Tag Archives: john a powell

Mappae Mundi, Psychological Governance, and 21st Century Citizenship Priming

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Let’s start with a quote that will help us recognize the bullseye that needs to be manipulated by education reforms tied to social and political transformations. This blog and my earlier book laid out in depth that those transformations are the undisputed goal.

To acquire knowledge we need an apparatus of concepts to classify and organize our sensory experiences–the more so as the latter become, through all kinds of measuring equipment, elaborate extensions of those experiences…Beyond our immediate sensory experiences, with or without artificial extensions, we use inferences, hypotheses, speculations, conjectures and refutations as part of our genetic and acquired configuration…It may sound trivial but: you can only see what you can see. Yet even in the realm of sensory perceptions philosophical questions may arise about the relationship between those perceptions and the associated experiences, information and knowledge. There is always a lot of filtering and selection going on, followed by complex cognitive processes which add ‘meaning’ to the perceptions–or simply ignore them.

That’s what was being manipulated that gave rise to what were misleadingly termed the reading, math, and science ‘wars’–pretending the dispute was about how to properly teach a subject. As the book Mappae Mundi put it, “human beings are able to conceive new ideas, put these new ideas into practice and transmit their innovations that come after them”. That capacity, however, is not evenly distributed among human beings and is thus not equitable. Even more crucially though, those who possess that capacity, really do not fit well into a collective. Inventors of new ideas may not simply accept the transformational “myths, maps, and models” those with political power insist that they use.

the idea of myth as a narrative account intended to make sense of the present by explaining it in terms of events and developments in the past…[This interpretation of myth] has the advantage of not drawing a sharp dividing line between ‘true’ and ‘untrue’ images of the past…The standards by which we measure the validity of our myths evolve; but this applies to our maps and models as well. Maps are a pictorial means of orientation and communication…The standards by which we measure the quality of maps depends on the purpose for which we wish to use the maps…Loosely speaking, any scheme representing associations between events may be called a model…In the process, the complex forces at work are interpreted and simplified. Even rudimentary and relatively simple models can serve important heuristic purposes by pointing to significant problems for further research…Myths, maps, and models represent three modes of discourse, that is, of thinking and communicating, which are, respectively, mainly narrative, descriptive or explanatory.

Useful to control in other words for anyone wishing transformation in the world that currently exists, but not just at the level of conscious thought. In July 1999 American Psychologist published an important article entitled “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being” that recognized a crucial aspect used by learning standards and the conceptual frameworks they mandate. School curriculum can be created to manipulate “mental processes that are put into motion by features of the environment and that operate outside of conscious awareness and guidance.” See how useful controlling Myths, Maps, and Models can be once they become embodied in the neural architecture of the brain as Habits of Mind that can be activated without any conscious thought, but still actively guiding both perception and behavior? That article quoted a 1911 insight of philosopher Alfred Whitehead we should also be aware of:

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle–they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Controlling conceptual frameworks instilled in students at both a conscious thought and an automatic level means that when the student believes they are making their own decisions–launching a cavalry charge to use the above metaphor–they are still coordinating their life in a way designed by others. When it is unconscious, it uses what that article called “a direct and automatic route provided from the external environment to action tendencies, via perception.” Makes the requirement that student achievement now be measured by action required–‘performance standards’ as the measure of learning make more sense, doesn’t it? The student as automaton, completely unaware of how much his or her future action has been programmed into them. A useful tool for anyone with aspirations for a compliant collective and disdain for the historic Western conception of the individual.

That includes john a. powell from Racing to Justice to build on the previous post, whose interest in dreams in the book, made it crystal clear that he too wants to reconfigure K-12 and higher ed to use the psychological fact that:

Mental representations designed to perform a certain function will perform that function once activated, regardless of where the activation comes from. The representation does not ‘care’ about the source of the activation…The activated mental representation is like a button being pushed; it can be pushed by one’s finger intentionally (e.g., turning on the electric coffeemaker) or accidentally (e.g., by the cat on the countertop) or by a decision made in the past (e.g., by setting the automatic turn-on mechanism the night before). In whatever way the start button is pushed, the mechanism subsequently behaves in the same way.

Think of it as BF Skinner’s aims, but not his methods, because the values, attitudes, and beliefs–the categories of thought whether myths, maps, images, models, lenses, or frames–become the activated mental representations guiding perception and behavior. Across the political spectrum, this bullseye appears to be what everyone wants to use education to remodel and control. It’s also the source of a great deal of deceit. Much of the deceit comes from think tanks, which makes far more sense given these totalitarian aims, when we become aware of a book from 2017 called Psychological Governance and Public Policy: Governing the Mind, Brain and Behavior. No wonder there was such an organized effort to misdirect public attention away from the documented revelations in Credentialed to Destroy, especially in the areas of how learning standards, competency frameworks, and Tranzi OBE (as defined in book) operate.

They all utilize both the manipulation of nonconscious processes, as well as when the student believes they are making their own decisions consciously. Why on earth would a think tank that quietly advocates that governments and the law promote “the widespread use of psychological governance techniques” be forthcoming about such aims? Utilise the methods of 21st century governance that rely on

the ‘two-brain model’ that succeeds in gaining policy traction precisely because it does not challenge liberal democratic assumptions of political freedom…Certain nudges are aimed at cultivating deliberation and rational responses, whilst others seek to bypass conscious awareness to achieve rational responses through irrational (heuristic) means.

That 2017 book recognised valid concerns that such psychological governance techniques could be considered by some to be overly intrusive in a free society, but rejected that contention since there was supposedly no covering up of this nudging. My point in today’s post is to reject that contention because this targeting is being made in K-12 learning standards that virtually everyone writing books and white papers on behalf of think tanks is misrepresenting. That deceit then leaves no impediment to each student’s very mind, brain and behavior becoming a means where

Key to the exercise of psychological governance in this case, therefore, is a set of technological developments that represent certain tools and techniques necessary for the practical workings of governmental power…[It allows] the political and cultural normalisation of a therapeutic behaviour change agenda. In educational settings from early years to university, numerous policy reports reflect a wide, influential consensus that an interrelated set of psycho-emotional attributes, dispositions and behaviours…can be taught, learned and transferred over time as an essential foundation for successful education and life functioning…All mainstream political parties now agree that the inner states of human subjects determine the relationship between psycho-emotional responses and behaviours in complex, non-linear ways.

Ways that are now being deliberately manipulated via education globally to create the desired citizen of tomorrow, ready for the ‘wicked problems’ of 21st century living. For our own good supposedly we are seeing a new vision of 21st century education grounded in values, attitudes, and beliefs and controlling the instilled mental representations, operating largely unconsciously where

psychology is a source of knowledge and practice with regard to policies and initiatives designed to make live: to impel people to live in particular ways, to endorse certain views of the good or responsible life, to promote and normalise ways of achieving this good life.

