Before I explain why I have decided to join the current discussion surrounding the remake of the AP US History course (“APUSH”) course, let’s remember that most people who have ever sought fundamental transformations of the real world as it currently exists think of history as a consciousness altering tool. We will never get back to the “grand narrative supported by well-known documents, events, and historical personae” many of us long for unless we recognize this political pursuit of history. That history as a body of knowledge, even one dominated by Leftist figures and radical ideas, is Ahistorical to anyone who looks now at all coursework, in all subjects, in K-12 or higher ed, as determined by “the kind of society and world we would like to bring about as the United States enters its third century.”
That quote is from a 1988 paper by the same Freeman Butts I wrote about in my book describing all the transformative shifts obscured within the term Competency. http://www.civiced.org/papers/morality/morality_ch1c.html We cannot then be surprised that Butts also saw the Teaching of History as a means for creating a new kind of citizen. One who will believe fervently in, and be ready to act, to bring about Democracy in the sense of Economic Justice. The original advocate for this view of history though as a Framework for creating change in the here and now was actually not Uncle Karl. Luckily there is no buzzer in this post so no one loses points for a wrong guess.
Let’s meet an 18th century man from the Naples area of Italy-Giambattista Vico. He matters so much to anyone writing about education as a means of social change because Vico believed that the means of transforming the real world of social relations, institutions, and everyday life lay in “modifying” how our human minds see that world. Change the mental concepts and a process begins, Radicals hope, whereby one “historical structure succeeds another.” That’s real history to someone intent on transformational change. So with the push for conscious evolution, or requiring a common understanding as the Rockefeller-funded Communication for Social Change or the Structured Dialogue Design do, we are back to Vico’s view:
“Mind is, however, the thread connecting the present with the past, a means of access to a knowledge of these changing modes of social reality. Human nature ( the modifications of mind) and human institutions are identical with human history.”
Change how the mind perceives the past and the theory then is we can change human nature itself. I think that’s a bad bet, which is why I interjected myself into the APUSH discussion. Continuing to discuss any AP course or any other coursework for any age being touted as the Common Core, Next Generation Learning, 21st Century Skills or Competency as if we are still talking about conveying a body of knowledge is a mistake with potentially tragic consequences since we are literally talking about social engineering. This past Monday there was once again a hearing in Georgia on the Federal Role In Education. It was conducted with a level of conscious deceit that would have been right at home at the Trotsky Trial. In the midst of all the lies though, there was consistent and accurate testimony across witnesses about one thing: concepts.
Knowledge to the extent its still exists under the Common Core is about concepts. We have encountered this before as the Enduring Understandings or Ilyenkov’s Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete. Concepts that can be used within and across subjects to guide how a student and later the adult he will become will perceive everyday experiences. Guess who it goes back to? Now you do long for a buzzer to press, don’t you? Yes, “Vico’s project, which we would now call social science, was to arrive at a ‘mental dictionary,’ or set of common concepts, with which one is able to comprehend the process of ‘ideal eternal history.'”
Well, it’s ideal if Transformative Social Change is the name of your game. In the real world, deliberately trying to mentally engineer how the masses view the existing world has a terrible, bloody track record. Since controlling history is now seen as just another tool to create a desired Worldview, those objectionable, bloody parts will be omitted just as surely as anything that might foster pride in the world as it currently exists. Years ago, I first encountered this idea of teaching history through broad concepts instead of facts when I encountered the new AP World History framework that was full of hatred for capitalism and the environmental destruction it supposedly caused. It literally treated the term Communism as an “international means of structuring economic relations.” Talk about a whitewash. That Framework was supposed to go into effect first, then APUSH.
In looking into the history of that Framework I discovered that what all the participants in its planning had in common was a reverence for the work of historian William H. McNeill. Now President Obama appreciates his work as well as we can see from this smile as he hands the professor the 2009 National Humanities medal. http://chicagomaroon.com/2010/03/02/obama-honors-history-prof-mcneill-for-u-of-c-experience/ McNeill sees history as the “search for a normative matrix connecting the world in its totality” and built around “the idea of gradual progress.” The progress, by the way, once again supposedly heads towards Economic Justice.
When I read Stanley Kurtz’s article this past week “How the College Board Politicized US History” http://www.nationalreview.com/node/386202/print and he wrote about the 1998 La Pietra Conference, two things jumped out at me. One, that Thomas Bender was clearly seeing history through the same conceptual lens as William McNeill and that I should look into that. Secondly, that La Pietra should be seen as a continuation of everything I knew about the still extant World Order Models Project. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/reorienting-world-order-values-via-the-intervention-of-activist-education-and-progressive-politics/
The Giambattista Vico discussion is from a 1984 book tied to WOMP called Culture, Ideology, and World Order. It basically is the global blueprint for all the changes that have come in as education reform and in the name of Sustainability, except there it is acknowledged to be a New World Order intent on making sure the poor of the world anywhere get their fair share. Nary a concern at all about temperatures or carbon dioxide levels. That’s a book that recognized that fundamental transformations need a “common conceptual paradigm or vision” as well as “a coherent framework of intervention in the historical process” and set about to provide it.
That’s how APUSH as well as the La Pietra conference should be seen. Needless to say, it was no surprise to me to discover that the Rockefeller Foundation had also helped to fund La Pietra. Just another way to influence the prevailing common understanding of the masses, just like WOMP, CFSC-Communication for Social Change, Metropolitanism, or its deliberative democracy funding. Useful ties all for grounding APUSH into other components of a common transformative vision, as is that Freeman Butts piece I linked to above on how to use history “to reclaim the public realm, where groups interact to make a national politics and culture, as the central territory of history.” Using history then to change prevailing conceptions to create support for new ways of living together and organizing the society and economy politically.
That turned out to be how McNeill, Butts, and Thomas Bender all saw history back in the mid-80s. History should be about creating a “commitment to deeply held humane values.” As McNeill put it, “Better than any discipline, history can defend shared, public identities.” Those identities of ordinary citizens are public because they have been deeply grounded in achieving “the positive ends of a society dedicated to ‘liberty and justice for all.'” As Bender noted in 1985, “public life” is crucial because it is “that essentially civic arena where groups interact, even compete, to establish the configuration of political power in a society and its cultural forms and their meanings.”
That philosophy of history as a handmaiden to contemporary change just cannot cohabit with a view of education or history as the transmission of a body of knowledge. It might nurture a nostalgia for the past that could become a barrier to a transition to a new kind of citizenship in a different kind of democracy. As Butts noted, quoting the 1987 New York State Social Studies Framework: “The principles of a democratic system should serve as organizing ideas for the social studies program and for student learning. The development of civic values consistent with life in a democratic system is an overriding goal of the entire program.”
That’s not a goal that can be met if students become acquainted with what the American Revolution really sought to achieve. Given that the CCSSO last year emphasized the necessary Dispositions for Citizenship and Citizenship is the 3rd C of the Social Studies C3 Framework, Butts’ idea that the “morality of citizenship should be the central theme” of all K-12 coursework clearly remains alive and well. Any analysis now needs to remember what was said and sought back in the 80s too since these admissions were made before School to Work and outcomes-based education ran into controversy in the 90s.
