Tag Archives: Benjamin Bloom

Mandating Internal Noetic Development and Pathways of Actualization: the Integral Vision

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Let’s go to a quote from Ken Wilber, who ties to Robert Kegan from the last post, as well as the actual learning standards implementation in K-12. This quote came from a 2007 book called Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution: How the Integral Worldview is Transforming Politics, Culture and Spirituality and its author, Steve McIntosh, works closely with Carter Phipps from two posts ago on intentional cultural evolution. Ervin Laszlo wrote one of the back cover touting blurbs. This is all tied together in other words, even before I link to a previous Wilber post where he referred to these aims via a new kind of education as Mystical Marxism. http://invisibleserfscollar.com/mystical-marxism-shapers-of-our-current-world-system-or-building-new-mental-software/ is from 2013. McIntosh is bemoaning the fact that postmodernists have the right goals in terms of fairness for all, but that “they do not really know how to bring about the change of mind they seek” at the level of “consciousness and culture.” He thinks Wilber ‘articulated’ the current problem well when he said:

“Simply asserting that we should all learn a worldcentric ecology, or embrace a global compassion, is a noble but pragmatically less-than-useful project, because worldcentric waves are a product of development, not exhortation. As noted, the ‘new paradigm’ approaches exhort a goal without elucidating the path to that goal–they are cheerleaders for a cause that has no means of actualization, which perhaps explains the deep frustration among new-paradigm advocates who know they have a better ideal but are disappointed at how little the world responds to their calls.”

Learning standards and competency frameworks, whether in K-12, higher ed, or ICF Core Competencies to be qualified to train executives, are the 21st century tools to provide a mandatory means of actualization. They force a desired internalized development at the level of the mind and personality into Habits of Mind that invisibly bypass this implementation frustration Wilber laid out. Not explaining the ‘vision-logic’ of these changes correctly means that it is difficult for those who recognize a problem and the perfidy of so many pushing (or obscuring) this template from successfully organizing an effective opposition in time. I think that is why we saw the strange characters juxtaposed around common aims in the last post. If, in fact, “this new frontier of human understanding is largely approached through philosophy rather than science,” it suddenly makes sense why psychology, education, and normative political science are the new tools.

As McIntosh admitted, “in order for integral philosophy to achieve its mission of helping to bring about the next historically significant stage of culture, it is important for integral philosophy to be described in ways that allow for inclusion for a variety of different spiritual belief systems.” Boy, have we ever seen that, haven’t we? Yet in the end all the labels and rationales seem to be headed toward the real purpose of Marx’s writings as described here. http://invisibleserfscollar.com/naming-educators-as-the-levers-shifting-the-human-personality-to-marxs-moral-revolution/ is also from 2013. So what makes this Integral Vision so different? Let’s go back to Wilber again as he called for a “vision-logic” that would provide “the beginning of a truly higher order synthesizing capacity of making connections, relating truths, coordinating ideas, integrating concepts.”

Does that sound to anyone else like the Higher Order Thinking Skills that federal law now requires be assessed for at least 95% of all students in a state at least annually or federal funds may be forfeited? How about the DCIs-Disciplinary Core Ideas and Cross-Cutting Concepts laid out in learning standards? Wilber said this approach “represents an integration of intellectual capacity with intuition in a way that brings together the body and the mind so as to produce a new ability to recognize relationships and approach problems with enhanced creativity.” Just the thing if fundamental transformation is on the 21st century docket, huh? McIntosh states that this new to-be-instilled capacity is “best described as ‘dialectical evaluation,’ because unlike reason or logic this new ability is centered in volition rather than cognition. That is, the new insights provided by ‘vision-logic’ come about through the use of our will–it’s a process of evaluation informed by head and heart–as opposed to the exercise of reason and logic, which is more analytical and strictly cognitive.”

I believe that also why the new federal ed law now in effect insists that the required state learning standards must judge ‘achievement’ on the basis of performance, not mental knowledge. We get a convergence between School Choice and Classical Education and what “many mystics and spiritual teachers” want for a new vision of education once we learn from McIntosh “how the triad of beauty, truth, and goodness can become an organizing principle of the emerging spiritual culture of integral consciousness.” Gulp, how’s that for a Convergence between Left and Right? Mystics have called these three most intrinsic values–the three essential ‘windows on the divine’–and McIntosh quoted the Indian guru who inspired the creation of the Esalen Institute on the “most powerful effect” of targeting:

“1) the way of the intellect, or of knowledge–the way of truth; 2) the way of the heart, or of emotion–the way of beauty; and 3) the way of the will, or of action–the way of goodness.”

State mandated learning standards, the new Catholic Curriculum Framework, charters, school mission statements, social and emotional learning mandates, and Excellence visions as the necessary legal fulfillment of civil rights laws are just a few of the ways to force just that “most powerful effect”. It does that because the “new way of seeing things best described as integral philosophy…[is] a philosophy of evolution that literally causes evolution.” It does that when legal mandates lay out the “systems of values” that must be used “for large groups of people [think of the scope of schools, higher ed, and executive coaching alone] by defining what and who is valuable and this has the effect of bringing orientation and direction to the lives of the people who ascribe to that worldview.”

That necessary worldview gets practiced until it operates at an unconscious level, guiding intentions and motivating actions that only seem to be a product of individual choice. The Integral Vision and the type of revolutionary education it inspires, for either adults or children, is driven by the “recognition of the spiritual quality of values–goals, ideals, desires, intrinsic qualities, standards of perfection–[that] serve to energize consciousness and culture and nourish these internal systems with meaningful sustenance.” As McIntosh notes, “if we think about values in terms of beauty, truth, and goodness [or social justice and race, which work too], it makes the rather abstract notion of values more specific while retaining the level of generality we need to really understand values as a category of human experience.”

