Tag Archives: Great Transition

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.

Futuribles: Seeking the Levers of History by Focusing on the Types of Individuals In Societies to be Governed

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Please try not to get whiplash as we move back and forth through the decades. Just this week the OECD conceded openly that instead of focusing on structures and incentives, which both traditional government approaches and New Public Management theory (arose in the 1980s and 90s and tied to what is also called the Third Way) “are prone to do, it is more important and fruitful to focus on the type of individuals, particularly their competences and skills, which are populating these governance structures.” Explains so much, doesn’t it? That’s why education now targets what the Paris-based Futuribles initiative funded by the Ford Foundation in the early 60s called the ‘inner self’.

http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.com/2016/04/governing-complex-education-systems.html is the truly stunning confessional document on ‘steering’ people and places to fit with desired theories of change in the “socials sciences, it [complexity theory, which the OECD itself states is akin to the Dynamic Systems Theory fiction we met in the last post] offers a metaphor, or a lens, through which we might better understand what it takes to initiate and sustain systemic change.” All of our recent encounters with various members of the Atlas Network and their frequent teaming now with either the Brookings Institute or Center for American Progress makes much more sense when we recognize that the official OECD position on how to achieve “socio-historical change in human society” is through “policy making” and changes in consciousness.

This is also why it matters so much that, unbeknownst to us, the behavioral sciences have been thoroughly embedded in education ‘reforms.’  They now define students as ‘goal-seeking systems’ as Boulding laid it out. Competency-based education and ‘evidence-based policy in education’ are simply the newest obscuring euphemisms for what the Futuribles contemplated as the way to use education to ensure that the “social sciences should orient themselves toward the future.” Futuribles wanted “to instigate or stimulate efforts of social and especially political forecasting.” It would be based on using the human imagination, unrestrained by fact-based moorings to the present or the past, to speculate on different futures and then to motivate personal action to make it so.

Quoting Destutt de Tracy who was declared to have “said very well: ‘It is the constant march of the human mind. First it acts, then it reflects on what is has done, and by so doing learns to do it still better.'” That’s the theory of education being espoused now when we hear a Principal or Super declare that a school or district no longer embraces a ‘deficit view of the child.’ For any readers who are unaware, the same Ford Foundation funding the Futuribles research organization and the translation of The Art of Conjecture into English in 1967 also financed the creation of our often-encountered Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in the 50s. That would also be the place where Kenneth Boulding and others created systems theory.

A chapter of that book is called “The Project” and seeks to use mental images “that do not represent any reality past or present” to become a person’s goals for acting in the future. Here is the vision for the Project (italics in original).

“There is no volition without object, and the object of a volition is that a fiction of the mind become a ‘fact’. This fact is the goal of action (in the sense of ‘action’ defined below). When we retain a fiction as something to be enacted, it serves as the source of systematic action. This fiction–a non-fact–can be situated only in the future, which is necessary as a receptacle for a fiction accompanied by an injunction to become real.”

I am going to stop for a moment to come back to the present. Just this week I got an announcement from a company called ProExam of a new product called Tessera that could be used by schools to assess non-cognitive attributes and qualities of students using what it called Forced Choice and Situational Judgment scenarios. It also reminded educators that these social and emotional learning attributes were now a statutory mandate for measuring and monitoring under federal law. Now we can go back to what was laid out in 1967 in the intro to the next chapter called ‘The Conditional’:

“I have formed a representation that does not correspond to observable reality and placed it in a domain suited to receive it; now my activity tends toward validation of what my imagination has constructed. [Anyone tying this aim then to the rise of Project-Based Learning and the Maker Movement now?] For the event to comply with my design, the moral force of my intention must hold and push me on the road to the goal. But the road must really lead to the goal; and this implies that the appropriate road has been discerned (an intellectual operation). Hobbes put it all like this: ‘For the thoughts are to the desires as scouts, and spies to range abroad, and find the way to the things desired.'”

The goal then is “like a beacon beckoning me.” Those of you who have read my book know how much research I laid out showing that the real Common Core implementation targets ‘values, attitudes, and beliefs’ as a means to change behavior in the future. On top of those disclosures, let’s now overlay this Futuribles recognition from that same chapter:

“Any power, whether social or political, is maintained by people’s attitudes; any project, short or long, shallow or profound, is founded on their attitudes and behavior. Now each of us is capable of changing his attitude and behavior…Concerning the individuals of a society, we cannot doubt that they have received a code of behavior from their family and from society, that they are subject to pressure from their fellow men, and that they are pushed into particular roles.

But we also know that they are able to form and pursue projects. And each project is the germ of a shoot which may or may not be propitious for the maintenance of the general form of the society. Lesage once made use of a Lame Demon who unroofed houses to reveal what was going on inside. Let us suppose that this diable boiteux could reveal people’s minds in the same way, enabling us to surprise the projects each member of society forms in his inner self.

We could then apprehend, at their origin, those shoots which as they grow will deform the familiar social surface and produce swellings, fractures, and cracks. What will these changes be? How can they be foreseen? Here lies the subject that preoccupies us.”

And I would add that this is the subject that has preoccupied all so-called K-12 education reforms globally from the 60s forward under a variety of names. It absolutely is the lodestar of what is mandated under ESSA and what practices are required to merit federal funding and expansion of charter schools. It also is what drives the social and economic steering visions laid out in that graphic OECD report that is part of its New Approaches to Economic Challenges(NAEC)  initiative. Given that the acknowledged target of all these education reforms is the inner self, which is why I bolded it, we should read carefully that a key component to “building the systemic capacity of the government to improve policy design, steering, and implementation” is Trust.

I am sure that it is entirely coincidental that the same theme of Trust was a major component of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s recent speech on public policy. As the OECD laid out as the requisite means for Governing Complex Systems that includes people and their inner selves (their competences and skills, remember?), “the public’s trust in government must be reenforced, and efforts must be made to strengthen institutions and build capacity across different dimensions of trust (e.g. reliability, fairness and impartiality, integrity and honesty, and inclusiveness).”

That VA Scandal and the lack of actual consequences is just so darn inconvenient to this trust demand, isn’t it? All of our encounters with think tanks and what I call the Faux Common Core narrative, as well as deceit surrounding the nature of federalism and the Constitutional Convention calls, makes much more sense when we throw in this quote:

“Which outcome is realised in the social sciences is a question of intervention at as many levels as possible: for example, at the macro-structural level [WIOA] and at the intentional human agency level [ESSA], so that sufficient momentum is generated in a particular direction to displace the inertial momentum of the current dispensation and to create a dominant inertial momentum for the desired changes.”

Not the desired changes you or I might seek, but the changes desired by political and economic power to secure the futures they seek. DST from the last post, and complexity theory to the OECD oligarchs and their allies, is “first and last, about reaching critical mass among the diverse range of factors, elements and agents that constitute a particular environment.” In other words, complexity theory sounds more scientific that simply citing to the infamous Uncle Karl, but still allows political power to guide the so-called Scientific Management of Society he and the USSR dreamed of.

Instead of openly decreeing the institution of his Human Development Society that is also known as little ‘c’ communism to political theorists, we get the same ends approached through ‘complexity theory.’ We are all to still be the Governed with our inner selves measured and manipulated as “new properties and behaviors in the education system, emerges from the interaction of a myriad factors in the economic, political, social, and cultural environments in which education is situated.” Those would be the same environments currently targeted for steering via legislation that starts with Congress and the federal agencies and goes straight through to all of our local communities. All targeted for steering in the 21st Century.

If this sounds like we are to have sovereigns and be ruled, like it or not, the OECD paper actually used that word when it stated that “complex societies cannot be ruled rationally from one centre, if only because the amount of information that needs to be processed to make that possible far outstrips what any central government can achieve.” I guess that means that we are guided by oligarchs who believe there is nothing wrong with ruling per se. Governance is just a matter of finding better methods, starting again with that inner self.

Next time a think tank or politician hypes the ‘local’ or a private provider as the “Conservative’ position, remember that the OECD said that “privatisation and decentralization are not just about raising efficiency. They can be interpreted as ways in which national governments are moving power to places better able to handle the complexities of global, liquid, and interdependent societies.”

If governance in the 21st century and the Levers of History really have decreed the Inner Self as the key to sustainable change, it certainly does explain why there has been so much deceit surrounding what is really going on in education.

“We are creating the citizens who will be amenable to being governed” is certainly not why we send our kids to school and pay all the taxes that support this industry.

Frankly admitting that the true global aim after the Fall of the Berlin Wall was that “Power has moved away from central governments in different directions: upwards, toward international organizations, sideways to private institutions and non-governmental organizations, and downwards toward local governments and public enterprises such as schools and hospitals” would have each of us reexamining the load of deceit doled out by politicians of both parties over the last thirty years.

Mustn’t have us accurately reexamining the provided narrative of the past. History, after all, is now about imagining what the future could be and what must be done to act to achieve those goals.

