Getting back to our theme of how useful this Pandemic Hype and the mandated shutdowns of schools, colleges and universities, and many businesses has been to the already announced global agenda for transformation, in March IEEE issued an edict that ‘adaptive instructional systems’–you know like the digital learning so many closed school systems have resorted to–needed to modified to add John Dewey’s Ethics of Moral Principles and Deliberation. Anyone who has read my book Credentialed to Destroy understands precisely the transformation Dewey hoped for with his reimagining of K-12 education, but the IEEE paper began with this epigraph from his book Ethics
Especially in times like the present, when industrial, political, and scientific transformations are rapidly in process, a revision of old appraisals is especially needed.
Italicized just like that so that these ‘online’ or ‘digital’ systems will be designed to incorporate “Moral principles or standards that provide a consistent point of view to be taken in ethical deliberation.” Now each student can practice the Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions that they will need “for analyzing novel situations.” Like a Global Pandemic with a previously unknown deadly virus? Well, this high school English teacher certainly thinks so https://www.educationdive.com/news/coronavirus-the-definition-of-global-and-climate-curriculum/576322/ as he hopes for “a curriculum that leads to action and solidarity…as students see how true ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’ really is.”
Nothing like these past two months of food insecurity and financial concerns to have a lasting impact on the children as they face a vision of education that wants to focus on:
the methods through which we seek to continuously determine what is good, what is of value, what should define our moral principles…As a pragmatist, Dewey’s interest was rooted in the importance of employing reflective, reflective, discriminate intelligence to revise our judgments as a result of acting upon them–what Dewey termed deliberation. Deliberation, Dewey asserts, includes the ‘reflections when directed to practical matters to determination of what to do.’ Through deliberation, our judgments are formed to redirect actions when habits fall short — particularly in the context of solving novel problems. Essentially, Dewey’s meta-ethics of value judgments derived from moral principles, and his notion of deliberation functioned as an iterative expression between thoughts and behaviors…
Dewey’s Deliberation then functions just like what Classical Education touts as the Good, True, and Beautiful or what is also termed Higher Order Thinking skills. Domain learning objectives, instead of actually being about history, science, math, or literature, become merely the avenue for “a continuous process of reconstructing experience that involves lasting adaptation of the learner.” Classes and online curriculum become, in this vision of education few are even aware of:
organs of initiation into social values. As mere school studies, their acquisition has only a technical worth. Acquired under conditions where there social significance is realized, they feed moral interest and develop moral insight.
Again, what could be of greater ‘social significance’ or involve more ‘practical matters’ that will “impact our perception of the world and how we interact with it,” than this pandemic, how it has been portrayed, and the shutdowns and their continuing, likely long term, consequences? Let’s pivot though from the changed function of adaptive instructional systems to be grounded in Dewey to another document with global aspirations (tied, in part, to Russian Pavel Luksha who we have covered numerous times here at ISC) to be found here https://weavinglab.org/ . We can all read that site and contemplate how the Pandemic impacts education to cultivate a need for Universal Well Being or what the constant refrains of “We are All in This Together” will do for the typical student being constantly exhorted to view themselves as Interdependent with the Collective.
Whereas, IEEE wants to make the focus practicing analyzing a novel situation where old habits fail, the Weaving Lab wants education to focus on how to “align people to shared notions of quality in daily practice (seeing that values are manifest in daily practice) [aka Action] and Helping your community agree principles that everyone will adhere to.” Hard not to think of the people descending on state capitols in still totally lockdowned states in the US or trying to get to a beach on a sunny day, while being told they will be punished for their defiance of official mandates with another month of lockdowns, and not think of this open admission of where education globally now wants to go. Honor political authority and its edicts. Respect the collective.
The Weaving Lab wants to make the focus what will this individual student and the adult they will become do in VUCA situations — Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. Again like the Pandemic, where algorithmic answers will supposedly not suffice and Old Habits Fail. The Weaving Lab wants to create the mental conditions that support ‘collective action’ for ‘co-creating the future’. Nothing like the Pandemic and its shutdowns to fuel the kind of uncertainty to make students feel there is a need to co-create a different kind of future and imagine the “new ecosystems you want to bring about.” The Weaving Lab again was created before the Pandemic, but the Pandemic hype creates the incentives for transformation Luksha had already laid out in numerous papers I have written about. It reenforces at a turbocharged, visual, emotional level, the need for the New System being sought.