What are state performance standards other than a mandated form of prescribed human experience to be assessed in terms of officially desired internalized outcomes? The fact that they are mandatory and that they also serve as “conceptual categories [that] actually lend themselves to bring about evolution in both individual consciousness and collective culture” is omitted from the think tank presentations and school meetings. It’s up to all of us then to recognize what we are looking at. If it is true that “each stage of consciousness constructs its worldview out of agreements of values…that are tailored to its location along the timeline of history”, we need to realize that we are once again in the situation of another lost invite to the planning meetings that developed these values now being imposed.

The values and “concepts of understanding” that are to “act as compass headings for the improvement of the human condition” are apparently not subject to debate. Best then that we recognize how they are to work:

“Beauty, truth, and goodness are relative because they are always working to contact consciousness where it is, and then move it to increasingly advanced states. This is what the structures of consciousness and culture actually do–they act as dynamic systems of value that take these universal directions of improvement and translate them, down-step them, so that they can be applied to a given set of life conditions–so that they can be used to make things better ‘on the ground,’ if you will.”

That’s what Benjamin Bloom called Mastery Learning in what was the predecessor of Outcomes Based Education. Now those same aims get evaluated in terms of whether a student is on track to possess the characteristics associated with a prescribed Portrait of a Graduate or Student Profile.  All were and are, like Integral philosophy itself, aimed at transforming the external culture by instilling Values and Ideals that will motivate purpose, actions, and goals “guided by the value of goodness.” Why? Because “as we can see throughout history, it is often ‘just ideas’ that end up changing the world.” If the Good, Truth, and Beauty can serve as an italicized-for-emphasis ‘conceptual cathedral’ that act as “a key to the ‘physics of the internal universe,'” we need to grasp that purpose before blindly accepting the false tenets that Classical Education is some kind of rescue from the federal mandate of the Common Core.

It simply accelerates the real purpose of the Common Core to get at the internalized level of cognition, emotion, and will. Everything seems to be going to the same place because that is where the needed Moral Revolution is to occur. The Integral Vision, per McIntosh, is simply the “appreciation of how values are the substance of every worldview, serving as the energy-source of systemic metabolism for these internal universe structures.”

That metabolism is no longer freely chosen by the individual, but imposed by political authority through required Standards, Competencies, or Masteries.

Scratch the surface of any of those terms and we consistently find mandates aiming to use “the importance of values because it can see that it is values themselves that are actually evolving within the realm of consciousness and culture.”

I bolded it in that quote because we need to see this politically prescribed evolution too, not just become the ‘product of development’ of prescribed competencies and standards imposed by others.

We also need to grasp that this intended evolution of Consciousness and Culture may be deliberate, but it is NOT a voluntary evolution taking us there.

 

Shaped and Sculpted Young People Ready to be Governable Participants in a New Future

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Remember that catchy Peter Paul and Mary song “Leaving on a Jet Plane”? Well, I am practically humming it in my head this afternoon. After reading revelations in the last few months that have me feeling like I have been staring at a supernova without my comrade-approved conceptual goggles, I am taking a little break. Because things have been breaking so fast and furiously just in the last week though, I want to talk first about what is happening and also to bring back a group of posts that bears directly on interpreting the intentions of the Every Child Achieves Act of 2015.

Now I am known for liking a good Grab the Attention metaphor in my titles, but this one is an actual quote of the intentions involving students, education, data, and experimenting to create new kinds of people and societies via public policy. First, we get a declaration of giving the public bogus reasons on why children need to learn to code as a basic new educational skill. Meanwhile admitting that the required practices will reorient students into the new ways of thinking “required to participate in the digital governance of the state” [and thus them, whether our ‘new thinkers’ ever grasp that real goal]. Later, ‘digital making’ activities are acknowledged as “a way of seeking to shape citizen subjectivities and capacities”, which certainly fits with my insistence that K-12 education globally is now intent on molding future likely behaviors and the student’s personality at a biological level.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00220620.2015.1038693 will take you to the journal to download this Mother of all Confessions. The title actually comes from this doozy on page 267 where we are told “learning to code is itself a form of digital policy instrumentation–a technical means of operationalizing a particular set of policy ideas and exercising specific effects in terms of the governance and control of the population. It is a channel through which young people are to be shaped and sculpted with both the civic capacities and expertise to become governable participants in emerging strategies, techniques, and methods of digital governance.”

Elsewhere that report announces that these well-connected public and social innovation labs show the “spread of experimentalism as an ideology for how we shape the future.” In case that’s not graphic enough and showing why I had to get one more post up before my Great Adventure, we have adaptive learning, data science in education, and these psi labs generally declared to be seen “unambiguously as part of an ideological project of designing the future.” Now pay attention also because the Next Generation Science Standards put out an advisory on assessment this week that fits with the following as a desirable Practice to be Measured: “based on the assumption that design can envision desirable realities and develop ways to make those futures realities.”

I will deal with NGSS when I return so wish me a safe trip. In the meantime we also have philanthropies and governments at all levels admitting their coordinated efforts with each other to redesign society around place-based initiatives.  https://socialinnovation.usc.edu/files/2014/12/Prioritizing-Place-Moving-to-Higher-Ground.pdf Of course that report further confesses all the particular federal programs we are funding with all this deficit spending and the ties to fed Ed and then the need to transform the broader social and economic systems. We are told excitedly that this is not an ‘Either/Or” situation, but calls for an Integrated Framework that they intend to keep practicing on us with.