The beauty of theorizing that we are all now just goal-setting systems and subject to manipulation by political power.

 

Leapfrogging Via Deceit that Crucial Last Obstacle to the Long Sought Convergence to Collectivism

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Collectivism is one of those loaded words that sounds like I am trying to create a furor. Unfortunately, in this case, whatever the personal intentions of Texas Governor Abbott when he called Friday, January 8, for a Constitutional Convention, the actual release http://gov.texas.gov/files/press-office /Restoring_The_Rule_Of_Law_01082016.pdf may be one of the more deceitful documents I have ever read. It is deeply irritating to continue to be referred to as one of ‘the governed.’ Although since I live in Georgia, perhaps it is only Texans that are to be quietly subjugated at this point. Perhaps the author of the paper, a Texas Public Policy Foundation (another Atlas Network member) employee, Thomas Lindsay, who was previously with the National Endowment for the Humanities, is unaware that the phrase ‘We the People’ is now being used by radicals all over the world to promote the concept of a binding, collectivist, normative view of ‘democracy’.

Maybe the call of UT-Texas prof Sanford Levinson in his 2006 book Our Democratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It) for just such a Con Con that is tied to the Soros-financed American Constitution Society’s desire to have a new Constitutional vision by 2020 (began in 2005 as explained here) http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/progressive-polyphonic-federalism-invisibly-binds-people-and-places-to-the-just-society-vision/ was somehow news to TPPF and Dr Lindsay. It certainly looks like a Convergence, however, especially given all the insistence in the paper that the Rule of Law is the core value America was founded on. Excuse me?

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that ‘We the People’ just happens to be the name of an initiative Community-Organizer Extraordinaire Harry Boyte, who inspired President Obama and has worked on White House education initiatives, has created to be the so-called Third Way, neither Left or Right, to use education to get his ‘cooperative commonwealth’ vision in place. https://www.kettering.org/sites/default/files/product-downloads/We_The-People_Politics.pdf Maybe it’s a coincidence that Boyte created that paper originally for a Dewey lecture in 2007 and it just happens to fit John Dewey’s vision for how to create the right kind of consciousness via education to fit a normative democracy where the law would bind everyone to the common good vision. The one laid out in the 2008 Democracy in a Global World book that I tracked from looking at Amartya Sen’s work covered in the last post.

Let’s start pushing on all these ‘coincidences’ headed in a common direction. The quote that “Our nation was built on one principle above all others–the Rule of Law” is not simply false, it is false in a way that is useful in jettisoning the principles our Nation and its existing Constitution were founded on–the primacy of the individual. Lindsay is correct that at the federal level, politics is broken. That dysfunction, however, is no reason to reverence the Law so state and local governments can turn each individual into merely the Governed. It is facetious to argue, as that Con Con advocacy paper does, that “The whole point of the rule of law is that we comply with it even when we do not want to; otherwise, it is the will of man and not the rule of law that reigns supreme.” Huh? That’s the kind of sophistry a wannabe tyrant would assert.

As Daniel Hannan quoted Baron de Montesquieu as saying in his 2013 book Inventing Freedom: “I am in a country which scarcely resembles the rest of Europe. England is passionately fond of liberty, and every individual is independent.” When the phrase ‘We the People’ is used in various American 18th century documents it is referring to independent, sovereign individuals who believe in a “unique legal system that made the state subject to the people rather than the reverse.” That TPPF framing of the Rule of Law is the Continental View of the Law that Hannan contrasted with the very different “philosophy…from the common-law conception of a free society as an aggregation of free individuals.” It is a view of law grounded in collectivism, as Hannan noted, and “in particular, from Rousseau’s belief in the ‘general will’ of the people in place of the private rights of citizens.”

A conception of the Law grounded in the visionary who gave rise to both Fascism and Communism as the basis for a call to jettison the current Constitution is apparently what the admitted Left as well as quite a few Atlas members want as well. A reverence for individuality is an obstacle to the Convergence apparently. The US Constitution is in the way.  I am going to use a particular essay “The Global Public and Its Problems” to illustrate what was meant by John Dewey by the term ‘Creating a Public’ through educational practices. In 1927 Dewey wrote a book The Public and Its Problems which called for a communitarian form of citizen loyalty as being necessary to create the public will and values to make democracy sustainable. This is not democracy as some kind of representative government with periodic elections, but democracy in the sense that Boyte calls the cooperative commonwealth, Marx called the Human Development Society, and the UN now calls Dignity for All by 2030.

In other words, there are reasons that the concepts from a 1927 book remain relevant in the 21st Century as the first chapter of my book Credentialed to Destroy made clear. Dewey defined the Public as a community where “its members recognize a common interest in confronting problems they all face and see resolving these problems by means of collective action as a common good.” Regular readers will recognize the current concept of Fostering Communities of Learners as the measure of what constitutes being an Effective Principal as using the school to now prepare students for a future where they get to be a mere member of Dewey’s concept of a Public. Needless to say, Dewey’s Public needs a strong, anti-individual view of the law to bind individuals to this broader vision.

Here is where the story laid out in the essay gets really interesting and directly relevant to our Convergence today. “Problem-solving is used as a self-building process” where “education figures prominently.” In fact Dewey called on it, like Boyte,  for “bringing a certain integrity, cohesion, feeling of sympathy and unity among the elements of our population.” This, of course, can only happen in socioeconomically integrated schools with no tracking. The kind of deliberative democracy envisioned then and now can really only go on at the local level. In the late 1960s, that essay announced that (my bolding):

“the Eurocommunists (misleadingly so described because they included Communist party theorists and leaders from Japan and parts of South America as well as from Italy, France, Spain, and Great Britain) rejected this standpoint [the bourgeois/proletarian distinction] in favor of one that posited general democratic and political norms, potentially shared by them and by champions of capitalism within their respective nations.”

Couldn’t we describe that as the model for today’s Convergence we are seeing by the so-called Left and Right think tanks? Doesn’t that fit with the video in the comments of the previous post of Pastor Rick Warren this year moderating a forum with Professor Cornel West and Professor Robert George, the founder of Atlas member–American Principles Project? Have we once again returned to Dewey’s view of education, political life, and social policy that the Eurocommunists also used that “resisted both sides of this orientation by seeking common democracy building social projects.” I was at a forum last week where Policy Link founder Angela Glover Blackwell was the Keynote Speaker and the admitted radicals seem just as hesitant to admit they are now working with Big Business and Chambers of Commerce to advance their vision of a Just Future.

Yet we know that is already going on in the required local and state WIOA boards. It sounds just like the Eurocommunists who were “prepared to respect those with procapitalist attitudes, including capitalists themselves, insofar as they were sincerely prepared to engage in joint democracy-enhancing projects.” Isn’t that arresting to read as we continue to stumble across these clear collaborations and common visions among public policy think tanks and politicians that supposedly have nothing in common. Governments at all levels are in charge of us with the law as the enforcer of the vision in a world where suddenly “a Deweyan public comprising adherents of both egalitarian and neoliberal philosophies is possible, provided that neither camp is hypocritical in its professed commitment to solving common macro problems.”

No wonder Atlas member employees suddenly seem so fond of citing Justice Brandeis that “it is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” If the citizens consent. That must be why the University of Texas-Austin is working with Stanford on the national Growth Mindset study and doing such a loud and explicit declaration of experimenting on students to change their conscious and unconscious mental models. All consensual. Not.

Reverence for the Rule of Law and Education for Democracy are just the thing in a nation where a Republican Governor calls for a Constitutional Convention with a paper that tells us again that “It is wise, therefore, in every government, and especially in a republic, to provide means for altering, and improving the fabric of government, as time and experience, or the new phases of human affairs, may render proper, to promote the happiness and safety of the people.” That’s the view of Law from the Continent where as Aldous Huxley noted, rights are taken, but never given.

That’s the world of the Governed, the serf, and the subject, which is indisputedly where both WIOA and ESSA and a world where the White House has a Behavioral and Social Sciences Team working to change the nature of citizens at the levels of their minds and personalities. I just was not expecting the State of Texas to play such a prominent role in launching this new view of education and what it will now mean to be an American in the future.

Remember with Dewey’s methods comes the totality of his underlying vision. Suddenly the title’s reference to Collectivism is perfectly on point.

Can Bicameralism and Proper Presentment now bind individuals to everything 21st Century state and local governments choose to impose?

No wonder there is such a consistent push to teach through ideas, concepts, and themes now instead of a body of facts. Facts are a useful tool of the individual, but inappropriate without permission for the ‘Governed.’

