Tag Archives: GEFF-Global Education Futures Forum

Snuffing Out the Old World That is Dying to Hatch a New One Via Public Policy

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Building on the last post’s explanation of the importance of targeting people’s internalized mental maps to effect external change, let me cite this recent article https://www.alliancemagazine.org/feature/systems-change-and-philanthropy/ on how crucial it is for foundations to support “reframing the narratives people hold” because of the necessity that people be “mirroring internally what is sought externally.” Did you also know that the National Science Foundation is pushing something it calls CHANS–Coupled Human and Natural Systems–research as part of its Social and Behavioral Science work currently? That research wants to model and control human decision-making, just like UNESCO as we saw in a 2018 post on creating desired Anticipatory Assumptions that the Rockefeller Foundation was funding. It turns out that “fuzzy concept maps (FCM) are potentially very useful in modeling human decisions and behavior in CHANS.”

So the NSF and UNESCO want to target what is internalized to control decision-making and say so. No one who looks at their work and funding would disagree that it aims at a transformative vision to a human well-being centric future. Let’s skip over to Classical Ed or religiously oriented schools, since they are often asserted as the alternative to the Godless and Progressive public schools. https://members.classicalconversations.com/article/book-review-norms-nobility makes it clear that education is all about the “person education should produce (norms) and the way this person should act (nobility)… education [is] preparation for virtuous thought and action,” but the instilled virtues that guide who the person is, what he values, how he perceives, and what motivates him to act are not up to the individual. The community supposedly decides what will be instilled and practiced until it is an unconscious habit.

My point is that there is a convergence in the vision for education in the 21st century between Left and Right that is rarely being shared accurately with the public. If something called Agile Governance globally is all about controlling each individual’s knowledge and beliefs in order to aid declared public policy goals and we have “State Capability, Policymaking and the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Do Knowledge Systems Matter?” laying out the need to “change the nature and meaning of knowledge production and use in policy decisions” using think tanks across the globe, all of a sudden we have the best explanation yet of why there has been so much deceit and False Narrative coordination coming out of think tanks when it comes to what is really going on in education.

If we envision think tanks in the 21st century as both the executioners of the old vision via their White Papers or testimony that create a certain perception of what is currently wrong, and the midwives guiding the birth of a new vision, things start to make far more sense. Then aspirationally quoting Antonio Gramsci, without pointing out he wrote from prison in the 1920s for being an admitted Communist, and noting he “has described a situation like this as a ‘solstice’ and an ‘interregnum,’ where the ‘old world is dying, [but] the new one has not yet been born'” fits the Midwife role. It also turns out there is something else at U-Penn beyond AISP, Positive Neuroscience, prospective psychology, and the other transformative social systems research we keep encountering. It is called the Think Tank and Civil Societies Program (TTCSP) and it publishes a Global Go To Think Tank Index Report on the “role policy institutes play in governments and civil societies around the world.”

Sure enough, we find so many of the think tanks that pretend to be ‘conservative’ while misrepresenting competency-based education, social and emotional learning, data initiatives, or deceiving readers about what Marxism is being celebrated by the Index for their effectiveness as think tanks or having one of the Best Advocacy Campaigns of 2018. If the new purpose of education globally is to create a planned citizen with the characteristics of altruism and motivations governments and connected corporations desire, it makes sense to be targeting what they clearly are:

all aspects of what it means to be human: feelings, intuition, connection to others and the cosmos, as well as the more familiar ground of the mind and intellect. Whole Person Learning is intimately linked with how the individual sees themselves and, supremely, how they view others.

That is what has now become a matter of ‘public policy’ to change. That’s what it means to declare that in the 21st Century Knowledge and Education are “global public goods” and that think tanks are to act as the “intermediaries” between legislators and bureaucrats and ‘advocates’. Anyone motivated to act must be guided in what they believe and value. In this new paradigm for education grounded in public policy:

Instead of focusing on the improvement of students, Education must start focusing on the improvement of the world, enabling each individual to be an active part of that process…Indeed, learning is not the ultimate goal of Education, seeing that individuals learn in order to attain/create useful, desired goals. Specially in a time of relentless possibilities created by technology, which creates the scenario for people to learn, work, and exist in a close yet heterogeneous network, individuals may now be empowered to learn and attain great goals with local/national/world impact.

That would certainly explain the convergence of visions around controlling what a student’s Identity is and what they value, believe, and what principles motivate them to act. How many people appreciate that these skills of active participation in a project of transformation in the human and natural worlds is what it means to be a Critical Thinker in the 21st Century?

Sure enough, if students are being educated to become critical thinkers, it is aimed at serving a higher purpose still: that these individuals become equipped to devolve into active, participatory agents in the world–of work, surely, but also of their surrounding (and our global) community. This is possible since critical thinkers are prone to approaching common public challenges with a hands on conduct ignited by an ethical and committed attitude.

That vision of education creates the needed ‘citizens’ to fit with a global vision for the 21st Century that “with effective multi-stakeholder cooperation…the Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to address–and possibly solve–the major challenges that the world currently faces.” What is necessary to this vision of the future? –“a population that can think critically and in interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary ways.” Precisely what the Disciplinary Core Ideas, Cross-Cutting Concepts and Topics of those instilled Fuzzy Cognitive Maps are creating. No wonder US federal law requires Higher Order Thinking Skills to be assessed annually on at least 95% of each state’s students. It’s a necessary component of this global transformative vision of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century where Knowledge Systems must evolve so that “Governments have the opportunity to design policies to prepare the knowledge systems of the future to make better decisions for the wellbeing of all.

I bolded that last part because it is what Uncle Karl called his Human Development Society vision where little ‘c’ communism would be enabled by a certain level of technology. It is also called Marxist Humanism, which I have documented is another area where certain colleges, publications, and think tanks have made a concerted effort to mislead. Few can recognize what no one has accurately explained to us, Plus, creating False Narratives to guide human decision-making apparently gets a think tank recognized as Effective. That State Capability paper tells us that “Both citizen and professional knowledge are important to successful implementation [of the 4IR/Human Development/Wellbeing of All vision]; ignoring them weakens the potential for success.”

Well, neither is being ignored, but the targeting of both is not being accurately explained either except here at ISC. Going back to all the misinformation out there now from think tanks makes it clear that the disinformation is being manufactured in what appears to be a coordinated manner in order to “influence or change the system’s purpose, which is the level of intervention capable of instituting the most profound change in the system.” Student-centered, personalized learning that is brain-based and evidence-centered sounds so much better than that long quote and works the same way, doesn’t it? No need to get parents all upset by referring to students as ‘systems’ that need a new form of Governance at an internalized level in order to get the desired transformation in the external, material world.

Do you remember my research on the Global Education Futures Forum and GEFF’s ties to the World Economic Forum? GEFF’s true focus makes more sense when we are familiar with the January 2018 White Paper “Agile Governance: Reimagining Policymaking in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” The need to transform education globally goes hand in hand with a need for “positioning values that promote societal benefit and well-being as priorities for governance.” And what precisely does governance now mean if that’s the new vision of education in the 4IR?

In its simplest form, governance refers to making decisions and exercising authority to guide the behavior of individuals and organizations…The concept of agile governance aims to shift the manner in which policies are generated, deliberated, enacted and enforced in the [4IR]…to enable policy-making that is more inclusive and ‘human-centred’ by involving more stakeholders in the process and allowing for rapid iteration to meet the needs of the governed.

References to the Governed are straight out of a 1971 Soviet book called The Scientific Management of Society that I covered back in 2016 when I introduced my readers to the term they used for such comprehensive management at the level of the mind and personality–Upravleniye. Hello again old friend with a new name and sales pitch.

No wonder that WEF White Paper pitches what looks like what governments in the West are now calling evidence-based policymaking (while certain think tanks mislead about its true nature) where:

The combination of systems and design thinking provides an iterative and cumulative learning process by exploring a complex and fast-moving ecosystem, sensemaking [using FCMs?] of observed variables, and shaping of possible outcomes, while analysing the influence of those outcomes on the status quo…Adopting system and design-thinking approaches fosters a shift from planning and controlling to piloting and implementing policies to get rapid feedback and iteration…Feedback loops allow policies to be evaluated against the backdrop to determine if they are still meeting citizens’ values and needs.

Those would be the deliberately instilled values and needs created by a new singular vision of education in play under the Common Core in public schools in the US and in charter language or school mission statements for those parents opting for School Choice. The deceit makes more sense now, as well as the very term–School Choice–in a vision of education designed to get at the internalized basis for human decision-making as an invisible lever for social control.

All this to enable, without scrutiny or effective challenge, a vision of the 21st Century where think tanks and governments get to specify “the outcomes we should be striving for as a collective endeavour.”

No wonder all these visions push the community as the determining source of what the individual must now be.

Healing the Psychological Split Within Ourselves is the Learning Transformation Goal Few Openly Express

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Let’s see if I can bring together a wide variety of sources from people of varying political labels which appear to me to be headed to the same place. The first part of that explicit and startling goal came from a 2013 book Dawn of the Akashic Age: New Consciousness, Quantum Resonance, and the Future of the World from our old friend with his own ISC tag, Ervin Laszlo. We have also met his son Alexander, in connection with introducing us to Pavel Luksha and GEFF-Global Education Futures Forum, and his son Christopher, who is involved with transforming business schools globally through a UN-affliated entity called PRME and executive leadership retraining programs. If all three are interested in transforming human systems, Ervin wants to make it all humanity and his sons specialize in schools and businesses, respectively. Influential, in other words, in hugely crucial domains, whether we are aware of their work or not.

In education, Laszlo was involved with pushing intentional cultural evolution in the mid-80s with other ISC favorites with their own tags like Riane Eisler, Csik with his Excellence template, and Bela Banathy who created the vision for charter schools as a place to practice theories of reform. All these troubling quotes, in other words, have a way into the school or online learning platform near you whether that is appreciated or not. Let’s see what Ervin intends now:

“The need to integrate and heal the psychological split within ourselves and embrace a unified and harmonious political partnership is essential if we are ever to shift the balance and co-create with the systemwide sociopolitical systems in existence today. It will require psychologically integrated and spiritually balanced humanitarians to guide twenty-first century humanity in a new direction. It is such people who can offer the greatest potential for the evolutionary transformation of humanity and a peaceful and sustainable global community.”

