That quote came from a fall 2017 slideshare down in South America by Pavel Luksha, the Director of the Global Education Futures Initiative where he went on to post in his next sound byte that “The frontier of evolution of the [sic] humanity is thus the self-guided evolution of consciousness.” Now someone can accuse me of simply mining for inflammatory comments as to what is planned for K-12 education and its true aims and Pavel Luksha is not showing up at school district planning strategies, but education consultants who have been working with him at forums like the one on Silicon Valley in 2015 I wrote about or GEFF forums in Russia are. The GEFF plans “that aim to change global model of education at scale” thus may have a way into your local schools, public or private.
Aspirations of “Improving collective understanding and collaboration capacity of human groups through new modes of (collective) consciousness” are not in fact grandiose declarations if those common understandings and capacities make it into prescribed learning standards and new definitions of student achievement and frameworks for success. Luksha ended the slideshow with a picture of Buckminster Fuller and this quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Too many parents are still listening to hype about Student Success, or a Portrait of a Graduate in a state ESSA plan, or a vision statement from a charter, parochial, or independent school through the existing reality of education that they experienced.
All over the world they fail to realize that a new model is being set up using enough old rhetoric to obscure the enormity of the sought shift or its revolutionary declared intentions (if, like me, you know where to look). It aims to shift “living systems” like people, but also cities and workplaces by targeting “human intentionality and social structures” while we assume the familiar is what is intended. Meanwhile, UNESCO, foundations, ed supers at a district level, and school heads are, as Luksha’s slides also showed, targeting “Psycho-technologies (including spirituality & religion)” for deliberately designed change along with “Institutes /Norms/ Rules/ Soft Tech.” Since Luksha stated it was in an effort to shift us all to a “Thrivability” or “Wisdom-Based Society” and GEFF’s tentacles extend all the way to the local level on an organized basis, we should listen to this planned:
“shifting to ‘horizontal’ net-centric world ‘working for 100% of humanity…without ecological damage or disadvantage of anyone’ (B. Fuller). Implies involving everyone and all in a ‘revolution of consciousness’. Technological advancement is necessary but secondary to the development of individual and collective human potential.”
Since one of my life mottoes is to recognize when we are on the menu so we can recognize how we are to be captured for eating, and this aspiration for some type of planned cultural evolution via education to alter consciousness, has kept coming up since I covered UNESCO founder, Julian Huxley in Credentialed to Destroy, let’s use a quote of his brother’s, cited early on in a book on Esalen, The Upstart Spring, that I stumbled across during an offline discussion on the commonalities between what is going on in K-12 globally and required management training and coaching practices that kept linking to Esalen and Integral Philosophy. If all these collective institutions like schools and workplaces, especially involving multinational corporations, are suddenly requiring participation in practices designed to alter consciousness and prevailing understandings in common ways, we have every right to recognize those intentions and track through to the beginning of such plans for a “psychological revolution.” Here is Aldous in 1960:
“Let us begin [said Huxley in his kindly Oxonian accents] by asking a question: What would have happened to a child of 170 I.Q. born into a Paleolithic family at the time of, say, the cave paintings of Lascaux? Well, quite obviously, he could have been nothing but a hunter and a gatherer. There was no other opportunity for him to be anything else.
The biologists have shown us that, physiologically and anatomically, we are pretty much the same as we were twenty thousand years ago and that we are using fundamentally the same equipment as the Aurignacean man to produce incredibly different results. We have in the course of these twenty thousand years actualized a tremendous number of things which at that time and for many, many centuries thereafter were wholly potential and latent in man.
This, I think, gives us reason for tempered optimism that there is still a great many potentialities–for rationality, for affection and kindliness, for creativity–still lying latent in man; and, since everything has speeded up enormously in recent years, that we shall find methods for going almost as far beyond the point we have reached now within a few hundred years as we have succeeded in going beyond our Aurignacean ancestors in twenty thousand years. I think this is not entirely a fantastic belief. The neurologists have shown us that no human being has ever made use of as much as ten percent of all the neurons in his brain. And perhaps, if we set about it in the right way, we might be able to produce extraordinary things out of this strange piece of work that a man is.”