 

Quoting Che Guevara and Importing Personalizedategic from Russia Seems Odd for a Cold War Victor

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Buckle Up. Once again we are being played now in a way that fits the Blueprints from decades ago. Let’s look together so we can shield ourselves and our children from the deliberate assaults on our very Consciousness. In the last post, when I chose the “Incarcerated by their Minds” quote, I knew it fit with the expressed goals for what a Whole Child emphasis and Student-Centered learning were really designed to do. What I did not know yet was that ‘Consciousness as a Prison’ that needs to be broken out of was a favorite metaphor of many of the New Age writers and Systems Thinkers we have encountered. The 1968 SRI study we began looking at in the last post recommended a 1978 book New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society. In a Chapter on how to see through to the prison, it laid out what needs to change and why as follows (my bolding and comments in brackets):

“inner structures, to deep-seated changes in states of mind, points of view, custom and routine, personality and consciousness…this is the level where the Six-Sided Prison can be found.

This third level of history isn’t impossible to change; but it is the hardest to change. It is…a ‘transformation of culture so large that it isn’t an event any more.’ No wonder most political activists have chosen to ignore it! [but not education, sociology, psych, or poli sci profs].

And yet–and yet–if it’s true that governments and economic systems determine the nature of events, as the Marxists say, then it’s also true that the third level of history determines the nature of the governments and economic systems, and the context, the atmosphere, the quality of events. [Remember the omnipresent PBIS and Positive School Climate with only the rationales varying].

If we simply ignore the third level of analysis until ‘later’ we’ll end up with no social evolution at all, in any deep sense. And we may end up with a stronger Prison.”

I mentioned the Cold War, a theme I developed extensively in my book, but Mark Satin in 1978 cited that Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the other Russian dissidents were actually pushing a “material limits to growth” and “calls for political and economic decentralization” that sounds much like what the UN is now calling Localization per the last post. Turns out someone has planned a Local/Global spin for a while because Chapter 16 of Satin’s book was called “Localization: Celebration of Diversity” with a vision for community-based decision-making that could be something Amitai Etzioni, the Ford Foundation, or the Brookings Metropolitanism vision would call for today (because they are). The Russian component of the New Age Politics book ended with this vision–

“Once understood and adopted, this principle diverts us–as individuals, in all forms of human association, societies and nations–from outward to inward development…”

There’s  a rather constant drumbeat for this now apart from all the social and emotional learning and restorative justice practices in schools and classrooms we have looked at. This is bigger and from every direction as adults and all institutions get targeted. Last Thursday I was at the “Wisdom, Moderation and Opportunity” put on by an Atlas Network affiliate, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, with speeches with ties to other Network members. The Luncheon Keynote Speaker, Arthur Brooks, president of AEI, insisted that to be a Conservative required having the Heart of a Servant. A true, little c conservative, would probably know from history that telling people what must motivate them is authoritarian, not conservative. Those systems thinkers we met in the September 28 Menticide post pushing how to force Creative Altruism into future human personalities would have loved that speech.

Call it Conservative and then describe a long-pushed Progressive, Internationalist, or Communitarian Idea seems to have been a common theme among speakers. From citing constantly an obligation to meet people’s needs and aid their well-being to the audience hissing when a questioner asked Nevada legislator Scott Hammond, about the actual student choice in his touted “near-universal Education Savings Account legislation,” there was a decided emphasis on a vision of the future that fits perfectly with what Uncle Karl called the Human Development Society. Which is fascinating timing as Friday, the Great Transition Initiative (has a tag as I have previously tied this to the OECD and what the PISA assessment is really driving) released this jaw-dropping paper.  http://www.greattransition.org/images/GTI_publications/Foster-Marxism-and-Ecology.pdf

If I covered everything in that confession that tied to these various programs and education initiatives I have been describing, it would turn this post into a book. Instead, let’s go to the section called “The Great Convergence” and remember the Re-Imagining Education link from two posts ago from the Bipartisan Convergence Center. In the GTI link we are told:

“Development, particularly in the rich economies, must assume a new form: qualitative, collective, and cultural–emphasizing sustainable human development in harmony with Marx’s original view of socialism. As Lewis Mumford argued, a stationary state promoting ecological ends, requires for its fulfillment the egalitarian conditions of ‘basic communism,’ with production determined ‘according to need, not according to ability or productive contribution.’ [Footnote is to Marx and his Gotha Programme book].

Such a shift away from capital accumulation and towards a system of meeting collective needs based on a principle of enough is obviously impossible under the regime of capital accumulation. What is required, then, is an ecological and social revolution that will facilitate a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality.”

That agenda is the UN’s Vision 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals that our political leaders have already signed us up for. They are not citing Marx or basic communism, at least to us, but this is the grounding nevertheless. As Foster admits “In this Great Transition, I believe socialists will play the leading role, even as the meaning of socialism evolves” [Required Heart of a Servant, perhaps?] as we all are shoved, with deceitful definitions and government programs no one tells us about, for “establishing more egalitarian conditions and processes for governing global society, including the requisite ecological, social, and economic planning.”

Existing inequalities and hype over Climate Change then are just excuses to plan and tell most of us what we can be and what we must do. When the Frameworks Institute last week put out a report “Talking Human Services” http://frameworksinstitute.org/assets/files/humanservices/nhsa_mm_final_2015.pdf , they intended to reframe prevailing perceptions in ways that fit with this desired communistic Human Development Society. They simply left that part out of why something is ‘desirable’ or not. The Notorious Che Guevara comes into this vision because of a 2008 speech John Bellamy Foster gave in Australia that was published as http://monthlyreview.org/2008/11/01/ecology-and-the-transition-from-capitalism-to-socialism/

Foster made it clear that the emphasis, per Che, would not be economic development but on the “need to develop socialist humanity.” That’s the part the UN leaves out when they tout Human Development as a goal. It means “a revolutionizing practice that revolutionizes human beings themselves.” When the Georgia DoED speaker stated that PBIS and Positive School Climate were not going away, he meant that the entire emphasis of school, starting in preschool, has changed. Social and emotional learning are not add-ons. The mandated shift is this revolutionizing process that targets ‘inner development,’ internalized images of how the world works, and appropriate future goals.

The obnoxious audience response to a heartfelt attempt to bring pertinent facts to the sales pitch of School Choice was a reminder to me that the current head of the cited ESA designer–the Friedman Foundation, Robert Enlow, is just one of a myriad of figures who keep popping up with ties to Seattle Pacific University. Others were Richard J Spady and Richard Kirby. (Civilization Building Leadership and the UNESCO-tied ed vision Nurturing Civilization Builders) That latter book cited a Tatyana Tsyrlina who is now Tsyrlina-Spady and an adjunct at SPU. In 2009 she started the Russian-American Education Forum, an online journal that first came up when I was looking at Arizona charter schools. It can be read in English or Russian, which means odd words come up like Personalizedategic.

I am quoting in particular from the November 1, 2010 Newsletter http://www.rus-ameeduforum.com/ but any of the newsletters describe a supposedly Russian vision for education that is being implemented in US schools. It explains the reasons for the task emphasis that figures so prominently in the actual Common Core implementation (Chapter 7 of my book) and also the real rationale behind “student-centered learning.” As students master each task, it “has some personal meaning for each of them.” Remember inner development? Well, the Russians do because they give us the reason for Rigor and assessments where there is no single correct answer.

Under “Personality-developing model,” we finally learn that “Personality development is possible only when a student’s level of knowledge and skills cannot meet the requirements of a given educational situation.” This gap then pulls a student’s “needs and motives” into play and forces the student to “exercise introspection and stimulates their self-reflection.” The “self-reflection is a primary contributor to personal development” and gets at the inner dimension–“the inner learning process, and its interconnected structural elements” consisting of “students’ activities, personal experience, and self-reflections.”

This Personality-Development model “helps students accumulate necessary skills and experience related to self-realization, self-organization, self-regulation, self-control, and self-management.” It sounds just like what the CCSSO is calling Competency-Based education in the US and what UNESCO calls the same thing globally in English-speaking countries.

It also “forms and develops personal values and has a strong effect on both intellect and motivation.” Sounds like everything our transformational social engineers need, so what’s Personalizedategic? That’s the final model that relates to the real world and remembers that “one of the main objectives of education is to prepare students for future adult life.” Sound familiar? It also explains all the various Redesign of High School initiatives. How about “the teaching process should include a system of interconnected, complementary situations that stimulate students’ personal development and challenge them to design key life strategies.” Now remember, this is translated from Russian into English in what could hardly be a better vision for mental disarmament of a once, and maybe future, foe.

Examples of life strategies are “choosing future profession, choosing a college, or realizing personal plans. Strategies are most likely successful when students know how to identify and utilize their personal traits, I-concepts, and real life situations, for the promotion of their success in the real world.”

Big shifts in the nature of education. Revolutionary shifts. Every one of these shifts targeting inner development gets hidden by terms like College and Career Ready, Student Growth, Every Child Achieves, and Success for All.

Now look at everything the UN is pushing and the events in Iran and Syria and think about what Putin knows about the true nature of the Cold War and how to invisibly overwhelm a population without firing a shot.

No wonder he is so cocky and chose to come to New York City in September for the final rollout of what has been building up for so long.