Just imagine how the Pandemic hype functions if students are to be “developing yourself through intentional inner-work” and the remedy curriculum for the stress of the Pandemic is Mindfulness Practices? The effect of a One World broadcast with lots of celebrities when there is a desire to have students “seeing the interconnectedness of the system and seeing yourself as part of the system.” Creating students who are “willing to change your mind, behaviours and approach” and shift their emphasis in schoolwork to “developing and paying attention to your inner compass to navigate your way in the world.” That ‘inner compass’ reference, like the North Star emphasis we saw with Valor Collegiate Academy that the Chan Zuckerburg Initiative funded, covered here http://invisibleserfscollar.com/lucrative-deceit-managing-consciousness-by-conjoining-social-media-charter-schools/ is a cybernetic concept.
So is the Learning to Train Ethical Thinking that IEEE seeks to have incorporated invisibly into adaptive instructional systems. It’s why this paper I saw last week on “How to Make the Perfect Citizen? Lessons from China’s Model of Social Credit System” really caught my eye as it laid out a model of ‘cybernetic citizenship’. Precisely the purpose of how learning standards and competency frameworks really work under my analysis. In looking for the described paper, which was revised in April in light of the fact that the “Covid 19 crisis has triggered a new wave of digitalization of the lives of citizens,” I located this January presentation in Berlin http://global-citizenship.eui.eu/event/how-to-make-the-perfect-citizen-redefining-civic-virtue-in-chinas-social-credit-system/ that makes it clear that this vision is tied to a reimagining of governance globally and the areas for control over individual citizens using education and cybernetic principles. The Berlin presentation’s funding also usefully tied to the creation of PISA and the DeSeCo Framework that I covered in my book.
In other words, once again, we find education being used as a tool for the kind of internalized transformation of morals and ethics Uncle Karl said would be necessary for his Human Development Society (Universal Well Being seems like a good euphemism for the same vision) and John Dewey helped flesh out the blueprints for. We also have a great deal of attempts to mislead us about what is going on. I appreciated that paper’s authors being upfront that the Social Credit System China wishes to enact (with more precision than they were able to control bat virus research) is actually a cybernetic vision that “blurs the distinction between law, economics, and morality.” Just like education grounded in learning standards mandates these days, when those ‘standards’ are properly understood.
If a state-mandated Portrait of a Graduate or Learner Profile, like China’s Social Credit System, lays out a vision that “citizens ought to have certain qualities to sustain social order and harmony” or to drive desired future transformation to a New System as we saw above, these visions of what the student should be are also grounded in a cybernetic vision and an entirely new understanding of what citizenship is in the 21st century. China is being upfront about this aim (if about nothing else). Education systems elsewhere in the world, especially in the West, are using a new vision of education, cybernetic methods, an emphasis on the collective, and a reenvisioning of the individual without being upfront about it. We are also subject to “new possibilities to reconceptualize citizenship” that the Pandemic is being used to shift into high gear.
What is student-centered learning grounded in social values but an attempt to assess and then change each student’s Purpose? Why does that matter to so many school or district mission statements these days? It gets at what is necessary to create Cybernetic Citizenship, which is less visible than a serf’s collar but every bit as constraining to future choices. Here’s the definition from the How to Make the Perfect Citizen paper.
In general, the field of cybernetics is concerned with understanding systems of control and communication–how humans and machines communicate with one another. It is premised on the idea that goal-directed entities such as animals, humans, and machines cannot only be understood in mechanical terms but should also be comprehended in teleological terms, that is, explaining behavior in terms of ‘purpose’. These entities are conceptualized as ‘systems’ in the sense that they are assemblages of parts (e.g., databases, surveillance cameras) in greater wholes. and have relatively stable boundaries. Cybernetic systems have an internal, corrective feedback mechanism, which makes use of sensory inputs to change a behavioral output; governing is perceived as a purposive action, a goal-directed behavior.
Do you know what another word for goals is? Standards. Learning standards properly understood prescribe how to turn students into the desired cybernetic systems that they are capable of becoming with the right kind of prescribed learning experiences. They become the desired citizen of the future with few parents or taxpayers recognizing the wholesale shift. They certainly don’t grasp it is the same principles the Chinese are using with their Social Credit System or the same methods admittedly totalitarian governments use on their citizens.
We need to understand how all these aims work together now that the Pandemic has acted as an accelerant. Only knowledge lets us see how to get control over these levers of change that are being used. Only accurate knowledge, not prescribed frames, conceptual lenses, or approved narratives, can intervene in this scheme to get children, and plenty of adults as well, to think the world must now be transformed into a new system to control the risks of a VUCA future.
If you put the earlier Chinese “dogun” together with the “standards” of Elizabeth Dole’s Department of Labor SCANS, we had an earlier look at what is being proposed now. Fits the 30-50 year timeline to create a social change using education.
Glad you’re publishing again. Hope everyone’s all right in your family.
We are fine, but I am not used to having my husband around and it interfered with my working. The girls and I can easily stay in different parts of the house. The house though is much cleaner than it has been in many years and I am now working on my son’s closet.