Ervin stated that “global authority systems” can be used to “integrate an intelligent and sophisticated vision of collaboration”, which is exactly what learning standards like the Common Core or competency frameworks do when properly understood. Hence the reason for so much deceit. These plans are not supposed to be recognized nor the alignment in visions among different groups. Let’s use one more Akashic quote before we pivot to what is being put forth in the name of Conservatism: “The level of change required for the planet to shift toward a sustainable, harmonious, and more equitable future calls for us–awakening humanity–to draw on all our physical, creative, and visionary capacities. This is no sudden call; We have been forewarned. Our human systems and our worldviews have been undergoing preparation for some time for the transition to a global paradigm. A new era of social organization, communication, and understanding has been unfolding in the twenty-first century as the old systems reached their peak and began to decline.”

It’s no secret I have been tracking why self-billed Conservatives now push a vision I identify as communitarianism and Amitai Etzioni’s New Golden Rule, while also misdirecting readers on the true nature of education reforms, so when I read about a 2017 book called Patriotism is Not Enough on the Ideas that supposedly “Redefined American Conservatism,” I found the book.  I learned that Conservatism now aspires for social sciences such as education to be normative, not just descriptive. “This requires a political science of an entirely different disposition, one that is concerned first and foremost with the condition of the human soul rather than the structure of government institutions or the foundations of the law.” That quote is not an aberration as a few pages earlier, we have the quote: “Politics, if practiced as anything but an art of the soul, is bound to fail.” I also learned that Conservatism now views the “formation of character” as the “principal duty of government.”

Suddenly Classical Education’s pitches about Moral Virtues and Good, True, and Beautiful as new educational goals makes more sense if Conservatism itself wants to impose an “objective moral basis of human life. Ultimately, this cannot be done without a view to the good of the human soul, with an idea of human excellence and happiness that is not just an idiosyncratic individual exercise of the will.” Not a matter of personal choice then, but imposed and something held by a group. Boy, that sounds just like the goals from the Classical Education promoting Circe Institute in a September 5, 2018 blog post called “False Happiness and Human Flourishing: Part Two.” See if this doesn’t sound like Ervin Laszlo’s collective goals for transformation with presupplied purposes, but with a different rationale for the new kind of education.

“The great secret, as C.S. Lewis asserted many years ago, is that God is a hedonist at heart. God tells us to say no to many things, but only that we may say yes to higher and better thing! God instructs us to say no to avarice and prodigality in order that we may say yes to generosity. He commands that we say no to selfishness and self-centeredness so that we may say yes to love and community. If we make higher things–God’s things–our goal, our lives will flourish and they will be filled with moments of unexpected ecstasy and joy…”

Now let’s pivot to one of the withdrawn books I alluded to in the last post, which is interesting as the book The Next Enlightenment: Integrating East and West in a New Vision of Human Evolution was published in 2003. It is definitely New Agey in its approach and is by the author of the Esalen book–The Upstart Spring.It used a member of the GEFF Board, Howard Rheingold, as a back cover blurb advocating for the book. Relevant in other words to where global education, especially in the US, is really going. That became even more clear since the already tagged Robert Kegan and his desires for new forms of consciousness were laid out in the book. For anyone who has not read Credentialed to Destroy (shame on you!), it is Robert Kegan’s work that PISA assesses for as Key Competences and higher ed is also being reimagined around his Cognitive, Intrapersonal, and Interpersonal Competencies work.

Omnipresent in other words as a goal of both K-12 and higher ed reforms, which makes this quote all the more relevant as The Next Enlightenment urged us to “master new cognitive skills. The most important of these skills is what he [Kegan] calls the ability to ‘objectify’–to recognize as socially constructed and contingent rather than as God-given and eternal fundamental concepts such as selfhood, nationality, or religion. That doesn’t mean rejecting them, only seeing them as matters about which some sort of decision can be made. Without developing such an ability we remain trapped in our social structures.”

Those pesky existing social structures then need new forms of consciousness and new values, which is exactly what everyone I have quoted seems to be in agreement on. The sought change may be marketed as a “global ‘skill revolution’ that often takes the form of political action [as with last week’s G20 Declaration from Argentina Betsy DeVos committed the US to] but is fundamentally psychological.” Learning standards and competency frameworks in K-12 are examples of tools for “cognitive development in individuals [which] leads inevitably to the larger subject of cognitive evolution in societies and the human species.” It’s just that some writers like Laszlo or Anderson (quoted just now) admit that is what education reforms are all about and others do not. As Anderson said, if “enlightenment is cognitive development, and the various approaches to that development, whether we call them spirituality or psychology [or political science, Conservatism, or Classical Ed], are just different ways of groping the same elephant.”

That elephant is the human mind and personality and the big bullseye all these plans have placed on it to be purposefully transformed are just not well enough understood. Let’s use a different Robert Kegan quote from The Next Enlightenment that may be why the public library put it in the Discard bin. After all, it was Kegan the Hewlett Foundation hired to make sure the Common Core assessments would be assessing what it pushes as Deep Learning.  Anderson rightfully called Kegan “another of the big time moral development researchers” without pointing out that his mentor was Lawrence Kohlberg whose Moral Development Theory became the basis for the reimagined Hong Kong compulsory citizenship push Communist China imposed. Everyone then interested in individual or collective transformation wants to get at the level of values and beliefs. Quoting:

“the key process in epistemological change is what he [Kegan] calls ‘objectification.’ That means as you grow, you periodically turn around and look at parts of your worldview–values, beliefs, ideas, ways of doing things–that you experienced uncritically as subject, part of yourself and the way things simply are, and begin to experience them in a new way, as objects–things whose origin you might wonder about and whose ultimate truth you might question…In any case, you are quite a quite different kind of person from the individual in a premodern, traditional society who did not have to make such decisions at all because he or she never began to see the society’s beliefs as objects that could be thought about and questioned.”

That thinking about and questioning is precisely what every one of these educational paradigms seeks to do. Everybody wants a new kind of consciousness and political, social, and economic transformation, but some of the shifts are gift wrapped for sales pitch purposes as about God, Conservatism, or Classical Ed. They all want to get at Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy–Right Thinking and Right Actions. What Ervin Laszlo called “the wise way to think and be” and is willing to use social media to create collective pressure to force adherence so that we are “Democratizing the way we do things, how we relate to others, but also in the very way our minds work–in consciousness itself…a model based in shared interest as opposed to self-interest” fits with that Circe quote above to create Human Flourishing.

Another Circe quote from September 6 in “Language as Belief and Practice” begins with this statement: “Right belief and right action are necessary aspects of growing in virtue. Intellect and knowledge alone cannot save. If knowledge does not reach to the level of heart and action, we are left with smart people who are intelligent in their sinning and their avoidance of consequences.” Sounds like Whole Child and ‘objectifying’ the subjective, internalized realm to me. Let’s close then with another quote from Ervin Laszlo who makes no bones about the integration that will heal this psychological split between heart, mind, and will and the reasons why:

“the tipping point can be encouraged by a change in people’s perceptions…No real change can be achieved without a corresponding change in consciousness.”

Let’s pull these common aims for transformative education of consciousness into the realm of each of our conscious attention.

 

 

 

 

Outside In: Conjoining Education & Media to Consciously Create Consensus

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Do you regard the phrases “public transformation” and “societal transformation” as synonymous? The first, as we saw in the last post, seems interested in transforming who we are at the level of our beliefs and values–our very consciousness. The other wants to transform existing institutions and organizations–the external reality. The coverage of the Parkland mass school shooting and the student activists it has launched makes considerable more sense if we know that Global Education Futures (GEFF) released a report last fall called “Educational Ecosystems for Societal Transformation” that is referenced in other internal reports with a different title about “Education Ecosystems for Public Transformation.” Either title reflects a desire that the “level of challenges faced by humanity today calls us to find answers through a consciously created consensus.”

One side of the media, especially the legacy media, wants us to see the tragedy as a reason for gun control. The other seems to see Parkland as a convenient tool to hype School Choice, on-line learning, and supposed ‘local’ solutions to federal government tyranny. No one seems to want to eliminate the media’s ability to frame how we see Parkland and what we believe the solutions to be. Since the transformation vision relies heavily on misunderstanding the nature of learning standards like the Common Core or Competencies (Inside-Out) and also not reporting the long planned convergence of the media and education to create the narrative driving a perceived need for change, let’s tear away the shroud obscuring this cooperation.

Russian Pavel Luksha, who is a leader in GEFF as we covered here in 2015, also turns out to be involved with Chris Whittle’s new venture called the Whittle School, a global education venture. Back in 2005, Whittle wrote a book called Crash Course hyping the ability to use School Choice globally and private providers of education to drive innovation and a new vision of learning. He created a hypothetical “worldwide leader in K-12 curricula” that had previously been “the first of the world’s major communications and publishing companies to grasp fully that the world of schooling was an extension of the core competencies found in many communications entities.” We need to recognize that now too as that outside-in tool was a huge part of why previous UNESCO head Irina Bokova simply shorthanded the conjunction and its global transformative potential as “media education.”

Likewise, when that GEFF report headlines its “New Horizon” chapter with this Margaret Wheatley quote, think not just of the roles of the media and a new type of learning, but also all the high school students we are now seeing who simply assume a right to redesign the world and existing systems.

“We have only just begun the process of discovering and inventing the new organizational forms that will inhabit the 21st century. We need the courage to let go of the old world, to relinquish most of what we have cherished, to abandon our interpretations about what does and doesn’t work.”

That shift is much easier if, unbeknownst to most parents, the schools have long since shifted from a subject-centered curriculum to an ‘experience-centered curriculum’. Suddenly, topics, themes, concepts, and principles come first to provide students with a means to “intellectualize his experience.” To mine my personal library using a post WW2 book called Reorganizing the High-School Curriculum from 1947 to move away from the school as “merely an instrument for perpetuating the status quo” to one where “our democratic society is to be refined and re-created,” would require a new type of education grounded in a new theory of learning.

“Learning in its best sense involves the ‘continuous reconstruction of experience.’ Learning products are identified as changes in attitudes upon the basis of new or deeper understandings, and the acquisition of general and special abilities, habits, and skills. The learning experiences which the school provides [now online learning can also do this] for students are directed towards changes in behavior in line with democratic ideals and values. [Remember the PROMISE motto from the last post and the role of Restorative Justice programs] The school provides work experience for the student, not primarily to get the work done, but because such experience enhances growth in line with democratic values.”

That’s what student-centered learning is really about and everyone involved with education reforms, except students and parents, is either openly or covertly pushing this same vision. If we miss the planned role of all media in this, we are fighting a battle with blinders on. That was sixty years ago, but only the names and tools change, not the transformative aims. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/using_story_to_change_systems has a similar aim and came out about a week ago. Also recently the Data & Society Research Institute issued a report called “Dead Reckoning: Navigating Content Moderation After ‘Fake News'” that caught my eye. One thing about tearing a tendon in your leg, I have been rather stuck watching bad TV like it or not. A publication like that wanting to define what is Fake News not by veracity of the information but rather or not the source is preapproved by the powers that be simply emboldens the lies I have been forced to watch recently on the evening network news.

