Tag Archives: Roberto Mangabeira Unger

More than Men in White Sheets: Prioritizing the Power of Imagination Because Antiracism Demands Equitable, Just Systems

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This post follows up my previous post by quoting from the sources cited in the various Bibliographies. They make the aims of Critical Race Theory under its various euphemisms utterly explicit. In fact, the confessions are so graphic that EVERY use of italics in this post is original to the source. Let’s start with Kevin Kumashiro’s Spring 2000 “Toward a Theory of Anti-Oppressive Education” published by the same AERA that elected Bill Ayers to a leadership position. You will see why student-centered learning can be so psychologically dangerous and why a social-emotional learning focus is always integral to the desired new form of consciousness.

Students must always look beyond what is known; they must ask, ‘what is not said?’ and then go to places that have, until now, been foreclosed. Of course, such a process is antithetical to the ways we traditionally think about teaching and learning…Teaching, in other words, like learning, cannot be about repetition and affirmation of either the teacher’s or the student’s knowledge, but must involve uncertainty, difference, and change. I should note here that the goal here is not merely any difference, since not all changes will be helpful. Rather, the goal is a change informed by these theories of anti-oppression, a change that works against oppression.

Got that? Not the old-fashioned transmission of knowledge–lectures and textbook vision–and what is being learned are THEORIES justifying the need for transformation beginning at the level of what the student thinks, feels, and wants. That would be the actual definition of what Excellence means in education as long time readers will recognize. It’s also why the quote at the beginning of the post title came from another cited article we will get to shortly published in May 2005 in Equity & Excellence in Education. Back to Kumashiro:

anti-oppressive education involves crisis…learning things that force one to re-learn or unlearn what one has previously learned cannot always be done rationally…learning about oppression and unlearning one’s worldview can be upsetting and paralyzing to students…by teaching students that the very ways in which we think and do things can be oppressive, teachers should expect their students to get upset. Consequently, educators need to create a space in their curriculum for students to work through crisis…teaching and learning really take place only through entering and working through crisis, since it is this process that moves a student to a different intellectual/emotional/political space. In noting that both teaching and psychoanalysis involve ‘liv[ing] through a crisis,’ [Felman] explains that they both ‘are called upon to be performative, and not just cognitive, insofar as they both strive to produce and to enable, change. Both…are interested not merely in new information, but, primarily, in the capacity of their recipients to transform themselves in function of the newness of the information.

When we erroneously make a discussion of CRT, or new equitable practices for learning in education, about mistaken facts in the 1619 Project or Action Civics as getting academic credit for attending protests, we miss the intentional, psychologically traumatizing, aims of these confessed practices and stated purposes for a new kind of pedagogy. If the cited authors state that “anti-oppressive education also involves self-reflexivity (and the change of the individual)”, we should take them at their word, even if most parents and taxpayers never read the sources I am citing here. If they say they want to alter students at an internalized, psychological level “significantly changing how they see themselves and who they are,” don’t think that disputes over whether CRT is taught in schools are about whether the history of slavery or Jim Crow laws can be discussed in class. That is utter deflection from what is being aimed at in the name of antiracism and anti-oppression.

The change this pedagogy will produce cannot, of course, be known beforehand. Its goal is not, think like this, but think differently (and not different in any way, but different as informed by these theories).

Think about that line and those italics next time you hear the cry of Misinformation to something that is provably true as we have been seeing so much in the coverage of CoVid in the last two years, or when someone argues for, or disputes, that Mass Formation Psychosis can be deliberately arranged by collaboration of educators and the media. It’s how Standards for Teaching and Learning in K-12 all over the globe actually and intentionally work. Its why UNESCO created them and the US helpfully apes them. Informed by these theories is a chilling phrase, especially to an article that concludes with “how we want students and society to change.” Sounds like an essential component of any Great Reset or Building Back Better to me. To fully understand why these shifts are essential, we have another cite as I mentioned above by Sheri Lyn Schmidt called “More Than Men in White Sheets: Seven Concepts Critical to the Teaching of Racism as System Inequality.”

