFP_HKSCSRI_Business_and_SDGs-Web_Version.pdf and just today the NAS launched a report from two workshops from 2015 on “Lessons Learned from Diverse Efforts to Change Social Norms” which lays out how to change prevailing attitudes, values, and beliefs that differ from what is desired going forward.
The Behavioral Sciences allied with Neuroscience and now PPPs are hard to see, especially when the local level is the favored point.
We have been tracking and fighting SDG’s in southeast Florida for some time now. Currently, in Indian River County, we are fighting the regional efforts to force Transit Oriented Development down our throats with inter-city transit, stack/pack housing and mixed use. Right now we are making headway because we’ve exposed their plans to allow taller buildings, increase square foot of building per acre and narrow streets – all in an effort to remove parking lots and put in car charging stations. Grants and DOT funding will all be tied to complying in the near future and the young people will all think it’s normal.
Your focus is on the real estate physical component of the Upravleniye with several articles in just the last several days from both the UK and the NYT writing about Houston insisting that wealthy areas can no longer keep out affordable housing. At least those are visible to people paying attention.
That’s why all this deceit over what these education terms and practices really mean is both so toxic and so dangerous. Where do you go to protest when the principal is lying to you, your school board is being lied to by the overpaid Super, and the authors of books on the Common Core or websites and bloggers claiming to be against the Common Core are pushing falsehoods in what certainly appears to be a coordinated effort and narrative?
NAS also released a paper today called “Engaging the Private Sector and Developing Partnerships to Advance Health and the Sustainable Development Goals” that is all about using Business to both fulfill the SDGs and create a new global economic system. It’s much harder to see and protest against. Here’s a hugely troubling quote:
“the SDGs are a manifesto for all, not just governments or specific sectors. Every company, faith group, and university along with governments and international organizations should align their work with and contribute to the realization of the goals. The SDGs are the business of everyone…this shift will require different thinking, organization, and action.”
Notice how new ways of thinking is always front and center and too few recognize those aims as hiding behind innocuous sounding phrases like Excellence, Quality Learning, or competency-based education.
HUD’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing mandates – implementing quotas for HUD housing by county. There are a number of people currently working thru Dr. Carson’s new HUD to try and get this horrendous project stopped.
Susan:
Dubuque IA is a 3 hour drive west of Chicago IL. Dubuque had public housing and gave preference to city residents and then county residents as best I recall. This was ‘racist’ according to the Obama HUD because they were mostly white.
HUD sued and rather than be buried under legal costs Dubuque agreed to become part of the Chicago housing region. They must accept section 8 voucher holders from Chicago. They cannot favor locals.
Chicago and Obama = the birth of regionalism big league. Westchester, County NY’s HUD lawsuits worked just as planned, scared the B-Jesus out of everyone.
Equity initiatives like Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing and Human Caused Climate Change are really just excuses for the desired economic and social planning. https://muninetworks.org/content/transcript-community-broadband-bits-episode-260
Here’s the ‘shared values’ meme again and being distributed widely to all those state and local officials not invited to Aspen to “discuss ideas”. http://www.routefifty.com/management/2017/07/what-does-community-mean/139187/
Heather Gerken, the New Dean of Yale Law, was also at Aspen and her new concept of federalism and democracy is also being widely circulated. In ‘democracy,’ she says, we have an obligation to come to a mutual agreement. Apparently Fascism in practice if not by that moniker is quite popular these days in New Haven as well as Cambridge and Palo Alto.
John has a good point. Problem, reaction, solution to usher in their ‘new world order’. I don’t think the Hidden Hand will be satisfied until the entire population is microchipped. Speaking of Agenda 21, they are tearing down beautiful, historical buildings and homes here in Portland at a lightening speed. It is sickening. The new buildings are horrific looking – no character and prision-like . They want to get rid of anything from the past so we don’t get nostalgic. A longing for the past can give rise to revolutionary thoughts.
On another note, bought 3 copies of Robin’s book. Since my daughter is insistent on going back to her now CC School, I am sending a copy of Credentialed to Destroy to both the Archbishop and Principal. I hope they have the courage to read it.