Hope all is well with your clan during this rather unique period in our history. I have always cooked most nights, usually from scratch, but never as much as the last two months. I am beginning to feel like a food prep machine. Just put some pork chops in the oven and then got “out of the kitchen please” for the vegetarian.
I wrote about it, but did you ever read the report of the Commission on the Year 2000? That was the MH vision on top of the NEA/Rogers/Maslow book Becoming and about the same time. Daniel Bell, Boulding, and Margaret Mead were all involved with the Commission and it was also the MH vision. That makes sense since in 1957 when he was a fellow at CASBS Bell wrote about how the Human Development Society work had remained untranslated and little known until the 1950s when it was translated into English. We now know that may have been Bell’s belief and he wrote about how ‘we’ now understand Marx’s true vision better than anything Lenin had access to, but there actually was an academic conference in the 1930s in Oxford England where the MH vision was discussed in English.
Now we get Orgad and Reijers matter of factly writing that
Boy do they have plans for us. Imagine being in Oregon with relatively few deaths and being locked down until after July 4? That’s not about protecting people.
Speaking of that. People are getting rather upset With the lock down and defying orders.. Today was announced the gradual reopening of Oregon. Our socialist bisexual governor came out of hiding and graced us with her presence over media to inform us we will slowly be allowed to begin some sense of normalcy again. I guess we’ve all received the requisite amount of reprogramming needed.
As I watched a home improvement show with the kids the other night we counted six commercials with pandemic related messages. We’re all in this together. I sat there thinking, are we really? I’m not sure I’m with anybody on this. Fending for myself with enough TP and my allowed 3 packages of meat from the market. Who am I supposed to be in this with? My neighbor drinking beer on his patio collecting unemployment and a stimulus check? OMG Robin, it’s just nuts.
https://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/410
It’s rather interesting that a few key word searches like Dewey, Cybernetic informed education pop up “trauma informed education” as we have discussed previously. A pandemic is sure to cause trauma.
Yes, will need lots more ‘mental health’ initiatives that assume all are traumatized and in need of the right kind of experiences to make them more Resilient in the future. Right on schedule, Frameworks:
After husbands very public affair I dumped all social media just over a year ago. I have no social media accounts any longer. I rather like it. Macey gives me the scoop on all the Ed people.
I have to report that during MY adolescence peer social contact was ‘the’ direct cause of ‘mental’ disorders, and not because of any intrinsic evil in such interaction, but because of the terms dictated for it. As Bill Coulson said, TMP in the schools, TOO MUCH PSYCHOLOGY!
We just saw two Bakersfield ER physicians with ample epidemiological knowledge sail their way out of a VUCA situation by ‘testing’ their own sample of patients to get a baseline, and then picking up the telephone to talk to members of their cohort positioned in locations across the U.S. For these two docs, the ‘virus’ is no longer ‘novel’, it is partially known and understood.
For some reason, I am thinking of the exhortations of my facilitators, aka professors, in a program that purported to be focused on organization development, to jettison all prior learning in favor of the “beginner’s mind”….as if one could. WHY?
What is actually ‘novel’ about a virus that is constrained by the properties of viruses? I guess the ‘novel’ dimension would lie in the censoring of a rational discussion of a five-senses event.
Under the “Becoming the New System” heading of the Weaving Standards referenced in this post there are multiple sections of the desired Being and trait. After purposeful, proactive, and adaptable among others is “Being Growth-minded and Curious”, it staes as one of the qualities as “Having a beginner’s mind”. I remembered it immediately with your comment and I think my husband wondered why I started flipping through my papers so quickly. I had written in the margin after reading it “instead of an Axemaker Mind”.
The next quality in the same category is “Having explicit personal learning goals–engaging in deliberate training and practice–creating periods and reflection and refinement.”
I’m reflecting. How about you? The refinement is probably a matter of whether I am having a good day.
I just noticed that the “new System’ must be the Individual because all the ‘Being’ Categories and their elemental listed qualities are characteristics of people, not machines or individuals. Yuck. Sometimes I hate understanding this stuff.
I know you are interested in Maslow’s Pyramid and this new book is updating it for the 21st century. https://behavioralscientist.org/transcend-self-actualizing-in-the-21st-century-a-qa-with-scott-barry-kaufman/
Once again, the Pandemic Hype seeks a remedy being sought for decades with new synonyms.
Self-actualizing citizens fits right in with cybernetic citizenship shaped via formative assessments and the ‘right’ prescribed learning experiences.
We also have this confession which is why we have HOTS mandates now, DCIs, conceptual lenses. etc.