Created as a framework for college students, the concepts guide what teachers are taught and made to believe so that “students move from viewing racism as individual bigotry to recognizing its complex nature as a systemic phenomenon that pervades every aspect of United States society.” Theories, then, that justify the supposed need to transform “our systems of education, justice, business, health care, and government.” Students need to be taught that

Racism is part of a system that is larger than individuals and operates with and without conscious support…To help make the concept [a theory] of institutional racism concrete for students, it is important to use statistics and clear factual examples of the current disparities found in a wide range of institutional settings..,it is very important to concentrate on current examples so that students can see that racism is still very much a part of every aspect of our institutions.

That was my bolding to highlight what is now known as Mass Formation Psychosis if the shared instilled belief is pernicious and Shared Meaning-Making if the beliefs and attitudes support a Collective Understanding on the need to shift to a Just, Inclusive Society. Either way, the technique is intentional, the same, and quite well understood as necessary for the desired internalized change at the level of each ‘citizen’ in a society. Schmidt even has a section on Internalized Racism that states “it is important for our students to understand how racism has become internalized within the human psyche” and refers to the phrase as “this psychologically-based concept” in case anyone still thinks that the CRT dispute is a battlefield of ideas, rather than the intended psychological bullseye it really targets.

Why? From the section on Historical Inequality, we have this explanation that clearly aims at what the Political Theorists call Social Reconstruction:

Understanding history is central to an ability to understand ourselves and the world in which we live. History is a valuable tool that social justice educators can and should use as a foundation upon which to construct the current realities of oppression…History can be studied as a way to understand the current situation of all racial groups…a historical review can help students see that oppressive circumstances can change through the concerted efforts of committed individuals…Centuries of ‘historical forgetting’ have taught them that the United States is a place where anyone who works hard can get ahead. Therefore, it is crucial to share with them a history that makes clear the ways that past events and policies have directly shaped the social reality of today.

If those quotes are not graphic enough, I was following up recently on a webinar for educators tied to the Roadmap for American Democracy civics/history initiative and how it intended to use the topic of Oppression in the classroom. It planned to push a concept called ‘co-processing’ which sounded like a new way of describing shared meaning-making and what theories must now be used to shape each student’s thinking. A little internet sleuthing pulled up a March 2019 OECD paper called “Imagination Unleashed: Democratizing the Knowledge Economy.” Recognizing one of the authors who has a tag here at ISC, Harvard prof Roberto Unger, its education vision fits with the above, but is not sold in terms of antiracism. Nevertheless, its needed Education vision (which used bolding instead of italics for emphasis) states:

We must equip citizens not only to participate in the economy and society but to transform it, through a lifelong education system that promotes cooperation and prioritises the power of the imagination…The knowledge economy, therefore, calls for education, both in youth and throughout life, that develops character, mindset, and non-cognitive as well as cognitive skills…as crucial as these immediate questions are, they also form part of a larger challenge: how to equip every student with the tools they need not only to flourish within their societies as they currently exist but to transform them for the better. Teachers and students must have the political, legal, and financial means to deal experimentally with the central tension in education under democracy: preparing people to flourish within present arrangements and assumptions while equipping them to defy those assumptions and arrangements.

Some of the four basic elements such a vision ‘demands’ of education are that “engagement at depth across disciplines, around themes or projects, counts for more than memorizing facts.” It can be viewed as a ‘dialectical approach to education’ that emphasizes “jumbling up disciplines and methods. It would aim to form a different mindset: one that refuses to treat radical doubt and intellectual experimentation as the prerogatives of genius and turns them instead into a common possession.” The same classroom function of that global vision then gets pitched in the US in another cited CRT paper from March 2005 published in Race Ethnicity and Education by Tara Yosso on “Whose Cultural Has Capital?”. So when your local school board, a legislator, or the media insists that CRT is not “taught in our schools,” be ready to recognize that its advocates write about it as reflecting a focus on ‘experiential knowledge’ and a refusal to make any student a ‘deficit thinker’ because of their lack of factual information.

Yosso stated and anti-racist educators cite her work in their Bibliographies that

I define CRT in education as a theoretical and analytical framework that challenges the ways race and racism impact educational structures, practices, and discourses. CRT is conceived as a social justice project that works toward the liberatory potential of schooling [Imagination Unleashed?]…CRT utilizes transdisciplinary approaches to link theory with practice, scholarship with teaching, and the academy with the community…CRT finds that racism is often well disguised in the rhetoric of shared ‘normative’ values and ‘neutral’ social scientific principles and practices.