,
This will not be pleasant to read but the 2016 version of the World Happiness Report issued by the UN had what it referred to as a Special Rome Edition as well as meetings at the Vatican to lay it all out. This is Chapter 2 called “Human Flourishing, the Common Good, and Catholic Social Teaching.” http://worldhappiness.report/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/03/HR-V2Ch2_web.pdf
Getting at John’s point as well, schools, the media, workplaces, churches are all ‘mediating structures’ and their revised job is to remake our very consciousness outside our consent. We also see it laid out by Senator Mike Lee and the JEC Committee in Congress in what they are calling the Social Capital Project. Guess who the Social Capital is? Read this if rain interferes with your holiday plans. https://www.lee.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/socialcapitalproject Isn’t it wonderful Congress wants to direct our associational life? Remind anyone else of all the communitarian ethos and mandated altruism and Hardwired to Connect?
We are not supposed to see these binding webs. There’s a reason the organized deceit on K-12 keeps mentioning workplace preparation while the march to enshrine the internalized bases of future behavior marches on.
If you are not as prone to reading footnotes as me, notice the reference to Betsy DeVos and what drives her in this footnote from that special Rome edition. Remember too she used to be on the Board of AEI who sponsored the Mediating Structures Project Mike Lee praises for 21st Century inspiration. Her husband Dick DeVos has now taken her place.
The Daly referred to in the following quote wrote a 2009 book God’s Economy: Faith-based initiatives and the Caring State.
“Daly (2009) argues that the welfare states inspired by Christian Democratic traditions in postwar Europe showed how to blend solidarity and subsidiarity [the local!] in practical way. In this model, the public sector authorizes and finances social programs, while private associations take responsibility for delivery of service and benefits. [School Choice!]. In Germany, for example, social assistance laws require public bodies to enlist churches, religious communities, and ‘free welfare associations’ (some of which are religious in nature, both Catholic and Protestant). The Netherlands instituted a similar model based on a Dutch Calvinist theology.”
The DeVos’ would be the two most famous graduates of Calvin College, which pushes a similar vision as has their philanthropy and some of their ‘business’ investments. There is a rather fascinating discussion I found about the investment early on in Bill Bennett’s K12 that suggests they are quite aware of the desire to create the appropriate mediation within the mind.
I found this link while wandering the net: http://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-40485293/the-futuristic-school-where-you-re-always-on-camera
Robin has done past posts on the potential impact of computer monitoring and adapting to the individual child. Could be theoretically good, but could also lead to a very bad place in the wrong hands.
Like this one? http://invisibleserfscollar.com/hyping-personalized-digital-instead-of-closed-loop-learning-sounds-better-omits-all-that-troubling-data-gathering-too/
It is with a heavy heart that I write these words. They will appear so defeatist; especially to the ears of Americans, but I have tried to reason this one one out and it seems we are fighting a battle that is already over!
We have made several cardinal errors in a our analyses. What if what we are seeing is not haphazard, opportunistic and short-term, but is instead intergenerational, ideologically catalyzed construction of a new society – the end being too far for us to envision? By that I do not mean only that several generations carry on the same vision and mission, but that each generation is split off from the previous one, given new gaols, a new vocabulary and new values, religions, world views than the preceding. It can’t be done all at once as it will seem manufactured, but each new generation is worked on incrementally, such that finally, those with the new ‘everything’ is in the majority. The others have died off or are ineffectual and their voice can be drowned out. Those institutions interested in pushing the economy. society, politics and the world in some direction are speaking their world into existence in every form of communication system and in every sector of society. They speak the same things, foundations make grants and policy institutes push plans that always push in one direction. All bases are covered. The same things are formulated in different ways over and over again. That is because in each iteration, extra elements are added and new assessments made of their efficacy. You do not have to even force people to do anything, the ideas are matched with feelings of goodness and loving kindness gain a mental and physical reality, a thing to strive for, to live by, encapsulating all of man’s needs. To capture the more self-interested and less esoteric, the process is given additional cover by the concept of progress. This term is used to conflate mainly technological advances with social change such that we talk of progressive causes and social change as if it is always good and always must move forward to some nirvana. This is logically inconsistent, but intoxicating to emotionally charged individuals.
Life long learning has been occurring for all via school, media, work, public space etc. as Robin has said. We have made the mistake of believing that things just appear – no – they creep up on us.
Please try and listen to this show from Australia via our national broadcaster. They are a major propaganda organ in Australia. The program is more of a lifestyle program and as a result the talk is deceptively candid and uses modest amounts of modern jargon. The interviewer is either naive or bad at what she does. She never asks any incisive questions . In addition, part way through the discussion, there is an admission that people must get through their heads, and it is not a new idea – states plan the future and we must go along with it. It is horrifying these days because they all have the same play-book and end-point and it has nothing to do with some underlying ethical and moral system- it is merely technocratic. Have you ever wondered why no one asks – why are disruptive processes allowed to happen and the only response given is to ‘adapt’? We must adapt to climate change, to immigration, to a new global economy, to everything. We are powerless to act, they say. No they are not. They are planning the things that are happening, but do not dare tell us that it is deliberate and what the consequences will be for people. They gloss over them and simply say it is inevitable. The outcomes are truly frightening and I do not wonder why there is this full spectrum educative dominance to make people malleable for these changes.