Let’s close this intro to a transformational view of history with what Bender wrote in 1986:
“The present task is to begin establishing the relationship over time of the interclass, multiethnic, and multicultural center, which I call public culture, and the smaller, more homogenous gemeinschaftlich groups of the periphery…A focus on public culture and its changing connections with cultures smaller than the whole offers an image of society capacious enough to sustain a synthetic narrative.”
Synthetic narrative is fancy Profspeak for a common transformative vision of what the future ought to be and why. It’s not a Franklin or George Washington view of history, but Vico and Uncle Karl would be pleased.
Its interesting to me and should be noted how they are targeting the top students through the AP courses.
My daughter is taking AP US this year. And I thought last years AP World was absurd.
This cuts to the marrow. I majored in American History. I was president of my colleges chapter of the national history honors society for three years. I love the facts and the brilliance that built this nation.
My daughter will have to listen to her mother rant all while she tries to absorb the manipulated concepts that will earn her the A in the class and the 4 or 5 on the AP next spring.
This is sick.
Mari-I was a Phi Beta Kappa History major. When my mom asked why, I said I was going to law school and it would make my life more interesting.
I had no idea it would turn into a vocation and I would have to master what the Radicals call Historical Materialism.
Robin-
Me too re PBK!!! 🙂 ( and I actually got into law school as well but then was saddled with surprise debt from a parent and had to go make some dinero instead of further my education)
Sometimes I think though that maybe my love affair with History is just so that I can be accurate witness to what is taking place. Witnesses and Storytellers have always been important in any society.
Thanks for leading the way for all of us. 🙂
Good to have company Mari on our Bad Ideas Patrol Journey.
Honestly so much of what is being pushed is so fundamentally flawed in how it will work in practice it is as if politicians and administrators were insisting their credential gives them the right to sell unicorn rides. They may have the unicorn franchise by some kind of legislative fiat, but in the end no unicorns are going to be available for riding. Reality will intervene no matter how many tickets are sold or how fervently people want those rides.
In light of gemeinschaft one needs to consider also Gesellschaft and the dichotomy work of Tonnes… ( sp)
It is more troubling than you imagine, a bullseye on everything discovered in ed reform.
Is it any wonder communism is softsold in ccss and AP ?
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinschaft_and_Gesellschaft
Madmommy-funny you should mention Tonnes since Bender wrote a book published in 1978 called Community and Social Change in America where he makes it quite clear he would like to use history to create much the same type of community as what Amitai Etzioni pushes. I have not finished it and will talk about it in the next post. He spells the name Tonnies with the double dots over the ‘o’ and writes as follows in the Epilog.
“Instead of accepting the dialectical tension between gemeinschafft snd gesellschafft envisioned by Tonnies, modern sociologists, who are ostensibly liberal but in fact subscribe to a deeply conservative ideal that favors comprehensive integrating structures of order and equilibrium, ‘have tried to engraft elements of community onto the main stem of organization, hoping thereby to lessen the contrast between the two.”
I guess he wants the requisite feeling of interdependence or something. Another quote from the 1984 book that, to me, grasped the role McNeill, Bender, and Butts want history to play was in a Chapter from the 1984 book called “Oppression and Human Liberation.” None of them want what has happened in the past to be a barrier to reconceptualizing human practices going forward even though common sense tells us we should. That’s why misapprehending this new vision of the role of history coursework can be so dangerous. That POWER Model Carnevale spelled out that I laid out 2 posts ago is a wasteful, potentially tragic way to go through life, especially when it is embraced by central planners in a society and economy quietly shifting to a dirigiste model of decision-making by a collective.
Here’s the quote from an Indian prof, Ashis Nandy:
“Like history, which exists ultimately in the mind of the historian and his believing readers and is thus a means of communication, [there’s that 4th C of 21st Century Learning again] utopian or futurist thinking is another aspect of–and a comment upon–the here and now, another means of making peace with or challenging man-made suffering in the present, another ethics apportioning responsibility for this suffering and guiding the struggle against it on the plane of contemporary consciousness.”
People need to be aware of this normative use of history coursework and not simply see this as a matter of troubling facts and questionable views. Meanwhile the also poorly understood term “high-quality assessments” will be tracking whether the desired values and attitudes are taking hold and what concepts or strategies students use in ambiguous situations where there is no logical, linear answer.
Madmommy, I don’t think there is anything “soft ” sell about the philosophy being sold in “Communist Core.” The APUSH standards and assessment are rather blatant.
( And remember that “assessment” actually means “to assign a value to a person or thing for tax purposes.”) Really puts a different face on what happens when your child tries to perform well in that environment. Careful, careful.
CPW-have you seen this editorial Kissinger penned on the New World Order? http://online.wsj.com/articles/henry-kissinger-on-the-assembly-of-a-new-world-order-1409328075?tesla=y
I am pretty sure that his reference to “affirming individual dignity and participatory governance” is a euphemistic phrase learned from attending so many international conferences over the years created by various Rockefeller entities. Notice he also complains about the nation-state when the economy is global.
Remember when I wrote the post on HG Wells’ book The Open Conspiracy written originally in the 20s? It was professors tied to WOMP who brought it back into publication around 2002 as well as one of the most important books of the 21st history.
Glad you picked up on the Ford Foundation also funding the La Pietra Conference. Truly the gang that has always wanted this little c, Human Development Model imposed on the West through that very same ‘participatory governance’ is all gathering together.
I meant soft sell as far as how it is portrayed not its quantity, constant, blatant and omnipresent in all curriculum. The sharp edges of communism such as mao, stalin, hitler, pol pot, death tolls methods and deceit are excluded making communism seem fair and appealing potentially to youngsters.
CP-I think I have told you that it seems like every disseminator of radical ideas guiding education has done a stint at the Ford Foundation-created Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. CASBS is where systems thinking was created. It’s where John Rawls was when he wrote A Theory of Justice. It’s where many members of the Gordon Commission have been fellows. It’s where sociologist James Coleman was the year before the Coleman Report hijacked American education away from academics as too influenced by family structure and socioeconomic levels.
Now guess who was at CASBS the year before A Theory of Nations came out? That would be where he wrote it. No behavioral scientists at Stanford or SRI to appreciate the possibilities of a conceptual framework approach to history going forward. http://history.fas.nyu.edu/object/thomasbender
If you click his cv link there is a mention of the CASBS fellowship. I almost fainted when I saw it. Also numerous ties to Rockefeller entities including the Social Science Research Council. Good thing for us Rock F just celebrated its 100th anniversary with a really nice revelatory book of its history of causes available as a pdf.
Ralph Tyler still continues to influence and through those influences so does John Dewey since Tyler knew him.
From your Butts/Bender link;
“Historians, to whom we once confidently entrusted the custody of our public memory of ourselves as a nation, have been unable to pull together the vast mountain of scholarship produced in the past quarter century and make of it a coherent and explanatory account of American life. Both readers and writers have been drawn or directed, by a variety of social and cultural mechanisms, to histories of their chosen or inherited group. It is a phenomenon that may represent a disintegration of the civic sense as much as purely intellectual trends in historiography”
Bender makes the case for the gates/fed funding of public libraries to not only toss card catelogs and weed books to make way for microsoft products ( chaching to stakeholder) but to rearrange, remake , rethink, history by saving only old books such as martin buber and Rachel Carson… Note my tiny pub lib ( historical lyceum) has been purged of a 150 year old American history section, gapingly empty stacks and grim new librarians who hate and mock books.