In the next post,  I will track this aim through particular curriculum like a 21st century conception of American Democracy grounded in a new vision of History and Civics, as well as Global Education Futures new Learning Ecosystems: An Emerging Praxis for The Future of Education.  These qualities for a governmentally mandated and psychologically instilled ‘good life,’ with its need dispositions and attributes, are ALL communitarian in their vision. They all have the effect that at least john powell laid out explicitly as the real purpose of all this attention on race–to target and then rearrange–“the meaning of the Western self, to bring us into a new relationship with the other and the self. We can and must expand the circle of human concern and attend to our structures and the work they are doing.”

Rather than quoting more from powell that ties to the next post’s specific curricula or restate his tied to both K-12 education and higher ed, let me point out he has a tag for anyone interested in previous posts. Let me close by pointing out that he covered the importance of “framing and priming” because “what we call something can be consequential, affecting the way we think and what we do in relation to our conceptualization of it.” Mandating desired categories of thought to guide our perception and thought at an unconscious level are a major target of his book Racing to Justice as a way to get to his vision of a just society laid out here in a way that will fit well into the next post.

as humans, we are living beings, inherently connected with one another and with the natural world. So although our brains develop partly through categorizing and organizing in ways that can be challenging in a diverse society, our hearts orchestrate a system hardwired to care and respond empathically to one another’s suffering and joy. We can’t allow structures–economic or political–to block or blunt these connections…To embrace our commonality…will require new selves, who are citizens in the true sense of the term: individual, interconnected, and inclusive in ways that reflect the highest aspirations of our nation and our species.

Those new aspirations, to be instilled neurally at an unconscious level, just happen to be the target of the Roadmap to American Democracy and Learning Ecosystems for the global or species level. I guess we could call this the Instilled Mental Map Trilogy.

Promulgating a Personality Manipulating System However One Regards Cries of Structural White Supremacy

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The word ‘promulgate’ has several meanings per the always useful OED, but today I am using it in the sense of “to make widespread, as, promulgate learning and culture.” Lots of stories in recent days and weeks of the curricula planned beyond the links I have provided, including a Fox News story on Oregon’s Department of Education revising its learning standards, https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/08/how-socio-emotional-learning-became-another-vehicle-for-anti-white-racism-in-schools/ and https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/02/12/activists-outline-their-plan-to-push-black-lives-matter-in-classroom/ as recent examples. These are all rightfully outraged, but erroneously create the impression that there is a special place where these types of emotionally evocative curricula (to go back to the point of the previous post) can be avoided. No, not until the actual source of the contagion, and its true target, is understood.

That’s where ISC comes in as usual using my quite literally huge library of materials, which I mine to put things into perspective. The category White Supremacy is an example of an idea being used in the same twofold process first described in a Dutch book by Fred Polak from the 1950s called The Image of the Future. It won lots of European awards and fellowships for its author, including one at the inaugural program of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in 1954-55. Polak became close friends with the same Kenneth Boulding (see tag) who would create the systems science vision of education and helped found the social science-oriented General Systems Research Group that same year with fellows at CASBS. Kenneth’s wife Elise taught herself Dutch in order to be able to translate and abridge Polak’s book into English.  That’s what I am quoting from:

Man’s attempts to push back the frontier of the unknown…can be seen as a twofold process: the development of ideas concerning the ideal future as it ought to be, and the unfolding of the real future in history, partly as a result of man’s purposeful intervention…The relationship between conceptions of the time-dimension, the future, and the idealistic ethical objectives of mankind for that future, has been a neglected one and offers a fruitful field for research.

Well, it’s no longer neglected and has been a major source for behavioral science research of the kind laid out in my book Credentialed to Destroy and now on ISC where we cover the twists and turns of a new vision of education and student learning. Neither actually seeks a return to the past or a ‘classical time.’ Rather, this new vision seeks concepts and images that:

picture a radically different world in an Other time, and they are imaginatively shaped in a way that they can be applied on behalf of mankind…The more general theory of images may be thought of as ‘eidetics’. This concept, derived from the Greek eidelon, ‘image,’ has a long history…[Not] enough emphasis [has been put] on the significance of the time-dimension in the dynamics of image formation and image propagation…attention must be given to the dynamics of image formation, both in the public and private mind, and the function of images in the economy of the individual personality and the social, national, or cultural group.

What do images mean, how are the meanings transmitted, and how do they affect individual and social behavior? Under what conditions do images change, and why? What can accelerate or retard these changes? How amenable are they to purposeful manipulation, in both the short and the long run?

The answer to the last question is quite amenable to purposeful manipulation, which is precisely how we should start seeing the New York Times’ 1619 Project or Howard Zinn’s work as well. It’s not about history as a body of knowledge, where someone is erroneously changing the facts of the past. This is actually about how education, as a social science, is a tool to where “social science is increasingly making use of these images to increase its analytic power.” That analysis is only the beginning though as this later quote recognizes. The point is to “control social processes” and redirect them to what john a. powell [see tag] described in his 2012 book Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society as the use of allegations of White Supremacy to change our categories of thinking to force “a renewed commitment by all of us to fulfill the promise of a truly democratic society.”

Before getting back to powell and his intention to use White Supremacy as a means to target and alter the unconscious mind to create his desired new kind of self and new kind of citizen, let’s quote again from Polak because powell’s techniques seem to be exploiting Polak’s insights.

The image of the future as such may be an important tool for interdisciplinary social science. The possibility that science may be able to predict and control social processes through analysis of existing images of the future, both private and public, and direct a change of these images, is a thought-provoking one… it is still not too soon to begin pondering the problems of controlled image-change. How could such a possibility be fitted into a democratic system of government?..If we pause to think what can be done with the minds of men…

And women. Boys, and girls. It has happened and is happening even more now. These aims of reconstruction are how we should view not just these White Supremacy curricula currently receiving so much attention, but also the Pandemic, the Holocaust, Reconstruction, the Charlottesville Hoax with the tiki torches, and, finally, the Insurrection at the Capitol. It’s about the Images of the Future  and their potential to incite and justify transformational change in the minds and hearts of students at all levels of society. To quote powell again from his Afterword:

Although our brains develop partly though categorizing and organizing in ways that can be challenging in a diverse society, our hearts orchestrate a system that is hardwired to care and to respond empathically to one another’s suffering and joy. We can’t allow structures–economic or political–to block or blunt these connections…To embrace our commonality in an increasingly diverse public space will require new selves, who are citizens in the truest sense of the term: individual, interconnected, and inclusive in ways that reflect the highest aspirations of our nation and our species. This is a heavy lift for all of us, and it is particularly heavy for those who continue to organize around the myth of the radically isolated individual. The alternative–a just society–requires major realignments with respect to corporations and a remaking of our institutions and ourselves. But it is a dream worth dreaming and a fight worth fighting for.