Plans for us again. Since the author https://behavioralscientist.org/behavioral-public-policy-faces-a-crisis/ is teaching at Princeton this fall maybe he and Robert George can do lunch. Bet he’ll be working with Uri Treisman and Phillip Petit at that behavioral science center an alum funded that I wrote about when I recognized that Treisman’s work functioned like HOTS. Decision-making in ambiguity helps if education gets to prescribe the prevailing mindsets.
I am editing it as I misspoke. Uri Treisman is the Texas math guy involved with MSPs. It is Daniel Kahneman who is married to Anne Treisman who was a fellow at CASBS in 1977-78 where she seems to have met Kahneman of Think Fast Think Slow. I wrote about it and here’s the announcement https://www.princeton.edu/news/2015/05/04/gift-establishes-kahneman-and-treisman-center-behavioral-science-and-public-policy Petit is also there and he likes to cite people like Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum who created Human Capability Theory. Petit’s quote that is on my copy of the above announcement fits perfectly with what we are seeing with the Pandemic and lockdowns and poor Shelly Luther.
“According to the republican way of thinking, it is not nature but society that determines the liberties we may hope to enjoy.” All over the world now those liberties are being extinguished as we are being dctated what we are to do, know, and believe, and that we must yield to all political authority as if we have returned to feudalism.
The Japan lockdown has been extended despite the VERY low infection/death rates in this country. No, this is not about protecting people.
My future is very uncertain, I believe.
The world is looking to the U.S., is hopeful that Americans will STAND UP. I am not hopeful.
Will post when I can…but, really have no idea what will become of me.
I am so sorry for your situation. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/05/01/destroying-trust-in-the-media-science-and-government-has-left-america-vulnerable-to-disaster/ shows just how much this is about using public policy, the law, and govt edicts to force the long desired fundamental transformation.
Just like that ridiculous judge in Texas who thinks every edict delivered by an elected official must be obeyed and defiers must be suitably contrite or go to jail. Clearly he, like Japanese pols, simply expects us all to submit quietly and accept purported rationales. Accept what we are told, follow commands, submit to political authority, and accept the Mind Arson being pushed globally in education that is an essential component of this shift to people as cybernetic systems where their goals are what is desired of them.
Happy to report that a Japanese student (Open Source Software Designer) presented today, ONLINE, a more comprehensible comparison of COVID-19 statistics — pan-national than can be found on, oooh, say, the Johns Hopkins fear porn site. And, what did we learn? Well, JP does indeed have a much lower incidence of both infection and death than do western counterparts, and this despite a very soft lockdown. And, no, this was no owing to a lack of testing. JP had added to the standard test both CT and MRI scans. Possible explanations: 1) wide administration of a vaccine (malaria, leprosy, tuberculosis) across Asia, 2) reasonable compliance with social distancing protocols (not insane, just prudent), 3) habits — handwashing, use of chopsticks rather than hands as food to mouth vehicles.
Still, fear walks the land — bank tellers are now bubble-wrapped as are subway station attendants.
On another note, I was privy to COVID-19 correspondence today between individuals in my field who had responded in a particular way to the LAST crisis, here; the 3/11 quake/tsunami/nuke melt-down extravaganza. What I noted in this DIALOG was the same thing I noted in the last go-round; that being a complete absence of empathy for victims or those whose livelihood had been wiped out; an immediate leap into VISIONING mode; an absurd level of chutzpah given radical uncertainty.
Thanks for sharing those insights. Never thought that about chopsticks. You will find this interesting and Moe is tied to Stanford’s Hoover Institution. https://medium.com/gsv-ventures/dawn-of-the-age-of-digital-learning-4c4e38784226
I have been working on organizing my notes in part because one of my daughters wants to repurpose the room I was using and was just going through some of my old notes on what makes digital learning so different from print. Now it is mandated. If it’s not visual and experiential, then it is DIALOG among a group.
I have found young people to be among the most frightened. I did find someone making Liberty of London cotton masks which will be helpful in Southern heat and humidity this summer. Some places now require masks and black was never my color.
Plus we now have this. https://www.nextgenlearning.org/articles/radical-connectivity-big-win-for-educators-from-covid-19
The rationale for the necessary submission to political authority and its need for a subservient mind that ‘thinks’ in the assigned, useful manner.
“Kaufman’s goal is to bring Maslow’s ideas back to life, along with those of Maslow’s fellow humanistic psychologists of the mid-1900s—those concerned with “what it means to be fully experientially human and how that understanding illuminates the fulfilled or vital life.”
This is a text timely published.
I have been ruminating on “what it means to be fully experientially human”…and, what I have come up with via a careful study of the psychologist William Coulson’s reflections on his work with Rogers and Maslow, is this:
It means, “Do what thou wilt”…and, not even with the caveat, “as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.”