Maybe I should find a cave somewhere and just hide in the wilderness. If I did that though, who else would look at a paper like https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B__OTXR_u3RbYkRQX3dKWjNtalE/view “Driving the skills agenda: Preparing students for the future” from Google [who is really psyched about this data emphasis by the way] and notice all the undisclosed connections. Instead of reading it as major employer speaks about what all employers need, I remembered our recent post http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/windows-on-the-mind-to-confiscate-and-control-our-very-essence/ where Google called for changes in public policy to redesign society. Maybe Google is once again speaking as someone with a Stake in this Game of Experimentalism with Data and less as an Employer.

I noticed Google hired the Economist Intelligence Unit to prepare the report, but no one ever mentioned that Pearson, with its global Ed Unit headed by Sir Michael Barber of ISC tag fame himself, owns The Economist. Many of the experts involved with the report are also involved with ATC21S, the global 21st century skills initiative backed by Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel, but that is omitted from the paper as well. Since I covered ATC21S in my book Credentialed to Destroy, I got to call on that knowledge in reading the report. It also allowed me to notice that the very skills “employers need” are the same skills being touted as necessary to be a 21st Century ATC21S Learner. Now since Pearson is officially part of ATC21S and so are UNESCO, the OECD, and the World Bank we are getting what will satisfy the desires of the transformative Learning Metrics Task Force now being pitched as necessary to satisfy what employers need.

I can practically see every county, state, or country bidding to be the next recipient of a jobs-creating data center for Google being presented with that very document. Then the eager-to-please and plan ‘business development’ mayor, council members, governors, legislators, and Congress critters will cry in unison that “this is what our schools must do or there will be no jobs.” That’s how what is openly acknowledged to be Experimentalism and social theories looking for implementation to produce data to see if they work makes it all the way to your local school to start that Shaped and Sculpted Process.

Beyond those links that should probably be read with an adult beverage or your blood pressure medicine nearby, I am providing the links to a series of posts I wrote originally in January 2014. I called it the Obuchenie Trilogy, but there were four of them as it turned out. Obuchenie is a Russian word that does not translate smoothly into English, but understanding it as a goal is crucial for translating the Every Child Achieves Act’s aspirations for our children into the actual goals. In order here are the posts so we can get ready to deal with ECAA when I get back.

http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/obscuring-the-reinvention-of-all-education-around-envisaging-new-ways-of-being-in-the-world/

http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/unveiling-the-true-focus-of-the-common-core-obuchenie-within-students-to-gain-desired-future-behaviors/

http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/supposedly-creating-a-generation-of-solutionaries-by-using-education-to-create-futures-oriented-change-agents/

Finally, we have this  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/finale-of-the-dangerous-mindset-trilogy-spreading-the-contagion-to-fundamentally-alter-how-we-think-and-live/

Reading the language of the new form of ECAA, 1177, made me think of what Benjamin Bloom really intended Mastery Learning to become because that seemed to be a driver behind the 1177 language’s clear intent to fundamentally change our children. When I went back to the early 70s, I found Bloom writing alarmingly about changing the nature of the task in order to change the student in order to get at Cognitive Behaviors and Affective Characteristics. Well, that’s clearly not just another way to teach math or reading so it becomes accessible to all. There was something else noticeable though in the 1974 book schools, society, and mastery learning that wrote up presentations from an AERA annual conference.

Remember what the typeface created by the old typewriters looked like and how much trouble it would be to hyphenate ‘teaching-learning process’ just like that for more than 100 pages of typing. Sometimes it appears several times on a single page. Someone wanted that hyphenation because it helped stipulate the meaning of the phrase. In my mind, that much trouble consistently gone to in the early 70s means we are right about the phrase being a translated Russian word for a psychological and pedagogical practice created over there. Being brought over here and in 2015 it’s about to make it into a federal law when accurately understood.

Don’t expect a thank you from me for THAT importation into our classrooms.

Russian psych research, federal law, and Experimentalism via data as an ideological project of designing the future.

Leaving everyone with lots of relevant reading so no one needs to Miss Me While I’m Gone.

Now humming “Sure Gonna Miss Me While I’m Gone” as I pack. See ya.

Commanding Students to Treat Themselves as Manipulable Objects Means Invisible, Ongoing Predation

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This post ends what began as a Trilogy but became a Quartet of posts when Senator Lamar Alexander substituted a substantially new version of his K-12 federal legislation rewrite with virtually no attempt to let the voting public know of the switch. As the last post covered in part, as a whole 1177, as the bill is called, reads as if it is the fulfillment of everything the behavioral and social scientists in Palo Alto have ever wanted from education to remake the existing world. It will take the sequel to my book Credentialed to Destroy to lay out all the connections I have documented, but I have them and I get to read 1177 with the informed mind and well-stocked glossary from books and papers going back to its founding in the early 50s. 1177 is also deeply embued with the communitarian ethos and seeks to turn it into collective obligations under federal law. Quite a combo.

I began this Quartet with the Fraud of the Century post because I thought it was important to begin to frame these shifts accurately as a usurpation by governments at all levels of an ability to make decisions that traditionally and legitimately belonged to private individuals. Now please forgive me for what is about to be a graphic metaphor, but it is the best comparison I can come up with and it unfortunately fits. Back in China under Mao or the USSR, the ordinary people knew perfectly well that they were coerced and manipulated by the power of the State. I won’t say imagine because this may be an apt image, but it’s not a pleasant one, that you wake up to someone with a knife to your throat and they insist that if you submit to sex they will not hurt you further. You may not have black eyes, but you were still raped and you would know that.

