You may have noticed that first I figure out what is really planned for K-12 classrooms and then I figure out why. It helps when I discover that certain foundations, like Rockefeller or Carnegie, have been financing specific education visions for decades. Hard not to intuit “So you believe this fits in with your other work and gets to the same ends as initiatives that now go by different names?” It’s almost like a Treasure Hunt except what drives me is a recognition that if this continues there will cease to be much treasure outside of political connections or a tax-free endowment. Being a dedicated researcher though I was recently reading Michael Cole’s 1989 The Construction Zone: Working for Cognitive Change in School laying out how to use classroom activity, especially via computer interactions, to create the desired ‘intrapsychological’ changes that would guide perception and likely behavior going forward. That precise word kept being used.
Now before you exclaim that I am not going to be in the running for How to Have Fun on a Weekend, let me say in my defense I knew I was going to be stuck somewhere for several hours and wanted a few options on what to focus on. So I was also reading Martin Erdman’s Building the Kingdom of God on Earth as suggested by a blog reader. Maybe that simultaneous pondering first of how, made the proclaimed why jump out at me. Back when the Protestant churches were far more influential than they are today, there was a pre-World War II global vision that they could be the institutions that to create the “state of mind which must precede any genuine progress toward world order.” That quote was by future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1944 to the graduating class of the Princeton Theological Seminary.
It is precisely the same view of changing hearts and minds we now see in the schools, especially K-12 education. Education became the social vehicle for transformations in prevailing beliefs in a collectivist direction. Beyond this constant theme over the last 100 years that the way to change the nature of the real world, politically and socially going forward, “consists no longer in physical obstacles but only in the minds of men. The difficulty of so changing the minds of men, even in commonwealths so advanced, is hard to exaggerate…The work of effecting that change is essentially work for the churches; but they cannot begin it till political thinkers have clearly said what the change should be.”
Now substitute the word ‘schools’ there for ‘churches’ as the far more effective long term influence now. Also recognize from the last post that Uncle Karl is absolutely one of those political thinkers and that the principals and administrators dictating required classroom practices, and psychologists creating the measuring assessments, are all now actually looking to force and then monitor precisely just those sought changes in students’ minds and hearts. Now one more quote is crucial to what I really think is now intended under euphemistically phrased practices and policies like Competency-Based Education, digital learning, formative assessment or assessment for learning (notice next time you see that phrase that for is italicized just like that for emphasis).
In England before World War I, a politically influential group called the Round Table laid out its 20th Century international vision. It had ties to both the famous Rhodes Trust and to what is now the well-known Council on Foreign Relations. Deep pockets, influential, in a position to maneuver any agreed upon plans into place over time is a succinct way to describe any of these types of groups. What I care about, because I believe it was the goal that led these people to want to use both the churches then and the schools now, was a desired “power to act directly on the individual citizen.” That’s not the view of the role of governments in common law countries like the UK, the US, Canada, or Australia. Being upfront about these intentions and goals is a great way to prevent their ever happening.
Remember that 2004 Cooperation Agreement between UNESCO and Microsoft that global ed reform advocate and financier Bill Gates signed personally (November 6 post)? It explicitly mentioned Etienne Wenger and his concept of Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Needless to say, I got a copy of that 1998 book so we know that to Gates, Microsoft, and the UN entities:
“knowing is not just a matter of information. In practice, understanding is always straddling the known and the unknown in a subtle dance of the self. It is a delicate balance. Whoever we are, understanding in practice is the art of choosing what to know and what to ignore in order to proceed with our lives.”
Except all this insider talk of intrapsychological structuring, mental maps, and cognitive change is actually about someone else designating in advance what is likely to be noticed and ignored. All those references to ‘lenses’ with no optometrist in sight. How’s THAT for the ultimate power to act directly? On the importance of guiding available vocabulary, limiting the genuine ability to read fluently, and moving away from a personal store of factual knowledge, here’s Wenger again:
“An adequate vocabulary is important because the concepts we use to make sense of the world direct both our perception and our actions. We pay attention to what we expect to see, we hear what we can place in our understanding, and we act according to our worldviews.”
That’s why we have a quiet but coordinated global effort per Wenger to mandate a shift in K-12 education so that the “focus [is] not on knowledge as an accumulated commodity–as the ability to repeat the past–but on learning as a social system productive of new meanings.”