 

 

 

Confessions of a Coordinated Cabal Intent on Psychological Rape with Impunity

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Does that title sound too strong? I wish it did not fit the facts so well. From open admissions stating an intent to rewire students’ brains http//www.educationdive.com:/news/districts-turning-to-neuroscience-for-new-instruction-strategies/402553/ what is clearly coming seeks to fundamentally change who we are as people–from the inside-out. Before I start with the next mind-blowing revelations, let’s once again look to historian and political thinker, Kenneth Minogue, to help us make sense of what is no longer in dispute. In his chapter called “The Project of Equalizing the World” from his 2010 book The Servile Mind, Minogue reminds us that goals of Equity and economic justice turn “the vast majority of the population” into “materials to be transformed.”

Making the satisfaction of needs and mental health and well-being the new purposes of governments at every level turns the public sector, its employees, and their cronies into “a voracious octopus forever extending its tentacles into civil society and talking about partnership when the reality is unmistakably domination.” As Minogue concludes, and I agree wholeheartedly, “human history is very largely the story of despotic elites.” The ESEA Rewrites passed by the House and the Senate and the language in them seeking to manipulate the human mind, control likely future behavior, and track and alter emotions and the fundamentals of personality would amount to rape if it was sexual and accurately understood. These nonconsensual invasions do amount to psychological rape. That’s why there are so many lies and misstatements surrounding the legislation.

Politicians of both parties are dismayed by the character and values of people they believe they rule. They are keen to change us, but do not want to get caught out. So they either lie about the nature of what they are doing or simply do not bother to locate the truth. Either way we are supposed to be bound, ignorant of who and what is binding us. No one who has read my book Credentialed to Destroy remains unaware, even if the truth is painful. This blog now has several years worth of subsequent disclosures of the intent to use education to socially engineer the mind and collectivize society in the US and globally. Let’s expand on that now and all the deceit about “returning education to the states and local school districts” when all those involved keep openly discussing their coordination.

On February 3, 2014 the White House held a Workshop on what it called “Hard-to-Measure 21st-Century Skills” where a “select group of researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and funders gathered in the White House Conference Center to discuss the assessment of academic mind-sets, collaboration, oral communication, learning to learn, and other hard-to-measure 21st-century competencies.” Obviously none of us were invited nor do we work for the Rand Corporation, which has now been hired to develop such Intrapersonal and Interpersonal assessments. Unfortunately, Rand was very clear I had to get their permission to even link to their report so we will have to settle for me telling you about it. Hilary Rhodes of the Wallace Foundation was there though, which explains why their Young Adult Success Framework (July 1, 2015 post) fits with what I call developing the right kind of mind, personality, and behaviors as if people were Ervin Laszlo’s cybernetic systems.

AIR and ETS were there and Angela Duckworth of Grit and Perseverence fame along with Growth Mindset’s Carol Dweck and the OECD and UNESCO-sponsored Center for Curriculum Redesign’s Charles Fadel. David Conley was there–Mr Champion of the inclusion of Non-Cognitive Skills that did make it into the Every Child Achieves Act language and Creator of the misleading phrase College Ready for the Gates Foundation. They were there too as were the Spencer, Hewlett, and Ford Foundations.

I am afraid I do not know what anyone had for lunch or whether it was even provided, but everything else calling for “the development of student learning profiles and other methods that allow students to demonstrate proficiency in ways that are meaningful for them” was laid out in Appendix A of the Rand Report. Come to think of it that meaningful quote from the Appendix on the policy desired sounds like what Laszlo called the “subjective mode of comprehension” needed to turn people into engineered cybernetic systems suited for collectivism.

On July 30, 2015 in DC the National Academy of Science is having an open hearing on Assessing Intrapersonal (internalized in the brain and personality) and Interpersonal (how we get along with others and interact with our physical environment) Competencies. Discovering that is what led me to the Rand report and that White House workshop and the fact that on January 5, 2015 the National Science Foundation (#1460028) funded a study “to determine the best available methods to assess student skills in teamwork, communication, self-regulation of behavior, academic tenacity, and grit. These skills, also known as interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies…” Now if we go back in time to how the systems thinkers and cybernetic aspirants described their model of how education could be used to reengineer people from the inside-out, the phrase most commonly used in books from the 60s was “self-regulation of behavior.”

No wonder I see the cybernetic model thoroughly permeating how the Every Child Achieves Act will affect students. Now with the confessions from the language used in that NSF Behavioral Sciences grant and our knowledge of that White House Workshop, we can see the White House actively coordinating with everyone likely to fund or direct assessment in every state and school district to make sure everyone is on the same page in their vision. That’s NOT letting states and local schools decide. It’s forcing everyone to implement the same Reengineer the Mind and Personality to Control Future Behavior Model.

We got more proof of active coordination last week and a concern to make sure all layers of government are using all the “levers” of control they have to force a common vision in another federally-funded report on “Transforming Educator Preparation to Better Serve a Diverse Range of Learners.” http://ceedar.education.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Promises-to-Keep.pdf Nothing like trying to use federal civil rights laws and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to force states and schools to use “developmental learning progressions” for ALL students and that teachers understand “the role of self-determination and self-regulation in learning.” There’s that phrase again and if we go further into the underlying 2012 report, we get to read about the two sponsors of the Common Core, the CCSSO and NGA-the National Governors Association (governors appoint state school chiefs now in most states), agreeing to use all their authority to force chiefs, teachers, local school districts, and anyone else they can bind to implement the 21st Century competencies vision.

After citing the Holmes Group Report from 1986, the Carnegie Task force from the 80s, and John Goodlad’s work, all of which I covered in my book explaining what the foundations for the real implementation were, the CCSSO report Our Responsibility, Our Promise: Transforming Educator Preparation and Entry into the Profession stated explicitly that “If we put aside our turf protection, find ways to collaborate effectively, and focus on what we must do for students to make good on our promise, this time we can be successful.” This time we will finally impose the cybernetic model of reengineering our students at the level of their minds and personalities. Any teacher not on board with that model or principal will no longer get licensed to enter the profession. Those who refuse to change will not be able to keep their licenses. “Student cognitive development” must be the new focus of the classroom and using “data to drive instruction” to change the students in the ways desired.

Backward mapping in the desired traits, beliefs, dispositions, and behaviors and then ultimately assessing them as Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Competencies or Higher-Order Thinking and Understanding. Assessments now for teachers or students are seen as tools to drive behavioral change. No variation among states or types of schools is ultimately where all this is going. The next post will also cover this theme of all the active coordination going on to push the same cybernetic vision and to cooperate with the global collectivist vision pushed now by UNESCO and the OECD. Before I close I want to point to a recent IBM paper “The future of learning: Enabling economic growth” being pushed by the Center for Digital Education. Now that entity is a subsidiary that takes us straight to mayors and local government officials pushing an expanded view of what their roles should be in building the society of the future.

More coordination, in other words, around the same politically-directed at the local level reimagined society and economy. That’s the real reason and context for “adopting analytics and promoting vision of personalized learning.” It creates the needed citizen suitable for a collectivist society. After the IBM disclosures of their vision of education and the world as a “system of systems” in my book, it is so exciting IBM is touting that “social analytics can provide insights from the interaction of students with social media sites, resources and peers to gauge levels of engagement in learning.” Because let’s face it, the ‘engaged’ student is easier to reengineer from the inside-out. How exciting that companies and public officials wanting to maximize political control will also have access to “Integrated student processes [that] will transcend individual institutions and allow for the exchange of student data, learning programs and outcome metrics.”

All that exchanging by the way and results of mind reengineering would be fully authorized under the Student Privacy Act introduced in a Bipartisan manner last week in the US House because such mental and psychological manipulation qualifies as being for “educational purposes.” The ‘purposes’ of K-12 education have just drastically changed. No need to tell parents or taxpayers since they might rebel.

Does psychological rape still seem too strong a term?

The impunity comes from writing this into federal laws and misdescribed required measures of student success, achievement, and growth. The impunity also comes from making this model the foundation of graduate degrees and teaching and principal licensure.

Only widespread recognition of what is really going on can revoke the impunity. That’s precisely what I am trying to do.

 

Illegitimate Extension: the Stealth Substitution of ECAA and the Dystopian Future Triggered by its Mandates and Lures

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ECAA is the acronym for the new federal K-12 legislation–the Every Child Achieves Act of 2015. Since Senator Lamar Alexander, assuming unknown to me powers never discussed in Civics in that “How a Bill Becomes a Law” brochure, has pulled what unanimously passed his Senate subcommittee and substituted this more than 200 page longer bill http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-114s1177pcs/pdf/BILLS-114s1177pcs.pdf , we are going to interrupt our trilogy to take a look. Especially since the lack of any genuine public notice of the “Yoohoo, Heads Up” variety makes it appear none of us were supposed to have a chance to notice and object to the switch. I was not fond of the old bill’s language and wrote several posts explaining why back in April.