So next time anyone is told “CRT isn’t taught to students in our schools”, turn that statement into its actual, openly declared purpose as laid out in this post. Are its tenets and practices USED on students in the classroom, whatever it is called? Is it their thinking and emotions being targeted for transformation? Are we prescribing Theories and Conceptual Understandings that they MUST use in evaluating their lived experiences and current situation? The advocates say quietly in publications not intended for us that all these things are components of CRT, whatever it calls itself and whatever its pitched rationale. If we investigate by function instead of name, we can still recognize what we are dealing with.

And remember that it ALWAYS aims at social, economic, and political change at an institutional level. The individual student and their psyche is merely the conduit for mass, almost invisible, change.

Unleashing the Power of Disruptive Imagination in Every Citizen to Avoid Linear Thinking

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Educators, think tanks, and other social scientists are not the only ones who can ‘backwards map’ from desired individual and social outcomes to the policies that need to be prescribed by law to put them in place. We writers can also use papers on desired New Forms of Governments by 2030 to lay out the new citizen characteristics needed to supposedly get these transformations. As a recent paper from the EU laid out https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/future-government-2030-citizen-centric-perspective-new-government-models the FuturGov game creates a process (bolding in original):

through which participants immerse themselves into the future, take on roles that are not theirs, and strategize the achieve their goals…[This will] Trigger imagination and creativity [and] Immerse people into possible futures…shaking up people’s preconceived ideas about the future. The aim is to avoid linear thinking in order to be more receptive to emergent changes…New literacies will be needed for the future. Futures literacies are needed to enable citizens to participate in anticipatory decision making recognising the context of uncertainty and complexity and building up individual and societal resilience to work collaboratively to address these…Critical thinking should be nurtured, through the education system and beyond in the workplace and civil society, including understanding digital media [media literacy] but also other aspects of people’s lives. Policy literacy is also very important, both for the present and for the future.

[Prescribing and standardizing values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors is simply part of the] “New practices and innovative strategies needed for governments to be able to tackle the emerging challenges. It is essential that governments nurture the culture of innovation, as well as the openness and responsibility for society.” Student-centered learning then, and a 21st century focus on prescribed outcomes on what is to be internalized at the level of the mind and personality. should be seen as simply a necessary component that are “enablers of new forms of government from 2030+ onwards…[part of] Putting citizens at the centre, not only is an opportunity to rethink government formats, and individual relationships with the state and institutional ways of working.”

Apparently an Axemaker, linear thinking, logical mind with a store of factual information is an impediment to an envisioned “‘hard-wiring’ of equality into the economy.” In this other recent, complementary, vision https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/Imagination_unleashed-_Democratising_the_knowledge_economy_v6.pdf just quoted:

It is not only ‘economic’ institutions that require transformation. The power of disruptive imagination needs to be unleashed in every citizen. Education systems and participative democracy needs to encourage a spirit of experimentation. Critically, these must be accompanied by the protection of vital stakes, safeguards, and endowments, making it possible for people to remain unafraid in the midst of quickened change.

Somehow I can just hear Sean Connery’s voice from The Hunt for Red October, but instead of the accented “One Ping Only”, we get policy planners and politicians all over the globe with these transformational plans for us insisting students now just need “Essential Content Only” and then attributing that to the presence of AI or search engine and Internet availability. Factual knowledge and a logical mind gets in the way of being ‘unafraid’ as the above quote called for. It gets in the way of the supplied conceptual understandings and prescribed categories of thought designed “to realise this cultural change, [which needs] education that fosters an attitude of lifelong questioning.” Going to the title of the previous post, genuine factual knowledge impedes the willing use of:

alternative pictures of how the future world, in which citizens live and governments operate, might look. Narratives do not claim to be unique truths, they are considered as frames that facilitate making sense of the world, frames that usually combine past and future, fact and fiction. Made of hopes, desires and fears, narratives frame people’s understanding of the past, perception of the present and imagination of the future. We took into account assumptions about the situation in 2030+ that related to the following categories: society, technology, economy, policy/legislation of the state, relationships between citizens and the state, new actors in citizen-government relationships, and role of corporations.

It is a vision that claims to be “citizen centric” and responsive to societal needs and it requires an education system where the obligation “requiring citizens to engage in regular and ongoing local policymaking” has been joined with ‘numeracy’ and ‘literacy’ as “the key pillars of the school system from Year 1 of schooling.” Anyone with actual, unrestricted knowledge of history and political theory would read aspirations of a future where “To avoid a divided state and a broken social contract, democracy work needs more resources and extensive engagement from all citizens. Democracy needs to permeate the entire society” and recognize it for the authoritarian, anti-individual, conception it actually is. Therefore we get Essential Content Only because it allows the necessary “shaping and constraining how governments, citizens, businesses and others interact with one another.”