What the behavioral and social scientists in the East and West have been looking for over decades in a horrifyingly coordinated manner (also documented repeatedly beyond what is in first book) is an ability to gain that physical submission to whatever schemes the public sector decides on without the public appreciating the extent of the sought submission. That of course requires psychological manipulation and a limiting of knowledge, which is precisely what K-12 education in the US has sought to do from the original legislation in 1965 forward. On page 32,  the Every Child Achieves Act of 2015 (ECAA) prescribes that  each state “shall include the same knowledge, skills, and levels of achievement expected of all public school students in the state.” The ‘same’ and ‘all’ are deliberate language that limits what can now go on in K-12 public education for every child, regardless of ability.

Accessible to all as a legal requirement means that the focus has to be on emotions, beliefs, and behaviors because those are the only things all children have in common. Usefully those are the areas that the behavioral scientists have always wanted to access and now it’s the only legally acceptable focus. How useful. Now we are going to go back to one of the Big Fish among those behavioral scientists, Benjamin Bloom, to something he wrote back in 1976, where he believed his Mastery Learning techniques (notice how many times ‘mastery’ appears in ECAA) could create equality of learning.

He also wanted to shift the focus of school away from subject-content to affective characteristics, cognitive behaviors, and psychomotor skills. He pointed out that making equality of learning outcomes (italicized just like that) be a goal of education rather than equality of opportunity would mean “teachers and instructional material and procedures should  emphasize acceptable levels of learning for all children.” High standards gets its height from the percentage meeting the goal, not from the height of the goals themselves.

We see that same planned focus in the remake of all high schools project that started in 1998 as the National Urban High School project that the National Governors Association and the federal DoED saw no reason to tell us about. We have already discussed how all secondary schoolwork will meet distressingly low ‘common core goals’ such as the listed low, non-intellectual skills the federal Department of Labor created for its SCANS-Secretary’s Commission on Acquiring Necessary Skills in 1992. Oh, that would be when Alexander was the federal Education Secretary. What are the odds? From the 2008 NUHS “Seeing the Future” report, let me quote two more examples of “Common Core Goals” that would “cut across disciplines, drive the curriculum, and serve as the standards for assessing student work.”

The Six Hoover Learner Outcomes: What All Students Should Know and Be Able to Do on Graduation

1. Demonstrate habits of inquiry

2. Experience high technology

3. Collect, analyze, and organize resources and information

4. Communicate ideas and information

5. Work effectively with others

6. Organize personal resources, plan goals for the future, and show a commitment to lifelong learning

Now try to control your enthusiasm at these generic skills and personal qualities as I list The Five Habits of Mind from Central Park East Secondary, NYC.

Connection: How is it connected to other things?

Perspective: What is the viewpoint?

Evidence: How do we know what we know?

Speculation: How else may it be considered?

Significance: What difference does it make?

With those thresholds, what will now constitute mandated ‘learning for all’ judged as meeting federal law requirements, these very low and largely non-academic ‘common core goals’ asked of high schoolers will make a great deal of difference to where the US and other countries with comparable goals are really headed. Just imagine College and Career Readiness based on those as the high school completion goals and we will see why we found what we covered in this post. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/now-more-than-five-years-into-an-attempt-to-help-organize-a-near-total-revision-of-human-behavior/ , which usefully gets us back to a global focus as we all ask why, why? For that answer we need to go to Uzbekistan to some research Alexander Luria did there in the early 30s to test the effect literacy had on the mind based on a theory he and Lev Vygotsky had developed.

What Luria found was that: “For illiterate peasants speech and reasoning simply echoed practical and situational activity. For somewhat educated people the relationship was reversed: Abstract categories dominated and restructured situational experience.” In other words, illiteracy is problemmatic for pushing theoretical thinking as a reliable guide to altering perception, and thus future behavior, because it simply does not work. It works poorly with an Axemaker Mind that recognizes inapt metaphors and can develop its own concepts from its personal store of facts. So if that Davydov vision of a restructured curriculum and purpose of school we met in the last post and in Chapters 2 and 3 of my book is to work students need to be kept at a Basic Skills and low levels of factual knowledge threshold. Are things making more sense now?

And we have also documented repeatedly that in mandating assessments tied to higher order thinking skills and understanding ECAA mandates that Davydov vision. Now the title came out of reading the following passage in a book from 1981 called Educating because the described vision throughout the book dovetailed so well with the real Common Core implementation I documented in my book and all the references to ‘learning’ now in ECAA. Gowin stated that “voluntary individual learning probably cannot begin until the person can regard the self as an object…One must be able to treat oneself as an object in order to probe one’s self, to see it as an instrument in learning.” What ECAA does is mandate that the student must view themselves that way and accept the school’s right to manipulate his beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and even the hardwiring of his brain as he wishes.

That’s what that language in the statute translates into when it is run through the behavioral sciences glossary and existing papers and books. Gowin called it  a ‘controlled yielding’ and viewed the reorganization of the mind and personality at a neural level as necessary. All of this is bad enough and quickly leads to all sorts of literature on precisely what Transformational Learning really means that makes me long for that first post where we were angry that “high standards” meant combining college prep and vocational into project-based learning for all students. A reader though has passed on the most aggressive charter language I have ever read from the school district, Clarke County, whose leader was recently named National School Superintendent of the Year. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8U0imqlmoA-alFFRU1aNGxBQjQ/view?pli=1

It was this local school district declaring the right to reorganize its students minds and personalities via required “personalized dynamic learning experiences” that really brought home the level of predatory invasions governments at every level are insisting on. Dynamic means transformative change in the student so I want to close with a quote from the late Professor Jack Mezirow on Transformative Learning Theory that fits with where that charter, the ECAA, and this entire learning focus takes us. Long, but vital.