I think that Dream fits with the essence of what ‘public policy’ is always about, whatever the expressed goals of any think tank, is, which is why we keep getting cries for School Choice that actually enable the planned mechanism of change when examined closely. I think it’s why there has been so much deceit surrounding the Common Core, competency frameworks, and especially CtD’s coverage of what I nicknamed Tranzi OBE. There is a desire for this kind of change to a just society grounded in the minds and hearts of a new kind of citizen. Powell mentioned the unconscious target, but his footnote went to a 2002 book Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious . It is that adaptive unconscious, a term I had never encountered before, that I immediately recognized as the true realm of Tranzi OBE, the actual language in charters for schools and districts, mission statements for private schools now, the Catholic Curriculum Frameworks, state Portrait of a Graduate mandates, and other redirections with the same aim.

Let’s finish this Part 1 on Images of the Future, the ‘adaptive unconscious’ with its “distinctive characteristic ways of interpreting the social environment and stable motives that guide peoples behavior”, and how it can be manipulated by quoting the ‘personality mediating system’ it creates. Yes, I substituted the word ‘manipulating’ for the original term ‘mediating,, but it fits with what media actually means and does. Media, whether print, broadcast, or social platforms for dissemination, has now set itself up as the Lighthouse that gets human perception to notice and then the Interpreter that explains the to be accepted significance of what got noticed. It is no accident that the Oregon pamphlet on Equity in its new curricula intends to target the ‘lived experiences’ of the students as the area of change to supposedly end White Supremacy. It gets at what Walter Mischel in 1968 found in a review of personality research (my numbering to ease the categories):

people possess a unique set of cognitive and affective variables that determine how they react to the social world. They describe five components of this ‘personality mediating system’ that guide people’s behavior: [1] encodings (people’s construals of themselves, others, and situations); [2] expectancies about themselves and the social world; [3] affect and emotions; [4] goals and values; and [5] competencies and self-regulatory plans. In short, they argue, people have distinctive ‘if-then’ rules that determine how they respond in a particular situation; for example, ‘If I feel I’m being ignored, then I get angry and aggressive.’ [Remember] a fundamental property of the adaptive unconscious is that people have no access to the ways in which it selects, interprets, and evaluates information.

The student may not know that, but personalized learning, formative assessments, and holistic, evidence-based strategies can all ferret that out, call it personalized learning, and use curricula to instill the desired images, ethics, categories of thought, and interpretive tools to be changed. Feelings and emotions can be changed through role play. Digital learning is a particularly rich source for mining and manipulating this ‘personality mediating system.’ The system each and every student has so targeting it for change is equitable and coincidentally, conducive to the sought change to “ourselves and institutions”. The other part of the rallying cry and civil rights mandates of Equity and Excellence turns out to mean getting at students at the level of what they want, think, and feel. http://invisibleserfscollar.com/excellence-means-education-putting-what-we-feel-wish-for-and-think-in-harmony/

Sounds just like a bullseye of the Adaptive Unconscious to me.

Sculpting the Inner Eyes that Guide What Real Eyes Perceive from Daily Experiences

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All the references to Global Competency or World Citizenship may have us looking for a new flag we will be expected to salute or a quiz on world capital cities, but that is not what these terms actually mean. I took on Global Competency and the CCSSO’s explicit push of it in US K-12 classrooms in Chapter 7 of my book so please look there for the initial foundation for what is coming. We are off to Finland today, not to get frequent flyer miles or to look for stunning vistas in majestic fjords, but simply because professors there have been far more graphic in what the required Human Dignity Paradigm/Justice for All inclusive classroom looks like. They have also laid out with stunning candor what it intends to do and why. It explains why US suburban high schools would be nonconsensually shifting students to ‘problem-based learning’ with an affirmative Student Code of Conduct that most parents are unlikely to even catch in time.

Before we take off though I want to lay out the known links of the same model to the US beyond the descriptions to the Folk School vision laid out in the previous post. I noticed last May that all the school principals and district administrators in the high achieving part of Metro Atlanta’s Fulton County had switched to referring to classwork under the Common Core as either being ‘STEM’ or ‘Humanities.’ Recognizing this meant a jettisoning of academic content as something to be transmitted from what STEM meant (also in book), I have been keeping an eye out for a means of explaining explicitly what the shift to a Humanities focus would specifically mean in the classroom. Professor Martha Nussbaum, so usefully loquacious as to what is really intended that we have given her a tag already, thankfully laid it out in a 1997 book called Cultivating Humanity.

Using classwork to “cultivate in ourselves a capacity for sympathetic imagination.” Such empathy in all students is necessary “in order to foster an informed and compassionate vision of the different.” This “narrative imagination is an essential preparation for moral interaction. Habits of empathy and conjecture conduce to a certain type of citizenship and a certain form of community.” A Blue Ribbon for Astuteness to each of us that picked up that this compassion towards others is the consistent core we are finding in K-12 ‘reforms’ all over the world. It is desired because it “cultivates a sympathetic responsiveness to another’s needs” that is in turn necessary for a world determined to make meeting needs the new focus of the global economy. What Karl Marx called the Human Development Model of Society and Harry Boyte now calls the cooperative commonwealth.

One more well-connected American prof willing to reveal what is being laid out in meetings we are not invited to is Wharton’s Jeremy Rifkin. Since his discussion of the “new pedagogical revolution emphasizing empathic development” is in the context of a broader 2009 social vision called The Empathic Civilization, Rifkin is also usefully forthcoming. In fact he discloses that “Collaborative education, at its core, is concerned with shifting the center of educational concern from the individual mind, to forms of relationship.” We have encountered this before http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/distributive-justice-is-not-enough-we-must-break-the-illusion-of-the-unitary-self/  in the early days of this blog so I know even beyond the clear links to the Positive School Climate mandate that these mentions of a ‘relational self’ as the new focus are truly an insistent, very real, aim of K-12 education reform globally.

Let’s quote Jeremy one more time as he explains that the “new classroom emphasizes cooperation over competition and the sharing of minds. [Exhale, please! Some of you dear readers are now turning Blue in the Face with Outrage.] Education becomes a collaborative venture rather than an individual pursuit. The aim of all knowledge is existential: that is, to come ever closer to understanding the meaning of existence as well as our place in evolution through our shared experiences and the meanings we glean from them. Technical or vocational knowledge [like digital learning] becomes merely instrumental to the pursuit of this larger goal.”

Now we can go to Finland where we will recognize the curriculum as merely the more graphic announcements of the same classroom intent that we are supposed to be transitioning to in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, Hong Kong, and everywhere else that ever cherished the individual. The Finns stated that the solutions to the world’s problems are to be found “in a shift in our view of how we see ourselves and our relationship to society, and its future…Whatever lies in the future, the ability to collaborate with others in the identification and resolution of problems is crucial. If humankind does not have this capacity, our fate is sealed. If it does, the skills for collective action must be nurtured and strengthened.”