One only needs to google ” better world books scandal” and “library weeding”. This document explains it !
The Butts/bender link brings daylight to the gates/fed efforts in public libraries. Ours has literally entire empty stacks where a vast American history section once was. Using the same ” revitalization” trick of town councils, stakeholders, grants… Out with card catelog and ” old books” to make way for computers for the new age ” community” center. new age librarian change agents help by continuous “weeding”, except for books that tell the story they want, martin buber, rachel carson, al gore…
Look up, ” library weeding”. ” better world books scandal”, gates library grant, you will be shocked.
From your link:
“Historians, to whom we once confidently entrusted the custody of our public memory of ourselves as a nation, have been unable to pull together the vast mountain of scholarship produced in the past quarter century and make of it a coherent and explanatory account of American life. Both readers and writers have been drawn or directed, by a variety of social and cultural mechanisms, to histories of their chosen or inherited group. It is a phenomenon that may represent a disintegration of the civic sense as much as purely intellectual trends in historiography ”
This also makes sense of David Coleman’s comment ” nobody gives a sh$t what you think” or something like that, regarding students writing prose and stories. The ccss preference for real world, non fiction, heavily defended essays answering specific and leading questions ONLY!
“Deep engagement with text ” ( puke)
Guided reading, well you get the picture… Its all making sense….
The definition of Close Reading also involves reading through disciplinary ‘lenses’ or conceptual understandings and sometimes imaginary role playing.
This concepts element gives new meaning to omnipresent. It’s also of course intimately tied in with Cybernetics.
McNeill also has a son John who is a prof at Georgetown.
There is a youtube of William McNeill and David Christian basically gushing over the Big History created with Gates financing in partnership with Moscow State.
You may remember other countries are looking at Big History as a tool for all coursework.
Anon-look what now constitutes history course work for both Illinois high school standards or college. Role-playing of everyday life at the fall of socialism in Poland. http://reeecillinois.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/new-community-college-curriculum-module-everyday-life-under-late-socialism/
Also Amitai Etzioni, changed his name from Werner Falk… A little influence from Gemeinschaft, hmmmm? Like his contemporary georgy schwartz? A little Gessellschaftmachen?
Thought you all may find this interesting. This post came with great timing. Our district has adopted new ELA and AP History. My oldest will be subjected to both. They conveniently left out the portion of district policy allowing public review on new material. Not one board member asked a single question regarding the new text.
http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/members/courses/teachers_corner/180101.html
The quality (eye roll ) material they are giving us for ELA. Watch the video.
http://springboardprogram.collegeboard.org
LL-my response to CPW reminded me that the 1984 book refers to a 1979 report and 1978 Trilateral Commission conference in Japan on Industrial Policy that I was able to track down and read as I was preparing the post.
In it was a term that reminded me so much of where WIOA, Career Pathways, sector strategies pushed by the states, and the required ‘workforce readiness’ collaboration of middle and high school with extant area employers and industries. Enterprise Corporatism was the term. If you are not a multinational business and thus used to partnering with governments who may be actual customers ordering in many countries and thus used to Corporatism, Enterprise Corporatism is what all the rest of these official now ed policies being pushed by the feds get us to.
Just like Europe. A very dysfunctional place once you get beyond the medieval scenery where it still exists.
I have one doing springboard math. Group learning, peer teaching algebra. Are you kidding me? At a private christian school! Where they can choose their own curriculum, somebody is lying to me. We have asked to opt out and hone school algebra with old Saxon book. My daughter hates it. Its put out by college board as is the AP psych, full of pervy sex and misinfo…
English teacher reading her ccss script. School is a joke waste of money.
Have you seen this on SpringBoard? http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/springboard/springboard-research-compendium.pdf
I have numerous College Board books from the 90s version of this that I used when researching the book. I especially recall the one John Goodlad created for them that I will go back through.
There was also PACESETTERS that was designed to get academically weak kids into AP coursework by changing the nature of the courses. It fits with the current change in emphasis we see in APUSH. It is mistaken to treat this as a standalone. It’s also a mistake to see it as about history in the sense we are used to. I have spent today tracking through some real examples that should illustrate my points here very well.
Page 50 to that link says I am right. It is the old PACESETTER approach. I have those materials. You know my old joke about how some of the books I bought used had a musty smell like they had not left a closed room with no windows in 15 years. That was one of those books. I also remember who was pushing it because she just loved to use the word ‘reify’.
Robin-
I know you are right about this. My hairs started standing on end last spring when my daughter told me that a LARGE number of students who are good kids mind you but average students have been admitted into the AP classes this fall.
My daughter is a driven and accomplished student. Even more so than her father or mother were. I am worried for her. If she is in classes that once were demanding and thoughtful but have now been made accessible for all she will go a little crazy. 17 and crazy is not a good combo. Crazy and anything is not a good combo.
Oh dear L.L. . I saw ‘Collaborative Discussion’ highlighted in that video. Because of course free speech is acceptable as long as everyone is in agreement. We must all learn to not deviate from the group thinking. No no. Collaboration is the new religion.
Getting a look at the new 11th grade text tonight. First section is on America. What it means to be American, what does it mean to be free? What is freedom? What is the American dream? It openly discussed the embedded assessments. First assessment, write essay on what it means to be American, using different “perspectives” (lenses?). The task of course is a group project to discuss what qualities are needed to be American. Second task, McCains Greater Than Self Essay, stating ” habits of mind” that bind us together.
Somehow I do not see my child’s essay gaining him any points with his teacher. We speak often about what is happening in school, he’s fully aware of the duplicity involved.
A simpke search on the text provided some instructor guides, stating the need for new perspectives. I do not think he or she will like mine either.
I keep telling myself, he’s almost done!!
LL-these I-Nodes funded by the NSF will simply augment the Workforce Boards, Career Pathways, and Sector Strategy approaches that are all straight out of Turchenko. http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Research-Universities-Entrepreneurship-Scientific-Innovation.html
Also plays into the Anchor Institutions approach to an economy that only works as long as feds can deficit borrow. Notice this gets into K-12 and coordination with community colleges.
Remember the Center for Digital Education is actually a trade name for the Center for Digital Government. Did you know the e-Democracy theory originated in Russia? I know that for a fact, but here is where I am speculating. I think it is because that is where so much of the cybernetic research occurred and it is still available there in untranslated Russian. UNESCO, remember, has its digital work centered still and always in Moscow and when you come across the conferences many of the papers are in Russian.
I am looking now into the Forum Foundation in Seattle now and up came its ties to Russia on also implementing its approaches. Sometimes these days real life seems more like the rejected script for a bad sci fi movie.
Sound familiar? http://ellisoncenter.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Tsyrlina-Spady.pdf
My education has a first name it’s b.o.l.o.g.n.a! Page 6 has a definition of patriotism that matches the springboard definition. Coincidence? Maybe. Not likely.
In addition to beginning the essay, my son first had to fill in a graphic organizer. Two sides, one on the McCain letter one for a word of choice in the text. My son has inherited my sense of humor apparently. I had not seen his graphic organizer until today when I asked for his book to check the definition of patriotism with your link.
