The first question then is “Useful to Whom”? Not the students themselves or the adults they will become, but useful to anyone seeking to benefit from this collectivist, steerable, scientifically-managed society and economy we just keep encountering. Useful to the decision-making oligarchs in this hoped for Upravleniye vision. The entire basis of the steerability must get at what each person has internalized at the level of the human mind and personality. Taking comfort that I am probably just exaggerating to drive sales of my book Credentialed to Destroy? Here is the link to the 2013 Harvard Ed School paper called “The Science of the Individual” https://www.gse.harvard.edu/~ddl/articlesCopy/FischerGroundwork.MBE2009.3.1.pdf
There is a lot in that paper about the “new capacity based on technological innovation to collect and analyze massive amounts of data on individuals…for building realistic models of individual behavior, learning, and development.” What I want to talk about in this post is the confession about the “invention of a framework that can sustain a science of the individual.” In other words, the offered up theory–Dynamic Systems Theory–need not be factually true if enacting its practices through federal and state law mandates and required classroom implementations that get promotions for Principals and lucrative administrative jobs in central offices like being a District Super. Not true but useful to the Politically Connected.
Am I being mean here? No, DST grew out of NIH-funded research at Indiana University and its creators in 1994 classified this learning theory as “consistent with theories of the social construction of knowledge and in fact offers a biologically plausible mechanism for such a process.” Translated into English, the researchers want it to be true because advocating for the theory earns grants. Implementing the theory in school classrooms can have useful effects on guiding and motivating students to behave in desired ways that will ultimately be grounded, if the ‘research’ goes as hoped, into the students’ neural synapses. To quote again, “a dynamic systems approach to cognition and action provides a biological ground for cultural and contextual accounts of human cognition.”
Why am I hyping on these confessions? Because these are the theories adopted for the classroom in the famous 2012 federal “Education for Life and Work” report covered here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/so-now-common-core-rejects-individual-thinking-to-embrace-soviet-psychology-ecology/ It is the theory guiding both the new federal education Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and its companion 2014 federal Upravleniye legislation WIOA. That 2013 Harvard paper above is part of the IMBES–International Mind, Behavior, Education Society work and this 2014 meeting in Ft Worth, Texas shows just how thoroughly what ought to be off-limits in a free society and what used to be known as cybernetics research is rolling right into Texas classrooms, especially, with nary a barrier to entry.
http://www.imbes.org/Resources/Documents/2014%20IMBES%20Program%20FINAL%20for%20web%20%281%29.pdf They even have state legislators there describing how to get these theories and practices into effect. David Rose, the creator of that very same Universal Design for Learning covered in my book as incorporated into the Common Core required implementation, and now mandated in ESSA, was a speaker. Did you know he is a co-author of the US Educational Technology Plan? Another speaker, Fumiko Hoeft, is described as “interested in ‘understanding interaction between academic achievement, cognitive abilities, external environment, and [the student’s] ‘internal environment’ such as resiliency, self-esteem, grit and motivation.”
In other words, all the hype about instilling grit, resilience, and perseverence is not about creating those qualities. It’s simply as excuse to assess and collect data on what yet another speaker there, Paul van Geert (a name I recognized from systems theorizing) referred to as the simplex system. In a 2014 paper called “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly? The Dynamic Interplay Between Educational Practice, Policy and Research” defined what he meant by a simplex system. He was referring to people and what they have internalized. He used italics for emphasis so so shall I.
“We define such a simplex system as a connected whole of beliefs, representations, values, emotions, habits, practices and material tools that serves as a simplifying representation of the overarching complex system in which a person participates and that organizes the participants’ actions.”
When the Faux anti-Common Core Narrative makes protecting Personally Identifiable Information the focus of their False Flag coordination it leaves no obstacle to manipulating each student’s simplex system as needed so they are amenable to the Upravleniye vision of the 21st Century. When the same groups keep hyping ‘standardized testing’ they create popular support for a switch to the formative assessments (covered in detail in my book) that are far more effective at altering this individual simplex system than anything that can be put on a multiple-choice test of knowledge.
When I was following up on the implications of Kenneth Boulding’s definition of people as purposeful, goal-seeking systems and what that really meant ‘student achievement’ and ‘success’ were now about (my child can meet the behavioral goals prescribed by government officials who want to steer!!Hallelujah, indeed), I kept encountering references to a 1976 book Ego Development where I encountered this alarming passage: “The drives, including the sex drive, are subordinated to a person’s goal or purpose in life, his guiding fiction. The philosophical concept of the fiction was developed by Vaihinger (1911). Fictions are not fantasies but predictive schemes necessary to orient oneself in the world; they are subjective, created by the person, and unconscious in some sense.”