A feature of my own book will entail the retelling of the often-fudged story about Carl Rogers and how his cohort peer-group pressured him into abandoning his wife of 50 years during her terminal illness. I believe he self-actualized with a young female student.
To be “fully experientially human” means a functional return to ‘id’ drivers related to aggression and sexuality. It is a one-way ticket to hell on global-scale.
“But we were wrong. We just didn’t really know we were wrong until our schools closed.”
Add to that, “our churches closed”.
This is a BIT DISINGENUOUS in that clearly “we”/they had a very good idea as to how they wanted to reconfigure the education system (have been working at this with the coordination of a termite ant colony for years ) BEFORE ‘our’ schools closed.
This disingenuousness reminds me of what some critics of Jordan B. Peterson call his, “Hamlet moments”, i.e. the striking of self-reflective poses, and pulling out pearls of fresh wisdom with regard to questions he has answer 1,000 x before, or topics he has been researching for decades.
I would wager that one would find a lot of “Hamlet moments” in all of this post-Covid19, edu detritus.
Our churches are closed.
Statement from Catholic prelates who represent the faithful remnant of the Church:
Also, you may have come across this when reviewing the literature, but FYI, here’s an interview with Coulson that first appeared in The Latin Mass, hence the initials TLM for the interviewer:
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/story-of-a-repentant-psychologist-11932
Deborah, thanks.
I hadn’t seen this interview, but several similar ones were published around the same time. Coulson did spend the last 30 years of his life warning church leaders, catholic and protestant AND educators about the dangers of Humanistic Psychology and person-centered ‘anything’. Reading this article reminded me of Maslow’s early warnings about human nature and what was being unleashed.
Also meant to say that I found Coulson’s reflections on Rogers & Co’s early experiences with person-centered work interesting. He noted that early on, Rogers encouraged participants to “consult their consciences” in making life decisions. This, however, assumed the presence of a conscience, which in turn harkens back to values inculcated from ‘external’ authorities. Dismantle these and after a couple of generations, or even a few years in the case of IHM and Jesuit religious orders you basically get cults of personality and the ascension to power of the people least able to ethically lead others. Sound familiar?
On another note, in the course of my research, I discovered that Japan, of all places, is the repository of a Carl Rogers/Humanistic Psychology archive — his early papers are HERE, which speaks to the geographic scope of these interventions. ‘A’ theory of mine is that they were targeting what they perceived as hierarchical or authoritarian systems — the Catholic Church; Japanese corporate structures — there was a method to their madness.
And, I should note that the Catholic pope inserted prayers in this week’s rosary and to the effect that resources currently used to create weapons should be diverted to scientific bodies that are seeking a cure or vaccine for a certain deadly virus.
First it was COVID-19 as punishment for ignoring climate change. Now it is misdirection of funding as being responsible for inadequate preparedness to combat deadly viruses. I wonder about the LAVISH funding of HIV/AIDS ‘research’. I wonder at the misappropriation of funding from sanitation and public health projects to the pharmaceutical industry and the role of this in death by virus in the developing world.
Did you see that haircutter stand up to the JUDGE who had demanded an “apology for her selfishness” in going back to work in an effort to feed her children?
If memory serves, Texas is a state that has basically contained the ‘virus’, which, on a good day was capable of killing no more than .03% of victims, anyway.
Could this woman be the “Rosa Parks” of this mess, or one of them?
I have been dealing with a lot of disgusting behavior — spoke with an old ‘friend’, yesterday, who retired from financial services to a luxurious existence in a CA beach community. She is VERY angry with her neighbors for violating the lockdown…for going to the beach with their children…for braving a meal at a local restaurant — on the sly.
She believes these people are jeopardizing her existence by breaking rules that are NOT on any books, and were not ratified by any political process, local, or national.
Was listening to a commentator who observed that ALL of these mandates have been couched in the language of, “advisories”, meaning suggestions and are not dissimilar to travel advisories issues by various embassies, or weather advisories issued by the American Meteorological Society…as in, take care in traveling to X, or it might be best to baton down your shutters and stay home today. That said, violating a travel advisory does not usually result in arrest, a fine, and a requirement to apologize to judge sitting on the ‘case’.
Just sayin’.
I saw a clip of an interview with the Texas “Rosa Parks'” lawyer. I would hire him in a heartbeat. He said his client refused to “bend the knee” by “apologizing for her selfishness.” He gets it.
Two grains of incense. I would take that two-bit wannabe tinpot dictator of a judge and put him on starvation rations until all the restrictions are lifted. Experiential learning.
Saw that too. Good for her!
The self righteously stupid and victimized are everywhere . Ironically the more people mask up from the boogie man virus the more they are unmasked as neurotic, hive minded, lemmings. Everyone clamoring for other people to “protect’ them. I have just about lost my last nerve with people. In PA the idiotic mask and totalitarian social distancing mandates are not mandates at all but “recommendations”. ( specific language ) And yet the virtue signaling masses pressure the few businesses that are open to “protect : them with poster directives for customers safety.