I bolded that line because I think a great way to accurately decipher the purpose of all these education reforms grounded in ‘cognitive science’ with holistic aspirations that started in the 1960s in earnest after Huxley’s speech, and in earnest in the 80s just after The Upstart Spring was first published, tracks to what both Huxleys had in mind. It’s also what UNESCO clearly has in mind now in the name of Media Education, Futures Literacy, and the Discipline of Anticipation. It’s what Pavel Luksha and GEFF have laid out. What if all these aspirations and their commonalities keep coming up because no one accurately told us where Uncle Karl’s hoped for battleground for transformation really lay?
In the 1930s professor Sidney Hook published a book he called Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation that he refused to allow to come back into print during the remainder of his life. The publisher of the reprint, the humanist Paul Kurtz in 2002, shows up at several points in that Esalen book and then at 21st century UNESCO conferences. If altering consciousness via education is everyone’s actual aim, let’s see why:
“all social action and change is mediated by ideas in the minds of men. Ideas, therefore, cannot be passive images; they must be active instruments…The scientific approach to society involves the continuous application of ideals to the functioning of institutions and the continuous testing of those ideals by the social consequences of their application…Processes of social transformation are thus at the same time processes of psychological transformation. The dialectic principle explains how human beings, although conditioned by society, are enabled through activity, to change both society and themselves. Intelligent social action becomes creative action. ‘By acting on the external world and changing it,’ says Marx, ‘man changes his own nature.’…
Human nature does not change over night. It develops slowly out of the perception of new needs which, together with the limiting condition of the environment, determine new tasks and suggest new goals. But the new needs themselves do not emerge suddenly into human experience. They arise out of an attempt to gratify the old needs in a shifting environment and find conscious articulation only in the active practical process by which man both changes and adjusts to his environment…This theory of perception was necessitated by his [Marx] philosophy of history. If human beings are active in history, then, since all human activity is guided by ideas and ideals, human thinking must be an active historical force.”
And so it is. If we do not understand its role well enough to grasp why Sidney Hook himself italicized the word thinking back in the 1930s, having those thought processes of concepts, ideas, and ideals manipulated for political purposes in the 21st century is exactly what will continue to go on in earnest. Tying these aspirations over decades and continents to recently, Education Week ran a story on August 13 that “Meditation Isn’t Just About Self Help. Here’s What Educators Need to Know”. It wanted to make sure yoga, meditation, and mindfulness standards (sometimes as part of anti-bullying or Positive School Climate mandates and others as part of Physical Well-being State Standards) were not merely being used as a “distraction to get people to adjust to oppressive conditions.”
Oh, no, these requirements are needed to change consciousness just like Aldous Huxley, Esalen, and Pavel Luksha’s presentation all had in mind. The post ended with a call that these practices are a necessary component to education now to cultivate the necessary “critical consciousness. We also need the knowledge and skill to challenge norms and structures perpetuating inequities. Integrating both mindful reflection with social-justice action has the greatest potential to shape coalitions, build collective empowerment, and mediate a new standard for education.”
That new standard is all about altering prevailing consciousness, or, as an earlier post noted, regulating subjectivity at the individual level of the mind and the cultivated ideals instilled in the personality at the level of ideals, norms, and habits.
Is that what anyone is recognizing when they think of Student Success and Achievement or Competencies in the 21st Century? Time to wake up to get ourselves off the revolutionary transformation menu.
Robin,
As you say and have demonstrated in your important posts on mind
games in K-12 ‘education,’
“All over the world they fail to realize that a new model is being set up
using enough old rhetoric to obscure the enormity of the sought shift
or its revolutionary declared intentions (if, like me, you know where to
look). It aims to shift “living systems” like people, but also cities and
workplaces by targeting “human intentionality and social structures”
while we assume the familiar is what is intended. ”
Here’s a video that reveals other globalist attacks, via UN Agenda 21
on human freedom .My own research on George Soros’ program for
global governance is another cross reference to what’s taking place
by global elites. It’s Orwellian.
Maybe we should start using the phrase ‘Huxleyan’ to describe these deliberate plans to create political and economic transformation via cultural evolution by targeting the individual mind and then using euphemisms like Character or Social and Emotional Learning.
Nel Noddings, who wrote the Foreword to Riane Eisler’s book, has been active in both the General Evolution Research Group pushing intentional cultural evolution. She has also been involved in Positive School Climate initiatives in Australia. There has been a great deal of deceit to try to stop anyone from recognizing the actual bullseye and the methods used, but this time we recognize it thoroughly, don’t we?