“Transformative learning is defined as the process by which we transform problemmatic frames of reference (mindsets, habits of mind, meaning perspectives)–sets of assumption and expectation–to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, reflective and emotionally able to change. Such frames are better because they are more likely to generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action.

Frames of reference are the structures of culture and language through which we construe meaning by attributing coherence and significance to our experience. They selectively shape and delimit our perception, cognition and feelings by predisposing our intentions, beliefs, expectations, and purposes. These preconceptions set our ‘line of action’. Once set or programmed, we automatically move from one specific mental or behavioural activity to another, and we have a strong tendency to reject ideas that fail to fit our preconceptions.”

No wonder the behavioural scientists wanted a shift to theoretical instruction (called there frames of reference) as I have repeatedly documented. No wonder the government officials and employees who want all this power are lying to us.

The public sector gets to determine what is problemmatic and decide the desired fix and it’s all out of sight. Except for in the language it is using in laws, regulations, and charters to try to make all these personal intrusions mandatory.

Luckily for us the latter is my playground.

 

Masking the New Integral Human Rights Focus: Education Becomes a Tool of the Sought Cohesive, Caring Society

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The Great War, as World War I was called in the 20s, had the effect of forcing many Europeans to begin imagining a world where there would never again be such a violent convulsion. HG Wells’ The Open Conspiracy came out of just that kind of search to fundamentally change all the rules for the future. The essential part of Wells’ vision was to use education to remove the “outworn ideas and attitudes” and substitute concepts and values conducive to world reconstruction. To Wells, there could be “no half measures. You have not yet completed your escape to the Open Conspiracy from the cities of the plain while it is still possible for you to take a single backward glance.”

The NEA’s Life Adjustment Model we encountered in the last post came out of America’s reaction to the convulsions of World War II. Then, and in its current iterations stressing school as the source of a psycho-social catharsis of New Communitarian-oriented values, attitudes, feelings, skills, and beliefs, this change in the focus of the curriculum and the classroom should be seen through a recognition that “whatever we retain [of the ancient ideas and order] will come back to life and grow again.”

What I have been calling Mind Arson is actually just the deliberate pruning of educators working as gardeners of the Mind and Personality in pursuit of Wholesale Change. Because,as Wells once again recognized: “the more thoroughly we seek to release our minds and the minds of those about us from them and cut off all thoughts of a return,” the greater the possibility of the desired fundamental transformations in how people act and societies, economies, and countries organize their daily lives.

Wells even had a beguiling phrase for this intent–‘mental sanitation,’ which would certainly explain why it looks like mind arson and psychological manipulation to us. It is. An aspect we have been dealing with all along in the US and also the West generally is the idea of ‘myth’ hatched at the University of Chicago in 1948 (the year after the NEA began its revolutionary push in ed to make human relations its focus) where the ‘myth’ ceased to be a story that had never happened. Instead, a myth would become a vision of the world as it might be and ought to be. Education then quietly became a means of changing the student to make him or her ready to take action to fulfill that vision. Like the role of today’s similar terms-‘relevance’ and ‘real world problems’–the idea was that “constructive change of the world” would become the “guiding form of all human activities.”

Today we call those Learning Tasks as my book lays out. Consider this post further filling in around the edges of these long term pursuits at social reconstruction on a global basis, like it or not. Aware or not. I don’t know about you but I think we can attribute Ralph Tyler’s creation of the term ‘behavioral sciences’ in 1948 to the other activities going on at that Chicago campus on how to move the US and the West towards a World Republic grounded in distributive justice as a human award, not a reward for merit or a pick-up after bad luck. Likewise, Tyler’s 1949 book shifting the curriculum focus of school to Learning Objectives and away from knowledge. Those Learning Objectives remain the basis for the very outcomes-based education we dealt with in the 90s version of these reforms and what goes by the name Competency today. It always comes back because …

Following up on what I heard in year end meetings in a local school district that combines suburban affluence and urban poverty with a racially and ethnically diverse student body, with that 2011 NEA CARE Guide we have talked about, turned up once again the behavior modification and character manipulation curriculum hiding under the deceitful phrase Facing History and Ourselves. I have written about it before (see tag), which is why I was so alarmed to see it going international as the UK used it as part of its Journey to Justice, which also seeks distributive economic justice for all as a matter of human rights. Since I was already dismayed about this related upcoming conference in Boston  http://commonbound.org/page/about-commonbound, it is hard not to feel that revolutionary change is coming from every direction to go along with these ed reforms in preschool, K-12, and higher ed.

FHAO turned out to be everywhere now with its proclaimed goal of pushing “policies and practices that prevent violence and promote peace.” Working with PBS, for example, to create a Choosing to Participate curriculum to “think deeply about what democracy really means, and what it asks of us.” Pretty sure that will not be the democracy as the tyranny of the mob that so concerned the US Founding Fathers since knowledge of that history might result in the forbidden backward glance. No, it will be democracy as a vision of what might be. Another reason to be concerned when FHAO representatives are listed on the program of this recent Immigration Day program that also talked about A New American Majority: Political and Personal Perspectives. http://www.kbcc.cuny.edu/nac/Documents/ImmigDay_2014.pdf

The US-based Human Rights Education Associates, as part of its Citizenship Education, Globalization, and Democratization push used FHAO to create a curriculum for South Africa called Facing the Past. http://www.hrea.org/pubs/tibbitts-prospects-sep06.pdf Instead of a focus on facts the point is to “infuse the question of values in the learning of content.” Teachers were told they must “‘unlearn’ any ‘official narrative’ of apartheid.” Instead the students and teachers would use “interactive, participatory methods of learning” to explore each other’s perspectives. They would role play and examine “human behavior and universal themes such as identity, group membership, obedience, and taking action.” Through “working with personal experiences and choice in these histories, links were intended to be made to issues and moral dilemmas facing young people today.”