Now we can infer that John Foster and friends and the Round Table would be pleased if they were still around, but we can in fact know what UNESCO, the Gates Foundation, and Microsoft have in store for us via this 2012 Video (23 minutes and well worth it) on the New Classroom Experience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG6PVCMb3tE Now this Learning Without Frontiers vision is linked by UNESCO http://www.unesco.org/education/lwf/ to the same troubling transdisciplinary vision of changing the student we examined in detail here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/opting-out-as-the-remedy-may-mean-accidentally-accelerating-nonconsensual-transformations/
Maybe Queenstown was picked to be the global Transdisciplinary pilot because it’s just so much fun to travel to the Barrier Reef in Australia at someone else’s expense. Let’s not let that non-updated website fool us since Learning Without Frontiers global conferences ran annually from 2005 to that one in 2012. Now those same aims are lurking in Charles Fadel’s Curriculum Redesign Project, GELP, ATC21S (17:42 mark in that video), and especially in KnowledgeWorks’ High Tech High and the work now of the League of Innovative Schools.
Since we have already examined all those entities previously on this blog, let’s briefly look at what confessions Anthony Salcito made in that video. Consistent with Wenger’s vision, Salcito is annoyed that “what we’re learning hasn’t changed.” He, and his employer we may presume, want to “fundamentally change what we are teaching and assessing” and “get ready for the workplace.” There’s that controversial School to Work vision again coming in by stealth this time. He is excited that it will be a different kind of workplace. I suppose that’s because Microsoft says so. In what may be my favorite confession of the social engineering intent behind all these sought ‘immersive experiences’ that combine ‘visual representations and emotional connections,’ Salcito explains the “technology advances the emotional response.”
Not your desired emotional response, silly. The emotional response at an intrapsychological level that Planners have decided students need to have to prime that perception and those future actions. Beyond that confession, listen at 18:02 to hear that History is no longer about content, but rather a means to “learn leadership.” Algebra is now a means to learn holistic abstract thinking. Apparently the Planners would like to specify all those internal structures of mental interconnections, instead of having whiz kids develop their own. Neither controlled or equitable I guess. We might be troubled by what Institute for the Future’s Jane MacGonnigal declared as the intentions for Game Based Learning, but Salcito embraces it (19:26). http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/when-gaming-intends-to-shape-and-distort-our-perceptions-of-everything-around-us-viva-la-revolution/
Notice Salcito admits a desire to use Game-based Theory to “reenforce positive behavior.” Their definition of it, not ours. Likewise, he recommends Service Based Learning as a way to get students “fully away from content” in order to apply this theory of learning. This experimental theory of transformative political change created at the intrapsychological level in the minds and hearts of unsuspecting students.
There’s a much shorter Learning Without Frontiers video, also from 2012, http://vimeo.com/50438579 that says that “if we get it wrong, we will jeopardize an entire generation” of students.
I am asserting that if this vision of learning goes as intended and planned, we will lose more than a generation of students. Education for transformation at an intrapsychological level is a superb way to generate economic famine for virtually everyone.
Real economic wealth lies in the human mind. And too many are currently determined to extinguish that believing falsely that this mind arson creates willing subjects and more for others.
You can see why I have so little patience for Opt Out as the final parental remedy and solution for what is being changed in the K-12 classroom.
With all these trackable declarations, it may turn out to be a “Look Squirrel!” misdirection while the intrapsychological structural changes are rolling along.
http://unitedoptout.com/2014/11/16/urgent-national-update-opt-out-of-all-online-testing-and-online-curriculum-for-under-age-13/
Was in my inbox this morning. Opting out is not going to fix what you just described. For one you would need to get the left, the unions and BATs etc to stop complaining and making this only about benefits, privatization and heaven forbid a profit making business. Don’t get me wrong, I am not down with the testing for values and in general over testing of students.
Geez, does voting those in office promoting this even work any longer?
The church part I need to wrap my brain around, so much going on in that area right now. Here I thought SEL was bad on the emotions.
How does Csisk fit into this? Was reading a paper from Apple (ACOT2) last night and it is focused on flow.
Csik is the definition of Excellence. He was involved on GERG from the Get-Go with Laszlo and Riane Eisler and Bela Banathy.
Long before I understood how important he was, his Good Work book with William Damon and Howard Gardner was in the old post involving, once again, changing the future. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/what-if-higher-order-thinkingdeliberate-confusion/
I have almost finished the book, but my take was that it reenforced the longevity of these same goals and the search for which social institutions can actually bring enough hearts and minds to the desired place.
On Opt Out, you will notice I chose my words carefully. I am not saying do not do it. I am saying given what is actually being sought, it is a solution that is no panacea. It also diverts attention when it is toted as an effective remedy that dangerously shifts the focus from the real shifts in K-12 education.