Factual knowledge gets in the way of the transformative need to “generate conversations about what the future may look like by allowing us to displace our understanding of the present.” Provided concepts that can be used to address perceived problems “produce new ways to explore uncertainty and to have dialogues with stakeholders about complex and dynamics issues.” Making so much K-12 and higher education about the use of computers and virtual reality allows the needed “expressing different ideas and stories of the future through tangible objects allows the public to challenge their imagination; to see the possible future more as a multiplicity of ideas rather than separate space and time as well as to address the present critically.” No wonder we have such an emphasis now that all curricula be Relevant to the lives of students and perceived problems.

Let’s go back to that Nesta vision with its desire to create “an inclusive knowledge economy” that “gives expression to our distinctive human ability to reimagine the world around us” to advance ‘human freedom and realisation’  for everyone. That requires “promoting experimental government,” reforming education, and altering the “stories societies–and politicians–tell.” No wonder I keep encountering False Narratives from think tanks on education, data privacy, and how evidence-based policymaking really works if the crucial lever towards these transformations is to create stories to engage “the power and potential of the individual and collective imagination.” Factual knowledge and a logical mind get in the way of Nesta’s story of a reimagined vision for education where (bolding in original):

We must equip citizens not only to participate in the economy and society but to transform it, through a lifelong education system that promotes cooperation and prioritises the power of imagination…[Required Learner Profiles and Portrait of a Graduate come in handy where] the knowledge economy, therefore calls for education, both in youth and throughout life, that develops character, mindset, and non-cognitive as well as cognitive skills. This style of education crosses the divide between general and technical education. Rather than emphasising job-specific and machine specific skills, it requires a new model focusing on generic, flexible, high-order capabilities…they also form part of a larger challenge: how to equip every student with the tools they need not only to flourish within their societies as they currently exist but to transform them for the better. Teachers and students must have the political, legal, and financial means to deal experimentally with the central tension in education under democracy: preparing people to flourish within present arrangements and assumptions while equipping them to defy those assumptions and arrangements.

That flourishing and defiance requires “Essential Content Only” with prescribed beliefs, values, and categories of thought. It requires active learning so the needed Habits of Mind that will motivate the requisite transformational change in the present are embedded at a neural level in each student’s mind and personality. It creates a Marxist Man as a Maker of History which is not a surprise to anyone familiar with the work of its author, Harvard law prof Roberto Unger, which is why he has a tag here at ISC already.

If we have been led to see Marxism though as about the USSR and the Iron Curtain, and to believe socialism is about state ownership of the means of production, we will never recognize in time the little ‘c,’ Human Development Society vision, embedded in both these linked documents. If we only know what the think tanks tell us about education reforms and how standards, competencies, and social emotional learning work, we will not grasp that the requisite education laid out above to fit this sought transformation to ‘democracy’ is precisely the education being imposed by public and private schools right now.

Factual knowledge and a logical mind are viewed now by  institutions, politicians, think tanks, and civil society operators as impediments to this desired “push forward into the realm of the adjacent possible.” It is the only thing that can liberate us from this clearly planned intention to enslave the mind and person in the name of inclusion for all. flourishing, and meeting our needs.

History as a body of knowledge, and not as this planned march to alter and control the future politically, would reveal this will not go as planned. The question becomes though how many of us will recognize in time where these education visions are actually going.

My thanks though to all the promoters of the deceitful narratives. It made the desired Super Collaborative Government, Scenario #3, easy to see because it was full of all the many things I had noticed, that were factually not true, in various published White Papers.

The Future of Government is apparently all-intrusive according to anyone, of every persuasion, involved officially with formulating public policy. Education reforms are their favorite, largely invisible when misexplained, tool.

Good to know now, huh?