One one side he had the thoughts on McCain’s essay, the point being patriotism is about serving others in society, the good of the collective. Scared me for a minute, until I read the other side. He chose intelligence as his word. In one bubble he had intelligence meaning the ability to think for ones self independently and reach conclusions outside of the collective thought, or political persuasion or bias of others. I laughed, he confirmed it was intentional.
Did you see IB with Kondakov?
http://contentincontext.org/2012/index.php/program-speakers/328-alexander-kondakov-izdatelstvo-prosveshchenie-russia
Mari-this is the Mission Skills Assessment Toolkit the privates are going to be using to get at the Whole Child and 21st Century Competencies focus. http://www.scribd.com/doc/238772984/MSA-Toolkit-Sept-2014
The drumbeat of no way out continues. Would these parents be better in public and using the tens of thousands of dollars for old-fashioned lessons, riding out these bad ideas?
Do parents notice if the grounds are lush and the amenities offered seem like a college campus? My personal experience was no. Most parents thought that the cost of going there and the difficulty of getting in ratified whatever the school then chose to do.
I will never forget the Lower School Principal shrieking at me “Do you know how hard it is to get into X school?” when I asked a perfectly legitimate, respectful, and on point question. She was also rattled I had picked up on a minor statement in her Back to School speech and grasped it meant a wholesale switch from the philosophy pitched 3 years before when we chose that school. It felt like a complete change of itinerary and the captain insisting we are still getting a cruise and the same boat.
I am inclined to agree right now. Most people, my husband included, assume the price of admission guarantees them safety and something better. They still imagine that there is curricular autonomy within private schools.
I recently read the division head welcoming statements online for the school where my daughters go. The Lower and Middle school heads have graduated with advanced Ed degrees. Their verbiage was identical. Civility, Collaborative, Susutainable. The whole 9 yards. The Upper School head does not use any of that language. His writing was real. Now I have not got a good read on him yet. Im not sure he is stealth or trying to circumvent the crazy. It’s confusing times.
This MSA is devastating on multiple levels. Not the least of which is that I know one of the school heads represented in the article fairly well. My husband taught with him. He is not a bad guy nor he is a stupid man. But he has been thoroughly hoodwinked and hornswoggled.
And this statement:
Hallway conversations are no longer only about a storyline from a piece of literature in English class. The conversations are about how the characters in the story could have developed better teamwork or been more resilient. This is happening only two years into the MSA program. I can only imagine what it will be like in five years.”
In five years. A Five Year Plan No less. Yes I can imagine. 6 defined and ingrained skills sets is what we can all happily imagine. But just 6. No more. No, indeed. More than 6 and some axe maker mind might get uppity and start having unapproved thoughts or ideas about skills that she would like to test out. A 7th skill might lead to questions that insist upon facts.
Wow. Slightly terrifying.
Question: So ETS administers this MSA and assesses the data. Which data is then reported back to the school for them to tweak and improve upon to the extent that they need to get everyone under their roof thinking and speaking in lock step.
What federal agency is ETS connected to? I cannot hold it all in my brain yet. Do they pass along this gross data to our fearless leaders at College Board or some other likeminded entity to inform about our cultural level of readiness for an enforced communitarian globally administered economy and society?
Mari-ETS sponsored the Gordon Commission and this fits with their agenda. Reread those posts with the tag Gordon Commission. Notice how many of the GC members like James Paul Gee or Lauren Resnick or Pearson Ed employees or Kenneth Gergen who created Appreciative Inquiry with its ties to Peter Senge all have their own tags.
http://www.gordoncommission.org/rsc/pdfs/vol_2_no_1_18885.pdf is a particularly graphic GC report. I have read them all. I can track all this because I remain a knowledge maven in a world trying to pretend it no longer matters. That’s the desire because I bust through the dictated explanation. Where I am today is laying out what I had presumed but never thought anyone would put in print. It is circumscribing knowledge itself that is the point. Think of it as invisible censorship. It really does fit perfectly with HG Wells’ World Brain scheme that I am obviously not supposed to recognize since the talking point just said that only with the advent of ICT was this all possible. No, Wells envisioned the attempt as a means of control and power. My job is to explain all this with facts.
MSA is how this all gets in place fairly invisibly. Look how it is being touted as Character Education. We went through this with Everyday Math. In Atlanta, the fact that Westminster was using it was used to silence parent complaints and get the other privates on board. The big three privates in Atlanta: Westminster, Pace, and Lovett are all listed as being on board with the MSA.
The Global Cities Education Network is who is touting MSA as the best assessment of 21st century competencies they have seen. Using the Rand Corporation as the evaluator. Same entity that was behind the Change Agent Study from 1973 to 1978. Where Linda Darling-Hammond once worked as the Chief Social Scientist before moving to Columbia and now Stanford. That has Gates, Pearson, JP Morgan Chase and other sponsorship. I first wrote about GCEN in April 2013.
This is about no port in the storm. No place where a continued emphasis on traditional ed can be highlighted for contrast.
ETS was also the first to fund the Higher Order Thinking Skills research back in the 80s in conjunction with Apple. Remember I mentioned that as part of the reason the choice of Tucson for the first Digital Promise conference this past spring was important. I linked to the graphic drawings touting Competency Based Learning.
Peter Senge’s SoL does their Camp Sunshine in Tucson too and its where P21, the 21st Century Skills push was created, and Ken Kay’s new Ed Leader 21 making sure the suburban metro districts are all on board. Same vision in actuality as what MSA is measuring.
ETS was created with Carnegie funding and has a lovely campus in Princeton. By the way Princeton’s Center for International Studies was explicitly a part of the 1988 conference in Moscow that resulted in the book Contending Sovereignties with ties to WOMP.
ETS gets lots of funding from the Ed Department in conjunction with creating the RTT and Common Core assessments.
Thank You Robin. I appreciate this. Yes. You are right of course. This is invisible censorship to circumscribe knowledge. Period. Interestingly, a decade ago it was the fact that Everyday Math was being taught in my daughters’s school that began all manner of flags waving around in my noggin.
It was clearly a time waster and inefficient in terms of teaching basic math skills. Even I, who struggled in math in the 70’s, could see that. The explanations we were given for why the school used Everyday Math were so weak I began to look at everything in the curriculum with a magnifying glass and then said, ” See Ya folks. ”
I was struck by the comment by Gordon in the link where he says a colleague was pursuing a line of research which suggested that studying a subject was sufficient in terms of growing an individuals intellect. As opposed to truly learning a subject in depth (mastery in the old world definition ).
Amazing the perfect research to justify offering tidbits of subjects on anything and learn absolutely nothing. While filling in the blanks with behavioral and value laden expectation propaganda.
Mari-where I am going in the midst of handling some “Mom, can you do this for me?” things today is all the places I now have that describe the function of coursework in any area, but especially in K-12, as creating the student’s ‘Identity’. That is the term being used over and over again and really it is how the MSA should be seen as well. Before I take us through particular recommended history activities I want to make that point. It’s also what is going on with APUSH and all the reworks of the AP Frameworks. It’s why my suburban school district, cutting edge with its Digital Promise and Ed Leader 21 memberships, refers now to all K-12 coursework as either Humanities or STEM. Not bodies of knowledge but perspectives and tools to alter current perceptions, beliefs, and values. Too bad for the administrators I recognized the rhetoric shift and what it meant.