There is a link to City2050 (http://www.city2050.com.au) – where on the front page there is the statement:
city2050 works with elected members, executives, planners, community leaders and change makers to create preferred futures.
Things do not evolve – they are manufactured. Think this is far-fetched? Please try and access this paper:
Computing brains: learning algorithms and neurocomputation in the smart city.
It will summarise what Smart Cities and Smart Education really are and how they are linked. If you think ‘nudging’ is intrusive – this will knock your socks off.
This paper will make you shake with rage; especially the conclusions. Please follow the references as well.
Sorry for leaving out the link to the broadcast I mentioned. It is as follows:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/blueprintforliving/designing-cities-around-driverless-cars/8678100
John:
From your link:
“city2050 provides expertise in urban governance, strategy and policy that is innovative, future-focused and outcome orientated.
It is valuable to cities, communities and corporations who understand that the future looks nothing like the past and aspire to be more prepared, connected and empowered.
city2050 works with elected members, executives, planners, community leaders and change makers to create preferred futures.
Services include training, speaking and consulting provided by Stephen Yarwood.”
OK Mr. Yarwood, show us your future predictions made 10 years ago. They had better include Uber, self driving cars, and drone delivery. If not we’ll stick with our Gypsy fortune teller.
Your first assignment would be managing 10 square blocks of Southwest Chicago IL USA. The gangs there are prepared, connected and empowered. Good luck.
Don’t make me laugh! I thought the same thing, but I can see now that he is just another contributor to the cause. He is also an example to may others who will become converts in order to benefit from the opportunities that will arise when the Circular Economy, Sharing Economy, Smart City and Smarter Education infrastructure are being planned, created and maintained. Individuals will sell their expertise as consultants and businesses will change in order to survive or get a head start. Those with the ability to talk and appear in public will be more generously rewarded I would think
I have just been listening to some presentations from a forum concerning the Circular Economy in Finland (https://www.sitra.fi/en/projects/world-circular-economy-forum-2017/#wcef2017). The thought of listening to hours of content made me wince, but when they started, I was riveted.
Once you considered the consequences of their ideas and used it like a formula to see where they will lead – you have to be shocked.
Please take your time and work through them. It may sound simplistic, but why would you need Smarter Education? To create and maintain a Smart City. Why would you want a Smart City where everything is monitored and connected with feedback loops? Because you need a Circular Economy where, regardless of what the definitions are or how many iterations it goes through, has only one goal in mind – to usher in all those changes seen as needed to meet the sustainability and ‘climate change’ goals.
Their discussions may seem pie in the sky, but look at the players, the foundations and internationalist organizations represented here. Many of the videos are on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/SitraFund/videos).
He may have seen this:
https://www.sitra.fi/en/projects/world-circular-economy-forum-2017/#wcef2017
Full videos are here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/SitraFund/videos
Here is why you need a Smart ‘this’ and Smart ‘that’. To control it all if it is to be a global racket. Imagine the opportunists and insider deals.
Listen to the videos. They are worth it for understanding. Look at the players and organizations involved
The IBM papers at your “Computing Brains” link declared they were working with Gwinnett County Schools. It is the adjacnt county to were I live and has twice won the Broad Prize. Now we know why for sure.
This is really not speculative to me. The children whose brains are being rewired are my neighbors and friends’ children. Meanwhile the parents listen to the False Narratives deliberately misleading them. I have written about attending the APP/Pioneer summit in marietta in summer 2013. The day before they were in Gwinnett.
These local school districts are far more predatory than the Bogeyman fedED. It’s what these Gypsy Supers are paid to do although in Alvin’s case he stays and they just pay evermore. What a retirement he will have courtesy of taxpayers,
I know you are correct in what has been aspired to, as CtD lays out, this is the third try, and since I wrote it I have gathered together what really is a vast library going back to the late 40s and post WW2 aspiring to rewire the brain to create a new consciousness to support a different vision of what it will be to be human. This is the paper you mentioned and it has come out in the last 6 months. It is tied to IBM so it ties to their System of Systems work laid out in the Concluding Chapter of Credentialed to Destroy.
https://www.stir.ac.uk/research/hub/publication/20789
I do disagree that understanding the aspirations and the extent of their aims and the duplicity is defeatist. It’s the opposite in my mind. It’s the commencement of effective resistance and the needed insurrectionary action. We are communicating about this from different parts of the globe now and people are waking up.