The difference though was I was in a position to find out more of what looked like immunity to lie to advocate for the repeatedly announced “public” or “societal transformation” as I was signed up to attend a February 23, 2018 Georgia Bar Media & Judiciary Conference sponsored by CNN among others. The speakers, who included a Morehouse journalism prof, a New York Times reporter, a former CBS reporter, and the managing director of CNN International, kept hyping the role of the “Legacy Media’ to be ‘gatekeepers’, which to me rather smacked of censorship before the fact by approved sources. The CBS reporter,  hyped “the crucial role of the press in shaping American history” and asserted that Facebook and Google’s recent policy changes to prefer the Legacy Media in search results were a good start but were “not enough”.

I thought about how Walter Cronkite had so hyped the Tet Offensive that a generation of Americans thought we lost military ground then. They did not recognize a deliberate use of the news and what gets covered, to steer popular and prevailing consciousness on an issue. When the audience was asked for questions, I raised my hand and asked if their position was that the term “Fake News” was about the source of the information or the quality of the information? That’s when things got really interesting since no one knew education was my area of expertise. The response by several of the panel members was to agree it was about the source and the standards of truth used by the ‘legacy media’ and then begin to talk about the need for new curriculum in the schools to create deference to the Legacy Media.

Another member then mentioned that the real solution to Fake News allegations was “further down the food chain in the schools” and called attention to a News Literacy Project that had been created to do just that. It would aid students to differentiate between Fake News and to know “what to believe.” That continued targeting of the internalized belief system that has always been a hall mark of Tranzi OBE under its various names (see last post and comments) got my attention.

So I came home and looked up the Project and discovered it had been started in Spring 2008 by veteran reporters from the LA Times. The family that had owned the Wall Street Journal before Rupert Murdoch was also involved and Steve Schmidt who had worked in the White House under Bush 43 and who managed John McCain’s Presidential run. Mollie Hemingway, now a Federalist editor and contributor to Fox News is on the Board. Since she is married to a writer at the Weekly Standard I think we can conclude that the Legacy Media as well as the so-called non-establishment media that is supposedly conservative all want to create school curriculum on how the media is regarded.

The really fascinating member of the Board in my mind who thoroughly conjoins media and education, learning standards and media literacy projects, and inside-out vs outside-in filtering to Consciously Create Consensus was Sam Wineburg. Wineburg is an education prof at Stanford who has been active in creating standards for “Civic Online Reasoning”. The Stanford History Education Group or SHEG is where everything comes together as they have created the Reading Like a Historian curriculum that can be used to create and measure the existence of the ‘desired understandings’ that students are to internalize as their required Higher Order Thinking Skills under federal ESSA law.

Doesn’t that sound like an excellent way to Consciously Create Consensus, especially if the curriculum gets used to create formative assessments that few parents will understand if they have not read Credentialed to Destroy? The News Literacy Project presented at both the 2016 and 2017 National Council for the Social Studies annual conference so we know these curricula will be used to create the C3 Framework ‘lenses’ to evaluate how students view the world around them. Turns out the nonsensical slogan that “we are teaching students how to think, not what to think” is actually not true at all.

Suddenly media literacy, new forms of learning, competencies, and the need to control the internalized belief system and values via prescribed standards and Habits of Mind takes us to a view of History that Karl Marx would have recognized. We need to as well to cut through the False Narratives ALL the media now seemed to find so useful:

“History is the ‘precondition of political intelligence’…It allows us to undertake sensible inquiry into the political, social, or moral issues that trouble us…[and] achieve the informed, discriminating citizenship essential to democratic government.”

The Parkland and other high school students then are simply fulfilling the roles SHEG and other experiential curriculum have trained them for. The way out of students who see themselves as Makers of History is to recognize that school has neurally and deliberately rewired them to do, think, want, and act in preapproved ways.

We are, after all, the Public whose consciousness the media, educators, and virtually every think tank I have looked at wants to control. We need to recognize the how and why and that it is not just students being targeted.

Invisible Designed Neural Coercion: Controlling Guided Missiles and Misguided Men

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Since it is summertime and the living is supposed to be easy, I wish I was off on vacation or taking a break from the blog. Instead, I have been dealing with a tsunami of corroborating research materials from all over the world on this neural emphasis in education. When I was writing my book Credentialed to Destroy and documenting what the required classroom practices would be under a Competency-focus, the Common Core, or any performance ‘standard’, I came to accept that what was being mandated would have a clear neural effect. It would alter how students’ brains functioned going forward. More research assembled in various places subsequently on this blog has made it clear that those neural effects are both known and desired. It is easier to rule people with little recognition they are being coerced.

The age demographics of who voted for BREXIT seem to show that as well as a desire to be coddled. As Bandura put it in our last post, the young people in the UK believe in proxy agency and institutions instead of individual achievement. What I have now had to come to grips with though is that the neural manipulation is the purpose of education reforms and standards-based education. It is the goal precisely because it makes a person amenable to manipulation without either recognition, resistance, or protest. Surely I am exaggerating, right? On Friday, the OECD linked to this paper  http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.com/2016/06/understanding-how-brain-processes-maths.html on “The Neuroscience of Mathematical Cognition and Learning.” It has pictures and graphs of the targeted areas as it is now clear that education intends to use “the scientific study of the biological substrates underlying cognition, specifically the neural basis of mental processes.”

Oh, c’mon, lighten up with seeing bad motives when all anyone really wants to do is help everyone learn to read fluently and be good at algebra, I can hear a few of my readers whispering. Except that is not the purpose and it is more than what is detailed at length in Credentialed to Destroy. The desire is to get everyone to ‘on-level performance’ and only to there. The hope is simply to get everyone to literacy and numeracy so they can understand and work with print, visual images, and numbers in ‘everyday life’. Prescribe a theory of classroom practices that creates “changes in neural pathways and synapses due to changes in environment and behavior.” Now are we beginning to understand the real implications of the federal ESSA law stipulating that all states must have ‘challenging academic content standards’ where behavior is the means to show ‘achievement’?

Please remember what I explained about Constructivism in Chapters 2 and 3 when you read this passage from that OECD paper’s conclusion (my italics and bolding):

“Research in cognitive neuroscience has allowed the possibility of exploring the neural basis of complex and sophisticated cognitive processes such as numerical cognition. Using an expanding range of tools from single-cell recording to brain stimulation, progress is being made in not only localising brain regions involved in overall functions, but also mapping the complexity of networks engaged in mathematical learning.

Overall, advances in cognitive neuroscience research is beginning to shed light on the ontogeny [physiology or neural formations are synonyms for that $100 word] of mathematical cognition, how cognition and behavioral performance can be modulated based on the knowledge of neuroplasticity, and how such findings can be used to understand the workings of the brain as a whole. Collaborations between scientists and educators and professionals relevant to the field of mathematics learning promises further advances in the understanding of not only mathematical cognition, but also learning in general, with long-term implications to enrich the mental wealth of mankind.”

That blog link also cites a 2007 OECD paper that came to my attention earlier in the week–“Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a Learning Science.” It outlined with numerous graphics precisely what the term Transdisciplinary is to alter and should be viewed through what UNESCO had in mind when it piloted this curriculum shift in Queensland, Australia covered here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/opting-out-as-the-remedy-may-mean-accidentally-accelerating-nonconsensual-transformations/ Since what is going on in education in the name of brain-based learning was not news to me, I went quickly to the chapter called “The Ethics and Organisation of Educational Neuroscience” with its cover quotes that “Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul” and HG Wells’ belief that “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

The chapter opens with a Martin Luther King Jr quote that–“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” Anyone detecting a theme among these quotes on the need to force internalized shared beliefs and values via education? How about if I further quote the authors acknowledgment that “traditionally, the ethical rules concerning biomedical research on human beings follow the Nuremburg Code of 1949 and the Declaration of Helsinki of 1964.”  See what I mean about purpose and aim? The bi-directional exchange between Trans-disciplinary Research on Learning and Mandated Classroom Practices and Required Assessments of what a Student has Internalized at a Neural Level are not the only reason I linked to that Queensland post.

When I first located that 2007 paper, I followed up on the Bibliography telling me that the US NSF had established Science of Learning Centers in 2003. I pulled up those materials and presentations and recognized numerous relevant professors and institutions. We have the creator of the 1987 HOTS report and the co-director of the New Standards project in the 90s–Lauren Resnick and Roy Pea of Stanford who is also now tied to NSF’s Cyber learning initiative and Charles Fadel’s Center for Curriculum Redesign at Harvard. http://invisibleserfscollar.com/drawing-back-the-standards-curtain-to-discover-the-global-coordination-to-redesign-the-very-nature-of-curriculum/ I knew back then these machinations were global, but not yet that we were looking at education research involving the physiology of real students in actual classrooms to “integrate insights about ‘micro-level’ mechanisms with evidence about aggregate, ‘macro-level’ outcomes that emerge from processes of implementing these mechanisms.”

In less stilted English (which I am capable of when I don’t have to quote for accuracy about indisputable aims), that would translate into monitoring the student’s neural network and which brain regions fire on prescribed tasks and how all that fits their shown behavior and how it changes. Data, data, data. Personal Identifiability is so NOT the needed area of focus in the Era of Sought Educational Neuroscience. I also wanted to go back to Queensland because there is a new Journal called the Science of Learning there and the Director of the SLC program at NSF wrote a letter to the Editor about two weeks ago. http://www.nature.com/articles/npjscilearn20169 See how real time we are here at ISC in tracking what is planned for us?

I started to write that Soo-Siang Lim was with the US NSF or the US SLC Centers with their declared emphasis on the “internal world of mind and brain” since so much of the prescribed emphasis has made it to all US classrooms in the name of the Common Core standards, but yesterday when I put her name into a search engine, I found out NSF has an office in Beijing and does Science of Learning work with jetsetting PIs at the University of Hong Kong. I found out Dr Lim sued for gender discrimination after she did not get tenure for an Anatomy Professorship at Indiana before joining the NSF and beginning her tour of the world. Found videos of interviews in Rio and dubbing into other languages. Perhaps most crucially though I found a January 23-24, 2012 OECD/NSF SLC conference in Paris called “Innovation in Education: Connecting How we Learn to Educational Policy and Practice.” http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/49382960.pdf

Notice the presence of Dirk Van Damme. We met him when I wrote about Global Education Futures Forum and Redesigning the Future and the presence of Alexander and Kathia Laszlo as Co-chairs of the Silicon Valley event.  http://edu2035.org/pdf/what_is_GEF.pdf  I could be sarcastic and say that coincidences abound but none of this is coincidental. The neural transformations being sought are the common glue that allows control without effective opposition and every wanna-be planner in the world seems to know it. It’s time we all knew it too. Also remember the quote from the head of the OECD in the Conclusion to my book that all of the OECD’s education policies are to pursue their desired plans of social, political, and economic transformations.