This kind of Student-led, Project emphasis that I find so often in Colorado also benefits from the Opt Out movement. http://castlerocknewspress.net/stories/Program-expands-definition-of-education,160861
Same reason ed insiders did not care if Bev Hall was cheating on the CRCT or not since they viewed any objective testing as itself illegitimate.
Here’s another overview of this Mosaic vision of a new kind of high school. http://collaboraider.com/post/69395741424/what-is-mosaic . This fits with the League of Innovative Schools template.
As a Coloradan, I can testify that there are many in the anti-Common Core movement with whom I don’t agree on fundamentals; politics makes strange bedfellows. Opt-out is a guerrilla tactic — and I’ll take it, believe me. Will it go to the fundamental philosophic problem that Robin devotes her book and this blog to uncovering and dissecting? By no means. For that, you would need to effect a total revolution of university departments of education and pull the plug on the federal DOE — just for starters. However, anything that slows down the juggernaut, I’m for it. Anything that demonstrates that the serfs are actually peasant freemen, and that they have pitchforks and are willing to use them, I’m for it. Anything that shakes the plutocrats out of their supercilious complacency and arrogance, I’m for it. Opt-out in this state is the only thing that appears to have made any impression on politicians or educrats.
Hey Deborah. Happy week before Thanksgiving. You have the right idea since you are aware of the real psychological end game that these ‘tests’ are designed to create frustration to create demand for embracing a different view of the classroom.
Opt Out is a start, but not a solution. It’s also dangerous for parents who still falsely believe this is a dispute about what type of knowledge is to be transmitted in the classroom or via computers.
You also have the advantage of being familiar with McREL and just how long Colorado has been a leader among the states in using K-12 education for noetic, Second Order Change in the student. Coloradans need to be familiar with what Bela Banathy was attempting in the late 80s when he first began pushing Achieving Excellence out there. In many ways the real CCSS implementation is nationalizing and globalizing that model as creating minds suitably empty for desired transformations. Along with emotions suitably manipulated to try to compel students to feel a need to act.
And those JeffCo students came through just like robots didn’t they?
Yep.
Did you see this? http://www.edutopia.org/blog/social-emotional-learning-and-spirituality-maurice-elias
I quoted Elias some in the book and pointed out UNESCO’s use of his work. It also shows up in the Noncognitive Factors the privates are emphasizing and piloting the assessment for.
Mr. Salcito make a very good point. One does learn from being immersed in real and relevant activity; by learning through surviving levels. He says access to immersion learning is a priority. I agree; I say lets get rid of all fake learning…starting with the public school system which is the biggest fake learning environment on the planet.
In other words; why don’t we dispense with all the “technology” and government do-gooders pretending to be knowlegable while turning our kids into National Socialists in exchange for money, and use real life to simulate real life.
No one ever said you do not ‘learn’ from being immersed in real and relevant activity. That’s why that type of K-12 education is called vocational and used to be called indentured servitude when the ‘student’ used that labor at real and relevant activity to pay back room and board or passage to America.
It’s not an academic education. It certainly does not nurture use of the symbol systems that allowed people to engage in abstract thought at an independent level.
Anon-because I will not let you turn this blog into a theological discussion at a pedantic level or quote scriptures for pages is no reason for you to throw around words like “National Socialists”. This is not a site for hate speech or poorly developed arguments spun by embittered people wanting attention of some sort.
Replacing the public school system to eliminate ‘fake learning’ is quite a red herring. When money can follow the child but private groups like the accreditation entities still hold control, private groups get access to our impressionable children, our money, but there is no effective remedy to prevent exploitation and intrapsychological abuse.
Speaking of Nazis as you seem to want to for some reason, that’s the sort of vision by Johannes Fichte that did create a monster. One that caused great suffering twice in the 20th century. I used to post as Student of History for a reason, I know it and I am trying to guide others in what its lessons are.
Speaking of history, we have more design a different type of government immersions. http://www.middleweb.com/18850/my-history-lesson-redesign/
Anyone else see this as priming students to participate in a redesign with no real knowledge of why we are structured as we are?
Query: If dictatorships are bad, are they still bad when the dictatorship is composed of a group rather than an individual despot?
Are students learning the dangers of despotic power generally? Isn’t that what real history taught?
http://langwitches.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/apps-grid-ipad.pdf
Gracious–notice how visual it all is. A sensory experience instead of the mental focus of old.
So 21st Century.