The new language though requires, as a matter of binding federal law, two revolutionary shifts in American schools. It imposes the UNESCO/OECD Seven Domains (and accompanying subdomains explicitly in numerous instances too often to be coincidental) of Universal Education. I intuited that after I finished the 792 page bill and then located the 3 reports created by the Brookings Institute Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF) and published in February 2013, July 2013, and June 2014. All the reports start with “Toward Universal Learning”. Report 1 is then titled “What Every Child Should Learn” and lays out those 7 domains of Physical wellbeing, social and emotional, culture and the arts, literacy and communication, Learning approaches and cognition, Numeracy and mathematics, and science and technology. Report 2 is “A Global Framework for Measuring Learning” and Report 3 lays out “Implementing Assessment to Improve Learning.”

Report 2 gives the perfect rationale for why ECAA has had such a stealth approach and why the Opt Out movement seems to really be about shifting to formative assessments and a Whole Child approach. Let’s listen in on this useful confession:

“While measurement may have different purposes at different levels, the systems for measuring and improving learning at the classroom, national, and global levels should not be working in isolation. Globally tracked indicators should be aligned with what is measured nationally and in schools or classrooms, while measurement at the national level should be aligned with the competencies measured in classrooms or schools.”

That is why ECAA is so intent on ensuring that all states and local school districts are using “high-quality assessments” and measuring “higher order thinking and understanding.” Now I have written about the meanings of these terms before, most particularly here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/muzzling-minds-all-over-the-globe-while-trumpeting-higher-order-skills/ , but it is time to reveal that second revolutionary shift mandated as a MATTER OF LAW by ECAA. It forces a vision of theoretical learning and “mastering of the technique of theoretical concept formation” developed in the Soviet Union to create ideological thinkers who could be manipulated by state authorities (or anyone else who knew about the methods). This relates to what is described in Chapter 3 of my book and is also why it is so alarming that ECAA has the National Science Foundation providing recommendations on Best Practices in STEM coursework.

After I had finished reading both the new ECAA and those three Universal Education reports, I pulled a 1984 book Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology for insights into what was being mandated via ECAA as “personalized, rigorous learning experiences that are supported through technology” and a repeated obligation to “personalize learning”. This is all under the Innovative Technology Expands Children’s Horizon’s (I-Tech) part that begins on page 551. In other words, after normal people have become too frustrated with ECAA to continue. I have known for a while that the phrase “personalized learning” is a quagmire of misunderstandings and psychologically intrusive practices to lock-in, at a neurological level, how the world will be interpreted going forward.

The book’s author did not think much of this theoretical learning and called the project an “outright utopia,” which should not be extended “illegitimately, to the whole of society.” Can’t imagine then why we should enshrine it in 2015 as an obligation under federal law. The book described all the programs that Vasily Davydov and his group created in the 70s that, from my knowledge of the actual Common Core implementation as detailed in my book, is the basis for all those planned learning tasks and literacy instruction now. Oh. Good. Kozulin noted though that by 1981 Davydov’s research showed that “object-oriented activity” alone had no effect on mental development. To have that effect, a “personalized form” of “educational activity” must be found. I am guessing that is what ECAA means with its constant references to “well-rounded educational experiences.”

To be ‘personalized’ according to the research of the Soviet psychologists, the focus “of the psychological program” must get at “problems of motivation and personal reflection and the construction of individualized programs of educational activity.” That would be what ECAA calls data to ‘personalize learning’ and ‘inform instruction’ and specifically calls for the “use of data, data analytics, and information to personalize learning and provide targeted supplementary instruction.” See what I meant by Windows on the Mind from the last post?

I have a lot to cover so here’s why Universal Design for Learning had to be in ECAA and why it is vital to personalizing learning http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/05/19/udl-personalized-939/print/ . Here is the Gates Foundation-funded and tied to OECD work and the Achievement Standards Network we have also covered on the Next Generation Learning Environment and its ties to personalizing learning. https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli3035.pdf

So why really must Learning be personalized and why is what now constitutes ‘content’ under ECAA really behavior or the kind of theoretical concept knowledge or principles we have now tracked to the USSR and its visions for utopia in the future? This is from the 2nd Universal Education LMTF report. I put up a link yesterday from 2013 of Arne Duncan hyping this very global agenda of the UN Secretary-General. It is worth quoting in full, but I am bolding the real stunners. Remember the UN Dignity for All by 2030 Agenda I have covered previously.

“The world faces global challenges, which require global solutions. These interconnected global challenges call for far-reaching changes in how we think and act for the dignity of fellow human beings. It is not enough for education to produce individuals who can read, write, and count. Education must be transformative and bring shared values to life. It must cultivate an active care for the world and for those with whom we share it. Education must be relevant in answering the big questions of the day. Technological solutions, political regulation or financial instruments alone cannot achieve sustainable development. It requires transforming the way people think and act. Education must fully assume its central role in helping people to forge more just, peaceful, tolerant and inclusive societies. It must give people the understanding, skills and values they need to cooperate in resolving the interconnected challenges of the 21st century.”

That is precisely what ECAA does when you go through its actual language as I have done. By the way, that quote was from a section of the report titled “An Adaptable, Flexible Skill Set to Meet the Demands of the 21st Century.” In the US and other countries all over the world this gets sold as students having a Growth Mindset. It’s no accident that before hyping that euphemistic term Carol Dweck was a well-known Vygotsky scholar. The 1970s Soviet work is an updating of Vygotsky’s work and what this blog has tagged CHAT-cultural historical activity theory. We have met it all before http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/treating-western-society-and-its-economy-as-a-train-in-need-of-rebuilding-and-central-direction/ and now we know why. These global plans and using education as the vehicle are far more extensive even than what is already alarmingly detailed in my book.

ECAA though is the mother lode because it makes regulating our behavior and personality at a neurological level not just something schools may do, but something they MUST do. As a matter of federal law to further an admitted global agenda. LMTF Report 3 talks about how the countries are to get the global Learning agenda and the Seven Domain emphasis into schools and classrooms as a binding obligation. By the time we trace through the schoolwide PBIS, Positive School Climate, “supporting activities that promote physical and mental health and wellbeing for students and staff,” creating and maintaining “a school environment that is free of weapons and fosters individual responsibility and respect for the rights of others” and other ECAA mandates that the local schools and districts must now provide we can see how Ban Ki-Moon’s transformation through education vision quoted above makes it all the way into each classroom and each child.

I have mentioned the repeated use of “well-rounded educational experiences”. It appears to be an obligation to implement not just a Whole Child emphasis, but also to make up for whatever deficits poverty in the community, a dysfunctional family life, or any other problems like being a migrant that does not speak English may have created. All means all. Physical education language in ECAA turns quietly into a mandate to promote the “social or emotional development of every student” and “opportunities to develop positive social and cooperative skills through physical activity participation.” Again mirroring subdomains laid out in those 3 LMTF reports.

I am going to close with yet more proof that ECAA is all about fostering desired behaviors, emotions, and values as it contains repeated references to meeting students “academic needs”. Now I wouldn’t be much of a lawyer if I did not recognize defined terms left mischieviously undefined. Sure enough here’s a link to a February 2009 statement from the National Association of School Psychologists.   http://www.nasponline.org/about_nasp/positionpapers/AppropriateBehavioralSupports.pdf No wonder there are so many references to school counseling programs and mental health providers in ECAA.

I have notes on everything I have described here. If I could draw a jigsaw puzzle to show how tight the actual fit is with everything I have described, I would. It’s impossible to get this level of fit accidentally or this level of correspondences coincidentally.

I joke about speaking ed. I understand intuitively and from years of practice how the law can be used to bind people and places against what they would wish. I have put both those skills together to bring everyone a heads up.

I only wish I was speculating on any of this. Hopefully this post will reach enough people in time.

Behind the Backs of Individuals: Creating the Well-Trained Consciousness

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Fasten those seatbelts because here we go again. In turns out that back in the 1950s, in Rockefeller Foundation financed research carried out at the Russian Institute at Columbia University, Professor Herbert Marcuse laid out the vision of what kind of changed individual consciousness would be necessary for a “society where the realm of necessity is brought under rational control.” I shorthand that vision using Uncle Karl’s term–the Human Development Society–and this blog has been systematically covering all the various announcements of it recently from the Next System Project from the last post or the Larry Summers-led Commission on Inclusive Prosperity from January 2015. Since this power grab is clearly a current quest, even if it is not being widely covered away from this blog, let’s go back to see what Marcuse laid out, especially as it fits well with the announced goals of the new federal education legislation in hearings this week.

This post should have everyone looking at the announced title of the ECAA–Every Child Achieves Act–and wanting to call Congress to protest calling psychological manipulation–student achievement. First let’s go back in time to look at where that title came from. Marcuse was pointing out that in the USSR “individual behavior and values” are “automatically directed by the political agencies” so that there is no such thing as the distinct individual making his own way apart from what is determined to be in the needs of the remainder of society. Marcuse really hated the Western tradition that views the individual as a ‘private person’ instead of merely a ‘member of society’. He called for “the passing of the bourgeois individual…as the autonomous ‘subject’ which, as ego cogitans and agent, was to be the beginning and the end of Western culture.”