How will engaging in this activity or having this experience, especially in a virtual reality change how the student sees herself, others, and the world? It is why language is so crucial and so controlled and why there is a clear effort, no longer just intuited on my part, to circumscribe the knowledge in anyone’s quiver of arrows. It is very hard to tell me knowledge can just be looked up now because I know how much what is in my head triggers the connections and where to look next that no one has ever spelled out to me at that point.
Some thing I read yesterday, again from UNESCO for global transformation purposes, said the use of a computer would now be treated on parity with knowledge. That would mean it is merely a personal easement like the utility company’s right to access property to get to power poles and not actual possession and ownership. That’s all the difference in the world, especially when the problem is an overweening state at all levels insisting we concede we are now to be merely ‘governed.’ That power left to the ‘people’ in the US Constitution is the people as a collective who have a right to have stakeholders be ‘consulted’ rather than power in individuals with a threshold even the king may not cross without permission.
We can see why actual personal knowledge created from facts and deep analysis among them and not presupplied IS an obstacle to all these plans of transformation. One of the historians in Bender’s 2002 book actually mentions the desire to replace the real world with the desired and imagined world. That such a desire ignited the conflagrations of 2 world wars was the detail he left out. He was pleased though that in the late 20th century the prospects were once again in place to try again.
You and I can scream “No. Not again” at the top of our lungs, knowing all the precious and fragile aspects of reality erroneously being treated as givens.
Mari-did you read this story on Big History? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/so-bill-gates-has-this-idea-for-a-history-class.html
It is hard for me to see this as anything other than propaganda to whitewash the actual history or sloppy reporting. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/schools-that-break-down-obstacles-to-the-formation-of-revolutionary-personalities/ is the story with cites on David Christian and Big History and its global use and history from about 1991 on.
Knowing that the AP history conceptual frameworks were simply stepping stones towards Big History ultimately and also the ties to Moscow State, I have downloaded lots of articles on Big History and social evolution generally from Russian sites within last week. One of them said that Big History makes a good vehicle for all coursework globally. That would be unadulterated Ideological Thinking but it fits with what is elsewhere.
So in the midst of the uproar over APUSH, Sorkin writes this fairly duplicitous explanation of the genesis of Big History that seems balanced if you do not know any additional info.
We really have entered into a world that wants to ignore facts in favor of desired, politically useful ‘narratives’. As I said in this post and the Times article confirms, it is William McNeill who is the senior figure among history profs teaching in US in terms of influence.
Wow Robin!
That NYT article is unabashed in its propaganda if you ask me. Now granted Sorkin probably doesnt have a clue about Big History being the ultimate vehicle to remake History for the Future as Uncle Karl would have it but still….someone said make Our Bill G. look good.
So Christian is a Sovietologist eh? Did he actually study in Moscow prior to selling his wares in Australia? Did he have funding ties to Carnegie or Ford for the purposes of his studies or was he on the state department roles?
My stomach is dropping more and more. Its almost at my knees.
Reading Christian years ago was the first point I ever encountered that the Left believed that the fall of the USSR meant nothing in terms of whether socialism or what I call little c communism to refer to Uncle Karl’s still unfortunately pertinent Human Development Model I have described. Christian said that both Russia and China had ignored the theory and tried to build socialism and communism on an agricultural economy. It was thus missing the technology that capitalism would have produced that made redistribution possible per the theory.
It was an ah-oh moment. I also learned that Christian was a big fan of Margaret Mead. Interestingly enough Mead’s daughter Mary Catherine Bateson was at the 1988 workshop in Moscow described in the next post. She wrote one of the final chapters in the 1990 Contending Sovereignties. The chapter was called “Beyond Sovereignty: An Emerging Global Civilization.”
Here is something pertinent to this entire history trilogy as well as where Big History intends to go if you research in greater depth than Sorokin had any interest in pursuing.
“What is essential to a sense of shared membership is a sense of the familiar, a resilient substructure og global community that will allow flexibility in tackling the vast and urgent issues that we as a species must face together. Trust and a tolerance for ambiguity [Note: that is what Rigor is designed to create] within some broader framework are built from the ordinary. At the local level, such a substructure is built from day-to-day interactions. At the global level, it is more likely to developby listening to radio and television and walking in a marketplace that draws on worldwide resources than through formal educational programs.”
So we now push media education via UNESCO to do just that as well as digital learning to turbocharge what radio and TV could do and turn the K-12 classroom into a variation on the Scandinavian Study Circle, creating desired shared understandings.
That article seems to have been created to be cited on why the switch that has been intended for a long time. Some one did not realize just how much on point was already in the public domain and appreciated for its intended purpose. As a result it does seem to be a deliberate propaganda piece and a misportrayal of both Gates’ and Christian’s intentions given what was left out.
It reminds me in that respect of treating Kahn Academy as just an idea to help his nephews while leaving out his MIT degrees, being next door to Google out in CA, or his video Edutopia had up where he makes it clear that the videos are designed to give the skills needed to then have a constructivist classroom. There’s a Radical Ed Reform concept called modularity that Kahn Academy also fits in with perfectly that is intended to be just as transformational in an unappreciated Trojan Horse way as the computer.
Got to share two bits:
1) because Nelson Rockefeller was such a poor reader because of his Lincoln School experience, guess who read his materials and books to him when he was governor then Vice President–Henry Kissinger!
2) you all really must read the 1934 “Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies” from the Carnegie Foundation. It’s all there.
American deception site has the 1934 pdf on file if anyone wants to read it. I had saved that one for future reading.
Well as the marketing phrase once went… “the future is now.”
No kidding, Robin! So much coming to fruition. Curious if Fadel’s Center for Curriculum Redesign is connected to APUSH / the College Board. Fadel, who claims to be a lover of classical history, has lectured around the globe about which parts of history students need to know, essentially gutting centuries. In at least two interviews he has expressed the trouble with ed reform in North America results from notions of self-government and the extreme religious right.
On another note, I came across a report on how Finnish students learn History to find out that students must demonstrate global awareness (which is a required skill attached to CCSS) by understanding World War II events from the perspective of the Germans, essentially sympathizing with their plight.
JT-I think you would appreciate this piece from historian Ron Radosh, by his own admission previously a committed Leftist, on how he sees the APUSH Framework and the indictments against it. http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2014/08/30/rewriting-us-history/?singlepage=true
I can just read through the passages Radosh quotes and see the synthetic narrative being woven through concepts to justify current desires of transformation in all spheres a la WOMP.
I was also wondering of the quoted history professor at the end with his book on the Cold War was ever at the same faculty meetings with Gar Alperowitz. Maybe he could pass along some insights on “seriously bad ideas” although Democracy Collaborative is not involved with military history. It definitely fits the tenets of Peace Education though.
Just finished the 1934 report CPW. It truly is startling how relevant it is to those of us tracking the actual implementation mandates and not the rhetoric about the ‘standards.’
I also noticed that the language on desired abilities and capacities tracked the workplace readiness language of the WIOA almost verbatim, except for the mention of ‘systems thinking’ in WIOA as a necessary component.