Wowzer! Keeping that one on hand. Just how much are the accreditors mandating the digital learning? I was informed that the principal of my little school was considering tablets for all students. The teachers protested in a big way. They have not done it yet, and I am set to speak with the administrators very soon. The admin also wanted teachers to put lesson plans online. Teachers are not happy with this and have protested the change along with parents. So far it has been delayed. This idea came from a software salesperson. I think that the admin is getting pressure from accreditation. Going back to read more in your book. Can you help me understand how this might come in? Is the accreditation standards? They have accreditation review every other year, this is a testing year and a review year for them.
I knew the little school would come under attack at some point, but not expected this soon. Good thing I have armed them with your book.
It also comes in through requirements of Equity and Closing the Gap as well as the UDL aspect of the Common Core.
When was the last accreditation review? When is it up again?
The Digital switches from a dominance of print, a symbol system that turbocharges mental processes as the book lays out using the Radicals own language to a sensory experience that is also physically active. The combo of the student and the tool creates an emphasis on the interaction with a tool instead of a focus on the student and their own mental processing.
All the reasons fluent reading is a concern if you want to push collectivism come into play with digital learning plus you will consistently hear people like Michael Horn declare that its not just a tool for accessing print. It enables that virtual, embedded, completely programmable learning experience. I explained the effect, especially when coupled to CUN-complex, unknown, nonroutine questions and problems, as taking what used to be called the Black Box of the mind and letting all the structures of the mind be coated in irridescent paint. Now shine a black light via the answers obtained and strategies followed and whoever is assessing knows what is being used and what is not and what areas of the brain are engaged in different types of problems. Then just turn to a database like the federally sponsored Learning Registry or a state ‘cloud’ and pull up curricula shown to create certain types of ‘understandings’ with comparable students. Then see what happens as a result. Then that gets added to the info in the cloud or LR so over time a database on how to create what types of desired changes in which types of students builds up.
Student as a socially engineered system with predictable reactions and likely behaviors. I am summarizing but that is the essence of what has been hoped for for a very long time. I am basically pulling up current well-known planners of education theory and locating what they wrote in the 80s or early 90s. I am not really speculating. It’s also how you get to that desired Holos Consciousness, which is why MIT Media Lab is involved.
This is what the hugely influential and connected New Schools Venture Fund had to say about the new role of video recently. http://www.newschools.org/blog/the-power-of-video-in-education-and-our-investment-in-zaption
A way to meet student ‘learning objectives,’ and thus increase student achievement while simultaneously keeping the mind as vacant as possible. Paul Ehrlich’s Newmindedness and preventing those annoying Axemaker Minds.
Records say accreditation began in 05 expire 2017. This is a testing year for the school, not computerized.
Maybe two years or so ago I found a detailed plan for what it would take for a private school in California to be accredited or keep it. It struck me initially because it was an amalgamation of every progressivive/ Dewayan idea I had ever encountered. I thought about how shocked most parents would be to see they were to be required to do what they thought they were paying twice again to escape from.
What was even more horrifying was that both AdvancED and New England joined with WASC to require it. It looked to me like a cartel agreement on a template to be forced on all private schools.
So yes I think accreditation can drive this beyond the details in the book.
Plus we talked about the P-Tech model in the book and both IBM’s “system of systems” vision of our future and the relation to polytechism and what Beck laid out.
This week Ed Week wrote a story on taking the P-Tech model all the way back to Kindergarten. To make “learning by doing” the new classroom focus for the entirety of schooling. The tablet focus is on learning by doing without that being obvious.
No one starts mentioning Marx, CHAT, or the DeLors “The Treasure Within” Report of UNESCO, even though they are all the real antecedents.
Implementing the theories brings in the declared intentions of those theories’ creators.
This is for business schools globally, but it ties to the UN and shows how accreditation gets used to force educational institutions to force social and mind change goals into their curriculum. http://50plus20.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Values-in-Action_Draft-20140920.pdf
Like I said, it’s the poison system. Law school deans have told me that they are being pushed by the accreditors to change the way they teach in classrooms and to emphasize repeatedly that “the common good” is the purpose of the law.
I knew they would come under pressure sooner or later. I think that teachers have closed the door for so long that it may begin to be noticed and acted on soon. I would like to understand what gives them pressure. Written pressure, verbal or new requirements. Need a new copy of your book it has been my resource guide, mine is filled with notes, tabs, etc. I know you did not want to write it but I am so glad you did.
I remember watching the 50\20 videos last year. My how time passes so quickly.
Did you hear the potus speak on immigration? The cheering that happened when he said he would like to act on his own? We are in real trouble.
The new kinds of assessments we have talked about, especially those emphasizing noncognitive factors, will show which teachers and schools are maintaining a factual focus.