In my ongoing knee rehab, I wrote this and then took a walk. Very cathartic, inside and out.
Wanted to make sure you saw this global ed template P21 just launched and this mentioned conference in China. http://www.gettingsmart.com/2018/08/closing-the-familiarity-gap-through-global-education/
Calling these kids the SDG generation sounds better than engineered SDG ‘living systems’ but the latter is more reflective of what all this internalized reengineering aims to do.
https://www.greattransition.org/publication/serving-the-earth-serving-one-another also fits with this post and is just out. I wrote about Joanna Macy in the early years of the blog.
So we have the Australian Tony MacKay, who headed ATC21S and who attended the Rockefeller forums on the Discipline of Anticipation and Futures Literacy that are now UNESCO policy taking over the National Center for Education and the Economy from Marc Tucker. http://ncee.org/marc-tucker-to-step-down-anthony-mackay-to-succeed/
More confirmation it is a global template we are dealing with. NCEE was also behind the New Standards Project in the US that really inaugurated the learning standards push.
Robin,
Yr first link, ‘Closing the Familiarity network through Education, ‘
might sound like education but, …’shaping 1,610 students to become
responsible Global Citizens and to be the Ambassadors of the United
Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals.’ Straight out of George
Soros European Central University, ‘occupy their heads.’
I will come back in tonight and read all those other links.
This is from your next door neighbor, New Zealand, involving both SDGs and Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory, tying them together, and adding in what the Esalen-Ford Project in the 70s called Confluent Education. That’s why the Passions are so important. The child connects from emotion, not intellect primarily.
https://whatedsaid.wordpress.com/2018/08/22/beyond-ourselves/
To get a further idea of the global template we are dealing with targeting the internalized drivers of the mind and personality take a look at yesterday’s announcement. https://curriculumredesign.org/ccr-and-somos-educao-announce-partnership-on-21st-century-competencies-for-the-brazilian-national-curriculum-currredesign-4dedu/
Four Dimensions translated into 15 languages? And to think people wondered why CtD accurately saw the common core as simply another form of competency-based ed (and not in the False Narrative’s vocational misuse of the term).
Same ol’ ‘ Sustainability Development ‘ meme imparted via passion.
Like Soros’ funded Central European University, training social justice
warriors, the occupy movement, ‘occupy their heads.’
I think it’s beyond occupying when you brag about ‘steering’ via controlling what is driving what is thought and felt via unesco prescribed learning standards.
Sounds like taqiya, (the principle of taqiya – adapting one’s appearance and practices to the local environment, while shielding one’s inner faith. )( hello community organizing)
is widespread to keep
concealed these intentions you keep digging up coming from Eselan etc. i like your term Huxleyan much better than orwellian. Its more direct.
My son is taking 4 AP classes, psych, LA, APUSH and Bio. ( took AP Human Geography last year, dont get me started) Bio syllabus states that the course is based solely on evolution and 4 Big Ideas. Hmmmmmmm… its a college level inteo bio course, good luck being a doctor) every class is riddled with misinfo systems delerium factlessness and bad ideas i will be counter punching sadly all year. The motivated kids want the AP’s because the regular classes are so dumbed down ( little writing, group work, worksheets) even at top private schools. So to “ get into college” ya gotta do AP’s. You know. We also saw the David Coleman shift come and go changing them to SDG springboards, remember…
So the Invasion of the body snatchers technique, Taqiya, goes hand and hand with the language games and doublespeak to fake out parents and keep us confused. Try to explain what we know, without context and background to a group of professional successful parents, and good luck. Its all greek and you dont get invited to the next cocktail party.
I was doing some research and found The Druze, the mention of Taqiya reminded me that you had mentioned it here a while ago if i am not mistaken, and it reminded me to catch up on this recent post. Busy summer, Glad to hear you are walking!
It is good to be walking now five days a week so my body is getting stronger while I am continuously amazed at just how prescient Credentialed to Destroy has turned out to be as all of these cited books are hyping Julian Huxley, cultural evolution, and Teilhard de Chardin’s relevance.