Hence all the ties we are seeing between deliberative democracy and participatory citizenship and the actual K-12 required classroom implementation. I highlighted evolution above not to talk about Darwin or Apes but in the Brameld/Huxley sense of cultural evolution laid out in my book. Or as the Finns have decreed: ” the function of education is not only academic skills, but the skills needed to play a protagonist role in the evolution of society. Rather than working for socialization to the status quo, schools can create pro-active agents of social change.” Now before I shift to quoting from the actual intentions so that parents will have it as a guidebook for the future whatever happens to Professor Margaret Tuomi’s research, I want to make two more points.

First, the Finns state this is based on the Baha’i Curriculum for Global Education. Like the UN as we saw, the Finns like that the Baha’i do not merely speak of rights, as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These guidelines also speak of obligations. Such duties to others are believed to be important to drill into each student at an unconscious level that will guide action. Secondly, please do not let all this high-minded talk of Equality and Success For All conceal the actual reality of what is being attempted here. The creator of Cultural Marxism theory in the 20s, Antonio Gramsci, did not just come up with an intention to March Through the Institutions of Power in the Individualistic West. He also developed the concept of the Integral State that all that marching was intended to create.

Civil Society would not be just an area of activity in his vision, existing independently of the State. Gramsci conceived of Civil Society, which would especially include schools and higher ed, as the terrain where the political elite’s world vision would be imposed. Troublingly the word he used translates as a required consensus. We encountered the same concept of few posts ago as the Rockefeller Theory of Communication For Social Change. The classroom would become the place where the psychological reality perceived by each student when they entered the classroom would give way to a Shared Understanding of Physical and Social Reality.

The five goals of Global Education then are [verbatim]:

1. To adopt the values necessary for the evolution of a global human society. (Ethics)

2. To acquire knowledge of mankind’s development, current state and achievements. (Knowledge).

3. To include in the world view a discernment as to how mankind has always formed ever greater social systems, and how this process has been encouraged by man’s natural urge to work in cooperation. (Understanding)

4. To see the future of mankind as bright, and to picture in one’s mind how mankind can through cooperation reach unprecedented achievements. (Vision)

5. To learn skills concerning cooperation and the management of information, and become directed towards acquiring skills necessary for the development of mankind. (Skills)

To give some idea of the sort of things the new Common Core assessments will actually be looking for, especially the formative assessments or assessments for learning, let’s look at the listed subgoals under 5. My bolding.

5.1 To learn and explore sources of knowledge logically in order to form holistic pictures and to apply the understanding thus gained to different challenges and activities; to learn to express clearly and logically one’s considered views for the development of human society.

5.2 To learn the skill of consultation in which the purpose is to promote the common good, not to advance one’s own interest; in which the aspiration is to achieve a common understanding; in which one’s view is expressed clearly and freely, but politely; and in which all participants seek to build their opinion based primarily upon knowledge and understanding.

5.3 To learn to consider those skills and capabilities that are needed for the realization of mankind’s future in practice when orienting for studies and choosing professions.

Well I must admit reading through all this that I did NOT become a lawyer to help realize mankind’s future. Interestingly enough though, having a solid base of unapproved factual knowledge and an Axemaker Mind is quite a useful tool in accurately perceiving the likely consequences of all this Manipulation and Mind Arson. That must be why the political elite and cronies are trying to discontinue these useful Mindsets all over the world right now.

Talking about it in the sunlight truly is the only antidote. Next time I will continue some quoting that will make the need for an affirmative Student Code of Conduct quite obvious.

Maybe we should nickname it the Fulton Comrade Code of Conduct Necessary for the Cooperative Vision of Our Future. Brought to us by people lying to our faces about what is really intended.

Some cooperation. No denial of self-interest by the public sector here. No wonder these coercive common good schemes always lead to kleptocracies.

Prescribing Racial Equity Outcomes at All Levels of Social Interaction Will Make Each of Us Truly Bound and Governed

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In my ongoing pursuit to track precisely what future is being planned for us, why education is being so radically altered in deceitful ways without consent, and why so many people assume people now exist to be governed and dictated to through political power I went back to that Humane Governance book I mentioned in the last post. Sure enough, in order to offer comprehensive rights “to those most vulnerable” as well as “all peoples on earth” Falk called for “a proper ordering of political life at all levels of social interactions” including the home and personal relationships. We may grasp that such officially sanctioned meddling is likely to turn the world into those who seize, those whose time or property are seized, and distributees, but it really is the new theory of rightful political and economic power being pushed in the 21st century.

No wonder I kept hearing references to governance that assumed that political power can now dictate individual choices. If the aim is indeed the “normative consciousness of society” including “the sense of life’s purpose” it makes perfect sense that education, Preschool, K-12, and higher ed, is so determined to make values, attitudes, and beliefs and the delegitimization of the very concept of the individual its focus.  What I was not prepared for when I tackled the 2006 book The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule is Giving Way to Shared Governance…and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same by Matt Leighninger was discovering that governance of all of us was deemed necessary to achieve Racial Equity Outcomes. Or that there was a White House conference in August 2009 that Leighninger was part of to officially kick start this vision of democracy and governance.  http://www.whitehouse.gov/files/documents/ostp/opengov/sond2%20final%20report.pdf

Another lost invite. Someone who was not only invited but was a co-sponsor of the conference was Everyday Democracy, which is the new name for what used to be called the Study Circles Resource Center. Along with the Southern Poverty Law Center we keep encountering as it protects the Common Core, SCRC created this Upper Grades Handbook called “Reaching Across Boundaries: Talk to Create Change” http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mixitup.pdf in an earlier commitment to required dialogues to supposedly create healthy school communities and a Positive School Climate where “every student can grow socially and academically.” Note that order of priority. That handbook remains in print because this is the kind of transformative school program where all children can be deemed to succeed and ‘grow.’ Plus there is that useful change to the acceptable norms of society beliefs and values.

OK you say, that’s one example but do I really have to make governance about race? The problem is that when I followed the footnotes in Leighninger’s book I discovered unbelievably alarming and sanctioned official initiatives like this 2002 Training for Racial Equity and Inclusion: A Guide to Selected Programs http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/docs/rcc/training.pdf It starts with a quote from a Manning Marable that:

“When we talk about race, we don’t mean a biological or genetic category, but, rather, a way of interpreting differences between people which creates or reinforces inequalities between them. In other words, ‘race’ is an unequal relationship between social groups, represented by the privileged access to power and resources over another.”