Now by the time I encountered that passage I had read The Scientific Management of Society and recognized the deliberate targeting via assessment and data collection of what we are now calling that internalized simplex. I knew that was what personalized learning was really getting at. I recognized, in other words, the Upravleniye implications if all the mind arson we are encountering and Inapt Metaphors being pushed was actually about Our Steering Keelsmen, in political office or public policy, wanting to create Guiding Fictions because they would be useful in creating that invisible noetic keel. Turned out Vaihinger’s book had recently been brought back into print.
A German, writing before the Great War and very concerned about the warlike, aggressive nature of the German people since the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, Vaihinger wanted to dictate and control “those ideas, associations of ideas, and conceptual constructs” which guide an individual’s perception. As if that’s not enough, given the current HOTS mandate in ESSA for annual assessment and the stipulation of CDIs–Core Disciplinary Ideas and CCCs–Cross-Cutting Concepts and Themes in Common Core and its state successors–Vaihinger also wished to limit thought to what was needed for practical action. Sounds just like Competency to me!
Here is his theory of Guiding Fiction (and his italics). Think about the Planning Potential of inaccurate concepts and categorization prescribed by political power, to be instilled by education, under a government mandate. A potentially useful policy to the Steerers, if not to the Steered Student. Just “because such constructs are devoid of reality they are not to be regarded as devoid of utility…Any true insight into the psychological setting and origin of knowledge proves that many things may be theoretically wrong and yet from a practical standpoint be fruitful in results, taking the term ‘practical,’ of course, in a wide sense.”
Let’s go back to that fictional framework Dynamic Systems Theory that can be the foundation of useful classroom practices for guiding, limiting, and predicting thought itself. For motivating desired behaviors in an Upravleniye society where we have become the Governed. The DST authors insisted that there are “compelling theoretical reasons for not putting the cause of developmental change in the frontal lobe.” What if the reasons are that such factually-informed, personally-sculpted Axemaker Minds are simply not amenable to being Governed and will certainly notice all the hoped-for steering and desired false guiding narratives?
DST wants to make the individual-in-context the focus because that theory is useful for Social Engineering purposes, not because it is true. It stresses Perceive. Act. Think. as the desired order because it too wants to limit the nature of thought to what is “emergent from the activities of everyday life.” Just like John Goodlad and UNESCO in the 70s for those of you who have read my book. I will end this post with a story told by another prof who wants to use Guiding Fictions and history as about creating scenarios of the future to guide perceptions of what ought to be done now.
“A Hungarian detachment was lost in the Alps for three days before finally returning to their camp. ‘We considered ourselves lost and waited for the end,’ said the soldiers, ‘but then one of us found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down. We pitched camp, lasted out the snow storm, and then with the map we found our bearings. And here we are.’ Their lieutenant looked at the map and discovered to his surprise that it was a map of the Pyrenees, not the Alps.”
The belief that the map was accurate caused the soldiers to act and action was the way out. Both in the 90s version of standards-based reforms and now, the very word ‘standards’ is yet another misunderstood, ambivalent term that actually is a euphemism for goals. The 90s New Standards Project and the Common Core now are actually efforts by political power to use a fiction that students and people are merely purposeful organisms. To insist that governments now get to monitor and prescribe what our acceptable Goals can and must be. Just a goal-seeking system whose internalized simplex is subject to tracking and manipulation via education. Why? Because that is what political power and its financial cronies believe will benefit them.
They want to prescribe “those ideas, associations of ideas, and conceptual constructs” that they find useful “as a guide to thought and action in the present. The map in the above example was clearly not accurate, and yet ‘by taking some action, the soldiers started to obtain new feedback about their environment, and they entered a new learning loop’ which gradually built up their own understanding and mental map.’ That is, the map facilitated the process by which the soldiers could manage and navigate uncertainty.”
When Congress enacted ESSA it required states to annually assess Higher Order Thinking Skills and Understandings for each student in most years. I typically summarize HOTS as the categories and ideas students use to decide what they should do when there is no single correct answer. How they will choose to act in a given situation when faced with uncertainty as to how to best proceed. Anyone think this is coincidental?