Look at this graphic, where it came from (at bottom), and where it also intends to justify taking us. https://behavioralscientist.org/we-have-a-rare-opportunity-to-create-a-stronger-more-equitable-society/
I committed an ‘act’ of total self-sacrifice in monitoring a “Resilience” seminar produced by members of my graduate school faculty. Needless to say, much of this discussion, the talking points, echoed what is encapsulated in edu posts in this forum.
As always, I noted the myopia…and perspectives that did not encompass ‘mindfulness’ of simple economic realities, public policy questions, questions of legal rights, which seem to have been superseded by vague constructs around human rights.
So, it was ‘same old’, ‘same old’.
Read some interesting commentary on all of this by Gilad Atzmon…and highly recommend his thinking. He tends to frame the current ‘whatever it is’ as a conceptual struggle between Jerusalem and Athens. I believe that Athens would be the equivalent of Robin’s Axmaker Mind.
I want to live and work in Athens.
Here is a quote you can relate to as the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional are all pertinent to this new model suddenly ‘necessary
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-05-06-how-can-educators-tap-into-research-to-increase-engagement-during-remote-learning
I believe in the stories I have seen using your described metaphor Jerusalem refers to the emotional and spiritual–the so-called Wisdom traditions.
Never been to Athens. Had hoped to go to Dalmatian Coast this fall just above it for one of those major wedding anniversaries. Too busy with kids or paying for college to mark any of the others with a trip. Now I think my husband thinks a driving trip is preferable. At least with all the walking during Stay at Home we could both make it to the top of any mountain in the US with ease.
So there is a story about a Finnish wellbeing template that
So of course I want to see the 28 categories of the Wellbeing Framework https://schoolday.fi/en/wellbeing and it turns out to already magically be set up for “distance learning.” Notice who all is involved with template including Beijing Normal and Stanford along with OECD.
Do we all remember that Maslow committed suicide?
The NYT’s obit says, “heart attack”…what is your source?
I had always read as well that it was a “sudden heart attack.” What Maslow was up to is now being channeled by so many with little knowledge of the previous heartbreak or worse engendered.
The 1970 obituary is hagiographic, describing Maslow as the “Father of Humanistic Psychology”….think he had a few helpers.
One of the funniest Esalen Institute ‘stories’ has Maslow just driving down the road, late at night, looking for a hotel…and, goodness me, he finds the Esalen Institute.
On the “worse engendered”: for those who read the “Confessions of a Catholic Psychologist” article Deborah posted above, a point that jumped out at me was that Rogers, et al, and this did include Maslow, the co-founder of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, — were in their early ‘experiments’, asking relatively principled people to consult their own consciences in deciding courses of action. As the confessant said, this approach was predicated on the idea that the participants had “consciences” to consult.
Let’s imagine, conservatively, that 2-4% of any human population does not possess a “conscience”.
I have been researching, and for personal reasons, the impact Gestalt therapy training (Fritz Perls) had on certain individuals whose later courses of behavior bear many marks of psychopathy. Deeply influenced by Perls’ work and being were: Richard ‘NLP’ Bandler, who to this day, misrepresents his academic credentials; was accused of the brutal murder of woman he was sexually exploiting; is thought to have had some involvement in the death of a second wife. And, then there is Bandler’s protege, Tony Robbins, who has recently been accused of grooming and sexually exploiting and/or assaulting female participants of his seminars; exploiting his staff, sexually and otherwise (that is the short list). And, then comes Werner Erhard, who is also said to have been deeply influenced by Perls — and, who creates an absolute MATRIX of exploitation in the form of ‘est’.
Really, ALL of this can be filed under the rubric of the “self-actualization” of sociopaths.
Let’s assume that another 10-15% of any human population is flirting with Cluster B-land…the narcissists, the Machiavellians, and let’s imagine the behaviors of these “self-actualized” persons in organizations, in government, in the church, in the academy, in corporations, and lets fill the media and entertainment industries with people modeling this state.
I keep returning to the matter of one, Jeffrey Epstein, who frequently stated that he was living his life exactly as he wished to live it.
This ‘life’ of his seems to have dated back to the early 90’s, seems to have involved a vast network of enablers, which included the proprietors of modeling agencies, art schools, fashion firms, film production companies, hair salons, medical clinics, operatives in government agencies, law enforcement, the courts, THE MEDIA, university presidents, and whole departments of academics, POLITICIANS — maids, drivers, pilots – hundreds, if not thousands of people over the course of several decades — all committed to, or abetting, the commissioning of a very particular crime against a very select group of victims, ad nauseam.