True Norths, Steerable Rudders, Heuristics Control, and Circumscribed Minds

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Now that we have finished that Trilogy, let’s put the parts together since I happen to have https://democracylab.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Democracy-Lab_Anthology-on-Democratic-Innovation_final-1.pdf explaining that this vision of ‘education and action learning’ can generate ‘shared understandings’ that will become the “building blocks for a new DNA of thriving democracy” and the “conscious evolution of our social systems.” That’s why Learn Liberty from the last post and its “Heuristics” video call for “Intellectual Humility” euphemized the same type of sought change. Instead, we are instructed to  begin “recognizing the flawed nature of [our] thinking [as] a bold first step to challenging it” and “be humble about our views.” Yet those of us paying attention will recognize this aim as functioning just like Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset as something all 21st century students globally should now have.

The part the admitted transformationalists via ed, and the purported “How to Think” School Choice ‘conservatives’, leave out is that they are both interested in creating what that Democratic Innovation blueprint called “Inner Work, self and meta-reflection as core competencies for a new OS.” If OS is not yet a recognized acronym in your busy life, it stands for Operating System just like your computer. That’s right. In the name of social and political change, your child’s very hardware and operating software, also known as their mind and personality, along with the biological brain and the central nervous system that embody both, are being targeted. Why? Because “we need to grow as human beings” and “develop a vision and an understanding of who we are and how we can internally host the rapid changes and become self-aware participants in the current transformation process.”

Hard not to visualize some of those marching Parkland or other high school students reading that passage, isn’t it? That blueprint included a quote from a name, Roberto Unger, who I recognized as a Harvard law prof [see tag] and it turned out he had written his vision of education in a book called The Religion of the Future. I think he is interested in a new Operating System as well, see what you think:

“In a free society, the individual has the educational equipment, as well as the economic and political occasion, to cross the frontier between the activities that take the framework for granted and those that bring it into question. He has been educated in a way that enables the mind as imagination to become ascendent over the mind as machine. He has learned to philosophize by acting [Parkland again and ‘action learning’ generally], in the sense that he recognizes in every project the seed of some great or small reformation. The practices of society and of culture multiply opportunities for the affirmation of this preeminence of the mind as imagination over the mind as a formulaic device.”

The “mind as imagination” is likely humble in its views and that ‘formulaic device’ slur sounds much like the Fixed Mindset insult or the supposedly discredited Axemaker Mind, doesn’t it? There turns out to be quite the consistence between the admitted Left and the supposed Right in the new kind of thinking and internalized OS each is pushing in the name of K-12 education. The better to get to a dialectical Convergence apparently. It all aligns with the Idea-centric vision we saw with History Matters, Thinking Like a Historian, and the News Literacy Project. All these curricula create internalized “shared understandings” that can be used to “design impactful projects and policies” so that “the political system can be transformed in such a way that we can adequately deal with our current environmental, social and ethical challenges and create the kind of world we want to live in.”

That willingness to transform needs new values and Ideas. Unger called it–“our vision of who we are and what we can hope for.” It also requires a willingness to be malleable in our dealings with other people–Intellectual Humility. All of these can be accomplished stealthily by what gets euphemistically hyped as “personalized learning,” or High Quality Project-Based Learning, to use just two current examples of what gets billed as “educational innovation”. Underneath though is what Unger confessed was a needed “reorientation of personal experience…and reconstruction of institutional arrangements, as well as with the radical changes of conception, attitude, and practice that such a combination requires.”

Values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors need to be targeted for change to create the sought new OS for each individual, not because they are the basis for an existing OS’s database of PII. Ideas are a useful vehicle to be the new definition of 21st century knowledge because, as Unger admitted, what is really being sought is a “revolution in human affairs”. That, in turn, requires “both change in consciousness and change in institutions…[where] no simple division exists between the religious and the political spheres of life.”

That quote certainly explains why every type of K-12 education now pushes a Tranzi OBE vision, doesn’t it? At stake are “attempts to influence our ideas about the possible and desirable forms of human association in each domain of social life.” Action learning instead of lectures makes sense for a change in classroom practice in this transformative vision when it is “the ideas we act out in our relations to one another [that] must, more than the ones we profess, be the object of concern.” Weigel was calling for much the same change when he emphasized that religion and education should create a properly cathected individual obedient to instilled values and Ideals. We have also seen this same aim pitched by creativity advocate John Raven as creating a ‘steerable rudder’ at the level of the mind and heart.