I must admit these last several weeks have produced many “Oh. Wow” moments in my research so I decided to go back to earlier works from decades ago, as well as now, where these aims were both clearly hoped for and sought. Turned out that in 1989 Paul Ehrlich and Robert Ornstein in New World New Mind called for governments to “make new ways of thinking and new ways of handling our problems immediately available to society’s decision-makers. And while changing the form and content of education would be a major step toward conscious evolution..” They go on to state that “there is a new understanding of the human mind, developed from modern brain research and studies of thought processes.” I have never thought it was just coincidental that under President Obama the NSF and all these education initiatives like the League of Innovative Schools report at the White House to a close Ehrlich associate–John Holdren.

Could have the motto: “Finally in a position to make it so.” Let’s come back to the present and Rebecca Costas’ 2010 book The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson wrote the Foreword and is quoted as saying in 2009 that “the real problem of humanity is the following: We have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.” Sounds just like the quotes prefacing the OECD’s Chapter on the Ethics surrounding Educational Neuroscience and its potential, doesn’t it? It should make us all very nervous that the well-connected Ms Costas thought that the way to avoid civilizational collapse was to reject thought involving “analytical processing [and] deliberate application of strategies and operations to gradually approach a solution.”

My last quote confirms just how often the phrase ‘evidence-based policy’ in education or ‘best practices’ is obscuring a sought neural transformation in the parts of the brain trained to respond and the very nature of the student’s brain itself. Frequently the sales pitch is also put out in the name of Equity as in a 2014 paper called “Neuroscience and Education: Prime Time to Build the Bridge.” It stated that “rising education inequality is among the gravest of the world’s problems.” Now, education inequality is a natural condition of humanity throughout history. Only by interfering with people’s brains and how they process is Equity possible and that very interference is totalitarian, especially when the nature of what is being targeted is the subject of so much organized deceit.

Anyone else chilled to the bones by all this global coordination with known and Proud-of-It Authoritarian or Communist States? As I mentioned to someone yesterday, individual liberty is precious and rare in the annals of history. In the era of unrecognized Educational Neuroscience it is about to become extinct within the current generation.

In the name of obscuring slogans like Choice, Higher Standards, Personalized Learning, and Brain-Based Instruction.

I’d like to Opt Out Please.

Being Thankful We Know About the New Mandate of Student Success to Create and then Sway a Group Mind

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Most years since I started this blog I have published a particular post originally called “Being Thankful for What We Know and Appreciating Why It Matters.” That message remains timely, especially given the gravity of everything I have laid out in recent posts. First though I want to provide a few updates since the last post. I had an opportunity last week to speak with Security Policy expert Frank Gaffney in a recorded conference call about the implications of what I had found in the Tarbiyah Project and how closely it aligns with the actual, to be mandated, meaning of success or achievement under the new proposed federal legislation. https://soundcloud.com/alice-linahan/women-on-the-wall-esea-and-the-the-tarbiyah-project

As I wrote in the last post, the alignment between the actual mandated implementation I covered so carefully in my book Credentialed to Destroy and what Tauhidi described was breathtaking and clearly no accident. I covered systems thinking extensively in that book, but although it was created at the troublingly ubiquitous Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), some of its creators were always connected to Michigan’s Institute for Social Research and Research Center for Group Dynamics. http://www.rcgd.isr.umich.edu/history/ Michigan is where Tauhidi received both his Masters and Doctorate and its School of Education has always been a national leader in shifting K-12 education toward the behavioral sciences. To truly make education into a science of human development it certainly helps that the current Dean Deborah Ball also chairs the Spencer Foundation Board of Directors.

That would certainly explain the alignment I found. Establishing the Group Mind and making it influential, then guiding, and finally motivating, as the definition of increasing Proficiency toward being an ‘Expert’ was laid out recently here.  http://www.epiconline.org/essential-skills-and-dispositions-development-frameworks/ Lots of influential entities there and 3 of the essentials are from 21st Century Learning: Creativity, Communication, and Collaboration. The 4th, Critical Thinking, has been renamed as Self-Directed Learning. That would be the same term Tauhidi used in his Tarbiyah Key Outcomes & Indicators. It’s probably not accidental that Tarbiyah’s Essential Learning of Noble Character and Moral Literacy is the Self-Directed Individual, especially since the other 3 Cs are also in various desired new personal character traits with their names in Arabic script.

Finally, Congress just released a Framework for its new ESEA legislation http://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=399784 that also aligns with Tarbiyah and the goal of turning the student, at an internal, neurological level, into a designed, predictable system. That’s the ‘success’ within the legislation. I now have everything I need to prove those assertions after the legislation is passed and signed. Here’s the long-standing goal, taken from work on Burmese culture and Buddhist values, attitudes, and motivating beliefs funded by the CASBS with a shout out to Ralph Tyler, the creator of NAEP, the 8 Year Study, and so much more we still encounter today.

“Which brings us to the importance of this symbol for the integration of Burmese society. For it is through their reverence for this common symbol of a shared ego ideal that the Burmese, I believe, come to identify with each other, as Freud puts it, they ‘have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.’ [no individualism left as the West knows it] And this is how Burmese society achieves its highest degree of integration. To the extent that members of a social group identify with each other, to that extent is the group characterized by social integration.”

That would be why Black Lives Matter in 2015 and All Lives do not. With that let’s go back in time. Remember all we have covered since forcing a required Group Mind and also the 2014 passage of WIOA, giving all governments unprecedented economic powers for planning society.

I had actually outlined another barnburner story but the day before Thanksgiving is no time to serve up indigestion. So I thought I would write a tale of appreciating why individual liberty has mattered in the past and why Freed Markets resulted in mass prosperity would be a nice tribute. And I do not mean that in a Pollyanish sense. One of the books I am tackling this holiday week is Robert P Moses’ radical equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project. I want every child to learn to the best of their ability. I want to really appreciate the desperation that is driving this Equality for All even if it guts the economy philosophy. It is why I read what attracted Van Jones to the Green Growth Economy as a manifestation of his self-confessed preference for Communism.

I think the history lessons of the Predator State declaring its Goals for People and then using its powers to coerce are too easy to forget. It’s not an ideological preference. It’s a factual story. A repeated pattern once government reaches a certain size of the economy. I think history consistently bears out the truth of what Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek said in his 1945 lecture Individualism: True and False. I give extra credit for people who have first hand experience in what led to most of the great tragedies of the 20th Century. It’s called Walking the Walk and there is great validity to the hard-earned wisdom it imparts.

“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is a condition of a free society, the second means, as De Tocqueville described it, ‘a new form of servitude.”

There is just no getting around the fact that government officials and their Business Allies deciding they get to fine tune personalities and reset Values, Attitudes, and Beliefs to guide an Individual’s Future Behavior is a 21st Century form of servitude. Especially when the inappropriately named Positive School Climate is now a tool to retrain each student’s filtering Mindset. The worldview they will use from now on as they encounter daily reality. With their preferred non-Axemaker Mind and habits grounded in emotion. All quite consciously cultivated and monitored.

But we now know all this up front and that really is something to be Thankful for. As an active pursuer of these plans and blueprints this is decidedly unauthorized knowledge that was not supposed to become available. A 2012 Deerstalker Gold Star Award for Me. The most common question I get from frustrated parents especially is Why? What I am saying simply rings too true with their daily reality to discount it. But why the Deliberate Operant Conditioning towards a Future that’s not really about prosperity?

Like I have said, I take great comfort in putting all this in its Historical Context and its real Self-Dealing Context. Because honestly that is where it belongs. So I am going to quote you a passage from Hayek’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom (page 176 in my 2007 copy). He really nails the drivers behind making education miseducation. Notice he also nails down the frequent unholy alliance between government and the media. Simply refusing to report or cover accurately anything that might caste a poor light on desired government policies. My bolding and snark is in the brackets.

“Facts and theories [Sustainability, Man-made Catastrophic Global Warming, Diversity, Social Justice] must thus become no less the object of an official doctrine than views about values. And the whole apparatus for spreading knowledge–the schools and the press, radio and motion picture–will be used exclusively to spread those views which, whether true or false, will strengthen the belief in the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority; and all information that might cast doubt or hesitation will be withheld. The probable effect on the people’s loyalty to the system [Peter Senge just swooned that we so understand the essence of Systems Thinking and Why It Must Be Pushed] becomes the only criterion for deciding whether a particular piece of information is to be published or suppressed. [Benghazi; Actual Employment Numbers]

The situation in a totalitarian state is permanently and in all fields the same that it is elsewhere in some fields in wartime. Everything which might cause doubt about the wisdom of the government or create discontent will be kept from the people. [Hard not to think of Candy Crowley and that 2nd Presidential Debate]. The basis of unfavorable comparisons with conditions elsewhere, the knowledge of possible alternatives to the course actually taken, information which might suggest failure on the part of the government to live up to its promises or to take advantage of opportunities to improve conditions–all will be suppressed. There is consequently no field where the systematic control of information will not be practiced and uniformity of views not enforced.”

There you have the incentive of Government officials for using education for merely Competent, Mentally Hobbled Citizens. Especially ones who are being bred to see a Duty to the State. And the Business Angle. They are politically connected and want special privileges and protections from their Cronies. That’s not Capitalism though. It’s Mercantilism where there is no mass prosperity. It is what Adam Smith rejected as he accounted for Britain’s phenomenal 18th century economic growth.

So enjoy your friends and loved ones on this cherished American holiday. Whatever happens in education in 2013, we WILL understand what is really going on and what the likely consequences are actually going to be.

And that really is something to be Thankful for.

Disguising the Rise of the Oligarchs Via Competencies, New Values, a Thinking Curriculum and Other False Narratives

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Unapproved personal knowledge is a meme-buster. If you are not sure why I say that think of the images of the South Carolina flooding and then attach the descriptions of “freak weather-related” vs “caused by climate change.” One affects us emotionally and makes us want to do something. Known, unassigned stores of fact can destroy a given narrative. Let’s use two examples from just this past week. Has anyone seen a picture of the Oregon shooter’s mother? If we simply got our news from the evening networks, we would not know the mass murderer was mixed-race, just like our first Black President. Facts in the way of the narrative.