The extent to which the language tracks Uncle Karl’s Human Development Model and the admission that the shift to a planned collectivist society with some type of socialized economy being due to having achieved a certain stage of technology is a point I made in the book and this blog. People really do not appreciate the feeling on so many campuses and foundations and think-tanks that the ‘transition’ has taken long enough. I think it’s why we see the public-policy foot on the action accelerator now in virtually every area described there.
I found the contrast between economic individualism which is to be neutralized in the classroom and individuality, which is to be fostered to be a fascinating distinction.
Speaking of workplace readiness, 21st C skills and WOIA…this landed in my email earlier today. Who knew one needed credentialing for this level of employment? I mean, Job. Every Body Must have Job. Every Body Eez Credentialed! Da?
http://hosted.verticalresponse.com/1268237/28b56c0272/545822737/6dc4928ce6/
“Dare the school build a new social order” may have meaning here. http://tiny.cc/gb4flx
Anon-Thanks for linking in Counts, the original Social Reconstructionist–an important term that I explain in Chapter 6 of my book.
What I did not know until I read Collectivism on the Campus by Merrill Root in the 50s was that Counts, like Sydney Hook, was a Marxist, or as Root called them State-liberal collectivists, with a deep abhorrence of what they saw as naivete of the Soviet threat and the anti anti-communists coddling of profs they viewed as abetting a real enemy. Both attempted to lead protests at the Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria on March 25-27, 1949.
Real history is hugely revealing of what drives people and just how obtuse many well-intentioned people are. Plus then the prevalence of people with bad intentions or just indifference to the intentions behind whatever causes pay them well.
Glad you took the time to read the 1934 Carnegie report. The thing that has alarmed me the most about the report–after getting over the initial shock at seeing such a plan actually put forward by the Carnegie Foundation–is that they have controlled so much of what has happened in Ed reform since issuing the plan. They have funded and controlled everything of significance that has transpired in education since the early days of the last century, including the establishment of the USDOEd. That includes the development of the NAEP, the SAT, the Teachers’ Quality standards, the College Board and just about everything else of importance in education. Given the plan they put forward initially for the Social Studies, I feel comfortable saying that I believe the Carnegie Foundation and all it’s sub entities to be one of the most subversive organizations in operation today.
And law partners of its vice chairman represent school districts where the school board members insist I cannot possibly be right because their lawyer would have told them.
But then again the report does say that the “supreme goal of education within the general frame of reference is the growth of an independent yet socially sensitive personality.”
Is it insensitive to actually read these reports and the conversion charter and get that the accreditors say no conflict of interests in school governance but it all gets ignored as long as the financially conflicted are pushing the model in that 34 report? Or the lawyers are? Or the doctoral candidates that know little but will push whatever will get them the next promotion?
The “entire curriculum of the school may constitute a unified attack upon the complicated problem of the contemporary society.”
Doesn’t that sound like all curriculum must be relevant to the student’s interests AND involve real world problems?
This is all a business model created to finally force the desired implementation at all levels and, unknowingly I would hope, blow up the economy and what has ever made any society work for long in the process. All while everyone involved just keeps billing the taxpayers.
Did you know CASBS started having Annual Summits in 2012?
This year’s is on the topic of the City http://www.casbssummit.org/ and includes Pedro Noguera from the Gordon Commission. Previous summits featured Carol Dweck with her hype of Growth Mindsets instead of Fixed Ones and Steven Pinker. Looks like yet another institution tired of waiting. Note the Hewlett Foundation sponsorship which is consistent with their sponsorship of Deep Learning and determination that the Common Core assessments reflect it. Still find it to be a fascinating concession as to what is really going on that they hired Peter Senge and Robert Kegan to prepare it.
Notice the new prominence of the social sciences as a behavioral science. That’s because the social sciences, especially education use the euphemistically named Deep Learning that sounds so much better than cybernetic noetic training, to get inside the Black Box of the mind in ways Skinner only dreamed about. Essentially the same goals of operant conditioning but using subsequent psych research to create thinking patterns to reliably guide predictable future behavior. 80 years is a long time to wait but the goals always remain intact. Only methods and names change and frequently those not much when you get beyond the rhetoric to the tell-all classroom guides or forgotten books and reports.
Funny (not!) that our 7th grade son took a personality test his first day back at school! And I think this was in AP math!!! Where the heck is that data going?
Did you know David Coleman has bragged about the College Board hiring the Big Data specialists who used behavioral data during the 2012 campaign to figure out what people disliked about Romney and then hammer those perceptions home before Romney ever even had his party convention and began his advertising campaign?
They also determined precisely which voters they needed to turn out, where they lived, and what they wanted to hear to vote for President Obama in 2012. That is who is working now for CB and they get to use that benchmark preassessment data to monitor the change and progression from what your son knew, believed, valued, and what strategies and analogies they used when there was no answer.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-30/googles-eric-schmidt-invests-in-obamas-big-data-brains explains how it works.
http://education-curriculum-reform-government-schools.org/w/2013/08/common-core-author-works-with-obama-big-data-team-to-mine-k-12-student-data/ is more specific detail including video of Coleman’s remarks. Big Data does not need Personally Identifiable Information. It cares about personal characteristics and no one is protecting that.
Robin, I have a really stupid question….I am looking everywhere but I can’t find anything yet…do you think David Coleman is related to James Coleman in any way?? That would be VERY interesting!
Not that I know of Macey but his mother Elizabeth Coleman, the President of Bennington College, did some graduate work at U-Chicago in sociology and may well have taken courses from Coleman. I believe Elizabeth Coleman was also a prof at the New School for Social Research before shifting to Bennington.
His dad IIRC is or was a psychiatrist in New York City.
Yeah, I remembered that…I thought it would be kind of cool if we could tie them together somehow…because I know there is something up with David Coleman…besides having a fruit cake for a mom…LOL!
Macey-this Whole Child pursuit that you and I have a running dialogue about is global as this Toronto story shows http://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2014/09/01/back_to_school_looking_beyond_the_3_rs.html
I was just having a conversation with someone in Australia who had bought the book and pointed out that there Nel Noddings is one of the profs hired to help with their Whole Child/anti-bullying campaign. That same work though, like Csik’s work on Excellence in education, also fits with both profs’ membership in GERG and its use of education to drive a transformative cultural evolution. Most of these things takes place on the plane with the innocuous PR campaign and the actual change in perceptions effect.
One of the things I always check is the Board of Directors and funding sources for programs. http://www.cfchildren.org/advocacy/about-us/board-of-directors.aspx Lots of ties to MS and other details that individually and cumulatively jump out as part of a larger vision. Globally bullying is the excuse for virtually all of these positive psychology programs. Both Martin Seligman and Csik have been open in professional psych journals that the intent is broader cultural transformation. Saw that within last several days from the 2002 so article.
I’m going to read those links….this whole child stuff is taking over everything. Like you said, it’s no longer about actual transfer of knowledge, it’s all behavior.
Subjective construction of reality is the term. That is precisely what is going on with that APUSH framework. I have followed this across continents and decades and famous people who also pursued this vision and people you have never heard of.
One way I have taken to referring to the actual proposed curriculum is that they all amount to some type of role playing. I wish this all were not happening, but I have many times the proof I could ever imagine to prove all this. The foundation remains the book though. It’s the Rosetta Stone to seeing the remainder as it happens. It’s why I know where to look as the implementation keeps rolling.