Without using the “M” word as I did in the last post, when Unger wrote of the need to “rely on institutional arrangements, established in law [good thing he is at Harvard Law, huh?], that restrain governmental or private oppression even as they secure a universal minimum of endowments to everyone,” it is still Uncle Karl’s ultimate vision he is describing. In the 21st century, preschool to higher ed are all being restructured to target the values and Ideas that guide an individual’s decisions and motivate his actions. This is all hidden for the most part and lied about by so many in the employ of think tanks and the media on all sides because we are no longer free NOT to “change our enacted beliefs about the possible and desirable forms of human association.” Education targets that internalized OS, as a government mandate from all levels enacted as a matter of law, precisely because this “effort to envisage and to establish a greater life for the common man” requires a new purpose for education.

That purpose necessitates new Ideas, practices, and arrangements that will, at a neural level, “bridge the gap between the personal and the political.” Hard to see though under euphemisms like Intellectual Humility, Excellence, or Quality Learning. All of these ultimately target what Unger said would be needed to get what he called Deep Freedom, a much more alluring phrase than that M word.

Having a Growth Mindset or Intellectual Humility as a prescribed goal makes sense if a vision of the future needs “many minds and many wills.” A focus on Ideas and Reading and Thinking like a Historian make sense if a desired transformation “evolves in historical, not in biographical, time.” Criticizing the “imperious, autonomous self” or insisting that students become “Hardwired to Connect” makes sense if one has a vision that “it is not within the purview of the individual, no matter how powerful, to direct.” Making the internalized changes to the student the goal of K-12 education makes sense, as so many of the Portrait of a Graduate or Positive School Climate visions now do, if the political and religious vision of the future relies on:

“a change in the conduct of life: a change of heart, a change of consciousness, a change in the orientation of existence.”

In other words, a new internalized OS. a/k/a student-centered learning.

 

Seeking Transfiguration of the Actual by the Imagination of the Possible: Competency in Context

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Don’t we just love it when we can locate the real rationales for what we have indisputedly uncovered? All of this deliberate Mind Arson via our K-12 schools and repeated disdain for a logical Axemaker Mind is too pervasive not to be an essential component of the plans, but an explicit, fully integrated confession of intentions can be hard to find. Pieced together works, but it’s neither as satisfying or as damning.  Luckily for us, my footnote mining recently pulled up a reference to a 1993 book published in the UK by Michael Fullan, still one of the world’s premier drivers of Radical Ed Reform. We covered his cutting-edge transdisciplinary global education vision here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/opting-out-as-the-remedy-may-mean-accidentally-accelerating-nonconsensual-transformations/

The equity and excellence that are the shorthand phrase to describe the goals of the Quality Education for Minorities Project we met in the last post are essential for all students Fullan asserted, but the “ultimate aim of education is to produce a learning society.” That requires students and teachers with a “combination of moral purpose and change agentry–caring and competence.” If that sounds like Fullan was already pushing for wholesale social change in a collective direction with education as the driver more than 20 years ago, he was. Quoting what he wanted: “Put another way, the ability to cope with change, learning as much as possible with each encounter is the generic capacity needed for the twenty-first century.”

Luckily for us, Fullan confessed that (with italics) that we “are talking about a learning society not just a learning school system. The commitment and practice of learning must find itself in all kinds of organizations and institutions if it is to achieve any kind of force in society as a whole.” (Remember two posts ago, Peter Drucker also saw organizations as key to his government-steered, planned economy and society with education as the transition vehicle). The 1992 program for the “human development project” for Canada and the United States is cited by name and is laid out in a document euphemistically called The Learning Society (because citing to Uncle Karl at that time was considered unwise and his blueprint needed name laundering) and published by CIAR–the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Before we cover those aims, we have another global radical (with a blog tag and a perch at Harvard Law), Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who has also laid out the global transformation vision, including the necessary role of education. He also wants to limit education to “the development of generic capacities by contrast to both training in specialized skills and the passive transmittal of information.” Those latter two traditional purposes of education were thought to impede “wholehearted engagement and action” towards the kind of democratic experimentalism Unger laid out in his 1998 book Democracy Realized: the progressive alternative. I bought that book after a mention of it because I recognized Unger’s influence (he was a professor at Harvard when both the Obamas were in law school there) and all the references we have encountered in the education reforms to democracy as the goal and progressive, polyphonic federalism (Jan 28, 2015 post) as the means to get around the US Constitution.