Part of the research into the sequel to my first book Credentialed to Destroy means that I have had to become an expert on Big Data. Let’s just say I have a lot of unapproved, demonstrably true facts at my command. So when this video  https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/haunted-by-data came to my attention as a touted solution, I immediately knew it was a tactical keynote. The speaker misstated the nature of the problem to get a solution authorized that would actually make the problem of personalized data even worse. Words to the Wise: with behavioral data, it is the ongoing flow that is crucial to insights that allow neurological rearranging. Remember we have Learning Progressions to stipulated outcomes or Competencies. Once there and locked into place at a psychophysiological level to prompt and guide future behavior, the Oligarchs do not need to keep monitoring.

After that Big Data works just fine for social and economic planning purposes. That last one comes from a report on Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy that just came out from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. http://www.rewritetherules.org/ Once again actual knowledge of what has transpired in the last several decades and what impairs and helps create prosperity is a tremendous obstacle to accepting the prescribed actions by the politically influential. Finally, the US is embarking on adopting Qualifications Frameworks just as I warned about in my book. Only the names are changing to create a better narrative I suppose. On Monday the first ever National Credentials Summit was held in DC. http://connectingcredentials.org/summit-recording/

Like Stiglitz, this is a group of people interested in redesigning and planning a ‘fragmented system’–this time in the name of those who want a credential that will guarantee them a good job. Once again factual knowledge impedes the panacea being spun, but it is a chance to see Anthony Carnevale [see tag] as more than just the author of those Workplace Manuals for the Bush 41 Labor Department that still guide the admitted to vision now of K-12 education as workforce training. We get to see how much former governors just love to go to work for trade groups pushing a politically planned economy or education reforms. Even former Prime Ministers like Gordon Brown find post-office full employment via the Rise of the planning Oligarchs.

Last week the GEFF connected advisor Tom VanderArk linked to the final version of the Bipartisan Convergence Center’s vision for us.  http://education-reimagined.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/A-Transformational-Vision-for-Education-in-the-US-2015.09.pdf It is just full of both false narratives justifying the need for transformation, as well as true declarations of intentions to change the children so that they are adaptable to the kind of changed social and economic systems Stiglitz and the Lumina Foundation (that called for the Credentials Convening linked to above) had in mind. In that planned, collectivist economy and society that still intends to use nonprofits and private companies to fulfill “the needs” of the people, unauthorized knowledge is in the way.

That report explains how the “learner-centered paradigm for learning functions like a pair of lenses that offers a new way to look at, think about, talk about, and act on education.” I bolded that part of the phrase because the ‘pair of lenses’ analogy is what the last post said was a means of framing an individual’s orientation at an unconscious level. Unapproved, personal facts get in the way of our simply putting on the prescribed ‘pair of lenses’. That report confesses the intention to use K-12 education to prescribe the specific core knowledge, skills, and personal dispositions ALL students are to internalize. Did any dictator in history ever aspire to more intrusion, unless we count keeping everyone but a designated elite (the oligarchs) completely illiterate?

Complete illiteracy is easy to notice. Prescribed ignorance, tied to useful false beliefs and regularly manipulated emotions, and then all coupled to doled out allowed core knowledge and practiced, approved behaviors, is what we are really looking at here. Unapproved knowledge impedes the Rise of the Oligarchs in our Vision 2030 UN-led world and it must not be allowed. http://www.iclei.org/details/article/advancing-sdgs-at-the-local-and-subnational-level-input-to-un-negotiations-on-post2015-development.html is a confession that the UN, mayors, city councils, and school administrators all know that most of the 2030 vision will be carried out globally at a local level. They have even coined the term ‘localization’ for this deliberate disguise for planned global control via local administrators and politicians.

http://landing.deloitte.com.au/rs/761-IBL-328/images/deloitte-au-ps-education-redefined-040815.pdf from Australia is a reminder that this planned ignorance and the ties to workforce development are not limited to the US. We can also go back in time to the report UNESCO created in 1968 to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Called “The Right to Education: From Proclamation to Achievement (1948-1968),” it made “the full development of the human personality” the new purpose of education globally just like Uncle Karl envisioned as a necessary component of his sought Human Development Society or little ‘c’ communism.  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/who-knew-karl-marx-had-a-human-development-model-or-that-it-fit-our-facts-so-well/

Not to be paranoid, but when that Re-Imagined Education Project mentions its “vision of all children learning and thriving to their full potential,” it certainly sounds like a rephrasing of the ‘full development of the human personality’, doesn’t it? When it calls for a “Coordinated Network of Institutions, Organizations, Agencies, Associations and Federations, and Businesses” it is using the word ‘network’ to replace the word ‘system’ used in all these other cites. The intention to fundamentally redesign, plan and direct is the same. This Network “offers open-walled, relevant, and contextualized learning resources and opportunities to learners and creates avenues for learners to be involved in and engage with the community.”

Sounds like what the Credentialing Summit is calling for as Seamless Pathways in a no longer ‘fragmented’ employment system. It would also fit with the communitarian, promote the Good of Others in daily behaviors, requirement that we found in the definition of Career Ready Practices. Let’s stay in the present for one more quote: “Additionally, this network promotes collaboration and communication amongst entities working to support learners’ health, nutrition, safety, and wellbeing.” Since those needs can only be met if the learners’ entire family also has their ‘needs’ met (see http://www.communityschools.org/assets/1/AssetManager/Better-Learning-through-Community-School-Partnerships.pdf ) , we are back to an obligation to meet such needs for all families with children. Just like Marx laid out, as well as the UN in that 2030 Vision all of our elected leaders signed on to about a week ago.

The UDHR is already showing up in much of the curricula coming in under the banner of the Common Core and Global Competency. Does everyone appreciate that it called for “economic and social equality” back in 1948 and empowered UNESCO to achieve it via education and planned changes to prevailing culture? That communitarianism was always at the center of the imagined future global vision and that only politically connected Oligarchs thrive in such a society? Essentially everyone thriving becomes a means of ensuring there will be no unauthorized breakouts of individuality or genius innovations. Here is the Oligarch plan via the UN and now ‘localization’ from 1968:

“When liberty, equality and fraternity are achieved, so too will be achieved the free, full development of man’s personality within the community; and thus man will be considered as an end and not a means. [BS narrative alert]…Duties toward the Community (Art. 29 of UDHR) For man may claim his rights, in the name of freedom and justice, only in so far as he consents to assume his duties, and becomes aware that the members of every human community are all interdependent.”

That’s why the focus keeps coming back to personality, even if the excuse is bullying, a Positive School Climate, Workforce Competencies and Soft Skills, Grit and Perseverance, or Character Education. Again to 1968: “the permanent task of education remains: to form the personality of every human being–the personality that will allow him to resist the loss of his individuality in his work and his leisure-time occupations, and to set forth, be it modestly, upon the conquest of the good things of the world. And these are not material goods only, but also intelligence, beauty and goodness.”

I guess the last three are what is hiding in the present as those to-be-stipulated Dispositions. It will not be the individual student or any of the rest of us picking them out and, once again individual, unapproved stores of knowledge impede the plans. That is why UNESCO in 1968 called for “not a well-stocked but a well-organized mind.” Organized around the designated core knowledge, approved themes and concepts, and supplied principles and values–“it presupposes a certain limited sum of basic knowledge, deeply rooted and constantly available.” Basic knowledge that creates a “capacity for action.” That would be action though along approved pathways of course.

Education then, in 1968 and now, in the US and in every other developed country, “forms men and women who will become the active agents of progress, ready to face what has never been faced before. Culture forms a close link between the concepts of education and the future…Culture, no longer the privilege of an aristocracy, is becoming the leaven of democracy. Every worker is a citizen. Specialization must on no account be an obstacle to the grasp of broader problems.”

Because broader problems should only be understood through the lenses of approved core knowledge. This ignorance and manipulated narratives of course greases the path for the Rise of the Oligarchs.

Genuine, Unapproved Knowledge–the ultimate 21st Century Rebellion of the would-be serfs.

Menticide: Deliberate Targeting of Our Frame of Orientation for Examination and then Assault Via Education

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One of the primary creators of Systems Science and thus a behavioral science pioneer was a biologist, Ludwig van Bertalanffy. He was very involved in reconceptualizing K-12 education in order to implement research coming out of what he called the “emerging psychology of man”. He also called it “a new science of man or general anthropology.” This new type of ‘education’ and new ‘science’ views “man as an active personality system.” Please note that the Workforce shift in purpose I covered in the last post would require that activity emphasis in all K-12 schooling. Not coincidental in the least. In 1966 lectures, Bertalanffy described Menticide as follows:

“If a population is manipulated in the right ways, it cannot transmit, to coming generations, values and freedom it has lost itself; and this is precisely what psychological manipulation aims at and has widely achieved.”

He should know since not only was he a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto shortly after it was created in the early 50s, but he was also a presenter at a 1957 conference on “New Knowledge in Human Values” held at MIT. Organized by the Research Society for Creative Altruism, it resulted in a book edited by famed, or notorious Humanist Psychologist, Abraham Maslow. Shortly after that book came out the NEA hired Maslow and his associate Carl Rogers to develop the new K-12 education vision we covered here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/psychological-approach-to-a-humane-politics-restructuring-the-west-quietly-and-effectively-via-ed/

In order to be able to spot the same vision implementing this desired ‘science of man’ in subsequent education ‘reforms’ we have to truly understand what was sought at conferences we were not invited to, even if we could get around the technicality of not being born yet. That’s what old books are for. Professor Robert S. Hartman also spoke about creating a ‘moral science’ and a ‘science of values’ by controlling the meaning people associate with words and images. As we read his intentions, let’s just imagine how much fun he would have had with his social engineering desires with access to today’s Digital Learning mandates, where the Images are controlled and dramatize whatever the creator desires for students to believe.

In the kind of naivete and hubris that can be hard to read in hindsight, Hartman said that “as natural science has changed the world, so moral science, once it is developed and fully known, is bound to change the world.” In fact, he believed that “There will come a time when the problems and conflicts that now plague us will be as forgotten as the tortures of the middle ages and the clubs of the cave men.” Talk about famous last words.

Hartman explained how the moral science principles “puts the spine in democratic ideology” and would be the “future science of moral humanity.” If it reminds anyone else of where the lesson plans for the UN’s Global Goals and the linked video for the World’s Largest Lesson from the last post are going, there’s a reason. Hartman related that he had written a report to UNESCO’s International Institute of Philosophy on the development of this value theory “over the last five years (1949-1955).”