The immigration XO at the same time there is an Economic Justice transformation push and a desire to treat Race and Ethnicity as defining Identity is even more troubling. It is the opposite of a melting pot attitude. We must make the schools refrigerants treating other cultures without any record of success as on parity or superior to our own. That’s just a dysfunctional basis for citizenship unless it really is about the shift to the global outlook. We know Next Generation Learning reiterated their support for both the Global Competency and 21st Century skills reports that I quoted with such alarm in the book as guiding the actual classroom implementation.
I just read Jeb’s Keynote comments at his Ed Summit. He is either extremely disingenuous or he really does not actually understand ed very well. Sloppy or deceitful is no basis for a further political career. Shame as everyone in Florida seems to think he did a good job. Maybe the family is just too keen on that New World Order 41 liked to trumpet too.
Now I see the affiliated site says what we know is less important now than what we do (italics in original) with what we know. http://www.globallyconnectedlearning.com/?page_id=895
I’ll bet that consultant wants big bucks for such nonsense, that is accepted as given by adults who do not know much and get promoted anyway, living at taxpayer expense.
I need to quit reading the tweets from the League of Innovative Schools field trips. They tend to be stupid and then I get to look up how much such stupidity earns a year.
Great article in American Thinker today on CC. If only the Lib/progs read anything besides the Kool Aid press they might learn something. I am personally shocked by the packets the 15 year old grandson is being given to work on in all content areas. Instructions are specific that the conclusions required on the blank lines may only be drawn from the info contained in the packets. No outside learning needed here, thanks, move along. Kool Aid recipes only, please. I can see no learning only absorbing. No thinking outside the box, absolutely none!
Two years ago there were textbooks and lit novels, now. . . none. The traditional older teachers are retiring or being squeezed to retirement by the usual methods: assignments outside of specialty areas and comfort zones, lots of changing classrooms or being required to roam to others’ classrooms each period using a rolling cart, huge class loads often filled with the lowest level students packed and travelling together to create strong bonds of the worst type, all methods I have seen done to those like me who won’t fold at the first signs of pressure from admins.
I have a decent personal relationship with our current Super. She used to be my boss and paid me to successfully tutor her daughter in HS Geometry, very successfully. She helped me out of zone my grandson a couple of years ago. I say that to say this, I have never approached her about CC and its true history. I just heard she lives in my neighborhood so I now want to walk the hood and try to run into her so we can “chat.” she is very PC, attractive Hispanic woman who entered admin at my middle school maybe 20 years ago. Experienced but surrounding herself with yes-men and women, and loving the job security that brings. I pray for the opportunity to educate her in a nonthreatening way over the coming holidays just walking the neighborhood. Pray for me.
And Robin, I pray the Lord keeps blessing you with health, a happy loving family, and the strength to keep doing what you are so successfully doing now. Grace and courage, that’s what I wish for you, day by day, and thanks for still being here.
Thanks Tina. I have two of my kids home now and the college kid here next week so I am excited by Thanksgiving. I do the cornbread dressing where you make the cornbread at least 2 days in advance so it dries out. I like cooking as it creates nice family memories and calls for skills that are the antithesis of my research work.
Ever since I first heard Sue Pimental describe not going beyond the sources on the page, it was clear to me that much like Guided Reading, this will turn into an attempt to literally control the vocabulary and particular ‘facts’ that govern ‘thought.’ Your grandson’s experience is consistent with how I surmised it would work. He will be fine though because he has you. What I write may be painful to read, but notice of it lets parents and grandparents rectify much of what it attempts to distort.
This morning I read a financial consultant from Denver who emigrated from Russia about 1990. He wrote about the uniformity of thought and how all the news was pitched so that visually the emotional part of the brain was targeted and in a way that would overwhelm the reasoning part of the brain. I think when I read the intentions laid out in UNESCO’s media education work that I wrote about or the Sakhalin Conference I have also mentioned, that is what the multimedia emphasis in the classroom also wants to do.
It troubles me greatly that what was sought at Sakhalin is absolutely what Jeb Bush’s report Students at the Center of a Networked World from Aspen also advocates. These are bipartisan bad ideas that suggest we have a political oligarchy globally that wants us to shut up, accept what we are told, and acquiesce in being ruled.
With a week to go until Thanksgiving, I am thankful that the book’s sales, despite all the attempts to isolate me, and this blog’s traffic show that people want the truth.
Again, thanks for the kind words. Time for me to go back into reading declarations again having to do with digital learning.
Carry on. And using 2 day old cornbread sounds like something this noveau Southern chef-ette needs to add to her repertoire. Online for a recipe I go, tar-la.