Reading the book I can recognize how closely what Unger wants ties with the actual pushes I am seeing now at the state and local levels in the US. At one point Unger stated specifically that US states were already pursuing his vision of democratic experimentalism by transforming institutions. Unger made it crystal clear he wanted the obstructions of the US political system’s “checks and balances” that impede social transformations aimed at restructuring property and social relations to be disregarded and overriden. That is something we should all keep in mind as the federal government sends money to states and cities and governors, legislators, mayors, and city councils all pursue comparable reforms to what Unger laid out at the necessary, “decentralized”, local level.

With the formal sponsors of the Common Core and several federal agencies all now pushing Competency as the goal of both K-12 and higher ed for all students, let’s keep in mind Unger’s desire for and definition of generic capacities for all. “Such capacities may be practical as well as conceptual [think of Enduring Understandings, Understanding by Design, and core disciplinary ideas in the current implementation], and they include the core substantive tools of learning. The heart of this education in capacities is the transfiguration of the actual by the imagination of the possible. In natural science and social and historical study we come to understand how and why things work by discovering the conditions under which each thing can become something else.” Adapt. Evolve. That certainly puts the C3 Social Studies Framework, Next Generation Science Standards  http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2015/03/teaching_the_next_generation_s.html , and the APUSH controversy over its new, divisive conceptual framework in the light of their true transformative mindset purposes, doesn’t it?

Actual, factual knowledge and a logical, Axemaker Mind are apparently as much an impediment to all these plans as that pesky US Constitution. By the way, the abstract for The Learning Society specifically mentioned “educating the population for new competencies” so I am not just interpreting Unger or Fullan’s “generic capacities” as fitting the definition of Competency. The basic developmental needs that are not just a floor for everyone, but also the desired ceiling so that herd-defying individuals cannot be transformation barriers in the way of social experimentation, are listed as the following outcomes: “the ability to make effective social connections with others, competence in the tools and skills of the culture and the opportunity to make productive use of them, good coping skills, healthy response patterns in the face of stress [grit? perseverence?], perceived control over one’s life, a sense of psychological well-being, and good self-esteem.”

I have previously pointed out that the Inclusive Prosperity vision (Feb 22, 2015 post) fits Marx’s Human Development Model perfectly and that it is alarming that in December 2013 the UK and US made achieving “subjective well-being” the new purpose of governments (Dec 23, 2013 post). The year after the dissolution of the USSR and 3 years after the Berlin Wall fell, we got a vision of wholesale social and economic, nonconsensual transformation, that stated that “reconceptualizing the nature of learning and the relationship between collective and individual development” provides the “knowledge base for moving our own society forward.” It just so happens that that reconceptualized “learning” fits with the parameters laid out by the QEM Project from the last post so that Uncle Karl’s vision can be shrouded and compelled by interpretations of federal civil rights laws.

The Learning Society foresaw this convenient cover and mentioned the “overdue recognition that as a society, we need to include previously excluded groups on an equitable basis, particularly indigenous peoples and those from minority cultures.” The previous paragraph had discussed the need for a Learning Society to deal with “the problems associated with large scale immigration, with poverty, and with unemployment are increasing.” Collectivism is thus the answer for the very problems governments created in the first place with previous bad policies. Since the Learning Society has little use for what an individual wants, why do governments want prosperity and economic growth? “To ensure that they create sufficient wealth to support a broad range of social, medical, and human services.” No mention of the added bonus of funding lots of public sector pensions for the dispensers of those services.

The return of a surreptitious School to Work emphasis now at the state level after the controversies when it was pushed at the federal level in the 90s makes perfect sense when we read this vision from the 1992 blueprint. “The creation of new ideas and applications is in turn dependent on the availability of a highly skilled and motivated workforce and its orchestrated deployment across a broad array of scientific and industrial tasks.” No wonder those generic capacities are all about “tasks and executions” in Unger’s vision of the needed progressive education and the emancipatory school. Serfs had to stay where they were commanded and we Americans now get to be deployed as “orchestrated” to meet everyone’s “needs.”

So add to the reams of source materials I lay out in my book Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon on how the Cold War did not end quite as advertised, this Learning Society vision. Who precisely did win if the “main objectives of a CIAR program in human development” to be implemented starting in 1992 in Canada and the US is to “reconceptualize the dynamics of collective and individual human development”?

If governments at all levels, and the organizations they are creating and funding, are dedicated to creating an “ability to motivate and organize all members of a society, in an innovative fashion,” did we escape from the Cold War still, factually, a free people?