I am asserting that the “worldwide intellectual potentiality” is still what is being carried forward by the Systems Scientists like Ervin Laszlo or Bela Banathy and embodied into K-12 via misunderstood terms like Excellence, Outcomes Based Education, Competency, and what GEFF is peddling. Another conference presenter, Erich Fromm (a member of the Frankfurt School of confessed cultural Marxists and transformational social scientists. See Tag) lectured on “Values, Psychology, and Human Existence.” In one of those jaw-dropping epiphanies that brings together so much, Fromm stated that such a human science would first change values. Then it would need to be able to get at–assess would be a good description for what is required–and then alter what he called “man’s frame of orientation.”

That single phrase so thoroughly captured precisely what all the actual Common Core/ Competency/21st Century Skills implementation is now pushing and has been since at least the 60s. I even used one of my very favorite bookmarks to mark the page. From APUSH “Conceptual Frameworks” to Social Studies ‘lenses’ to Cross-Cutting Themes and Core Disciplinary Ideas to Enduring Understandings and Whole Child, everything targets a student’s Frame of Orientation. Growth Mindset being required and exalted is just a way of insisting that the orientation and its frames must be malleable to the Learning Experiences supplied. When listening to the World’s Largest Lesson video or all the Climate Change hype, remember that Fromm told us that “even if man’s frame of orientation is utterly illusory, it satisfies his need for some [internalized mental] picture that is meaningful to him.”

No need to wonder now why relevance, real world applications, ties to “authentic local and global issues” and “assessment primarily concerned with providing guidance and feedback for growth” are the new required focus for K-12 education.  http://www.ccsso.org/Documents/2013/2013_INTASC_Learning_Progressions_for_Teachers.pdf that is now being used for teacher professional development is just full of confessions on what teachers must be doing to the students so that they internalize what Fromm called a Frame of Orientation that will guide their future behaviors and perceptions. I especially liked page 27’s insistence that “the teacher understands critical thinking processes and knows how to help learners develop high level questioning skills to promote their independent learning.”

Apparently a neurologically embedded, deliberately created, and manipulated Frame of Orientation fosters independence and autonomy in this Orwellian vision of the future where Unknown=Independent. How does this creation occur? Why “the teacher understands how current interdisciplinary themes (e.g., civic literacy, health literacy, global awareness) connect to the core subjects and knows how to weave those themes into meaningful learning experiences.” There is an crucial confession here in this “Application of Content” vision. School subjects now exist in order to be the means for instilling the desired Frame of Orientation. Then students collaboratively practice projects and tasks until the new values and beliefs are locked in place at an unconscious level. “The teacher is constantly exploring how to use disciplinary knowledge as a lens to address local and global issues.”

That emphasis fits perfectly with the World’s Largest Lesson, but even more so with the UN’s expressed plans to use data, like a student’s frame of orientation and values, to also restructure the world’s economic, social, and political systems. To a UN bureaucrat, too many politicians, and most education administrators these days we are ‘systems’ to be redesigned with data. So apparently is everything else involving people. That is what the meeting in New York is about this week and the 15 year commitment where no one gets left behind that president Obama signed us up for is actually not really about stopping malarial deaths from mosquitoes. http://www.undatarevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/A-World-That-Counts2.pdf is the blueprint that confesses:

“It is up to governments to put in place the rules and systems to realise this vision, working with domestic stakeholders and in the multilateral system, at regional and global levels. Governments, through the legal systems they enforce, are the ultimate guarantors of the public good.”

Because it worked out so well for all of us when in 1928, governments signed on to abolish war. In more utopian hubris:

“it is governments that can balance public and private interests and create systems that foster incentives without creating unacceptable inequalities, adopt frameworks for safe and responsible use and manage the international system that can transfer finance and technical expertise to bring the least informed people and institutions up to the level of the most informed. And it is governments that are elected to respond to citizens on their choices and priorities.”

Mercy me, somebody spent way to much time absorbing theories and not enough time learning genuine history and its constants. Now wanting to be Pollyanna instead of looking this awful overreach straight in the face for what it plans, let’s assume this paper gets dismissed as merely “the UN” and president Obama will be gone in 15 months anyway. In 2012, the National Science Foundation created http://www.nsf.gov/cise/aci/cif21/CIF21Vision2012current.pdf establishing a Cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century Science and Engineering and we and our various ‘systems’ are what need to be socially reengineered. In 2014 grants “Laying the Foundation for Data-Driven Science” were issued. http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=132880 One of the bolded Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs) program is to “drive innovation in education.”

Headed by Ken Koedinger at Carnegie Mellon and funded as LearnSphere, this project is premised on “Educational data holds the same potential to guide the development of courses that enhance learning while also generating even more data to give us a deeper understanding of the learning process.” Whatever the personal intentions of individual professors, LearnSphere is precisely what Hartman, UNESCO, and Fromm hoped to one day have as a cultural tool for transforming human nature. Or at least trying. I am not done yet though. The CIF 21 document compares the kind of human systems data that will now flow from our Cyberinfrastructure to the astronomical mapping of an area of the universe known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The aspiration and intention is “from individuals and communities, to address far more complex problems of science and society than previously possible” and “advance innovation in society.”

One more tie so the inexorable nature of this juggernaut is indisputable. Remember MIT prof Alex “Sandy” Pentland from this post?  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/redesigning-education-globally-to-humanize-personalities-and-make0each0one-of-us-more-susceptible-to-peer-pressure/ He is not only involved with the UN groups that produced that What Counts report and many Working Groups, including Education and Workforce Development, to gain implementation at state and local levels. He is also involved in the Kavli HUMAN Project as an advisor.  http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/big.2015.0012 It’s not just a Big Data project to “Understand the Human Condition”.  It’s not just that Kavli used that same analogy to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It also seeks to yield “detailed behavioral phenotypes that characterize the myriad ways in which humans express their genetic endowment in different environmental settings.”

And we wonder why Opt Out is to be no longer allowed once a state or district gets “meaningful formative assessments” or why we all need SMART energy meters.

Because we and our children in Preschool through higher ed are to be part of “a discovery dataset that would revolutionize the social and natural human sciences.”

Now I’m done.

Federal Reserve, Texas, and the UN System Usurp Our Children’s Precious Prerogatives Via P-12 Education

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So much going on as the cards have to now be laid down. The End Game we saw in the UN’s Ban Ki-Moon’s “Dignity For All by 2030” global program commences in earnest in our children’s classrooms and in their very ‘desired mental states’.  That latter graphic phrase was used at the March 8-13, 2015 59th Annual CIES Conference held at the Hilton in DC and called “Imagining a Humanist Education Globally Ubuntu!” Take a look at it and keep that phrase in mind as we move through today’s tsunami of disclosures.

Anyone wanting a link between today’s disclosures, GEFF, the UN System, the Common Core, and School Choice can look at all the links laid out in this bio of former Intel Chairman, Craig Barrett, on the Board link of an expanding chain of Arizona-based Charter Schools. http://bsischools.org/about-us/board-of-directors Most links should ring a bell, but it is the co-chairing of the Skolkovo Foundation Council that is behind GEFF and the Re-Imagining Futures Agenda by 2030 with MIT, Russia, and Silicon Valley that brings so much into the same circle with what I have been covering in recent posts.

Plans for Us and our Children is one way to put it.  David Coleman, confessed Common Core Main Architect and now President of the College Board, just spoke at the NYT Schools of Tomorrow Conference about changes to the SAT. He said that there would be no more “SAT-type words” that few children recognized and only showed up in a high-stakes arena. Instead, everyday important words like “analyze” and “synthesis” would be looked at to see if prospective members of the Ideological Elite were interpreting concepts and themes correctly, and showing proper use of the Dialectic, after their years of carefully selected Learning Experiences. This would of course give a final glimpse into the Desired Mental States to see if the youngster merited a slot in one of the higher ed institutions creating the Planners of Tomorrow prepping us all for the 2030 Agenda.

OK, Coleman did not phrase it quite like that but those were the example new SAT words he gave. They do resonate with whether students have developed the desired Worldviews, don’t they? Will they apply the desired strategies and techniques in everyday practice just reeks of something Moscow State or U of Belgrade would have pushed in the 70s to join the Party Elite. The vocabulary word I did not know when I took the PSAT decades ago was ‘usurp’. I came home and looked it up promptly. It means “to take or hold in possession without force or without right.”

Usurp is still a useful word in the 21st Century, but only if accurately describing and conveying to others what is being planned for us and our children, remains a desired goal. It does not fit though with what the Planners want to allow. As we will see, Workforce Readiness is the Euphemism-du-Jour to cover up a prescribed state of deliberate ignorance, coupled to cultivated false beliefs, and overlaid with new communitarian values.

To explain why there is a global call for Competency, let’s look to a 1978 book originally written in Polish by Leszek Kolakowski and translated as Main Currents of Marxism: The Breakdown . Frustrated, his words tell us precisely why ignorance is now needed.

“Human thought developed and produced science by enlarging the area of knowledge that was not subject to arbitrary judgement, thanks to the Platonic distinction between knowledge and opinion, episteme and doxa. This distinction, of course, leaves no room for an ultimate, all-embracing synthesis [bolded by me as a reminder of Coleman’s desired new SAT concept of knowledge] in which thoughts, feelings, and desires are merged in a higher ‘unity’. [Alert readers recognize the whole purpose of a Whole Child emphasis and what goes by the euphemism ‘Excellence’ in education].

Such an aspiration is only possible when a totalitarian myth claims supremacy over thought–a myth based on ‘deeper’ intuition [Deeper Learning–a 21st Century Core Skill], so that it does not have to justify itself, but assumes command over the whole of spiritual and intellectual life. For this to be possible, of course, all logical and empirical rules have to be declared irrelevant…”

Relevance, one of the New 3 Rs. Perhaps instead of declaring facts ‘irrelevant’ they can just be asserted as Inequitable and Not Accessible to All Students, especially given our more diverse 21st Century population. Maybe those logical and empirical rules can be asserted to be inappropriate for a “culturally-responsive curricula and pedagogy” and inconsistent with a Real-Life problem-solving emphasis where a single, unambiguous answer is supposedly highly unlikely. Yes, I am listing many of the explanations for all these shifts we keep hearing, but Kolakowski grasped what is still going on because he lived in such a police state.

“The object [striven for] is a unified body of knowledge which despises such trivial aims as technological progress, and whose merit is to be one and all-embracing. But there can only be such knowledge if thought is allowed to shake off the external compulsion of logic; moreover, since each person’s ‘essential’ intuition may be different from that of others, the spiritual unity of society must be based on other foundations than logic and facts.