First, have the students explore if “hate is innately a part of human behavior and experience? If so, how can we change that within ourselves?” Note to radicals, this amounts to the child who would never think about bullying others on the playground being asked to wear a T-shirt that says “Violence never works” and then wondering why he gets picked on. This type of emotional curriculum consciously milks stories to produce a sense of grievance, or guilt, depending on where in life one was born. There’s no knowledge being instilled of what actions might make the situation worse for everyone. This is a curriculum that actually cites that “[DM] was particularly moved by the video. He was crying afterwards. He wanted to know what the youth today can do to make up for the wrongs of the past–that their ‘white’ parents had committed and/or benefitted from.”

I am going to go into the US versions of FHAO more in the next post, but this New York Times ad from a week ago on the need for Equitable Implementation of the Common Core Standards in commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the Brown segregation decision should give us pause on the real intended purpose of the standards. http://civilrightsdocs.info/pdf/NYT-CCSS.pdf The listed Leadership Conference changed its name formally in 2010 to add “human rights” to its title and purpose of pushing “for progressive change in the United States.” Using the same concepts of distributive economic justice those World Republic dreamers in 1948 or Wells’ Open Conspirators in the 30s wanted to pursue.

Also pertinent to where all these reforms are really going is this recent Communique, a term always intended to announce revolutionary intent, from National Civil Rights and Education Groups http://nul.iamempowered.com/content/communique%CC%81-joint-statement-support-common-core-state-standards-and-equitable-implementation . Trust me on this as someone with a mother lode of implementation materials from my book and this blog, no one is planning on teaching that inner-city kid how to read properly. The equity comes from changing values in a manner that emboldens the belief in the need for fundamental transformations in how we live and what we all believe.

I am going to close by showing what such equitable education aimed at personal and social change actually looks like to a participant in programs like FHAO. “For the first time during my education, I was feeling and experiencing what I was learning. I was doing an inherently human thing, and my education was coming alive. [her bolding].

“Learning is felt.”

“that feeling that I can’t quite name, the one that gets my head all hot and my insides queasy and my muscles just aching to get up and go out and do something. Learning is experiencing what someone teaches me, letting it soak through and change me.”

Change me. Guided Inquiry. Planned activities and role playing “infusing the use of narrative, interactive methods and multi-media sources.”

No danger of a backward glance from these programs aimed at creating a “new collective memory.”

The danger comes from the internal redesign of what is clearly intended to be programmed future behavior.

In the name of democracy. Social Justice. Fairness. Globalization. Engagement.

Descending to a Connected Kleptocracy Via the Digital Learning and Climate Change Ruses

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In the continued reality where the truth involves far more official coordination than anything Agatha Christie ever imagined, the UNESCO global aspiration for media/digital education as the be all and end all for Everyone really does say flat out–“we need to get the media involved.” That would mean newspapers, broadcast networks, film studios, all aspects of the entertainment industry plus the computer tech and software companies and broadband providers like AT&T. Not a presumed coordination but an explicit one. Just chock full of those generous public/private partnerships where the only risk is to the already put-upon taxpayer.

This is more quoted language from that 2010 “Media Literacy and New Humanism” that literally laid out how to use education globally to get to every dream of transformation Uncle Karl ever had. Literally dovetailing not only with the Marxist Humanism vision we have now tracked in the West from the early 60s on but also the rather horrific UN vision of the Knowledge Society where we all organize around central cultural themes. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/all-that-is-solid-melts-into-air-but-does-it-really/ lays it out if you can bear the details.

Today is more about how and the fact that US Education Secretary Arne Duncan is clearly behaving as if the obligation to coordinate as a partner were already in place. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/state_edwatch/2013/06/arne_duncan_decries_imaginary_attacks_on_common_core.html is the story on yesterday’s speech to the Annual Convention of the American Society of News Editors. The one where he explicitly laid out the role he expected of the media in sending out the administration’s desired message on the Common Core. I will point out if you read the speech that he is describing the 21st Century Skills focus as the actual CC implementation. And he keeps referring to deep learning. And since I have UNESCO’s definition of curricula from its mischievous report and it does dovetail with what the federal government is financing or urging on, we will use that instead of his false gauntlet of textbooks (which by the way the feds have been financing for years through their math and science grants through NSF).

Because digital learning and cyberlearning are such a huge part of where the feds and their cronies are pushing education globally, they have redefined the word curricula as “an educational experience programmed for a learner.” Which apart from the assessments that Arne wisely stayed away from in his gauntlet tossing speech, the feds and the tech companies absolutely are getting involved in designing those types of experiences. And insisting that 21st century education must be about experiences and group activities and not be mental. If you are going to complain about imaginary assertions of federal overreach it is probably best not to give interviews to Pearson’s Michael Barber where you state that “our decentralised system has its pros and cons” and then show enough irritation that Barber described it in the report that:

“we’ve been too slow to move in the direction of hybrid learning. The question is …how do you make that standard practice?”

Hybrid learning is that blend of digital computerized, Benjamin Bloom Mastery Learning of skills and outcomes coupled to a physical school with interactions with real students and teachers. What is being called Blended Learning or the Flipped Classroom in most of the US hype. With lots of lucrative funding for the companies pushing this model. Courtesy of You Know Who.