It’s a nightmare.
At least it is no longer an incomprehensible nightmare with no one to talk to.
Amen on that, Robin! People are waking up…I just wish they’d do it faster!
Coleman’s bio in the 1965 book Education and Political Development that he edited that came out the year before the Coleman Report has him still at UCLA in the 60s. Interestingly, he was a Professor of Political Science there and Director of the African Studies Center. That certainly gives him reason for wanting to hijack that 1966 report to argue that academics was inequitable because family background, and especially the mother’s level of education, correlated so closely with how well students did in school.
You hopefully remember from the book that this Coleman interpretation created a rationale for where John Dewey and John Goodlad (who was the Dean of the Ed School at UCLA at the time) wanted K-12 education to be positioned anyway for reasons of the accompanying social, economic, and political transformation in a highly collectivist direction that both men were never shy about acknowledging. His CASBS fellowship was 1963-64.
The 1965 book credits his year at CASBS for allowing him to edit the book and he also thanks the Political Change Committee for their support. The book came out of Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council. Coleman in his Intro bemoans the “neglect of educators and other social scientists” to concern “themselves with the links between education, on the one hand, and the economy, polity, society, or culture, on the other.”
I just find McNeill, Butts, and Bender all too ironic in the grand scheme of things here.
Quick takes:
Bill McNeill, is imho the greatest living historian.
It is unclear whether the author of this piece has read McNeill.
Tom Bender was crucial in ending the navel gazing that had been going on in the study of US history by scholars and returning it to an international context that was common in the 19th C.
Stanley Kurtz is a hack.
Especially when he is out of his depth as he was in his APUSH comments.
Hi everyones facts. Yes, I am quite familiar with William McNeill. He may be Bill to you but to me he is the historian who first came up when I was tracing what the people in charge of the AP World History Frameworks had in common. It turned out to be the World History Association. So I discovered his work and his son John’s and watched the video with David Christian of Big History fame.
I have written a post about that too. I do not think you read the entire trilogy. You will see I have read Tom Bender’s books. You may not like what I am saying but I do my homework and these are ideas that I dig into. I do not call names, but I do hold adults responsible for what they advocate for.
I also remembered William McNeill’s bio of Robert Hutchins who I have also written about. Again quoting from his work. When Arnold Toynbee’s work comes up, I also recall McNeill.
I remember when I first looked into McNeill and he was making the case that there was nothing special about the ideas of the West that made us prosperous. It was just all that gold from South America.
So read the whole trilogy and you will see I am discussing all of these ideas in light of the declared purposes and using the writings of the principals I am quoting.
I love a good factual dispute. Please tell me where you think I am wrong.
I’ve read the whole trilogy. And reading the whole trilogy “made me think of…” Tangents are okay, but they don’t add up to anything than mere speculation.
From the comments, it does not seem that you actually like a factual dispute.
Have you read the McNeills’ _The Human Web_ or Bill McNeil’s _The Rise of the West_? I have. I don’t remember any major point about gold in South America. Now silver, probably had something to do with it. This wikipedia entry contains a quick overview of his pathbreaking work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_West.
The biggest debate among world historians is why the west has led for the last 500 years (or earlier or later). There are many many different interpretations for why, but nearly everyone concedes that conquest/colonies is a major contributing factor.
It does not seem you have read Bender’s books. You mention a book, but it is not his work coming out of La Pietra. _A Nation Among Nations_ and as editor _Rethinking American History in a Global Age_ Have you read those?
A quite boring video, but shorter than the book, if you wish: http://youtu.be/9D5gc7IIVcM
The book you quote is years before La Pietra. La Pietra’s work was new or re-newed. Have you actually read the La Pietra Report itself? Now, that is a short one.
For Christian, have you looked at _Maps of Time_ or the Big History Project? I am not a big fan, but I find his history to be quite good, but I’m just not that interested in what I consider the history of science.
It seems like you don’t know what you’re talking about. I like a factual dispute or even agreement, but for that it is more satisfying if the person has actually read the work(s) in question, at least in part. So, now the biggie, have you read the APUSH Framework, including the test questions (which are included)?
Here is the answer on David Christian. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/schools-that-break-down-obstacles-to-the-formation-of-revolutionary-personalities/
It seems you do not think I can comment about anyone unless I have read everything they have written.
Yes, I have read the APUSH Framework, but my interest is the parallels to the rest of the new purpose of history or science as a “mode of thinking” instead of a body of knowledge.
Also yes on La Pietra, but my notes are not handy. Lots of books read since then.
I do prefer early work on anyone to catch their philosophy before any outcry. I am quite sure about the gold and , interestingly enough, why Mcneill wrote an essay decades ago quite angry with Solzhenitzen .
The best I get from your Christian article is that you think he is communist. If you have proof, and what you wrote, isn’t. Please provide.
No, I did not say everything. Please read my post again. I emphasize major and relevant works. Bender’s work before La Pietra has little to do with his work after it, or the work coming out of La Pietra. The two books I mentioned are key.
Science and history are both bodies of knowledge and ways of thinking. The APUSH brings in this new focus. The book to read is Sam Wineburg’s _Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts_ – I would think you would want to read it based on the title alone.
Would like to see that Solzhenitsyn article. My guess is McNeill stood up for the West as S teared it down. Was it in response to this address: http://citizentom.com/2012/07/16/when-harvard-rejected-the-messenger/
No, it was a decades old article in one of the historical journals. I have never seen an article where McNeill stood up for the West. I would love to see one.
The World History Association makes quite a point at its conventions over the years of discussing how awful they find any obligation to make Western Civ the point of the course.
I do think Christian is a Marxist and I know there is such a thing as the Marxist view of history. That’s not namecalling but it fits with what Christian said in an interview about the time he relocated to San Diego. I remember wondering why Bill Gates was pushing his work so hard then. There is now a Russian journal devoted to systems that has written numerous articles over recent years on the function of Big History and its usefulness in their worldview. They have even written that they see it functioning as the global curriculum within 20 years. I suppose that links to UNESCO’s digital learning program being based in Moscow.
On Marxism, I have Bertell Ollman and Robert Tucker’s books. I also have Wolfgang Leonhard’s Three Faces of Marxism: The Political Concepts of Soviet Ideology, Maoism, and Humanist Marxism .
I wrote about that vision and its impact on education here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/naming-educators-as-the-levers-shifting-the-human-personality-to-marxs-moral-revolution/
For someone like me who has studied the World Order Models Project, it is simply not true to say Bender’s earlier work is not relevant or that La Pietra is not linked to the WOMP vision. It was no surprise to me to see common funding either.
Let’s face it, Marxism as a theory of history is alive and well and it heavily influences how ICT is viewed. It is treated consistently as the magic technology that would allow massive redistribution without beggaring. I did not go looking for this angle but I have come to recognize the significance of what I read.
I have never seen an article where he ran down the west. So there’s that too. For instance: http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/jwh/jwh011p001.pdf I see nothing positive or negative here. Maybe I missed it in The Human Web, Plagues and People, The Rise of the West, The Pursuit of Power, his book on dance and keeping time, his NYRB reviews, et. al. And there is this: http://youtu.be/eAWXFqbDzJM
You totally lost me with the Bill Gates pushing Christian / Big History which is pushing Marxism. If Gates is a pusher of Marxism I’ll be a monkey’s uncle – and a very rich one. Of course there are Marxist historians. I just don’t see Christian as one. Would need more information / evidence.