There must be some compulsion other than rules of thought, and that must take the form of social repression. In other words, [this 21st Century Learning as I update this 1978 language beyond Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School] system depends on replacing the tyranny of logic by a police tyranny. This is corroborated by all historical experience: there is only way of making a whole society accept a particular world-view…”

P-12 education reforms globally have been created around a hope that there can be two ways to force the acceptance of a particular world-view. That is the reason for the deliberate insistence on ignorance that gets covered up with a variety of explanations. Yet the insistence students arrive at a ‘shared meaning’ and without complaint become merely members of Communities of Learners makes it clear teachers and administrators are expected to have an iron fist within the velvet glove of ‘meaningful learning experiences.’ Now to three exceedingly influential plans driving this underlying tyranny in the classroom.

In 2014 the Texas Association of Workforce Boards created the vision for all P-12 in that state, once again showing why they did not need to participate in the Common Core formally–“The Workforce in Texas: Aligning education to meet the needs of Texas employers.” Is that really why people have children in Texas or choose to move there–to be molded to the desired mental states that meet current employers’ needs? Not the desires of the family or personal hopes and dreams based on a lively, logical mind that recognizes when their autonomy is being usurped and can say so?

I appreciate the explicit nature of that Texas declaration and the reason I know about it is that the US Federal Reserve System, the world’s most influential public-private partnership, whose product we all carry in our wallets and hit the ATMs to use, just published Transforming US Workforce Development Policies for the 21st Century.

https://www.kansascityfed.org/~/media/files/publicat/community/workforce/transformingworkforcedevelopment/book/transformingworkforcedevelopmentpolicies.pdf is the link to the 670 page Warcry to officials and politicians at every level of government to restructure the nature of the political and economic structure in the US, with an emphasis on Public-Private Partnerships. They touted the Texas Statement and especially the vision of economic and community development created by Project Quest in San Antonio, Texas. When the people in charge of a nation’s money supply proclaim Saul Alinsky’s community organizing tactics to be a national model, maybe we have turned quietly into a Police state still hiding behind Euphemisms. Chapter 4 in particular covers the “Connecting Education to Careers in the 21st Century,” which has become the sales pitch, as we have seen, for an education grounded in ignorance and manipulation.

Anthony Carnevale, the lead chapter author, and cited throughout the book, was actually the author of this same vision of education grounded in ignorance, which he laid out in the New Workforce Training Manuals created for the Department of Labor, during the same Bush 41 years when Lamar Alexander was the Education Secretary. The emphasis of those manuals and Carnevale’s various degrees in ‘cultural history,’ ‘social science and public administration,’ and a Public Affairs PhD are detailed in this post.   http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/anesthetizing-any-ability-to-blow-up-or-contaminate-a-chosen-politically-useful-narrative/

Obviously I cannot cover that entire book in a post although I did read it over the weekend, just like I have read Carnevale’s Workplace Manuals. I wish there was speculation about what is going on or that the Kolakowski quotes were not so entirely apt. Over and over again the book acclaims Congress passing WIOA–the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act I have been warning about since it passed (July 10, 2014 post). It gets praised regularly as a “Bipartisan and Bicameral Agreement,” making me wonder what legislation that Congress passes is not Bicameral. Alliteration though bolsters the overall giddiness at the nature of the fundamental transformation mandate.  It also makes it appear that politicians at every level wanted WIOA because this is the vision the private Federal Reserve already had for the American people, society, the economy, and the future generally.

Finally we have a video created to be a part of “the World’s Largest Lesson” to be held globally in classrooms this Friday, September 25. In honor of the launch of the UN’s Post 2015 Sustainable Development Agenda to shift us all towards Dignity for All by 2030, https://vimeo.com/137728737 is the video. http://www.globalgoals.org/pt/2015/09/17/welcome-to-the-worlds-largest-lesson-materials/ is the link to lesson materials already available in ten languages. The video makes it clear that there is ‘plenty’ for all of us and that the world and its ‘systems’ and institutions can and should be redesigned so there is ‘enough’ for all of us going forward. We can ‘share.’

That’s where I want to end because that video and this UN vision can only be attempted in a world of profoundly ignorant or misguided people. As Kolakowski noted, even trying necessitates a police state of power usurping at all levels of government. This is largely hidden though because already prevailing ignorance, false media hype, and these confounding, ubiquitous euphemisms. All obscure the reality lining the Road to 2030 that we keep coming across from every direction.

Ubiquitous-another one of those useful descriptions of reality that the College Board no longer wants students to have access to or practice with.

Manipulating the Human Mind and Personality Via P-12 Education to Engineer Transformational Social Change

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Notice how I did NOT write K-12. In most states and countries now, if we do a little digging, we will find early learning standards that put a heavy focus on social and emotional learning. That ‘P’ stands for Preschool, which is apparently where the transformation to new values and a new kind of mind and habits of thinking, must begin. A GERG (General Evolution Research Group) associate of Csik’s, Bela Banathy, and Ervin Laszlo and husband of Riane Eisler discussed in this post  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/rigor-relevance-and-relationships-the-new-3rs-to-get-to-a-caring-economics/ , David Loye, was kind enough to explain in a 1991 book that the systems thinkers had a new ‘schema’ for the mind. The mind could be programmed via education to become the “evolving guidance system for each person and for humanity as a whole.” From a book Ervin Laszlo edited called The New Evolutionary Paradigm that was a part of the World Futures General Evolution Studies, Loye wrote:

“Mind in this schema is further defined by viewing our time, the late 20th century, as a pivotal evolutionary dividing point between the dominance of the Truncated Mind and the crucial emergence and spread of Actualizing Mind, in which guidance sensitivities are more fully operative.”

Truncated Mind is a new term for what I have previously nicknamed the Axemaker Mind, but to build on what is laid out in my book Credentialed to Destroy , phonetic fluent reading and traditional Algebra build that Truncated Mind. Critical Thinking as defined now by P21 or Richard Paul, Excellence in education, and Competency help build that Actualizing Mind, even if none of the educators implementing its tenets in the classroom have never heard of GERG,  any of the Laszlos, or David Loye and Riane. Since the last post I also managed to get my hands on a 1966 lecture the creator of General Systems Theory (GST), Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, gave at Clark University. Titled “Toward a New Image of Man,” Bertalanffy stated that the purpose of GST was to create a model for a new psychological theory suitable for psychosocial change–people, economies, cities, societies.

In other words, it fits perfectly with the Social Systems Redesign work we have encountered in the last several posts and also with John Dewey’s vision laid out in my book. Loye was darn forthcoming as well about the need to “focus on human cognition, which shapes human action” in order to create a normative social theory that could close the gap between reality as it now exists and the “ideal developmental forms that must be the prime concern of all policy makers.” From what I can tell the politicians and policy makers at every level and both parties are glad to oblige now in 2015, but no one is being honest about what is up.

I think the vision of Heart-Core Learning we met in the last post is Loye’s Actualizing Mind. When Lucien Vattel writes about “a society that grossly overvalues the mind above the heart” and seeks an “education system that values both how we feel and behave, as much as what we ‘know'”, he is laying out the current form of the same argument as Loye and all the rest of the social transformationalists. Move away from the Truncated Mind and the P-12 education that produces it. Go for Deeper, experiential, Whole Child learning achieved through collaborative Projects and authentic role playing experiences–what Vattel called “interacting, playing, and making”–to build that needed Actualizing Mind.

Everything I have read from GEFF and any of the systems scientists and out of the Fuschl and Asilomar Conversations is all supporting this same vision. It is the inner workings of the mind that is Ground Zero for the needed transformation and a P-12 education centered in Competency is the way in. Loye started his discussion with citing several Club of Rome reports from the early 70s and ends with the 1977 one that Ervin Laszlo was in charge of that called for “the need for accelerating a fundamental shift in values.”

When I read that, it was hard not to think of the now ubiquitous Positive School Climate mandates and the suggested remedies to supposedly combat bullying. Getting at the inner workings of the student’s mind and personality even more directly though is the ASCD-sponsored 16 Habits of Mind push that aligns with the developing Thinking Skills push from the 80s and early 90s. ftp://download.intel.com/education/Common/au/Resources/EO/Course_Resources/Thinking/Habits_of_Mind.pdf

Empathy, cooperation, “having a disposition toward behaving intelligently when confronted with problems, the answers to which are not immediately known” sounds like just the very traits needed to implement a transformative theory of normative social change. Just the habits needed to persevere with actions to push for change whatever the difficulties encountered in the real world. If any of us were designing Habits of Mind suitable to create an exuberant change agent, one could hardly do better than what Costa and Kallick developed or what Critical Thinking and Thinking Skills (Marzano’s 1985 Framework for McREL) actually turn out to be fostering. http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_198604_jones.pdf from 1986 also laid out creating such “higher-order thinking and metacognitive strategies at all levels of schooling” and for all students and sold it under the appealing title of “Quality and Equality Through Cognitive Instruction.”

Everybody, it turns out, wants to create those very traits of minds the systems thinkers intent on transformational social change globally say they need. How should we feel when we discover that the Convergence Center’s Advisory Board on Re-Imagining Education included a medical doctor known for creating the area of Neurobiology whose vision for ed fits perfectly with Loye’s Actualizing Mind? http://kripalu.org/article/322/ Now when you look at “Awakening the Mind–Neurobiology and You” and its constant references to Mental Well-Being necessary practices, remember all the mandates in the ESEA Rewrite to providing for students’ mental health needs and whatever promotes mental well-being. Does that translate into a legal mandate from Congress to extinguish the Truncated Mind and build the Actualizing Mind in its place?

Siegel is at UCLA, which is also where the federally-funded School Mental Health Project is located. Anyone believe Siegels’ references to mental well-being are not designed to turn his desired practices into a legal mandate for all schools? Let me add one more tidbit: there are numerous stories on the Internet that Senator Lamar Alexander’s favorite book is called A God Within by Rene Dubos. Now I recognized Dubos as being frequently in the bibliography of references for most systems thinkers. In its Chapter called “On Being Human” Dubos explained that ‘The God within mankind is the spirit of purposeful and creative adventure.” That certainly sounds like a transformational mindset, especially with all the hype over purposeful behavior and envisioning the future.

Maybe Lamar as an ex-Governor really liked the vision from the previous page that “Over most of the world, the homeostatic feedbacks of supply-and-demand economy are giving way to new systems manipulated by government intervention.” Yes, that is unfortunately true and the date of the book’s publication in 1972 also coincides with an overall decline in mass prosperity with plenty of people wondering what has happened since. Note: crony interventions by governments and ‘systems redesign’ starting at the level of the human mind do not work very well, apart from enriching politicians, former ones, and their friends.