My oldest is a Jr. this year. He is a wonderful student in mostly AP classes. We have discussed AP History here. He has been consistent in his GPA. I noticed that there were some lower scores in history, not common for him. He has complained about the scoring, again uncommon for him. I emailed the teacher for some insights. Here is the response, I thought it may interest you.
“US History is graded on a modified proficiency model, to emphasize content knowledge and skill. Reaching mastery is challenging, but the goal is to focus on improvement over the semester. We will have several more assessment opportunities to demonstrate overall mastery, and high scores can replace lower scores once there are sufficient number of entries. Project- based work has been good as well as tests and quizzes. He has excellent work ethic and I expect growth to continue.”
Formative assessment is where I have seen some C+ scores. Highly uncommon for this 4.0 student. The above screams to me of mastery learning. Perhaps he does not have the formative assessment scores because he has a brain of his own?
One more year, Robin, one more year I keep telling myself that.
LL-what that really sounds like to me is Flyv’s Ladder of Competency (about developing goals), Proficiency, which is consistently acting on them), and Acting Like an Expert. Using Expert Categories in an Arational manner.
My high schooler rarely talks to me, but she does talk to her sister in college. Will see if I can get more details of AP History experience next week.
Yes. There’s a reason I am waiting to publish the book on digital learning and cybernetics after that diploma is in hand.
I don’t know how you do it, keeping track of the concepts based upon each persons work. Thank you again for putting your work out for us to read.
Flyv’s ladder was very memorable. Both because he admitted this use of the social sciences to circumscribe and dictate human behavior was controversial in other countries. Here it just becomes pedagogy and school board members receive formal training that they must defer to the Super because he or she has a degree precisely because of their willingness to impose this on children whatever the outcry.
Secondly when I saw the layout it fit with so much of the language I encounter describing the real Common Core implementation. Remember David Conley’s definition of College Ready for the Gates Foundation was all about Goal creating and Purposeful behavior in achieving aims. When I encounter that same language in Flyv’s work or in Digital Learning schemes or in Maslow and Rogers, a bell goes off that I am looking at the same thing.
I did rather like it though when Wenger or Leontiev just go ahead and cite Marx directly. Or the AI scientist I am reading today who cites John Dewey as his support.
Look what came out today with La Raza sponsorship just in time for the amnesty announcement. http://www.clasp.org/resources-and-publications/publication-1/Campaign-for-Youth-Road-Map-2014-Final-November.pdf
I am so tired of job training programs that have never worked, the hyping of Career Pathways, Competency, the primacy of gender, race, and ethnicity, work-based learning as if that is why people start a business–to provide jobs to strangers who also need constant training.
Ugh…. Having a hard time not getting angry over that one. It will never be undone.
Enjoy your kids while they are around this week. Will you be making pasta sauce? Mine are already asking if I will make cinnamon rolls twice.
Well their favorite dish is my bolognese on egg pappardelle but that is my Christmas eve marching order at the moment.
One has a birthday next week so I think we will do some variation of a tenderloin with cranberries in a port wine sauce.
All joking aside at some point when I was practicing law I realized that numerous people I had worked or travelled with but did not know well, had nonetheless at some point shared whether their mom was a good cook or not. So I decided to be one after I had kids.
Last year when there was the terrible storm that shut down atl in snow and ice, my youngest got texts asking if I was cooking. That was from friends who could hike here.
Take a look at this from Down Under. It’s an IB PYP teacher, but I have found IB to be a stalking horse for what is coming to everyone next. Notice the concept of show their understandings. It need not be verbal or knowledge. http://whatedsaid.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/planning-for-an-inquiry-into-digital-citizenship/
I printed out those transdisciplinary themes. They also fit with the Smithsonian’s graphic on Global Competency. Remember it had a bright pink surround? Students basically disregard WW2 and go straight to pondering Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If you think about the examples of 21st Century lessons I laid out in the book that Next Generation Learning has since embraced as well, they could really be described as transdisciplinary too.
Thanksgiving For Perspective
Yes, Thanksgiving is a time to stop a bit and consider all we should be thankful for — a cup half full rather than the whining half-empty cup narrative.
We in Canada had our Thanksgiving in October but it’s not such a big deal as in the US. I am appreciative of having US as neighbor so we can share North American exceptional privileges.
Today I read the remarks Jeb Bush made to a conference in Washington DC to the National Summit on Education Reform and couldn’t help but note how a lot of his key points apply to most international education problems. The challenges, and of course, the same culprits are identified.