How about if I add that the author of the 1987 HOTS report, Lauren Resnick, was also co-director of the 90s New Standards Project and on the panel for the Common Core set of student behavioral goals.
The real aim is so much clearer when ‘standards’ are described more accurately by their explicit purpose.
Continued conversation from the last blog post. Take a look at those directly involved with Tessera. Keeping in mind the PII narrative we have been talking about. How would an assessment like this fit with that? I assume it would contribute to monitoring that internal change?
http://tessera.proexam.org/about-us
Yes and this is the paper Tessera and Jonathan Martin mentioned with Michael Barber and Peter Hill as the authors. https://research.pearson.com/articles/preparing-for-a-renaissanceinassessment.html
I had seen the name Peter Hill before but had not realized he did a stint at the National Center on Education and the Economy. They were in charge of the New Standards Project discussed in this post so it was a good time for a carryover. Remember Vicki Phillips of the Gates Foundation was also there and she wrote Irreversible Change with Michael Barber in 2001 or so before doing her time as Pennsylvania State Ed head and then moving on to Portland to cause mischief.
When the link in that 21k12 blog cites the 2012 “Education for Life and Work” report and its competencies they are referring to the same report as the post I linked to in this post. Intrapersonal Competency is another way to obscure we are talking about that internalized simplex. Interpersonal competency is interaction with people and the environment. It’s the action.
That NCEE connection also pulls in Anthony Carnevale and the New Workforce Training Manuals he created and what they really contemplated that we covered here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/anesthetizing-any-ability-to-blow-up-or-contaminate-a-chosen-politically-useful-narrative/
Notice that Pearson document calls for a “total cultural shift within society to accept a different ‘what’ and ‘how’ of assessment.” How can we have that when everyone involved is still engaged in such deceit about the nature of the shift? I am telling the story accurately while the Atlas member think tanks erupted Monday into a full-fledged offensive from multiple directions to keep this reality obscured.
My favorite had to be Mary Grabar hyping what ‘very smart’ people were saying about the Common Core. Maybe she needs a lesson on the fallacy of Appealing to Authority to sell a false narrative that benefits her employer and its financiers. Look at the Board of any Atlas member and you will find business people who benefit from blurring the distinction between public and private and from a dirigiste economy.
I recall the name Mary Grabar. Can you provide a link to her material you mentioned? I could not find it here. She didn’t go over to the dark side did she?
I found some material fro her below.
http://townhall.com/columnists/marygrabar/2014/10/03/common-core-k16-education-n1900148/page/full
“Because of the latest developments under Common Core, we can now expect the student to challenge the professor and say, “But that’s not what I learned in high school!”
And he will have the full weight of the college administration, the state college authorities, and the federal government on his side to rule over the professor.
This is because a number of colleges, university systems, and education organizations have joined the Orwellian named group, Higher Ed for Higher Standards, who describe themselves as “a growing coalition of college and university leaders from across the country who believe that college-and-career-ready standards, including the Common Core State Standards, are critical to improving student success in K-12 and beyond.”
https://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com/tag/mary-grabar/
“Professor Grabar’s essay comes to this pointed conclusion: “If all poetry, writing, “spoken word,” and gesture is equally valuable, we don’t need literature professors.” ”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/mary-grabar
This is the story I am referring to. http://sfppr.org/2016/04/some-very-smart-people-analyze-common-core/
On the same day this was written reviewing a book that came out at the end of September with the Pioneer Institute as the publisher, NAS announced that Peter Wood would be speaking today about the same book before the Heartland Institute. The same day that Joy Pullmann, who used to work for Heartland, announced the Common Core was done. http://thefederalist.com/2016/04/04/stick-a-fork-in-common-core-its-done/
Not to be mean but the Hamilton Institute where Mary is a fellow, Pioneer, Selous, and Heartland are all part of the Atlas Network of think tanks. Monday that network went into overdrive to create a desired narrative around the Common Core.
This is not personal and Mary is an acquaintance, but these think tanks do have a common agenda that apparently wishes to obscure the true nature of the Common Core. It is one of the reasons I think it is so important to quit delinking CCSSI from its predecessor–the NSP as I covered in this post.
I don’t know anything about the think tanks involved. The Mary Grabar book review at the link was OK. Good to know she has not been assimilated into the Borg, yet.
Have you read this report?
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20439783?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
No but I am quite aware of the implications of NCEE uploading all the NSP developed materials to their site back in December 2014 and how closely they align with the actual common core implementation outlined in my book and since corroborated multiple times by the Innovative Lab Network push.