So the existence of inequality among groups for whatever reason becomes the excuse to Govern everyone and meddle constantly in what people believe, value, have, or what they can do. To seize economic and political power and dictate approved social interactions. To define “modern racism as unconsciously held beliefs and feelings that people of color are making illegitimate demands for changes in the status quo.” To be deemed racist if you are not willing to fund the revolution and do it now. Won’t the omnipresent focus now on social and emotional learning come in handy with such programs prescribing a “psycho-social approach to changing racism emphasizes the importance of individual awareness and emotional literacy–or the ability to read one’s own emotions and those of other’s–in the process of understanding and changing oppression.”

Once again this focus in K-12 is equitable, since everyone has emotions, and transformative for “creating a more equitable and just future.” Just what Falk envisioned as Humane Governance and why Gorbachev joined in in 1986. Race becomes the way to transform behaviors in the West and consciousness all at the same time plus seize economic power. Truly who needs a Cold War when there’s education.

Well, that was a 2002 paper. Maybe the Aspen Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation (which also funded WOMP)  has rejected such a vision of Race Equity and the intertwining of Education and Community (then why was this on naesp’s website yesterday?)  http://www.naesp.org/resources/1/A_New_Day_for_Learning_Resources/Building_and_Sustaining_Partnerships/Education_and_Community_Building_Connecting_Two_Worlds.pdf Unfortunately though a new acronym RETOC and a 2008 publication date show that these unfortunate theories just keep getting more influential as the basis for government decision-making along with nonprofits and charitable foundations.

RETOC is short for Racial Equity Theory of Change and it is “the desired alternative to white privilege. Racial equity paints a radically different social outcomes ‘picture’ in which race is not consistently and predictably associated with disadvantage. It envisions a fairer America in which race is not associated with merit and social opportunities. With racial equity, we would not have social strata, prisons, schools, boardrooms and communities that are distinguished by their skewed racial profiles.

A racial equity vision takes for granted that the nation possesses sufficient resources to offer everyone an equal chance to succeed.” http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/aspeninst1.pdf Since people have resources, not the nation itself unless we are going to redistribute national parks, racial equity is all about seizing what is desired for redistribution as well as Mind Arson to keep things equitably tied to those transformatively useful emotions. Since RETOC intends to dismantle Structural Racism, it becomes an excuse to meddle everywhere, once again necessitating the concept of Governance. After all, how else can governments and special interest groups alter:

“the many systemic factors that work to produce and maintain racial inequities in America today. [No attempt is being made of course to change factors like unwed teenaged mothers or force urban schools to finally teach reading properly] These are aspects of our history and culture that allow the privileges associated with ‘whiteness’ and the disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to remain deeply embedded within the political economy. Public policies, institutional practices and cultural representations contribute to structural racism by reproducing outcomes that are racially inequitable.”

And if all this meddling and required restructuring of social interactions and relationships extinguishes much of those resources targeted so everyone can succeed, what then? What if the REO-desired Racial Equity Outcome–is not just something that can be imposed or dictated? What will be the effect of targeting the ‘Nuts and Bolts’ of Local power to force these REOs? Governance becomes necessary so that “decision making bodies at the state, local, or regional levels” can dictate the desired changes, whatever the actual costs.

Finally, the Aspen Institute, which again is so determined to push digital learning that replaces mental knowledge with the use of a visual tool as the key component of the Common Core implementation, published this document in September 2009. Highly relevant then to what is also going on in education, the AI Roundtable on Community Change created this “Constructing a Racial Equity Theory of Change: A Practical Guide for Designing Strategies to Close Chronic Racial Outcome Gaps.” http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/images/Roundtable%20on%20Community%20Change%20RETOC.pdf That report opens with the declaration in bold print that “As we begin the 21st century, the embeddedness of racism in our institutions and culture continue to exert great influence on how social benefits and burdens are distributed.”

Distributed by whom we should legitimately ask. The fallacy that these benefits and burdens are being inequitably ‘distributed’ is being used to seize power to be able to distribute. To plan societies. To force action by public officials against anyone or anything deemed in the way of an REO. That report helpfully reminds “planners to take the likelihood of sociopolitical resistance and retrenchment into account whenever they design and implement racial equity action strategies.”

So far that outcry has not been a problem because these REOs are being pursued but not under the actual Theory of Change. Not under the name Racial Equity Outcomes. The sought ‘backward mapping’ is going on in the schools, but it goes by names like Growth or Positive School Climate or Equitable Engagement of All Students. The function of transformative change and the seizure of powers of governance without admitting it’s about REO and eliminating Structural Racism.

In writing of the related Humane Governance, Professor Falk acknowledged that this is all about pursuing a “democratizing agenda of bringing law and popular participation to bear upon policies that control the exercise of economic and political power.” Race is just the excuse for seizing that power for the public sector and its allies. It offers emotions of grievance that have been carefully cultivated and boots on the ground voting for transformative change via seizure.

And no one pushing Humane Governance or Racial Equity seems to be grasping that if true wealth is the mind and what it is capable of, these policies may well be creating piles of dust.

No one can seize what has ceased to exist. Creating a sense of righteous revenge in some groups and an obligation to allow predation in others only creates human betterment in a fantasy world. But we can only confront the likely reality if we recognize what is now being pushed in the name of Equity and Democracy.

Consider this post that recognition.

 

 

Revealing the Ruse that Masks the Level of Global Coordination Around Education

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December in Paris is not nearly as lovely as April in Paris, but the food remains delicious and the vistas from the Eiffel Tower are still worth the climb. But once again our invites were lost. Wouldn’t we all like to be consulted about “The World We Want” instead of merely picking up most of the bill and being told how we must change? But no, UNESCO and UNICEF held a Thematic Consultation meeting on December 5-6, 2013 of the North American States, Western Europe, and Turkey to lay out the Post-2015 Development Agenda and left us out of the room. Unfortunately, we and our children remained very much on the agenda.

In case you are thinking that “someone’s” participation as speakers or attendees is no reason to assume US or Canadian or UK ed policies are actually being determined abroad and most definitely no longer at the district or school levels, how would you feel about a link to the US DoED first ever “International Strategy”? Published in November 2012 just after someone got reelected and apparently we all shifted into a whole new level of planned implementation. http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/internationaled/international-strategy-2012-16.pdf And I scoured that document and I can see we agreed to work with the OECD as to what is meant by “internationally benchmarking” what is going on in our schools. We also signed on with international labor representing teachers’ unions globally, but there was nary a mention of the Common Core.

Just like it was merely a ruse to get US schools on board with the OECD’s Great Transition we have talked about (and mourned over the implications of). It also mentions though a great deal about Quality Learning and Equity and Global Competency and 21st Century Skills and working with Brazil to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Discrimination and Promote Equality. It shows such openmindedness that an open socialist orientation in one country is no longer a barrier to a Joint Action Plan.  It’s also so nice to see the US commitment to participation in all those international assessments that were actually created to drive global convergence around the Great Transition/Time to redistribute based on Uncle Karl’s vision of the Future. All put into place through education changes driven by poorly understood international assessments. No, that’s not my opinion. I have a copy of Torsten Husen’s The Learning Society where he laid out what these assessments were actually evaluating, and what the intentions were. He helped create them all.