Loye did detail some tidbits I want to pass on because I can see their continued relevance now. In discussing programs for the needed fundamental shift in values, Loye mentioned that: “”for well over a decade, psychologist Milton Rokeach and associates throughout various parts of the world have been carrying out experiments using Rokeach’s Value Scale to explore value structural stable states. This work includes the induction, via cognitive dissonance, of the psychological equivalent of chaos states, and testing the effectiveness of interventions designed to produce fundamental and enduring values change.”

And we wonder why we have had an uptick in school shootings. What Loye did not say, but I know, because I have several of Rokeach’s books and have written about him and his links to Tranzi OBE is that Rokeach created the educational use of the term Competency to obscure the values and non-mental skills focus of this shift. We can see why the euphemisms ‘Objectives’ and “Outcomes’ also get used to hide the nature of this shift.

Anyone else read about Linda Darling-Hammond retiring as a Stanford ed prof to start a Learning Policy Institute recently? Here is a useful fact to keep in mind that Loye just happened to mention right after the Rokeach paragraph.

“The most comprehensive and well-financed study of ‘chaotic’ or transformational values change has been carried out over the past six years [about 1985 then] by California-based SRI International [Stanford Research Institute goes by just an acronym now], one of the world’s largest research institutions. Basing its VALS (values and life styles) program on the work of psychologist Abraham Maslow, SRI social scientists regularly update a data bank on more than 100,000 Americans to predict changes in attitudes, values, and preferences that will affect the American and world economic, social and political systems.”

Wow, how’s that for a confession? One of those SRI social scientists, Marina Gorbis, now heads the same Institute for the Future that works with KnowledgeWorks to develop visions for education in the future.

That would also be the same Maslow that the NEA hired back in 1962 to create its desired new vision of education grounded in psychology. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/psychological-approach-to-a-humane-politics-restructuring-the-west-quietly-and-effectively-via-ed/

The truth is that the same vision has now been pursued for decades by people who turn out to be connected to each other and the same institutions. Only the names for the vision seem to change.

Changing the functions and structure at the level of the human mind and then locking it in physiologically.

No wonder there has been such deceit.

 

Heart-Core Learning: Not Left to Chance or Adult Therapy and Thus Reimagining What It Means to Be Human

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Recently I have been writing fewer posts and talking more in between in the comments as I am inundated with confirmations in books and articles, going back more than 50 years, laying out a consistent vision. Books are the best means to lay out all the interconnections, but the toxicity of this vision and the clear determination to lock it in now at an undisclosed, and unforeseeable neural level, means I have to post red light alerts in the interim. Anyone else have a habit of watching the network news on a somewhat regular basis just to learn what the Powers-that-Be want us to believe about the world out there? That’s how I feel when I go through these explanations for the planned K-12 reforms hiding conveniently behind the Common Core banner. I believe I need to give everyone a heads up on connections like GEFF from the last post and all the various entities and initiatives that matter that are clearly tied to that Advisory Board.

In the comments to the last post I put up my original Bela Banathy posts from 2012. Those are pertinent to where we are going today that came out of the GEFF and ISSS connections. Before we move on I want to tie a crucial point from my book Credentialed to Destroy and these discussions and the current, actual classroom implementation. Remember the discussion of Transformational Outcomes Based Education and its links to Competency laid out in Chapter 4? Well, Bela Banathy worked under William Spady, the named Tranzi OBE co-creator, at the Far West Ed Lab in the 80s. They knew each other and Spady would have been quite familiar with what I have described in those two posts and what I am going to lay out today. Tranzi OBE in fact dovetails nicely with what are now being called by Rand and the White House as Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Competencies.

In other words, the ultimate social engineering Manipulation of the Brain and its synapses at a neurological level got to go on, despite bloodshed, with no one being the wiser. If someone noticed the fundamental shift it got attributed to Tranzi OBE without the broader agenda being understood. When the Columbine Tragedy occurred, Tranzi OBE and Spady were smeared and implicated. Spady moved out of the country to do similar work in South Africa and Australia and Tranzi OBE got renamed and broken into interconnected parts. The broader agenda went on. Nobody implicated Bela Banathy or the Laszlos or the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.

This is a quote from a 2003 paper Kathia Castro Laszlo (very involved at the GEFF Menlo Park conference) published called “Systems Science: Creating Transdisciplinary Knowledge for Conscious Evolution.” She talks frequently and forthrightly about the ‘human science’ that K-12 has quietly become in order to nonconsensually transform “social realities.” She excitedly points out that “humans do not need to be the victims of change–change can happen through us not to us” (her emphasis) and that we can “influence the direction of change through our intentions and actions.” Yes, using the guided perceptions created by the Cross-Cutting Concepts, Core Disciplinary Ideas, Enduring Understandings, and Understandings of Consequence, all coupled to cultivated responses grounded in emotions and deliberately created virtual reality images. Some freedom of choice, huh? A false perception of free choice when everything has actually been carefully manipulated, circumscribed, and controlled via the K-12 classroom.

Then, Kathia quotes Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi to say:

“for the first time in human history we can experience joy ‘while working for the most ambitious goal available to the human imagination: To blend our individual voice in the cosmic harmony, to join our unique consciousness with the emerging consciousness of the universe, to fold our momentary center of psychic energy into the current that tends toward complexity and order.’ Indeed, science and spirituality are coming together in the ultimate exploration of the meaning and purpose of human existence: Conscious evolution–the evolutionary phase in which a developing being becomes conscious of itself, aware of the processes of which it is a participant, and begins voluntarily to co-create with evolution.”

Now, I wish we could just consider such intentions to be poppycock, but the definition of Excellence in education as in Schools of Excellence and a civil rights obligation for Excellence and Equity tracks back to Csik’s definition of Excellence as combining what is desired, felt, and thought into action and behavior. Those two posts about Banathy all involve work he did with Csik that is linked to Columbine and Tranzi OBE, but stayed below the radar. We have Aspen Summits where Csik gets invited within the last 5 years and so do people from High Tech High. The 2004 ASCD System Thinking/ Chaos Theory/ ASC newsletter Patterns laid out a comparable quote from Csik about the “need for a new worldview” grounded “not in the traditionally taught evolutionary scenario dominated by competition and selfishness, but an understanding closer to the Darwinian one that sees cooperation and transcendence of the self as the most exciting parts of the story.”

Georgia has renamed what was its Common Core standards as the Standards for Excellence, probably without a politician in this state knowing where Excellence is actually going. The language about becoming conscious of itself is precisely what ‘reflection’ pushed by IB programs means. It is what Metacognition pushed by the OECD and a part of David Conley’s work on what the amorphous mandate “College Ready” actually includes. My point is that what may seem out there in terms of goals is getting written into statutes like the ESEA rewrites that passed Congress this summer or Charters that no one bothers to read. It is incorporated into mandated assessments that are being misleadingly called ‘tests’ to obscure the shift of K-12 education from the assimilation of knowledge into a human science to invisibly force transformational change.

Digging into Alexander and Kathia Laszlo’s work after what I had read that the well-connected GEFF planned to do turned up that about 1980 Bela Banathy began what he called Conversations on the Comprehensive Design of Social Systems. They took place regularly in Austria at a place called Fuschl and from 1988 on, in Pacific Grove, California, and those were called the Asilomar Conversations. At first they were centered on deliberately remaking the educational systems around the world, but gradually the aim became to redesign and transform social systems generally.

I have been digging through those records and all the confessions contained there, including that CASBS was tied to the infamous Tavistock Institute in London as is systems science generally. The 2012 ‘Conversation’, now moved to St Magdalena/Linz and held under the auspices of the now Gates Foundation-funded IFSR, laid out all the Tavistock connections and the desire to use Participative Design Workshops to push the education and social systems redesign agenda.

Now wonder people keep writing about going to a public meeting for discussion and feeling like they have been Delphied. In 2012 a Merrilyn Emery said in a keynote talk we were not invited to at the European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems research that: “There is one other property of human beings and that property created the need for a genuinely open systems science: it is the demonstrable fact of consciousness defined as ‘awareness of awareness.'” So we never get invited to any of these meetings but their confessions, insights, and intentions do get incorporated quietly into the required assessments no one wants students to be able to opt out of, the adaptive software in their digital learning mandates, or the real definition of College Ready.

A paper called “Opportunity Lost: Teacher’s Union Reform-Past, Present & Future” reported that the concept of “Education by Charter” was first presented in 1974 to the same CASBS affiliate-the Society for General Systems Research–that would rename itself as ISSS in 1988. That would be the Tavistock connected entity. I have a copy of the Ray Budde charter paper that was finally published by an ed lab in that busy year of 1988. It’s all about the use of the Charter to lock in a vision of education that few would consent to knowingly and willingly. I was able to locate confirmation  http://www.gbv.de/dms/tib-ub-hannover/509668720.pdf that Budde remained tied to GSRT from this 1982 Annual Meeting in DC. Budde spoke on “Applying New Findings from the Neurosciences to Education” and Bela Banathy on “Perspectives on Education in Systems Methodology.” Both were listed in the part of the program on “The Study of Social Systems.”

Today’s title came from this most alarming K-12 vision http://smartblogs.com/education/2015/09/03/know-that-you-have-it-keys-to-self-driven-self-loving-self-supporting-education/ . I could recognize the ties between its vision and what I recognized as being part of what is being quietly mandated for all classrooms, including Whole Child Initiatives, Positive School Climate mandates, unappreciated definitions of mental health and well-being, and Mindfulness practices. I will come back to this in the next post as once again the extent of the interconnections among the true vision being mandated are hard to cover in a blog.

Getting back to what appears to be an impossible vision being mandated, please click through to the Game Desk website and notice who is funding this Heart-Core vision. When AT&T, the Gates Foundation, and the National Science Foundation are among the listed funders, you do not have to be the author of one well-documented book on education and be in the process of writing another, to conclude this is coming to a classroom near you soon.

This is a vision that already assumes we are “a collective” and “a society that grossly overvalues the mind over the heart.” It fits right in to where Csik, Bela Banathy, and the Laszlos, just for starters, have all said repeatedly they intend to use K-12 education to take us to.

In order to obstruct the use of K-12 education as a nonconsensual Human Science, we have to wake up to the reality of that very deliberate shift going on all around us.

With the United Nations convening on the Post-2015 plans for us building on all this later this month, there is no time to wait.