Do you remember when I wrote about the World Order Models Project that commenced in 1973 with Rockefeller funding? One of the cited books involving the education template pushed via Esalen and not being accurately represented in books subsequently was by a name I recognized-Warren Wagar. I knew he was involved with WOMP as well as pushing HG Wells’ idea of a World Brain in the 70s. The referenced book Good Tidings: The Belief in Progress from Darwin to Marcuse brings together so much of what we have been encountering. I realized it was published the year before WOMP commenced so I am finishing it up this weekend before writing again, hopefully tomorrow.
Everyone wants to control the meaning-making and values following capabilities of the human mind without admitting that’s what they are doing. The admitted progressivists as well as affiliates of the False Narrative surrounding first the Common Core and now student data privacy and competency-based ed in addition to social and emotional learning. It all fits with where standards-based ed is really going. At least I no longer am confused about how ‘learning objectives’ and standards can be used for “creating a spiritual awakening through education” as James Moffat described it in The Universal Schoolhouse.
Glad you had a great summer and I do not miss those days of supplementing my kids’ education on the side. Of course now I have moved on to helping with the ins and outs of leases for apartments,explaining what happens when there is a sales charge on investment funds in a 401(k), and how to read an insurance EOB. I think the kind of instruction simply changes when they become adults.
Notice we would agree until the end when the author calls for a “new kind of brain”– https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf
This article makes me gag!
Notice how they speak to all audiences… then “the brain” apparently yes thrre is only on. And no spirit or psyche or soul. Just a big ol mushy cosmic brain. So over it.
We need to cultivate a new kind of brain: a “bi-literate” reading brain capable of the deepest forms of thought in either digital or traditional mediums. A great deal hangs on it: the ability of citizens in a vibrant democracy to try on other perspectives and discern truth; the capacity of our children and grandchildren to appreciate and create beauty; and the ability in ourselves to go beyond our present glut of information to reach the knowledge and wisdom necessary to sustain a good society.
Yes dr frankenstein lets create a new brain!” No, ok then lets evolve it with consciousness so close your eyes real tight….Darwins bulldogs grandsons have really made their mark. Dont forget what darwins theory was all about.
Omg i listened to a Kahn academy 10 min vid about evolution and i wanted to cry! The two girls teaching it were all, ummm and oh my god Like yeah… it was pitiful example of dumb down.
http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/08/21/reader-come-home-maryanne-wolf says she is joining UCLA as their Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice. Of course, social justice requires a new kind of brain as today’s post also noted. Remember all the initiatives centered now at Tufts, where she was, that were covered in CtD?
https://www.is1401eln.eu/fotos/editor2/peti-stantic_jyvaskyla_presentation_feb_2017.pdf makes it clear that Wolf’s Deep Reading is closely tied to what we know as Higher Order Thinking Skills. It is a merging of the reader’s schema with what the author wrote and not just what the book actually says.
Also, look at her cv. http://ase.tufts.edu/epcshd/documents/cv/wolf.pdf Not only is she Professor, John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service (2006–Present), but in 2014-15 she did a fellowship at CASBS at Stanford where everything has been launched going back to systems science and Kenneth Bouldings’ work, including Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift and John Rawls’ Theory of Justice.
This is all about something other than how to read. Also remember Kahn has a degree in artificial intelligence at mit, where so many of these plans that now affect K-12 education were also hatched.
Her cv also shows she was an invited guest in 2003 at the vatican meeting that launched IMBES–International Society of Mind Brain education sciences. She leaves out the IMBES part, but I am familiar with that meeting.
Notice here that any excuse will do to interject “mindfulness practices” as the solution for everything. https://shared-assets.adobe.com/link/16276482-b6be-40f0-693e-0364436a3049
Now, why exactly does “Our partner spotlight this month highlights United Way of Asheville and Buncombe County, an organization dedicated to taking a compassionate approach to their schools and community. Their health action plan provided funding to a local mental health provider to give individual and group counseling to under- and non-insured students and their families.” turn into a mindfulness mandate?
Turn out Broward County is also using mindfulness practices and soft-belly yoga breathing to cope with the Marjory Stoneman Douglas tragedy. http://www.gettingsmart.com/2018/08/human-development-as-professional-development-fostering-district-wide-well-being/
Chan Zuckerburg financed bring in the Center for Mind-Body Medicine to create the template.