Ms. Farmer describes whole apartment complexes filled with these victims, as they were being ‘processed’ for their various roles — how many doormen, taxi drivers said nothing?
Recently, too, we have revelations Abercrombie & Fitch’s salacious ad campaigns of the 1990’s, went far beyond topless teenagers frolicking with each other — oh no, there were the private catalogues, shipped in brown paper wrappers that became pedo collectors items. And, I just investigated the 2014 employee class-action suit involving “The Look” — what was required of retail store personnel. “The Look”, looked a lot like the the look of the victims living in Epstein’s catacomb-like apartment complexes around NYC.
Maybe, it is s stretch to link all of this to the subject domain of this blog, but, for some reason — I don’t think so.
It was the goal of Maslow, Perls, let’s throw in Rogers, too, to empower each of us to express our FULL potential as human beings. Apparently, many humans which to express their humanity with 14 year-olds w/ high cheekbones.
What a freak show!
A footnote on the matter of conscience. The Church speaks of a well-formed conscience, not merely the possession of a conscience or the lack of one. We have an obligation to be sufficiently well versed in objective moral principles to know right from wrong. To go into the confessional and expect exoneration because one’s conscience told one it was okay to perform certain immoral acts because of x,y,z circumstances doesn’t cut it.
Important point. Thank you! And, this speaks to futility, and worse, of “enlightenment in a weekend” and transformational everything.
Good point on conscience. Take a look at this https://campaignforsocialscience.org.uk/news/social-sciences-and-social-imagination/ . Notice too that the author was CEO of NESTA from 2011 to 2019. That would be when google paid nesta to reimagine the global economy along MH lines and all those ed reports we have looked at. Now see this quote
Notice too the reference to Finland’s Future Innovation work since SITRA is involved with their Transversal Competencies and that Well-Being metric I posted. It’s all about reimagining the future and moving collectively to change it.
Regarding Robin’s post of 5/15, I happened to be reviewing concepts and jargon used by ‘coaches’ who have been affiliated with est. One persistent concept is that of the “impossible future”. This is used by Robert Hargrove and Tracy Goss. Both were early acolytes of Werner Erhard.
Hargrove has ties to Harvard’s edu program, and allegedly conducted research regarding ‘leadership’ in that context.
More framing–
Oh. My. The Truth comes out. No wonder so much of ed now is about deliberately manipulating internalized mental models away from Facts.
This might be germane to the current exchange.
I wonder what happens when ‘they’ discover that there is no “we”.
Apropos of nothing, and everything, I have been reviewing a ‘research’ paper based on an ‘est’ intervention conducted in CA’s Lompoc State Prison — 1975.
This project was led by a psychologist who was attached to the University of Santa Barbara, where, if I am not mistaken, Gregory Bateson was in sometimes residence.
Though this study reaches a kind of ambiguous conclusion regarding the benefit of ‘est’ training to inmates at the facility, WHAT is interesting about it is that the psychologist author spends PAGES in a sort of preamble describing Erhard’s personal history and the formation of ‘est’. One senses that both Erhard and est were by that time, sufficiently ‘controversial’ that the author/researcher felt the need to defend against anticipated attacks.
I had forgotten the various explanations for the choice of the three-letter name, est, but
found this.
“According to Kornbluth (1976), a former Erhard associate, Bill Thaw, a used car salesman from Philadelphia, helped Erhard found est. Thaw reputedly found the name for the new organization in the book called est: The Steersman Handbook, by L. Clark Stevens (1970), which predicted the rise of the “est people” who could inevitably and invisibly transform society. est evidently originally meant the electronic social transformation. The est organizational version as promulgated in their Guest Seminars is the word est is merely Latin for “it is.”
Based on our recent discussions, herein, regarding digital education, I would have to say that the former explanation seems more likely.
“Steersman” is another translation for the Greek word that is the derivation of cybernetic. Probably not a coincidence since I am finishing Stanislaus DeHaene’s new book How We Learn this morning and in his chapter on Active Engagement as the 2nd pillar of learning because of what it does to pertient areas of the brain neuronally he mentions that “curiosity resembles a cybernetic system that regulates learning similar to the famous Watt governor, which opens or closes the throttle valve of a steam engine in order to regulate steam pressure and maintain a fixed speed.”
All these Science of Virtues, cybernetic citizenship, Good, True, Beautiful mandates etc, get at what it is that we are likely to want to know as well as domains we are likely to have no interest in. Hyped in terms of “thinking for ourselves” is empty rhetoric when we are trained to use the mental models and interpretive principles or concepts delivered to us so we are primed to accept the kinds of transformations and government overreaches over individuals the Frameworks Institute has in mind.