Please see: http://pets.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/jeb-bushs-opening-address-to-national-summit-on-education-reform/2207243#comments
[Yes Robin: I do note your earlier comment today about Jeb: “He is either extremely disingenuous or he really does not actually understand ed very well.” My opinion — third possibility is that he knows these NWO concerns but sees them as “fringe” and trusts that if parents really had choice and were really informed they would avoid these options. My question: Is FL as infected as the rest of North America?]
Essentially, Jeb Bush says in his speech: We need a system driven from the bottom-up by families.
* It’s a struggle to reform our schools. The unions fight us. The administrators often fight us. Sometimes we reformers fight amongst ourselves.
* Children now in failing schools will struggle all their lives. To get a job. To provide for their families. To achieve things they rightly should enjoy.
* We all know the challenge we face:
– Schools run by entrenched monopolies, more intent on serving the adults who work there than the kids who learn there . . .
– A system that blames the failures of kids on parents… on budgets … on socioeconomics … and on just about anything but the people who control the budgets, train and manage the teachers, design the curricula…
* If we were designing our school system from scratch . . . We wouldn’t start with more than 13,000 government-run, unionized and politicized monopolies that trap good teachers, administrators and struggling students in a system nobody can escape.
* First, parents would have the right to a full and competitive marketplace of school options. Neighborhood schools. Charter schools. Private schools. Blended and Virtual schools. Home schools.
* Families would be given a say over their children’s teachers, and would be given the information needed to make those decisions.
* We would make it crystal clear that the student is why schools exist. They go first. Their parents are their advocates, and everyone else would go after them in the pecking order. Everyone.
It will be interesting to see what comes out of this conference — whether any commitments are made.
I am particularly interested in his priorities about parents being FIRST in the pecking order as advocates for children’s priorities in schools. So far, parents are LAST and this has been splendidly described in the book — Parents and Schools: 150 years struggle by Cutler.
I see his speech provides an overview and perspective of the challenges ahead. Of course, he doesn’t mention the horrors of the hidden agendas behind current societal and human transformations being contrived, but as long as parents had more choices and were informed, they would be better able to avoid these traps. Genuine market-place education choices are KEY to survival of common sense, in my opinion.
Wow.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/churches-receive-stormwater-fee-discounts-by-starting-green-ministries-sermons/2014/11/16/7bbb94e4-6914-11e4-b053-65cea7903f2e_story.html
Responding to your edtech question to me earlier in the week. http://www.educause.edu/blogs/kvogt/7-ways-use-tech-improve-college-student-success
It really is a different view of what constitutes ‘learning’ that is not knowledge based. The Learning Forward Alliance yesterday issued a post about how technology lets students ‘interact’ with the standards. They are doing things. It is experiential, but it is also consistent with the theorists who want to redefine cognition and academic as sensory experiences involving doing things. Hence the Maker Movement as the way to shift the classroom to fit all students with High Tech High as the model of changing high school for the suburbs and the inner-city. How many parents will recognize that the subject-matter is simply being used to create personally meaningful social interactions?
Fascinating! Thanks for the mention 🙂
I came to this website because you seemed to have something important to say. Unfortunately, your writing style is so godawful, I don’t even know where to start. If you were just a silly celebrity website, I would not care. Unfortunately, the information you have is vital, but your writing is so terribly bad that only a tiny circle will be willing to do the work to get through your sentence fragments, unclear (or non-existent) referents, your personal asides and emotional turmoil, and your confusion in explaining concepts.
I have never been angrier at someone attempting to write about such an important subject. I will blame you for every child subjected to Common Core and destroyed. If you wrote better, more people would understand what is really happening.
Well, Joe, no one can accuse you of being reticent about what you really think. The blog is much clearer for people who have read the book, which lays out the overall foundation for all this vision. A single blog post goes nowhere if I am constantly citing to previous related stories. It is why I use tags that collate to the posts that are most directly implicated.
This is dark stuff we are exploring and I am not a machine. If being snarky is the tonic water that obscures the castor oil taste, why not use it?
Blaming me for every child subjected to Common Core seems quite cruel when I have been more on top of the actual implementation than any other site on the Internet.
Hope your insults made you feel better. I am back to my research so I can stay cutting edge on where this is all going. No one gave me any blueprints. I have had to find them for myself and connect all the dots that were never supposed to be joined together. They do not all fit into a single post. Most tend to be longer than I’d like anyway.
Now if you don’t mind I need to go find a kleenex to wipe away my tears from having my ego so firmly crushed. There goes my holiday spirit.
Wow, Joe has some cojones to come on to a blog and insult the author in such a rude manner, instead of asking questions.