Based on that Brookings Institute link in the last post Husen would be so pleased that the non-Scandinavian countries are finally going along with his desire that “educational planning must be integrated with social and economic planning in general.” Honestly, from just the documents I have read in the last few weeks, I am not sure there is much now not being planned on our behalf in any of these areas. And I know for sure that in the age of the Whole Child Initiative and the social and emotional learning/Positive Behavior mandates that Husen’s desire to put “more stress on the emotional life of the children” is definitely part of the current gameplan. It’s been almost 40 years since Husen wrote that book (1974), but we had already noticed that the underlying vision never varies.

So what’s the current post-2015 UN/OECD Development Agenda the feds have committed us to? And all those pundits and politicians and foundation employees denying the extent of the federal overreach should look at this line from “Succeeding Globally Through International Education and Engagement” (my bolding):

“The Department will also examine how the learning can be applied in the United States and at what level (national, state, district or school).”

Somehow it’s beginning to feel like we have federal and international bureaucrats looking at our suburbs and schools, public and private, and our students and rubbing their hands together gleefully muttering “Mine, Mine, All Mine. For Years At a Time.” So what do these schemers have in mind in the post-2015 vision for us all? Well, that Paris meeting said “achieving sustainable development requires a change in the way people think and act, and this is where education has a crucial role to play.” Especially now that the US Secretary of Education has declared we are all in with the international agenda. We all are to get the “opportunity to acquire the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values necessary to cope with existing and emerging challenges and shape resilient and sustainable societies.”

Oh I do hope we are not first on the list for some reeducation to drop our attachment to the Unitary Self as john a powell disdainfully called it. Then there was also the thematic discussion on Global Citizenship Education (which apparently will not be celebrating its foundations every 4th of July).  GCE “aims to empower learners to engage and assume active roles both locally and globally to face and resolve global challenges and ultimately to become proactive contributors to a more just, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive and secure and sustainable world.” With unicorn rides every other Friday afternoon. Please note that “youth is a particularly important target group” for GCE. Target group? Could we get more of an admission of propagandist intent via the schools and universities?

Then we also have “Quality of Education and Learning Outcomes.” Remember outcomes always has to do with behavioral or personality changes in the student, and it should greatly trouble us that the UN is deeply interested in this regard in “the new digital platforms on which teaching and learning are taking place and through which knowledge, skills and values are developed, transmitted, validated, and applied by young people.” And we parents and taxpayers may not be able to see what will be assaulting our students and what virtual worlds they are to be embedded in for much of their school time, but apparently UN personnel may have better luck. Checking out the potential for the unfiltered indoctrination of politically desired new values, attitudes, and beliefs thought to be amenable to global transformation. We would be worried if any of these entities had expressed intentions about wanting radical change. Oh, wait. Ooops.

Actually I suppose we should be grateful that the ruse surrounding the Common Core in the US as an excuse to cover up the sought radical changes in student perceptions about the world and their future has increasingly come out into the open. The links clearly go far beyond the accreditation agencies’ loyalties now and where Linda Darling-Hammond is jetting off to speak at. I want to finish this post with a British Professor who reaches out to all sorts of names and entities to describe the extent of the active coordination throughout the Anglosphere. His name is Guy Claxton and this was the 2006 Keynote Address to the British Educational Association’s Annual Conference. Called “Expanding the Capacity to Learn: A New End for Education?” the speech gives us the answer of why the US in February 2013 added Dispositions to the list of what it would mean to be College, Career, and Citizenship Ready.

Claxton believes it “is education’s most basic job to expand all young people’s emotional and intellectual resources to cope with life.” And yes that was his order of emphasis and like the UN, he wants everyone able to “cope” with the 21st century. Being left out is the 21st Century going through The Great Transition being launched by bureaucrats, politicians, and professors without our knowledge and consent. No wonder there is such concern for how we will cope. Claxton wants us to be “able to stay calm, focused and engaged when we don’t know what to do” which he believes will be augmented through new “emotional and personal attitudes, beliefs and tolerances” that are to become new habits of mind and character traits. Somehow we will all be better prepared for what is intended for us if we have a “tolerance for hazy or non-articulate ways of knowing.”

So we will do better under these officially hoped for scenarios if we have a Muddled Mind? Well, yes, apparently “those who have no tolerance for fogginess–who have been trained to think that confusion is a sign of stupidity, for instance–have therefore reduced their capacity to learn.” Claxton wants to reverse “any acquired intolerance for confusion.” And he calls all this developing dispositions in italics for emphasis just like that. And dispositions are so important because they “refine our sense of when it is appropriate to use a particular ability.” Then Claxton has this in parentheses– “to become more ready.”

So I think all the references to College Ready, Citizenship Ready, Standards for Career Readiness, etc. as the preferred euphemisms for the Common Core are not about getting students ready for the world and those institutions as they currently exist. All the references to Standards of Readiness seem to be getting at whether the student has developed a willingness to act and to “persist in the face of difficulty.” Let’s call it Grit and Perseverance for short. At least the new Principals and District Supers are being told their credentials are issued to enable them to be Social Change Agents. We are apparently about to embark on the creation of a huge corps of social change agents who are not being told what is being sought. Who ARE being targeted on the basis of what remains malleable to change. Who are being trained to act despite confusion and to keep at it whatever the immediate consequences.

We are going to come back to this next time as I have the new international Quality frameworks and they leave no doubt about the extent that it is student behavior being targeted.

We know why now. And how. We need to examine the methods next.

Mystical Marxism, Shapers of Our Current World System, or Building New Mental Software

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Please. Oh, please, can I opt for a Door Number 4 as I continue to track down the actual planned social, political, and economic transformative vision for the future? Global and using so-called education reforms as the vehicle. Without our consent and apparently without our knowledge. Modelled on of all things, Soviet psychology and philosophy, but now renamed and spun in terms of Confucius or transpersonal, Integral, philosophy and the ever present systems thinking. Because of course the mindsets that the Chinese leaders find appropriate for their “under our thumb” (to the music of the Rolling Stones please) citizens is precisely appropriate for a US or Australian or Korean classroom. Anywhere I suppose where anyone with political power dreams of looking at the masses of taxpayers and voters and assigning a role of permanent subordination.

Mystical Marxism. That’s what Ken Wilber called his Integral Worldview that explores, honors, and acknowledges “all the dimensions of men and women’s experiences–sensory, emotional, mental, social, spiritual.” Now Ken has actually been on my radar for a while because Harvard ed prof Robert Kegan seems to like partnering with the Integral Life philosophy when he is not pushing “Lessons of Systemic Change for Success in Implementing the New Common Core Standards” with Peter Senge and Hewlett Foundation funding. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/viewing-education-as-the-prime-lever-for-international-social-change-community-organizing-everywhere/ . But I do not talk about people on the periphery no matter how troubling the implications of their views. No I was following up on the definition of Global Competence and the Smithsonian’s involvement with both Understandings of Consequence and Big History.