All of the emphasis on the Whole Child and social and emotional learning and as I will show today–the “integration of education and mental health” into a single vision of what effective schooling is now to be–makes far more sense if we are aware of Marcuse laying out the preconditions for achieving the kind of social and economic visions we keep encountering. Think of the 21st Century required skill of collaboration as we read the call for “the shrinking of the ego.” Won’t all the data being gathered come in handy in the next Marcuse call for “the administrative regulation of his material and intellectual needs”? What could be done openly in the USSR in the 50s and 60s (my copy of the 1958 Soviet Marxism book is the 4th printing from 1969) was described by Marcuse as “the coordination between public and private existence, which, at the postliberal stage of Western society, takes place largely unconsciously and behind the backs of the individuals.”

Can we just all join together in unison and yell “No More”? Just because all these visions of transformations need the ‘passing of the individual’ as a ‘private person’ to make it so, and even though, the education reforms are quietly trying to arrange the necessary “internalization” that will otherwise “impair the social cohesion and depth of morality,” does not mean any of us have to accede to this vision, for either ourselves or our children. The political theory involved, being implemented quietly, then and even more so now as federally mandated and financed education policy, insists on redefining freedom. Marcuse even italicized redefine to emphasize this crucial point: “it no longer means being the self-responsible architect of one’s life, of one’s own potentialities and their realization…the standards of freedom are shifted from the autonomous individual to the laws governing the society which governs the individual.” (my bolding)

Well, that quote certainly explains why my tracking Radical Ed Reform via its accompanying legal mandates has always proven so prophetic of actual long term intent. Since the needed shifts must occur, per Marcuse, at the level of ‘inner being’ and we know that is precisely the area that the new kinds of Common Core assessments emphasize, let’s come back to the present. First though a wave to Marcuse for being so usefully graphic. It certainly puts the Common Core’s emphasis on creating and measuring desired Habits of Mind into perspective http://www.tascorp.org/sites/default/files/TASC_SELResourceGuide_FINAL.pdf or “normed measures of social and emotional well-being.” A parent concerned about the increasingly widespread use of the PAX Good Behavior Game can add Marcuse’s confessed purposes to PAX’s admission that it:

“is teaching students to self-regulate, reduce impulsive or emotional reactions, delay gratification, and work together for a higher purpose. This is not achieved by lessons on the brain or behavior or some formal curriculum on social-emotional learning. [All of those would be, of course, somewhat visible rather than behind our backs]. Rather, this is achieved in the context of ordinary life at school that mimics the conditions of human evolution.”

Huh? http://www.promoteprevent.org/sites/www.promoteprevent.org/files/resources/2013%20Purrfect%20PAX%20Rubric2_Text_only.pdf That fascinating remark makes no sense in any biological sense, but it does begin to make sense for anyone who has read my coverage of using education to drive cultural evolution as laid out in my book Credentialed To Destroy. Marcuse also clearly had something similar in mind with his descriptions of targeting ‘internalization’ and an individual’s ‘inner being’. All of these things also become much clearer once we are aware of a desire to Integrate Education and Mental Health in Schools. http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/docs/pdf/camhs_special_issue/3_Toward_the_integration_of_ED_and_MH.pdf is from the 2009 conference and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874625/ shows the actual 2010 publication and Health and Human Services’ interest.

In fact, it is not just a federal agency’s interest in “examining models to better integrate learning and behavioral health” or support at the federal level for a “closer alignment between education and mental health.” It’s not just the citing of the P-20 education agenda “embraced by the National Governors Association and the Gates Foundation” or “other reform efforts (e.g. Next Generation Learners)” sponsored by certain states and the CCSSO or ‘personalized learning’ as good vehicles for this desired integration. All that is bad enough and ties directly to what we have been covering on this blog. No, what ties all this directly to ECAA and this week’s Senate hearings is the call-out for making such integrated education about identifying and cultivating “functional competencies.”

Competency-based education. Where have we heard that phrase before in addition to chapter 4 of my book?   If the new ECAA is about anything it about fostering the shift to competency-based education. As the 2009 paper noted a goal of schools focusing on improved student functioning and “this focus on competency could also create a better alignment between educational and mental health policy.” In fact, the paper concluded with “education and mental health will be advanced when the goal of mental health is effective schooling and the goal of effective schools is the healthy functioning of students.” I believe that would be the healthy functioning of students as ‘members of society’, not so much as private persons anymore. Sure does explain the anti-academic emphasis (there goes that pesky ego) and all the hyping of workforce needs.

I want to close with a quote William James, America’s original psychologist and John Dewey’s instructor, laid out a very long time ago, when so many radicals hoped to change the 20th Century towards collectivism. I wish I could say I pulled this from a long dormant book on him or Dewey. Instead, it is the epigraph at the beginning of a concluding chapter called “A Solid Bridge to the Future” from a 1992 book Breakpoint and Beyond: Mastering the Future-Today.”

“Of all the creatures of earth, only human beings can change their patterns. Man alone is the architect of his destiny….Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”

Perhaps, given what is laid out in this post, we should rephrase that as having those ‘inner attitudes’ changed for them.

Behind their backs. In the name of Competency or Positive School Climate or Effective Schooling.

At least none of this is behind our backs.

 

Rip Aside the Mask: Society Becomes an Existential and Experiential Lab for Students to Become Citizens

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That title comes from combining two different confessional quotes on the purpose of all these education reforms now hiding as the Common Core, Competency, or 21st Century Learning. We are sticking with Marcus Raskin’s book The Common Good we met in the last post. That initial phrase came as Raskin laid out how to “Reorganize the government for the common good. ” The “first task in a program of governmental reorganization which asserts social reconstruction [just like I described in my book Credentialed to Destroy] and citizen participation [no wonder we keep encountering the National Center for Deliberative Democracy] is to rip aside the mask of concern for efficiency to determine which group or class is being served by a particular way of organizing the governmental process.”

Wondering why all of a sudden the word Equity as an obligation is everywhere? How’s this for an open declaration? –“the criteria which are used to reorganize government should be consistently and deliberately discussed according to specific value standards: equity and caring, egalitarian interdependence and cooperation.” Now before I switch to the other quote and the vision of democratic education to create the necessary citizen to get there, some people may be tempted to ignore these declarations as from decades ago. In one of those serendipitous occurrences that remind us just how thoroughly we are tracking what is really coming at us, since I wrote the last post, Raskin and many others from the Institute for Policy Studies signed on to and published http://thenextsystem.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NSPReport1_Digital1.pdf .

“The Next System Project: New Political-Economic Possibilities for the 21st Century” features many of the radical names we have already covered on this blog. http://thenextsystem.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/nextsystem_ForWeb.pdf is the list for those who want to play Recognize that Name and Contemplate the Implications. Since everyone can read those for themselves, let’s get back to the source for the second part of the title.  I also want everyone to keep in mind the ubiquity now of CTE for All (last post again) and authentic, real world, active learning for all students.

“For most students a practical, concrete and non-abstract education encourages their productive and imaginative side. [Think of Creativity as one of the 4Cs of 21st Century Learning] If schools pursued this course the society would become an existential and experiential laboratory for students. Schools would become the central place to bring one’s personal experience, other people’s experience and findings together with human needs. The experiences themselves, the way they were described and understood could and should include the ethical ought and the nurturing of the artistic.”

“…the way they were described and understood” sounds precisely like what the Frameworks Institute from our last post does in education and beyond. Minimizing facts makes perfect sense for anyone who believes “the educational process becomes the central way to bring forth value considerations in relation to actual situations in the lives of people and their institutions and in the way human beings relate to nature.” If we did not already know that the phrase Democracy is usually no longer about candidates, voting, and elections, this should do it:

“Democracy’s project is the sharing of responsibility between the citizenry, finding common uses and ownership of property where that benefits the whole [in whose opinion?]–while continuously recognizing the needs of the person…A modern democracy recognizes the need to generate situations and relationships which simultaneously recognize similarity in the Other…it moves beyond individual and group interest to hammer out shared values which can be located in the whole, the group, but which cannot be found in the individual.”

That alarming project, coming at us like pollen on a spring day in Atlanta–fast moving and everywhere–views education as the means for how “skills…where people share their public and private lives and where problems of everyday life and abstract problems are considered.” That sharing and consideration gets masked behind the non-dictionary meaning of yet another 4C–communication. And if that communication is ultimately about “social regulation which needs and demands alternative modes of thinking and living,” values, beliefs, and thinking itself can be changed and molded with few parents being the wiser as long as “the grades are OK.”