Thanks for helping me wake them up.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1181194 is a better link as it will let me get to the actual 20 page pdf.
Robin:
I grabbed one sentence.
“The article conceptualizes the relationship between learning algorithms, neuroscience, and the new learning spaces of the city by combining the notion of programmable ‘code/space’ with ideas about the ‘social life of the brain’ to suggest that new kinds of ‘brain/code/spaces’ are being developed where the environment itself is imagined to possess brain-like functions of learning and ‘human qualities’ of cognition performed by algorithmic processes. ”
Alan Sokal lives! I am amazed people can make a living writing drivel like this.
I have no idea what any of this word salad maps to. If IBM is involved they might even contract useful idiots like this to write propaganda but I can assure you they laugh themselves sick when they read this crap.
Fortunately or not I was able to grab quite a bit of what is laid out in that bibliography and the mentioned New Sociology for a New Century Project in turn tied to the Wellcome involvement with the October 27-28 workshop in London Forum on Public-Private Partnerships and “Engaging the Private Sector and Developing Partnerships to Advance Health and the SDGs.” IBM clearly does have this aspiration.
This is the paper that tied to Wellcome and it was found on the NIH server so there’s the tie to their funding of the Science of Virtues too. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4425296/ “Social Science and Neuroscience beyond Interdisciplinarity: Experimental Entanglements”
There was also this http://www.urbantransformations.ox.ac.uk/debate/the-neurosocial-city/
This will not work out as planned, but the aspirations are not disputable.
Re David and “thinking like a computer”: Remember, “garbage in, garbage out.” If your major premise is wrong, so will be your conclusions, even if your computer-brain reasons with impeccable Aristotelian logic. And the Overseers are making sure that the major premises being fed to our information-starved students fit the false utopian narrative constructed with all the Big Ideas and Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions that have been exposed and analyzed over the years on ISC.
I never tire of telling concerned parents that what our students need is not “to learn how to think” but information. Lots and lots of information.
This quote from that link John called our attention to is precisely what you and I have been warning about. By the way did you see that on July 5 Princeton prof Robert George, founder of the deceit prone American Principles Project and the Witherspoon Institute so interested in the false Closing the Door on Innovation Common Core narrative, Bradley Foundation board member, and member of the Commission on Civil Society, and co-author with John Haldane of that 2015 Human Flourishing book came out and endorsed the CLT? It certainly puts all of the deceitful and purloined narratives APP has foisted on parents and concerned adult groups in connection with the Common Core into its rightful context. They want to control what is internalized, but not have that neural aim recognized. They want part of the truth to come out so their employees seem authoritative, but not all of it. Just like the admitted Progs.
“Neuroeducation, in particular, tends to treat brain processes as if they are computational or algorithmic processes, and is part of an emerging field of policy experimentation that treats reductive forms of neuroscientific evidence about the neurobiological processes of young people as the target for strategic intervention (Pykett, 2015) .Through the ‘biopolitics of the brain sciences,’ the ‘cerebral knowledges’ of neuroscience are coming to play a significant role in contemporary techniques of governance, whereby experts of the brain, rather than of “psy” or society, ’are understood to be addressing societal challenges, and ‘governing the conduct of human beings [has] come to require, presuppose and utilize a knowledge of the human brain’(Rose & Abi-Rached, 2014, pp. 3–5). As a result, neuroscientific developments have become entwined with strategies designed to govern human conduct by drawing upon the growing availability of empirical knowledge of the brain. ”
That’s quite a confession to what I had tracked down, but it’s all in one paragraph. My bolding on governance. It certainly puts all the hype on self-government and self-regulation instilled via a reimagined education into its proper context.
Jonah Goldberg has discovered that ignorance is a real problem. Glad he is no longer ignorant about this. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449274/americas-ignorance-historical-literacy-lacking
Self-Esteem Movement 30 years later — con, hoax
How the self-esteem movement gained global traction has now been revealed. It took one year of investigative work to bring forth the never-before-told story of how one needy person’s drive and distortion of research started the self-esteem crusade — now rather discredited.
The author of the book Selfie, Will Storr, has provided a good digest of his findings in an article in the Guardian — Search for “It was quasi-religious’: the great self-esteem con”.