That video Tunya links to doesn’t have either Jim Milgram or Sandra Stotsky owning up to California and Massachusetts both being involved in what were called state systemic initiatives in the 90s. They were funded by NSF as part of its behavioral science push of constructivist curricula and concept-oriented instruction. What is actually going on now is so much clearer when we properly bring in the CC antecedents.
Steering Via The Hidden Curriculum
The concept of the individual versus the collective is injected into classroom lessons via activist teachers and by others just following the lesson plans. Cross-curricular themes such the “public good” can be done in Math, Science, whatever — not just Social Studies.
The two-class progressive agenda was enunciated in 1909 by Woodrow Wilson. He said: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
The collectivization proceeds as planned as more kids drop out or graduate HS or college rather unskilled and uninformed. The training to deindividualize is embedded in the curriculum itself. Here is one example from Pearson material:
An English lesson is teaching the possessive — the assignment is to replace a key noun with its possessive form, but watch the underlying hidden curriculum —
1. The job of a president is not easy. Answer: The president’s job is not easy. (Now, watch the progression to a steered self-evident conclusion!)
2. The people of a nation do not always agree. A: The nation’s people do not always agree.
3. The choices of the president affect everyone. A: The president’s choices affect everyone.
4. He makes sure the laws of the country are fair. A: He makes sure the country’s laws are fair.
5. The commands of government officials must be obeyed by all. A: Government officials’ commands must be obeyed by all.
6. The wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation. A: An individual’s wants are less important than the nation’s well-being.
This information brought forward by a very appropriately named group — BoilingFrogs — watch their video: 2+2=5 (Common Core) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1Ubjg_o8vg&ebc=ANyPxKokoxyYOil51NOGtuQkg1vQycSJyvIc93hMvbbWuO6Op0Zj2jNi5sohF2YF4dGsHrxYqcufA_JEfFW0LjFruPZiNt53ZQ
Tunya-if you look at the Global Progress Third Way report from March 2016 I put up Tuesday on the previous thread you will see that one of the cosponsors beyond the Center for American Progress (anyone pick up that the founder’s brother is implicated in the Panama Papers?) is Canada 2020.
It also had stunning quotes from Justin Trudeau that made me think of that fancy State Dinner the White House and the American taxpayers threw for him recently.
He said, among other things, that “democracy exists to do good for the people…Technology itself will not detrmine the future we get. Our choices will. Leadership will. Progressive leadership should be focused on policies that create growth and on ensuring that growth produces tangible results for everyone.
Progressive leadership creates a virtuous cycle. The more results we achieve for the people–the more we grow the middle class and the more opportunities we create for those working hard to join the middle class–the more our citizens will grant license for further ambitious leadership.”
Now think of that hubris married to the behavioral science techniques Michael Fullan has been pushing and what we see laid out in that Ft Worth IMBES conference since the 2016 conference is in Toronto.
The intro to the report mentions an intention where “By making public information and services more readily available, governments can restore public confidence and grow a new generation of engaged citizens.”
Any illusions as to where the planned hatchery for that vision will be or the intended methods?
Interesting video but it skews the interpretation of CCSSI in a direction that is a start but not the end and features some of the same people involved with that hyped Pioneer book.
I also hate the ending where they feature the Lakeside School in Seattle. It’s just the flip side of that tragic argument so many misled parents spout about Sidwell Friends not using the Common Core. It’s not the point and both of these so-called elite schools are heavily in to constructivism and molding 21st century global citizens.
I also noticed that the narrator injected the word ‘classical’ into the Woodrow Wilson quote about an elite liberal education when the word was not in the actual quote. Interesting since I recognize the footage of Duke Pesta who pushes that vision. I will say that the quote Pesta used to alarm parents so they would purchase what he sells as the remedy about how is the government like the family fits right in with what the Global Progress vision wants to force. I just looked up the sponsor of that Sandra Stotsky testimony Freedom Project and it would explain the injection of that word ‘classical’ into the quote. http://fpeusa.org/ That’s their product. It gets sold by instilling fear in parents but as my posts on classical ed pointed out this is still a cybernetic vision and definitely not what Woodrow intended for HIS elite.