I have mentioned that I have learned enough political theory in the last few years to recognize Marxist Humanism whether it uses the M word or simply attributes the change to sociology or brain science. Yet sure enough, there was Raskin quoting “the Marxist philosopher Roger Garaudy” to hype his point that “authentic esthetic education is also the cultivation of the senses that have become atrophied in our Western tradition as a result of the exclusive emphasis of logic and discursive reasoning.” New modes of thinking indeed. Those who wish to dramatically transform society and the economy hate “the cold, abstract madness that parades as reason and ‘objective reality.'” We can each  contemplate where the madness truly is in this vision.

Now Raskin was definitely not afraid to call a spade a spade and used the M word as an apt description of certain beliefs and hopes and the means to get there. Hint: EDUCATION as my book laid out. He did, however, criticize Marxists by name for having “failed in comprehending the ethical dimension to political power and the role it must play.” Raskin saw the role of the “experience and process of democratic education” as a means for transcending the “type of social science that explains passivity from the dominated and control from the dominator as the natural order of things.” Raskin must be in ideological heaven with all the classroom hyping of White Privilege now as he helps roll out the Next System Project.

What happens when education is seen as the means of making some students feel guilty while others are emboldened to feel entitled to “change the political system by integrating procedural rights with political demands. The demands are meant to get the social, legal [Remember progressive, polyphonic federalism and the Constitution in 2020?], and economic systems to change so that the person forges a set of conditions that guarantees his or her egalitarian interdependence in all aspects of society.” ‘Do for me. I am owed’ has never, ever been a basis for mass prosperity. Heaven help us that this vision is to be locked into place invisibly through little known legal shifts binding all of us.

Such as revamping the nature of citizenship “to allow the person to comprehend in concrete terms the way each aspect of life is related and interdependent.” Substituting supplied concepts, core disciplinary ideas in a ‘domain’, and cross-cutting issues for facts plays right into training students to comprehend things that are not so and misattribute causes in ways that will only make the problems worse. For those of us with Axemaker Minds and a factual body of knowledge from history or science it’s hard not to imagine the tragedy from teaching future educators and their administrators and all those public policy degree holders that “social problems can be framed to yield humane and progressive solutions.” Maybe, but probably not.

Enduring Understandings, Understandings of Consequence, Understanding by Design–all huge components of the actual Common Core implementation and especially the new assessments make perfect sense if you believe, as Raskin stated, that “how we categorize can help us organize energies for the common good.”  Social and emotional learning, role playing as a slave to appreciate the Civil War, and a Whole Child emphasis likewise  makes perfect sense as a necessary component if the goal is to “bring the purpose of equity into lived reality.”

In the world of the same curriculum for all from the proverbial dimwit to the Super Nova intellect and the elimination of tracking, I want to close with how Raskin concluded his book’s vision. He saw a “great struggle” although with all these deceitful terms being used to describe the shifts in purpose, policies, and practices, who will know in time to resist?

“People are not prepared to surrender their present comforts or those knowledges which helped them achieve such comforts either for the protection of humanity, the building of a world civilization–let alone egalitarian interdependence.” That’s not just a chilling declaration of purpose.

It reminds us that a huge component of the means to accomplish these admitted transformations is to destroy fine, well-stocked minds. Anywhere they can be discovered.

What a thing to be implementing blindly while hyping the skills gap and the need to be internationally competitive.

Doubling Down on Deceit: Managing the Talent Pipeline Means Treating Students as Mere Chattel

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This concludes our Vassals and Fiefdoms Quartet of posts with, perhaps, the most astounding level of active deceit yet on the extent to which people have become moldable chattel that exist for the benefit of politicians (at all levels and parties), public sector workers, and politically connected Big Business. http://www.uschamberfoundation.org/sites/default/files/Managing%20the%20Talent%20Pipeline.pdf is a report prepared by the US Chamber of Commerce for a November 19, 2014 national conference in DC to sell its “New Approach to Managing the Skills Gap.” The idea is to partner with “employers in regions and communities across the country to advance talent supply chain solutions.” Employers are now to be treated as the end-customer of the K-12 and higher education systems. That document calls on employers to take the initiative in “championing a new vision for employer engagement with education and workforce systems.”

Now I have written about the new federal legislation WIOA and its impact on all states and regions to plan their economies going forward. I have also explained admissions that the Common Core is really just a ruse to jettison the traditional role of high school and force the School to Work vision that was so controversial in the 90s. I have explained all the federal programs on integrating CTE into academics and forcing industry sector strategies and Career Pathways. None of those undisputed legal obligations that would be hugely controversial if they were being openly admitted is mentioned at all in the Chamber of Commerce’s vision. All the public-private partnerships that have been stealthily imposed as legal mandates are omitted so that when those partnerships either come into being or step out of the shadows over the next few months, they can be described deceitfully as a private initiative taken by employers to fix their skills gap.

Now doubling really isn’t enough to describe all the deceit going on, but I do like alliteration. Neither we or our children deserve to be treated as akin to things in an inapt Supply Chain Management metaphor for political power enacting a “workforce strategy for our time.” If I spend all this post just describing that document, the level of deceit and coordination will not be revealed. I do want to link to this story on each US state’s federally coerced longitudinal workforce data system  http://abcsofdumbdown.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-greatest-christmas-present-to.html?m=1 and point out that this is precisely the expanded data sharing called for on page 28.

If you are wondering how the last post on Character Education fits in beyond the collectivist molding aspirations, let me introduce this 21st Century Workforce post from Charles Fadel of the Curriculum Redesign Project http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-fadel/skilled-for-success-raisi_b_787394.html created back when he was better known for being the architect of the 21st Century Skills framework  (the one with the rainbow if you are unfamiliar with that P21 Global Graphic. Here’s the presentation he gave in 2012 to the Workforce Readiness Barometer Meeting  http://www.slideshare.net/CurriculumRedesign/tcb-assessments-charles-fadel Fadel, you see, globetrots selling the vision of “21st Century Knowledge, Skills, Character, Dispositions” blending workforce readiness, a skills focus, changing personality traits, touting mindfulness, and gutting subject-content as the purpose of K-12 education.

The last post’s Eleven Principles were just the US directed component of a global movement with the same vision of education and a planned economy in the 21st Century. Since we could not make it to Geneva, Switzerland back in October to attend “Character Education for a Challenging Century” that Fadel put together, here’s the program. http://www.ecolint-arts.ch/sites/default/files/documents/character-education-conference-agenda-public.pdf Fadel is clearly a busy man, but this quote from a 2012 presentation he gave in Peru citing Christian de Duve, a Nobel laureate in Medicine, gets at why social and emotional skills and personality manipulation are so important to the 21st Century Skills Framework Fadel sells. “We have evolved traits (such as group selfishness) that will lead to humanity’s extinction–so we must learn how to overcome them.”

Now we are not going extinct, but we are in the midst of a carefully choreographed global coup involving education, economies, and a push to collectivism. With all this manipulation and called-for combining of “head, heart and hand” so we will feel compelled to act for transformation as desired (or at least tolerate it happening). Back in 2009 Fadel and Bernie Trilling (of the Oracle Foundation and thus tied to yet another tech company) published a book called 21st Century Skills that laid out this entire vision and its ties to other troubling initiatives like Digital Promise, Competency Education, Next Generation Learning, and the League of Innovative Schools. We are familiar now with all those things between my book and this blog, but that 2009 book once again confirmed that all these education visions are about it being “time to give all our students the chance to learn how to build a better world.”

The book ends with a diagram called the Big E Glocal Problems. Education at noon on the circle, Equity at 2 o’clock, Environment at 5, Energy at 7, and Economy at 10. Global problems that students can get involved in locally in their communities. When the diagram creates a star among all those points, in the middle is Quality of Life as the need for societies now to push the UN and the OECD’s visions for Subjective Well-Being and Gross National Happiness not tied to economic growth. Yes, that is also known as Marx’s Human Development end-stage model.

Not a huge shock since the OECD, UNESCO, and the World Bank (remember its mental models recent confession?) are all named partners of Fadel’s in that CCR. The book also stated that Fadel and P21 area are advising the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperative (APEC) on this vision, which explains why we keep running into it in countries without any Common Core. Australia, China, Canada, Russia among others are listed. Fadel and Trilling also write about developing a communications strategy to sell this vision. Precisely what hyping the need to “Close a skills gap so that America can be internationally competitive” deceitfully does.

I have pointed out before that CCR has lots of tech company partners, but one of Fadel’s slides mentioned a company called Sematech. I looked it up and it’s a tech research colluding consortium http://www.technologyreview.com/news/424786/lessons-from-sematech/ touted as the “model for how industry and government can work together to restore manufacturing industries–or help start new ones.” Corporatism is the polite term for this arrangement, but it has others. Needless to say it all fits in with the Chamber’s vision of public-private partnerships among governments at all levels, colleges and universities, and Big Business and collaboratives of small and medium-sized companies. Anyone remember the 1976 Turchenko vision from my book? We’re Here!