So gag me on the ire and misinterpretations of the feds’ efforts. If anything the utter coordination globally and the economic, social, and political visions it is tied to remain way too unknown in the US and most countries. Which is possible if you “get media involved” and then go on to detail that “this emphasis took shape in two ways [as always UNESCO loves to italicize for emphasis]:

a) the development of relations with the media industry and cooperation platforms [like news editor annual conventions?] and

b) the proposal to develop quality standards applicable to the messages and the media, which would contribute to making communication professionals more aware of the effects of their work.

Honestly if you can get that kind of direct and explicit and intentional coordination of the “media, professionals, legislators, and civic and political institutions” aligned to what is allowed or not in the classrooms via the real Common Core implementation. Then you throw in all the affective Big Data on frustrations and motivations that hybrid learning and gaming throw off and no one will ever need to actively censor again. Talk about nipping in the bud. And Arne’s speech yesterday and Karen Cator’s to the New Media Consortium a few months ago make it quite clear the era of this active coordination of messages and knowledge itself and communication to the serfs, I mean citizens, is upon us.

What is really problemmatic apart from the mockery of personal liberty such clear and intentional and regular coordination creates from “womb to tomb”, as the new favored phrase goes, is where I got that peevish hybrid learning quote from Arne. It’s in a report Barber and Pearson Education did with the Institute for Public Policy Research, which bills  itself “leading progressive think tank”. That must be another way of saying where Fabianism remains alive and well and excited about the 21st century. It was prepared as part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in September 2012 on Russky Island off the coast of Vladivostok, Russia. The report was named “Oceans of Innovation: The Atlantic, the Pacific, the Global Leadership and the Future of Education.”

The report lays out the global coordination using education (and climate change sustainability too but that’s not what I am stressing here) to get to the “collective future” desired globally. It also makes it clear that the age of the individual and the era of the UK and US is over. Which is in large part due to previous decades efforts to use K-12 education to “destroy the talent myth.” Which is much easier to do when internationally benchmarked has come to mean an emphasis on “equity and diversity” and “progressive immigration” to developed countries. AND “a standard of education that will enable [everyone] to adapt and change as they respond to the constant dramatic shifts in the global labour market. As American reformers put it, every student needs to be ready for college, work and citizenship.”

All that within the overview we had feared as we tracked the Global Cities Education Network and UNESCO’s Shanghai definition of the 21st century Learning City with its all-encompassing views of what is to be planned and what is coming in under the Global Competence Asia Society presentations in individual US states and cities. It is all part of a globally coordinated effort involving the UN and Pearson and foundations and the stated idea of political radicals with a real fondness still for Uncle Karl’s philosophy for the future that:

“As traditional institutions, such as the family or church, break down, increasingly schools are the only social institutions we can rely on to inculcate in young people the values or ethical underpinning on which our collective future depend…some values are universal and vital: respecting individuals equally regardless of their wealth, gender, sexual orientation or origin; recognising the diversity of life–not just human life–on Earth and understanding the threats to environmental sustainability…”

Well, the Canadians had tipped us off already that the real common core was about new values but the Vancouver brigade must be in the ascendancy instead of the Montreal area of Canada. They left off the part about the “eclipse of the Atlantic economy by the Pacific”  and a rejection of the individual ‘rights’ culture of the West. With a planned 21st century replacement from the rise of the Pacific and China in particular. And a new collective-oriented ‘responsibilities’ culture which asks what citizens “could offer the state.” According to the ASCD in the US, I believe the answer is the Whole Child with its “full personality.”

So the innovation you keep hearing so much about as a selling point for the Common Core and its equivalents in other countries turns out to be a desire

“to innovate as dramatically in our capacity to make peace as we are in our capacity to make war. Moreover, the next half century demands in other spheres too–in social and economic realms and indeed, fundamentally in human relations…unless there is also innovation in these more subtle and subjective domains, the future looks very bleak indeed.”

No wonder Arne was so peevish about delays in implementing hybrid learning everywhere. And increased opposition to the federal machinations, in support of the international coordination, hiding in the US as the poorly understood Common Core. It’s past time say the global key players: “society must furnish a culture that is progressive and open to the transmission of new ideas.”

Except those ideas are actually almost two centuries old. Uncle Karl really is back globally. And coming in through ed reforms and hype over Sustainability and Climate threats.

Any excuse for governmental planning. And lifelong deference from the planned for.

Coercing Teachers to be Social and Political Saboteurs–What Can Be Done?

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One of the greatest falsehoods, OK I’ll say it, Outright Lie, about the Common Core has been the repeated insistence that no one would be telling the teachers How. To. Teach. It seems like virtually everyone is. That’s the Whole Purpose of these New Teacher Evals and weakening Tenure. That’s why the NEA goes along. Well, at least its leadership who know the real long-term game. The delegates and members? Not so much.

There’s a reason that the teacher evals to be used now track back to people like Charlotte Danielson, Ray Pecheone, and Robert Pianta who were involved in forcing the related Outcomes Based Education (OBE) on classrooms in previous decades. Same goals of changing the student at the values and attitudes level. Just different language and different enforcement mechanisms so this national and international effort at student and teacher subjugation can be touted as “state-led.” Or the New Super’s Idea of Excellence and Quality Learning which seem to be Benign terms, right? Long time readers know better.

CCSSO (the political interest group that represents the chief state ed officers in each state and is financially sponsored by all sorts of businesses with a vested interest in its policies in a first rate example of Cronyism to the core) came out with Model Teaching Standards in 2011 after most states were on board. http://www.ccsso.org/documents/2011/intasc_model_core_teaching_standards_2011.pdf is a copy if you have never seen it that mandates student-led and new assessment driven (funded in that 2009 Stimulus Act to the tune of hundreds of millions).