The neuronal redesigns really are the ultimate invisible serfs collar, aren’t they? An Axemaker Mind is the key that either prevents the collar from ever locking at all or allows it to be easily picked once its presence is known. Neither est, its descendants per that ssrn paper I wrote about that was then taken down, or this model of cybernetic K-12 education imposed by poorly understood learning standards wants anyone to have their own independently structured Axemaker Mind. It might not engage cooperatively in ‘shared meaning-making’.
Robin, can you comment on how intersectional theory ties into all of this. TXH
Est and its multiple meanjng reflects efforts to confuse to direct/convey to certain groups of people differrnt meanings ( meaning making) when they say things. Concealing truth, manipulating atitudes values and beliefs of each, by misunderstanding their lingo tricks using the same words and sentences. Note all the endless meaningless word salad, enabling programming words to be inserted into the vague and repetative expliques, each taking their made meaning from it. Life long learning. Deep learning. Excellance. Literacy. Social and emotional learning. Higher order thinking. Its endless, the effective bamboozling the public of these charlatans. What they are selling ( used car/lemon ) has got to be so BAD that they had to create this language game to trick the world into it( communism/control).
Didn’t Kornbluth write The Marching Morons? The book from which the movie Idiocracy was loosely adapted?
That is VERY interesting.
My impression had been that Erhard did not begin incorporating elements of cybernetic theory into ‘est’ until he had, had contact with Fernando Flores but this story suggests otherwise. The used car dealer of the ’70s appears to have been a good deal more sophisticated than what I recall.
Been thinking about you Robin and how differently this Covid mess looks when viewed through your body of work. As the lockdown presses on, as Newsome and his western pact move to phase two (which is no different than one) as the rule followers reprimand those not getting in line by accusing them of reckless selfishness, I can’t help but think we’re losing to these cybernetic schemers. That’s why they can publish their plans in plain view and the masses applaud. I’m thinking of the WHO’s Solidarity Trial—where known drugs that work to block the virus must pass through testing in a 40 country coalition before they can be used. Can’t have a solution too soon or it jeopardizes the urgency of vaccines, of online schooling, of public private partnerships to save the economy and the planet. How do we fight it back? Seriously, that’s not a rhetorical question.
I am not Robin, but I did hear some interesting suggestions on Tim Kelly’s Powers & Principalities show, think it is #151. These were CA-specific.
Thanks!
Take a look at this https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/15/we-could-open-up-again-and-forget-the-whole-thing/ and all the references to “How could governments be so dumb?” and the resistance we are seeing, especially in your region, the NE, Michigan, and Wisconsin before its Supreme Court intervened. Look at what the Frameworks Institute has put out and remember all the TOGAs–translocal organizations of government actors–who sponsor and fund the Frameworks Institute. Remember it was you years ago who first asked me to look at FI because so many CA entities were involved.
The Pandemic is just the excuse that becomes the lever for the Upravleniye, government organized society around goals IT announces and mandates. It was the accelerant to get the type of internalized mental models we now know are THE essential component for taking purportedly free societies and once again have people who exist for the purposes of those in political power and their cronies. We really are back to feudalism in terms of effects, except few recognize the degree to which they have been enslaved. That’s the beauty of the cybernetic model when applied to the human mind and human societies. The totalitarian aspirations become hard to see. These lockdowns are imposed by pols who do want to rule and have never suffered financially from the effects of a politically organized society geared to collective goals.
“If we stop at drawing parallels between the coronavirus crisis and the climate crisis, we risk appearing that we’re vying for attention. This weakens our credibility. Messengers who appear to be self-interested or “grinding the same old axe” are unpersuasive, easily dismissed, and often vilified.”
THAT’S RIGHT!!!
Same crappy modelling techniques employed in both scams.
“We really are back to feudalism in terms of effects, except few recognize the degree to which they have been enslaved. That’s the beauty of the cybernetic model when applied to the human mind and human societies.”
Yes! Except I’d replace beauty with horror.
How about ‘tragedy’? It gets at the unseen aspect as well as the planned atrocious effects in terms of freedom of the individual.
Is your area of newsome’s personal fiefdom opening up finally?
Garcetti seems to think LA County can close down indefinitely. I guess even more filming may shift to Georgia. Got a haircut earlier in the week and rid of my gray today. I do try to get the first appointment of the day though so I am in and out before there is too much traffic. Same is true of going to stores. I have been stopped twice to confirm I am 60 or over. It feels like the reverse of being a tall 11 year old and the theatres insisting I was lying about being under 12 and should pay the adult price, not the child’s.
“We really are back to feudalism in terms of effects, except few recognize the degree to which they have been enslaved. That’s the beauty of the cybernetic model when applied to the human mind and human societies.”
Yes! Except I’d replace beauty with horror.