One of the co-authors of that Chamber Report is tied to the creation of labor market credentialing  and thus Qualifications Frameworks in the US just as I predicted in my book. www.ansi.org/news_publications/news_story.aspx?menuid=7&articleid=de4e4462-95f0-4bf2-ab7a-a545f8a8270d Yet another controversy no one is owning up to. Another is tied to this consulting group that went bankrupt. http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/01/20/when-smartest-guys-room-bankrupt/lUYj7Nl8vAHhlL1iWVpSoK/story.html  We can understand how a planned economy benefitting the politically connected would seem far less messy. The third https://www.mapi.net/blog/2014/07/qa-jason-tyszko ties it to the Manufacturing Alliance’s vision of STEM Pathways developed in Illinois.

Anyone know any prominent US politician from that state? Yes, residing in the White House and thus in a position to see that federal agencies and Congress have been quietly implementing this “framework for a new education and workforce paradigm that we call talent pipeline management.”

Because that sounds so much better than the reality of vassals and fiefdoms and what Benito called Fascism. I have given lots of cites here because we are talking about grave matters and we deserve to recognize there is no dispute over what is being tried. But no one involved wanted this full vision to come out. This is a vision of the future that can only last as long as the Federal Reserve can still print money magically or the US can borrow it. None of the people involved at any level have an incentive to put all these pieces together or imagine the real consequences of the vision.

As usual, we ordinary people and taxpayers have no choice but to take a hard look at this reality. That’s the only way to start the vehement protests in time and know what to do to best protect our loved ones in the meantime.

Speaking of that, I hope all my readers are enjoying this special time of year. It’s about time for me to shift fully into Chief Elf and Cookie Maker Mode.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

 

Locking in Marx’s Dream: Psychophysiological Means Precisely What We Fear as the Real Goal of Education

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I always feel odd writing down that infamous name, but as I learned when I was researching my book, Uncle Karl is never very far away from the theories behind the actual classroom implementation. Sometimes the link is too direct and too huge in its implications for me to use a cute euphemism either. Especially when Marx is cited directly as the support that leads to all the current hyping of Neuroscience and Brain-based instruction. How direct? Well, Etienne Wenger from our last post wrote a book Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity that I found deeply troubling. Diving into the relevant footnotes pulled up a book I had never heard of that turned out to be $800 used on Amazon when I looked.

Not wanting to eat PB& J sandwiches for the next 6 months to secure a copy of The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology, I decided to go internet surfing to see what cited Soviet psychologist AN Leontiev actually wrote about “The problem of activity in psychology.” In case you haven’t noticed, the requirement of active learning and a shift away from print, lectures, and textbooks is what I would call omnipresent in the real Common Core implementation. Knowing how crucial learning tasks are I thought I would gain some more useful insights. What I was not anticipating was for Leontiev to lay out aims and practices I recognized from all my research and then cite repeatedly to pages from Marx and Engels or from some of Marx’s other works.

Suddenly euphemisms won’t do, not with stated aims like using education and carefully crafted classroom or digital virtual activities to literally “lead to a reconstruction of the ensemble of brain psychophysiological functions.” If the aim becomes analyzing which kinds of student activities produce what types of physical changes in their brains, it sure would explain all the interest now in functional MRI, adaptive software, and longitudinal data. When I read those words and others being attributed by Leontiev to what Marx and Engels really desired that are as provocative as stating:

“This convenient formula [of separating psychology and physiology] leads into a greater sin, the sin of isolating the psyche from the work of the brain”

Waiting until the next book could be published simply will not do. Just last week, independent of this research, someone asked me if I was familiar with the White House’s new Fattah Neuoroscience Initiative. The answer was no, but it did not take much insight to guess that it would be linked to John Holdren, which turned out to be quite correct. http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP19/20140227/101775/HHRG-113-AP19-Wstate-HoldrenJ-20140227.PDF is some recent testimony from him on all that federal activity involving the physical structure of the human brain. Notice though that Holdren leaves out that Digital Promise and the League of Innovative Schools also report to him and they happen to be carrying out precisely the kind of education activity that Leontiev wrote about.

Holdren also leaves out his long time ties to Paul Ehrlich and his stated desire for Newmindedness no longer grounded in a logical, rational mind. Just think of the implications of all this Neuroscience and Grit, Perseverence research for Ehrlich’s current global research project–MAHB–the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior. Now that I have reminded everyone of the real current links to where K-12 in the US and globally is going, let me add one more thing. I found this graphic Leontiev book on servers at the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition at UC-San Diego. The place where Michael Cole and Yrjo Engestrom [see tags] have created the global base for Cultural Historical Activity Theory in the years since the Berlin Wall fell.

Happy 25th anniversary for that Happy Event by the way. Let’s commemorate that Death of Tyranny by continuing to expose that so much of the ideology we thought we were leaving behind in 1989 came on into the West invisibly through a new kind of psychology and a new vision for K-12 education. To bury such destructive required collectivism once and for all we have to know it is there. If you have not yet read my book Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon, get it.

The findings on this blog are not a substitute for it. They are the icing, cherries, and birthday candles. It simply keeps getting more pertinent with time. Given Leontiev’s disclosures though, we simply cannot escape the fact that everything now envisioned for the K-12 classroom globally in the 21st century is based on  a decision “at the beginning of the 1920s” in the Soviet Union to “consciously structure psychology on the basis of Marxism.”

Specific cites and everything. That psychology is sensory in its base, not mental as we have historically assumed, which really does explain all the links in the previous post. It is a view of psychology and education that “in the modern world psychology fulfills an ideological function.” Yes, which is why Leontiev keeps mentioning its use to create a consciousness in people suitable for a “socialistic, communistic society.” All three words, just like that. Apparently all our encounters with communitarianism and the references to meeting needs are part of this vision linked now directly to Uncle Karl. There’s that softening euphemism again. I guess I just cannot quite adjust to open proclamations of intent of the sort Leontiev uses:

“It must not be said that psychology has exhausted the treasure chest of Marxist-Leninist ideas. For this reason we turn again and again to the works of Karl Marx, which resolve even the most profound and complex theoretical problems of psychological science.”

What do we do when the actual and only support for what a charter or Principal or District Office or foundation grant are mandating for a K-12 classroom turns out to be Karl Marx’s social theories for how to gain the kind of brain and personality that would fit his vision for the future? Here again is what Leontiev wrote, the old view of psychology and education:

“isolated cognition from sensory activity, from the living practical ties of man with the world that surrounded him…Introducing the concept of activity into the theory of cognition, Marx gave it a strictly materialistic sense: For Marx, activity in its primary and basic form was sensory, practical activity in which people enter into a practical contact with objects of the surrounding world, test their resistance, and act on them, acknowledging their objective properties.”

What happens when doing all that as a physical, sensory activity involving group participation becomes the very assessment of student ‘achievement’ or Growth?

What happens when the purpose of digital learning is to access a student’s internal “picture of the world” so that learning tasks, virtual reality gaming, and adaptive software can provide virtual and physical experiences to alter that picture in desired ways? Ways that are chosen by others for their intended effects on the student at a physical level.

What happens when, having cited to Marx and Engels on the effect of vocabulary and words generally on consciousness and perception, educators then do everything they can to limit vocabulary, manipulate the words and concepts that are supplied, and minimize the historic role of print on the mind?

What if K-12 education seeks to circumscribe human thought in the 21st century so that it is “nothing else but a derivative of practical activity”? With the stated goal being a “true solution to this problem of the origin and essence of human thought.” And why is human thought problematic?

Because independent rational human thought with access to a store of facts does not submit to Overlordship easily. All these required practices hiding now as pedagogy and Effective Teaching are all actually about subjugation of the mind.

And personality too. Leontiev’s Chapter 5 has with a lead-in header of “Personality as a Subject of Psychological Investigation.” How’s that for aspirational? Do free societies do that nonconsensually using deceit? That analysis, by the way, has to get to the relationship of “motives and needs” just like innovative education seeks to do.

Let’s end with an aspiration that does explain all the intended use of social and emotional learning and an emphasis on the Whole Child. It fits with all the current UN hype of the post-2015 Sustainable World that will meet the needs of all. It fits with the goals we have encountered that we become a “Spirit Society”. This is how Leontiev ended his vision of a new kind of education arising from a scientific, materialistic psychology grounded, he declared, in Marxism:

“Lost from view here is the fact that it is necessary also to go through a transformation of material consumption, that the possibility for everyone to satisfy these needs does away with the intrinsic value of things that satisfy them and eliminates that unnatural function that they fulfill in private ownership society…”

Lost no more and just in time. Historian Richard Pipes in the book mentioned in the two previous posts pointed out that even animals show repeatedly that acquisitivesness is innate. Trying to dislodge what is innate via K-12 Whole Child education premised on practical activity and social participation is simply not going to end well.

Now would be a great time to start recognizing the ancestry of all these required changes in the nature of education.

No more euphemisms. Not with the stakes this high or the aims so personally intrusive.