How many times have we confirmed you are on the right track?. Daily, I think. As we have discussed the information you provide is complicated, not easy to digest nor palatable to many, this we know. Your work provides a great insight to many. Proven by many conversations here. Anyone who chooses to criticize, better have the ability to prove they can do better.
I am eternally grateful for what I have learned in the book, on the blog and from your interviews and our conversations.
Hold your head high, you have put the best information out there for people to read. I can think of a few people that could used the blame of CCSS but will never face it.
Carry on.
So Frustrated!
I see what’s happening. A client has been directed to the blog for some help on the topic — lurking dangers in 21st Century education, or something like that — whatever.
The blog posts may be frustrating because they are part of a long conversation that has been going on for a number of years. And, some familiarity with the book — Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon — is a plus.
The client so anxiously and enthusiastically wants to embrace the knowledge. But, it takes a while to get the substance and significance of the message.
Granted the writing is nuanced, to put it mildly. An obsession with all the complexities of a seeming conspiracy and the implications for mankind does not make for easy research. What is being tracked is a movement that is slick and stealthy — a lot of coded language, backroom planning, coercion, and haste.
For example, see the title of this book often referred to by Robin — Guided Evolution of Society, Banathy, 2000. Doesn’t that sound like deliberate manipulation of man’s journey? Robin goes so far into her probing that she does not just stay on top of current developments. She actually checks the references, credentials and favorite heroes of some of the current leaders who both write and provide “training” workshops in transforming communities and schools.
For example, one of the scariest “heroes” of some of these leaders is A N Leontiev who wrote texts in the 30s in Russia on the steps to take in transitioning to “socialist, communist society”. Imagine my alarm when someone in my neck of the woods (Vancouver, Canada) is starting up a service to bring forth community round tables for consensus-building and whose references include academics who participate in studies of Leontiev!
Yes, it’s frustrating to see no blueprints arising from Robin’s writings. But through following her revelations I was able to twig on to this “community organizing” coming to my neighborhood! Will be watching.
There is much pent-up demand out there for clear and straightforward analysis and especially, for guidance as to WHAT TO DO.
JoeJoe: If you are into school reform, think of the 100s of books along this vein — What’s Wrong With Schools And What To Do About It. Have any of these done any good? The main thing they do is cause the system to close ranks even tighter against the reformers and parents.
Robin unearths so much darkness that it is with some dread, no doubt, that she proceeds. What is so extraordinarily astonishing is that she still persists in digging away, despite the nasty stuff uncovered. This is what she says: I try to bring sunlight to the issues. It’s the best disinfectant I can think of.
I know it’s frustrating not to see one killer cudgel that will slay the common core monster. But, it’s disintegrating even now in large part due to terminal internal faults and critiques such as Robin’s.
Perhaps the best introduction to this conversation is to read all the Reviews in Amazon.com on the book. I agree: More clarity is desirable and some have complained about the style but not the content. If a new, updated issue were to be published with a comprehensive index, I would gladly buy another copy.
JoeJoe: Please give it a try. We need more people with eyes-opened-wide!
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A book reccomendation: God in search of man by abraham joshua heschel. Amazing thinker. Will the new generations be ABLE to read old/classic books!?
I mean read them and get anything at all from them? Children are being trained to be unthinking emotional reactionaries. No analysys or pondering or reflection….just indignant huffiness and sneering arrogance if their brainwashing is ever questioned. My son, 20, a 100% homescooled genius with an iq near 200, can READ. I used mcguffies readers…..and because he could read well he basically taught himself everything else. Yes, being a genius from a family of mathematicians and chemical engineers, readers and artists and eccentrics helped…..but so did phonics. And yes he’s social. He teaches hobbyist electronics classes and leads sing a longs. Public school was never going to work for him. He could read by 3. I think school would have made him withdraw and be shy. There was no place for an extra bright child in the public schools in the seedy northwest city we lived in due to my poor choice of spouse. If the schools were bad then, I hate to imagine what they aare now.
Learning without frontiers…..so… there are no frontiers to explore? Learning is a dead end? Don’t they mean learning without boundaries or something???
Hi m. Welcome to ISC. I think mental maps, Frameworks, learning trajectories, and pathways are all proof that our learning is to be very much bounded. No unapproved knowledge so there will be no unauthorized world altering innovations anymore. I mentioned that in my book in the Conclusion citing sources, but this manifesto on Innovation and Sustainability reenforces that unfortunate vision. http://www.insiteproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/I-manifesto_innovation-and-sustainability.pdf
Reading is the great mental liberator so of course it needs to be constrained in a world where politicians and cronies want to decide all. I think today’s post will help explain this all further.