By the way, both the SBAC and PARCC assessments to change classroom practice and what gets measured as the results of all that expensive K-12 schooling use the OBE-influenced Norman Webb Depth of Knowledge template we have already talked about. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/the-intentional-insurrection-in-texas-supers-override-governor-legislature-and-taxpayers/ explains why Texas classrooms look like the actual Common Core implementation in other states. All mandating student-led, Depth of Knowledge, and the also OBE-tied Understanding by Design as the means to measure the results of the classroom.

Two more housekeeping matters teachers and parents and then I can get to the juicy part of this story. What is being mandated for the Common Core classroom also is called Standards for Teaching and Learning. It was developed in Chicago and has ties to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Bill Ayers, and someone even more famous from back when he was less well-known. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/didnt-the-president-just-admit-ccssi-was-a-ruse-to-change-classroom-interactions/ Finally, President Obama’s 2008 Education Adviser, Linda Darling-Hammond, just came out with a report (with Ford and Sandler Foundations funding) classifying Effective Teaching and what evals should be measuring in light of the behaviors required by those Model Teaching Standards linked above.  http://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/creating-comprehensive-system-evaluating-and-supporting-effective-teaching.pdf

Now that’s a lot of legwork to change classroom practices without it being apparent. Why? Would you believe it goes back to the height of the Cold War and the early 70s and the Soviet Union and China and a very tense world? Yep. And the UN and trying to get everyone in the world during that tense time to change their education practices. Knowing perfectly well that changing education practices would only matter in free societies. In dictatorships, not so much. Which is why this report and its recommendations are so troubling. Not only does it tie to everything going on and being recommended for K-12 and higher ed all over the world right now. But it is clearly education to make one fit to be a subject. Tolerant of being told what to do.

This so-called “right type of education” for the global future was to be a revolution in man’s “inner space also; a new union of science and spirituality.” Yes I was laying a path in those last several posts where we started with Alice Bailey’s From Intellect to Intuition and there is even a listed Ford Foundation adviser who was officially a member of the panel issuing this early 70s UNESCO report. Again, what are the odds?

But to get this “interior revolution” that will lead to a “subsequent social revolution” requires a rejection of traditional instruction and pedagogy to one focused “above all” on developing “personality and attitudes.” Doesn’t that sound just like OBE?

See if this quote sounds like what is being mandated in the classroom and imposed on teachers and students by the accreditation agencies and eval criteria and Cambridge Education’s Quality Reviews and models like Spence Rogers’ Teaching for Excellence?

“Democratizing education will only be possible if we succeed in shaking off the dogmas of conventional pedagogy, if free and permanent dialogue is set up within the educational process, if this enhances individual awareness of life, if learners are guided towards self-education [sounds like the learner-centred classroom to me] and, in short, change from objects to subjects. Education is all the more democratic when it takes the form of a free search, a conquest, a creative act; instead of being, as it so often is, something given or inculcated.”

That’s the type of education the Communists wanted the West to adopt at the height of the Cold War. There was even a Soviet delegate on the panel and he admitted the new desired pedagogy was based on what the Soviets called psychopedaegogy. Which would explain its bloody history upon transferral to free societies like the US. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/how-much-innocent-blood-will-it-take-to-stop-sel-manipulation-for-political-gain/

Sorry but Toxic Social Goals call for Graphic Language if we are to have any chance of halting a Massive Social Engineering Project to remake the national psyche through education. In other places this “non-directive pedagogy” is also referred to as providing “psychotherapeutic data ‘centred on the client.” Given how much of Common Core is about using gathering, and responding to, data on actual student learning. Which is (elsewhere) defined as Changing Student Values, Attitudes, Beliefs, Values, and Behaviors, the acknowledgment that this is psychological data and based on Carl Rogers’ and Kurt Lewin’s work should give everyone involved in education pause.

Teachers being told they can no longer be the “Sage on the Stage” can relate to this passage decreeing that (italics in original):

“the teacher’s duty is less and less to inculcate knowledge and more and more to encourage thinking; his formal functions apart, he will have to become more of an adviser, a partner to talk to; someone who helps seek out conflicting arguments rather than handing out ready-made truths. He will have to devote more time and energy to productive and creative activities: interaction, discussion, stimulation, understanding, encouragement.

Unless relations between teachers and learners evolve accordingly, there can be no authentic democracy in education.”

And authentic democracy in education in the West would help the early 70s Advocates of Evil prevail in the Cold War. Such a psychologizing of education amounts to unilateral intellectual disarmament. Why? To prevent people who can accurately piece together a plan even though no one ever told them what was going on and how it related. There was and is supposed to be no whistle blowing in time.

So the Cold War is officially over despite Putin’s recent sabre rattling and war gaming, why is this still being pushed in 2012? Well, I believe UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres gave the answer at the end of this recent interview with Yale’s Environment 360. My italics this time.

“It is the most inspiring job in the world because what we are doing here is we are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] the <i>biggest transformation</i> that they have ever undertaken. The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a <i>guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective</i>. This is a <i>centralized transformation that is taking place</i> because governments have decided that they need to listen to science. So it’s a very, very different transformation and one that is going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different.”

The Cold War may be over. Aspirations of politicians and bureaucrats from the international to the local level to plan society and dictate what individuals are to do (or not) and how economies will work while living at taxpayer expense. Not Over in the Least.

Now that greedy reality appears to be perpetual. It survived the Cold War and is alive and well in 2012. And trying to force teachers to be Agents of Change in a social revolution that will not turn out well or as planned.

This is a good time to talk about this. On the front-end.