Which caused me to take a look at the SHOUT education conferences Smithsonian has been sponsoring with Microsoft and another entity I was not familiar with. TakingITGlobal–Inspire, Inform, Involve. It turns out to be a student social media site promoting Global Citizenship. Disturbingly to me, their Theory of Change http://www.tigweb.org/about/why/change.html is “inspired by the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber, which posits that there are 4 areas (quadrants) where progressive development can occur: Interior Individual, Exterior Individual, Interior Collective, and Exterior Collective. Through our programs and project, young people move along a linear path through each quadrant …(A) Youth Development; (B) Youth Action & Participation; (C) Social Movements; and (D) Societal Values.” There’s more specifics on that site to help inculcate that individual and collective common core that prompts transformative action. Parents happily thinking their children have become involved in service learning may want to search out Wilber’s aspirations for Achieving Binding Democratic Global Governance.

Part 2 of our title comes from more detectiving around this issue of Global Competence and its integral (couldn’t resist because it’s true) part in CCSSO’s vision of the Common Core’s actual implementation. Turns out in 2009 the Gates Foundation funded a  CCSSO project called EdSteps to essentially obscure the key implementation components that might be controversial. Mustn’t allow any disruption of the political narrative being used to con the public on what was coming. It’s the EdSteps frameworks then that announce that the Common Core is about “a nation transforming its business and education systems in response to the evolving global economy.” That would be the Capitalism 3.0 or  what Shoshana Zuboff called distributed capitalism and the Aspen Institute the fourth sector/for benefit economy.

http://edsteps.org/CCSSO/SampleWorks/EdSteps%20Framework-08_29_12.pdf is the framework. Virginians and Texans may want to note their involvement with EdSteps as more proof you can get the common core implementation without the actual math or ELA standards. The Five EdSteps skill areas are the key implementation components that no one had been previously and systematically assessing: Creativity, Problem Solving for Learning, Analyzing Information, Global Competence, and Writing. Now honestly as EdSteps describes all these areas they will go a long way towards training students to Ascend from the Abstract to the Concrete or what Paul Ehrlich called organizing around Big Ideas and Concepts that will instill a compulsion to act. But you now have those Frameworks and my earlier posts. I need to move on to the even more troubling ideas behind the EdSteps screen.

EdSteps is a partner in yet another entity, world savvy, framing transformative curricula and practices for the 21st century student. And without the above link you would never see the ties to CCSSO. http://worldsavvy.org/assets/documents/uploads/WorldSavvy_ComponentsofGlobalCompetency.pdf lays out the Knowledge, Skills, Values & Attitudes, and Behaviors to be instilled in students. It’s all troubling but it’s the Knowledge component we need to focus on now. Especially as it primes for Big History or something comparably false and influential.

In particular the phrase “Historical forces that have shaped the current world system.” We don’t have a current singular world system. If we did it would by definition be totalitarian. The aspiration for one was a huge part of what drove one side in the Cold War. As long time readers know, I have been describing what appears to be an effort by UNESCO and other UN agencies to use initiatives like the Belmont Challenge and the Future Earth Alliance (still have not seen anyone involved in tights with lettering on their chest) to get to a singular world system.

That phraseology in the Components of Global Competency tells us a lot about the assumptions inherent in meetings none of us have been invited to. It also indicates all these transformational reforms are being driven either by some woefully ignorant people or idealogues enthralled by Utopia. Not to mention the Champagne Tastes and Caviar Dreams of being a connected Business in this vision no longer worried about consumers or competitors.

But a key component of this social vision starts at the city or regional level. Where it is much easier to get all the relevant politicians on board and bought off with grants and revenue sharing to finance a transformation. At least in the short term. It’s called the Learning City or Region and shifting the US towards it to dovetail with its Asian push is the purpose of both the Metropolitanism initiatives we have covered several times and the planned shift in federal revenue sharing we covered here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/well-no-wonder-no-one-listens-to-common-core-complaints-if-it-is-tied-to-federal-revenue-sharing/ .

But inexplicably the mayors and city councils always leave out the key component of the vision about “building mental software conditions for human wellbeing.” Or that learning cities and regions are the vital first step in “building the structural concept of a ‘learning society’…based upon an emphasis that ‘a society should be rewired and re-constructed in a way that human learning is put at the very front and maximized to fulfill the idea of a whole person.”

Well that sounds outlandish and remember learning means changes in values, attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors. I seriously doubt UNESCO’s or the Chinese vision of a whole person would be ours. And again aiming at those personal traits is essential to anyone with an aspiration of an integral human system. Local, national, or global. Bad track record people. And the above links have the Common Core in the US linked to at least two strategies for such a totalizing vision of personal and collective transcendence. The one Hewlett paid for in that previous post and Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory of Change.

It will be no fun to be an individual in a “complex adaptive system” being reorganized and centrally directed. Which is probably why the 2010 UNESCO document I am pulling this global Learning City vision from is quoting from Korea, Shanghai, and Changzhou, China versions. Where “education is an instrument to rebuild the community” around the planned vision. A community where “all” is so “co-related and connected to make a whole complex ecosystem of human learning. It is like a human body which cannot be detached from other parts. If so detached, the human simply dies.”

There’s no place for the genuinely autonomous person in that UNESCO-inspired vision of the Lifelong Learning Community (LLC). And if you think nothing like this can happen in the US or other countries like Australia I suggest you read this Leading Learning Communities report to be an effective elementary school principal. http://www.naesp.org/sites/default/files/LLC2-ES-1.pdf . That LLC vision is supposedly necessary “as we face squarely the challenges inherent in the transformation of our global society.” A learning society. One where, to once again quote UNESCO and a Korean prof of Lifelong Education in Seoul:

‘learning functions as a key attribute and defines what a society should be [functioning like what the Chinese Communists used to call ‘thought reform’ and others had a darker term for]…a key apparatus of social production and reproduction [which sounds better than the reality of social engineering]…In sum, a learning society is a self-organising emergence [in a centrally planned and dictated sort of way] where new patterns of social fabric and learning systems are merged and deployed. Here my point is this: a learning city is not just an old-timer’s economic project, but a whole new idea where a whole new learning system emerges, revolves, and grows to lead economic, social, and political development as a whole.”

How totalising. No room for the unitary self there. No wonder john a powell said that the Regional Equity Movement in the US and its accompanying education vision was not just looking for distributive justice. Not when you can join a vision where “learning is considered an authentic and generic DNA for cultivating the post-industrial society as a complex adaptive system. In this vein, systems thinking is the key mode of planning and implementing the whole situation in action.”