Cristel Swasey of the website What is Common Core teaches at that Freedom Project Academy https://www.itsaboutthechild.com/speakers.html and that is also, again, who employs Pesta. I first read about the publication of that Pioneer book when it came out 6 months ago because the what is common core blog was pushing it. Here is the post they did on the day it came out. https://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com/2015/09/28/stanley-kurtz-drilling-through-the-core/ It cites to the Stanley Kurtz review from National Review on the book. Kurtz is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which is an Atlas Network member. It is chaired by Robert George, the founder of American Principles Project, another Atlas member driving this Faux Narrative.
You do realize that two of the Very Smart People I mentioned Mary Grabar is citing to are Sandra Stotsky and James Milgram who are interviewed at length in this video. All that traveling around the country at great expense to someone continues the false premise that the Common Core and its NSP predecessor are about subject-matter content. Even the “just wanting good workers” quotes do not really get at what seeing people themselves as systems to be measured, monitored and reengineered or the true vision of Transformational OBE are getting at.
That video is useful for someone like me who knows when someone has begun to spin but also can hear what that math teacher was really saying about the function of Common Core math. It’s a means of getting at the simplex as van Geert calls it.
Here we go re-‘engineering’ education again!
http://us7.campaign-archive1.com/?u=a47b05a8f1c8426cbfc2677ac&id=9c0a96e74e&e=5ed20fc0d7
This initiative fits right into this KnowledgeWorks push that just came out. http://knowledgeworks.org/worldoflearning/beyond-the-school-walls/
Also notice now that federal statutes have decreed every student must succeed we are redefining what success means so that we can have Equity. https://www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=1826899
Is your newest podcast up yet? Have a long drive today, thought I might listen then.
Here it is and I am back in town. http://disinfo.com/2016/04/common-core-k-12-schooling-turn-children-real-estate/
I noticed a billboard yesterday in Santa Monica across from their high school that talked about redefining education “for meaningful living”. I thought “Oh. My. Word. That’s how they euphemize Boulding’s training to act as a Detecting, Selecting, Effecting System.
If you want to hear something funny I was staying at the same hotel that was hosting the California Teachers Association/NEA convention and those partiers with their Bernie shirts on are in the elevators and drunk and I am just listening to the excitement over the revolution.
What timing.
Will the revolution involve breaking the teachers’ union?
Not from what I could see in California. The CTA was partying heartily at taxpayer expense at the westin bonaventure.
In Santa Monica the woman at breakfast was proudly wearing her hotel workers union pin “Unite!”. Made me wonder if they think tourists exist to pay whatever so they can have well-paying jobs with good benefits. Reminded me of the VW story that they committed the emissions fraud because they believed the purpose of the company was to rpovide good jobs and that requires a certain level of car sales, whatever the deceit involved.
It says “redefining success” right in the title of the conference! Glad my younger kid has escape velocity to get out of this system before it becomes too awful. Math is already getting worse. They’ve “redefined” the NY state Regents exams to be Common Core compliant. The Algebra 2 Regents exam leaves out 17 topics that used to be on the old Algebra 2 / Trigonometry course that it replaces, according to analysis by our district’s math teachers. They provided a detailed list, and they’re generally the more advanced or interesting ones that are good preparation for calculus and other more advanced courses. What’s left is very watered down. I asked my son who’s in the honors version of the course if he’s learned anything new this year over Algebra 1, and he couldn’t name much.
For your reading pleasure.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/08/the-war-on-student-privacy/
Sounds as If it will ooze information.
http://home.edweb.net/webinar/high-school-redesign-a-new-generation-playbook/
Yes and so will the broader implications of what Equity in the schools and the new 3 Rs of Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships in this one on Thursday. http://thenextsystem.org/webinar-counting-care-in-with-riane-eisler-and-gus-speth/?mc_cid=8235073e4a&mc_eid=e86bfa566e
Have you seen the iwitnessbullying campaign??? Oh my how Orwellian!!! In our efforts to be nice to each other we are walking straight into a totalitarian police state–where everyone will be comfortable with the idea of ratting on family and neighbors who aren’t following the state-defined politeness guidelines. Not to mention the ever vigilant eye symbol…Yikes!
Our district just hired a new Super. It was entirely in the hands of the Board of Education until this week the name was announced. This guy won lots of awards in his prior jobs, which of course is great right?
Any ideas on what to look for, to see what his agenda really is? In a week or so I will have the opportunity to meet him as a member of our Budget Committee. In addition to one or two budget-related comments, I can ask him questions that might elicit his real orientation on education. Ideas on what I should ask?