Advancing further on the theme of the irrationality of the self-esteem campaign, Chester Finn (a long-time education critic) wonders if some journalist, 25 years hence, will expose the current interest in social-emotional learning as fake, rebranded self-esteem. It “smacks of the self-esteem mindset” says Finn. See — Why are schools still peddling the self-esteem hoax? Social-emotional learning is rooted in ‘faux psychology’ — http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/06/21/why-are-schools-still-peddling-the-self-esteem.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EducationWeekVouchers+%28Education+Week%3A+Vouchers%29
Will these kinds of exposés of duplicity and hidden agendas help in the days ahead? Robin says that revelations of this sort as covered on ISC should help in “effective resistance and the needed insurrectionary action”.
My experience with Chester Finn is that he and Bill Bennett have done well obfuscating the true nature of standards and education reforms. Once I discovered his and Diana Ravitch’s founding of the Educational Excellence Network and what it advocated and then project Education Reform, all back in the 80s, and then who all was involved with EEN’s Educational Policy Committee, I think he is simply trying to mask the true nature of these education reforms once again.
Remember this paper of his written with Dennis Doyle (then at aei and later with heritage). Looks like the Bradley Foundation sponsored National Affairs has taken down “American schools and the future of local control” since I wrote about it last fall. Of course I have a hard copy with my comments as part of the EEN file.
Complicit Apologists in Education are like the “dog that didn’t bark”. The crime continues if the watchdog is familiar with the culprits. An alarm is not set of when it should be.
I agree fully with your comment that some “have done well obfuscating the true nature of standards and education reforms.” The field of think-tanks and other “watchdog” agencies that pretend to speak for the public interest in education are a big part of the problem. Their own self-interest interferes with real analysis ad condemnation when called for.
That’s why I thought it rather brave of Chester Finn to break rank and call-out “social emotional learning” as just another ed con or hoax. He also calls-out the larger 21st Century skills initiatives. But, he does fail to really challenge these global, organized, accelerating fads, as he should!
Instead, all he offers is a shrug and a prediction that in 25 years time SEL will be denounced as self-esteem is today. Casualties, waste, compromised life-chances of students — continue in this undisciplined field of today’s farce of public education! So disappointing!
But, I’ll still keep looking for opportunities for “effective resistance and the needed insurrectionary action”.
Robin:
You wrote:
““Social Science and Neuroscience beyond Interdisciplinarity: Experimental Entanglements””
Please stop. Wheez. Gasp. LMAO. I can’t take any more.
No one with a real job can read this without laughing. That includes the sales people at Pearson, IBM, Kaplan, etc.
Jordan B. Peterson noted that 80% of the post modern journal articles are cited zero times.
I’m a little confused because it was most definitely cited as it was in the “Computing Brains” bibliography. As I said the Wellcome Trust is the host of the SDG workshop and the notes at the end of that article let us know there is an Interacting Minds Centre project. Oh. Joy.
Lots of references to the Human Brain Project which we have also covered.
Off to watch Part 2 of an old BBC Miss Marple that I recorded. I do need a diversion from these toxic aspirations. Murder mysteries at this point seem more innocuous.
Robin:
I did not mean that the paper you mentioned was not cited. It just came to mind that most gibberish papers are not, according to something Jordan B. Peterson said.
I thought I was going to write today until I started following up on what was in that paper coupled to what I know that lets me read these sources differently.
Did you see that Volkswagen Foundation sponsorship? I kept thinking about the fraud with their diesel engines and how they thought it was Ok because the point of selling cars is to create jobs. Anyway it openly laid out the integration of neuroscience, Philosophy, and Psychology, which is certainly something to talk about. The philosophy aspect has to do with the Human Devt Society that I keep warning about and which the right pincer think tanks like heritage and aei seem to be quietly behind as sponsors when I delve enough.
I have delved so deeply I probably should be concerned with nitrogen poisoning.
http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-They-Built-at-Brain-Camp/134016 also popped out this morning
Glad you were not minimizing this. So glad that my writing CtD pulled out both sides of this false narrative aimed at the mind at a neurobiological level.
Catching up after long vacation. Looks like you are feeling better, glad to see it.
Turns out the UK Behavioural Insights Team has Education square on its plate of agendas. http://38r8om2xjhhl25mw24492dir.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/BI-for-Education-A-Practical-Guide-for-Parents-Teachers-and-School-Leaders.pdf?3
It is scientific and technocratic ‘hubris’. It seems that the more you know about nature, the more you will control it. You cannot help yourself. Only the excuses get more and more creative.
I have a big list of a similar unit being set up in Australia.