“The World History Association makes quite a point at its conventions over the years of discussing how awful they find any obligation to make Western Civ the point of the course.”
Well, obviously! Why would Western Civ. be the point of a world history course any more than world history should be the point of a Western Civ. course. One is a small part of one course and the other the context of the history. Neither would be appropriate.
Not so sure about WOMP. This always seems conspiracy theory like to me. Did check out these: http://www.worldpolicy.org/blog-50th-anniversary Common funding would not surprise me since there are only so many major foundations to give support. Now, if there are strings attached and you can cite that – that is good info. If not, it’s just $.
I cannot subscribe to the belief that every act of globalization – ICT – making the world a “smaller” place is act towards Marxism. ICT improvement is an act of mostly capitalist countries, companies, and individuals. I think I am missing what you’re seeing as a major emphasis of ICT. I am not saying it does not exist, but my guess it is an outlier, just as WOMP seems to be.
I hope you are getting paid for all the time you are putting into this spinning. I have the WOMP books, which make it hard to be a conspiracy theory. Richard Falk is still around as is Saul at Rutgers.
Mary Catherine Bateson has her papers donated to Harvard, but not open for decades. She was at the 87 conference in Moscow.
I did find the McNeill essay. It was called “The Decline of the West”. There is also a passage in the “Winds of Change” essay where McNeill writes “Russia’s modern greatness rests on the fact that twice (under Peter the Great and Stalin) the country’s rulers deliberately tried to overcome backwardness by hectic, heroic action.”
Most people do not tend to describe Stalin as “heroic” unless there is some level of admiration.
The Christian story about Bill Gates was in University of Vermont, Department of History listing of Christian as the UVM Marsh Professor-at-Law. I printed out December 12, 2010 when I was looking into the rewrite of those AP Frameworks. It describes Christian’s friendship with Frank Zelko and has a long quote from Wiiliam McNeill lauding Christian’s Maps of Time book. I remember finding Zelko’s interest in Greenpeace to be interesting.
Those frameworks had capitalism as the cause of all the environmental horrors in history. This was obviously before I understood these connections and was just beginning to notice them.
If Bill is not enamored with Marxist philosophy, then someone who writes his speeches is because he certainly just drips with the catchphrases of the Human Development Model.
I am not saying there are not WOMP books. I even cited a website. I just don’t see them as being as influential as you are making them – tri-lateral commissioning yourself…lol.
The “Decline of the West?” essay was a review of Samuel Huntington book. It is free on the Internet. I suggest you read that again as well as the essay from _Sea-changes: American Foreign Policy in a World Transformed_ edited by Nicholas X. Rizopoulos – available at Google Books. FWIW, part of your quote is off. Neither article are what you claim. Seems like you are seeing purple everywhere where there is very little purple, but hey there is a little speck of purple [change purple to Marxism/communism]. Both essays are much more even handed then you let on.
Since I teach AP World I would love to see that citation.
The current Frameworks don’t seem to have it, even for the most recent history:
Key Concept 6.1: Science and the Environment (1900-present)
II. As the global population expanded at an unprecedented rate, humans fundamentally changed their relationship with the environment.
A. Humans exploited and competed over the earth’s finite resources more intensely than ever before in human history.
B. Global warming was a major consequence of the release of greenhouse gases and other pollutants into the atmosphere.
C. Pollution threatened the world’s supply of water and clean air. Deforestation and desertification were continuing consequences of the human impact on the environment. Rates of extinction of other species accelerated sharply.
Do the upcoming standards have the capitalist connection?
Did the old ones?
Would love to see the article from UVM. Not sure I get the Zelko / Green Peace link. (I have not read Zelko, fwiw) Is he an absolute partisan?
No it was not a review. It was the name of the article he wrote. Yes, I know you are a World History teacher. Your email address said that.
Zelko wrote the definitive bio on Greenpeace or intended to as of 2010.
I am a bit busy dealing with other aspects of this story and the relevance of that Heritage report Jindal put out yesterday.
Probably this: FORUM: THREE PLENARY LECTURES FROM THE SIXTY-SIXTH ANGLO-AMERICAN CONFERENCE OF HISTORIANS ON THE THEME OF “CONNEXIONS: EUROPEAN PEOPLES AND THE NON-EUROPEAN WORLD” (LONDON, 2-4 JULY 1997)
World History and the Rise and Fall of the West
William H. McNeill, pp. 215-236
This article seeks how best to understand the history of humankind as a whole by emphasizing communications and transportation networks. It summarizes the principal consequences of major changes in the range and carrying capacity of these networks, with reflections on the role of the West in recent centuries. During these centuries Europeans enjoyed a brief experience of world dominance, thanks to an initial monopoly of modern forms of mechanically powered transport and electrical communication, only to see their dominant position decline as other peoples have caught up with them in our own time.
I might have it at home. But again, this does not look like he is running down the West. Looks like mainstream world history. Is there anyone that does not think that the West separated and then that China, South Korea, Singapore, et. al. caught up?
Yes, I saw that about Zelko. What do you think that means? Again, is he an absolute partisan? Or is it even-handed? And again, I have not read him. Seems like it is a page turner, if Amazon reviews can be trusted.
EF-no, it was earlier than that. My memory is back in the 80s, but this was more than 4 years ago. I was also not as careful then about always writing the date I printed it out. The Christian page was not a pdf so the printer printed date.
I am currently busy with the UN agenda all this ties to that Kofi Annan has so kindly put into print. Sorry for the brush-off, but other things are more critical.
Hi Robin, I’ve been trying to read the articles and many of the articles that you link. I am intrigued by your ideas but honestly at times am having trouble understanding them. One reason is the abbreviations that I can’t keep track of. Second, there are a lot of players that you talk about that I’m having trouble keeping straight. Is there a glossary sort of page on here that I could refer to for the various acronyms and people involved? If not, would you consider putting something together?
A lot of the acronyms when I do not define them in a post are defined in the accompanying tag at the bottom of the post. I did that kind of glossary in the book and I got the names of people to help me do one on blog, but it would have to literally be a downloadable document.
The blog is moving in real time and this post in particular started a trilogy.
For the blog to work I have to assume some level of knowledge. The book is the foundation especially since I finished writing it and then started the blog because of all the frightening connected events. This audio recording of me gets mentioned a lot with clarifying how things fit together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aaw03zSPy0
I also recommend going back to the first month or two of the blog. The posts are much shorter and are on discrete aspects of understanding the real implementation. Basically May and June of 2012.
Also now that I have approved this comment write down what does not make sense. Put it into a comment and I will answer your questions and put it into context. Chances are whatever is bothering you is also bothering someone else. Because I now know this topic extremely well, it is frequently easier for a newcomer to ask me what they need to know.
The glossary is planned. In the meantime there is a lot of info too in the tags. Clicking them pulls up all the posts with the same tag so you can also see the common trends I may build on months apart. Hope that’s not too frustrating an answer. I am still a Hunt and Peck Typist trying to get my kids to show me how to create powerpoints.