Which would explain why systems thinking just keeps popping up. All the function and little of the notoriety of the M word.

Explicitly treating all of us as if “cultivating a forest of learning systems, which needs patience, systems thinking and collective minds.”

No I am not done yet. But that is quite enough to chew on for today.

 

 

Building a Compelling Future Political Coalition Around Advocacy for Keeping the Axemaker Mind

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Former slave Frederick Douglass once said that “education . . . means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free.” Perhaps Joel Klein would also like to sneer that Douglass also had just an 1860s mind unsuitable for the 21st Century? No, I didn’t think so. THAT would play poorly in urban and suburban districts where Amplify and At&T hope to sell those new Tablets to be a visual replacement for emancipatory type knowledge within a students own mind. Such a lousy investment for taxpayers to be funding the known, intended, destruction of the Axemaker Mind.

http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/blending-sustainability-and-education-to-gain-arational-nonlinear-minds-and-new-behaviors/ is where I originally explained the significance of destroying the Axemaker Mind and where the now beloved metaphor actually comes from.

The point is that the transformative education being mandated for both K-12 and higher ed under obscuring but appealing names like College and Career Ready, 21st Century Skills, Lumina Diploma Qualifications Profile, the Common Core, Deep Learning for Understanding, Quality Learning, etc are none of them a Frederick Douglass type of emancipatory education. That would be too individualistic and might nurture a desire to pursue self-interest instead of communitarian values. Right because the only people entitled in 21st Century America or anywhere else in the West should be politicians and their cronies enjoying the coercive powers of government to take OPM, Other People’s Money, and reward it to their allies. Here’s the problem. You only get that one time confiscation of wealth to fuel the allies. Stalin got to use Collectivization to fuel Industrialization in the USSR but at the cost of the Soviet Union never having a viable agricultural sector again. From food exporter of grain to importer to avoid starvation.

He destroyed incentives and necessary knowledge and skills in addition to all those lives. It takes real individual knowledge in the Frederick Douglass sense and genuine personal skills of marketable value in the Julian Simon sense http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/learning-to-learn-or-how-to-replace-old-minds-with-sustainable-new-ones/ plus hard work and a willingness to take risk to create wealth in a society. New products or services that people want to buy. A job is not wealth if the money to finance it was confiscated from someone actually trying to create Wealth. The kind of Prosperity that raises all living standards.

The Economic Pie is not stable and fixed and available for redistribution to political allies without affecting its size. In the Lumina world of Equity in Credentials by stressing group learning and social and emotional learning and interpersonal skills, we are creating expectations at great expense without any real means of cashing them in. Contrary to the political slogans, a living wage in return for being human and drawing a breath is not a promise any government can keep long term. They can get to power that way (see Argentina) but when the wealth and knowledge are gone and incentives are destroyed, countries and civilizations can and do go into death spirals. Then most are dependent with a vacuous Newmindedness and there will not be enough Axemaker Minds to get the economy back on track.

Looking at the faces in the crowd on Tuesday night, America’s Election Night, and spending part of yesterday eyeing the makeup of the electoral coalitions, I can tell you there are a huge number of Americans who voted for both Presidential candidates who are not OK with destroying the Axemaker Mind and manipulating values away from what made America great. They are also not OK with the Corporatist/Dirigiste vision of the economy where political insiders and their cronies benefit and no one else.

In reality the rest of us are to get the kind of servitude and assigned roles that Frederick Douglass thought the US Civil War was fought to stop once and for all. Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, Immigrants, Middle Westerners, Suburbs. Our next generation of voters is under organized attack through education. To literally have their “hearts and minds” captured in the classroom over the years of imposed attendance to accept John Dewey’s idea of democracy. When he wrote that vision in 1916, no one fully appreciated the costs. But now we do know, but every reformer keeps coming back to Dewey anyway out of a desire to control individual behavior and have a politically directed economy.

I spent part of yesterday mulling over the fact that nothing now could stop the vision I have been profiling. And how few would support it if its long term consequences were actually understood. So I dug back into the school resegregation treatises which is where Regionalism and the 1990s ed reform attempt went to regroup after Al Gore lost the Presidency. Apparently there was a 2002 Chapel Hill conference. In the book that resulted laying out the blueprint for the future, john a powell, who was a featured speaker at President Obama’s Building One America conference in 2011 that I wrote about here  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/distributive-justice-is-not-enough-we-must-break-the-illusion-of-the-unitary-self/ lays out his vision for true integration. It basically marries communitarianism with Regionalism. It envisions more than breaking the unitary self. Trashing of the entirety of Western culture up to now is more the ambition of this very influential man with access to political levers and coffers at the highest levels.

“[T]rue integration requires community-wide efforts to dismantle that culture and to create a more inclusive educational system and a more inclusive society in which all individuals and groups have real, equal opportunities to build and participate in the democratic process.

True integration in our schools, then, is transformative rather than assimilative. That is, while desegregation assimilates minorities into the mainstream, true integration transforms the mainstream. . . it recognizes that cultures are not static but are constantly evolving and that all students benefit from a truly equal and just system of education.

To achieve this result, true integration addresses the issues of achievement, opportunity, community, and relevancy at a systemic level. In this process, institutions, communities, and individuals are fundamentally changed . . .Mandatory, interdistrict desegregation or consolidation is just an initial and temporary step in this structural transformation. We must then link housing, school, economic, political, and cultural opportunities and spread accountability throughout entire metropolitan areas via regional planning.”

Accountability in that quote has the same purpose we have seen with its use in accreditation. Compliance with this political vision. A very communitarian agenda. Now you know once again why ICLEI and Agenda 21 are never far away from what is now called Metropolitanism.  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/protected-producers-vs-paying-consumerstaxpayerswho-will-prevail-on-education-and-the-economy/ is the current vision as of a few weeks ago featured at a breakfast to promote Regionalism worldwide. No wonder you had such high turnout Tuesday in urban areas. What an opportunity for power at our expense!

In this world people rarely get a crystal ball that actually is reliably prophetic. I am afraid blueprints of intended political actions once power is achieved are as close as we humans can get to seeing the future. We have that. If we couple those  blueprints with a knowledge of history and economics, we actually can foresee the impending tragedy. And  it is incumbent on all of us to spread that knowledge and build up a real multiracial and multiethnic coalition  around our genuine common interest in averting the disaster that will accompany using education to “reconfigure our collective understanding and political will” around either John Dewey’s political vision or john a powell’s.

We did find out in time what the Second Term is putting in place. There will be a Second Term now so let’s begin to build a more widespread appreciation for what this entails. And how unacceptable it effects are likely to be for most of us not living at taxpayer expense.

Get up everyone! Throw off your funk or illusions. Whichever is apt. Time to Avert an Impending Catastrophe. Before the Collapse if Possible.