Especially if taxpayer-funded education and a new definition of Learning binding all of us at the level of our minds and personalities is the declared, intended vehicle.

Perhaps “Not Serfs Yet” as our motto was a premature boast?

 

Evolution to a Holos Consciousness Is Certainly Not My Idea of Education Reform. Is It Yours?

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Take a deep breath and hold on to your hat if you have one on. The amount of evidence I have on the story I am about to tell is overwhelming, but in a blog format I cannot really cite all of it. Those with my book will want to pull it out and reread the parts about Theodore Brameld’s intentions for education globally and Gorbachev, Harlan Cleveland, the noosphere, and the Club of Rome. The phrase Holos Consciousness is the desire of the related Club of Budapest and was laid out in Ervin Laszlo’s 2001 book, Macroshift: Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable World.

I ordered it after his son, Christopher, was cited as the main force behind the October 2014 Global Forum on Business as an Agent of World Benefit, and when I recognized how many of the important pushers of a radical K-12 education vision had been involved with Ervin’s pursuit of conscious evolution during the Cold War–the General Evolution Research Group or GERG. Two names really jumped out from the list of Honorary Budapest Members, Professor Nicholas Negroponte, a founder of the MIT Media Lab that we just keep encountering, and Robert Muller (whose World Core Curriculum from the 90s is the nightmare many have worried is where the phrase Common Core was designed to quietly lead.)

Now I am going to pivot for a moment to the report RSA issued earlier in the week that I assumed would tie into the already announced communitarian agenda of the future using Big Data. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/science-fiction-made-real-were-we-ever-to-know-in-time/ I knew it was on character education and social and emotional learning as the new K-12 emphasis. The actual report though had this provocative title: Schools with Soul: A new approach to Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Education. RSA promptly created the acronym SMSC education so we will too. SMSC “requires a robust, co-constructed and shared understanding of each of its components” in the literal sense of insisting we are now to have approved, and accepted by all, beliefs fostered via school (and media as well). Everything else I suppose is to be illicit. Foremost on the list of what must be jettisoned as SMSC comes to the forefront of the view of what education is to be in the 21st century are the “overt values of capitalism and individuality.”

That true aim of global education reform, which you may remember we just keep encountering in the small print describing definitions and planned practices, becomes even more apparent if you know anything about the two individuals chosen for intro quotes in that RSA report. Professor Unger’s is mild, almost fortune cookie material: “The commanding objective must be the achievement of a larger life for ordinary men and women.” Only a hint of his radical beliefs now told from his perch as a Harvard professor. We met Unger here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/multiple-recent-proclamations-laying-out-commitment-to-revolutionary-transformation-of-our-entire-society/ where I quoted his intentions laid out in a 2007 book. Here’s a sample from that post that fits in perfectly with the Helos Consciousness and the Education 3.0 we have been discussing in comments:

“Education, beginning in childhood and continuing throughout the working life, must nourish a core of generic conceptual and practical capacities to make the new out of the old. It must also equip the mind with the means with which to resist the present. For this very reason, the school should not remain under the control of the community of local families, who tell the child, become like us.”

Now Schools with Soul says that “more than any other dimension of SMSC, spiritual development needs a ‘stipulative’ definition that spells out how pupils’ spirituality will be developed at school…three categories…could usefully inform schools’ approaches: experiences, practices, and perspectives.” Long time readers will remember that many New Age practitioners attach all sorts of names to their pushes and then show up at schools or doing teacher development where it gets referred to as promoting Positive School Climate or anti-bullying or mental first-aid. Same practices and experiences being promoted. Same end-game transformed perspectives being sought.

In fact the second lead-in quote is far more overt than Unger’s. Stephen R. Covey is cited for stating that “We are not human beings are on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.” OK, you say, Covey is entitled to his beliefs. But how many readers would recognize that Covey’s books such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or his book just for teens are cited by charter schools and in ed reform presentations as embodying what schools now push to promote success for all? What they take into consideration in calculating whether a student is ‘achieving’ or has ‘Growth.’ The presentation I heard of Covey’s work was sponsored by AT&T and the local Chamber of Commerce as what the essence of the legislatively mandated “soft skills” would mean.

My point is that these fundamental shifts in the essence of what is felt and valued and believed are taking place now. It’s in the digital curricula and  MIT Media Lab produced games to create empathy or social and emotional learning practices that are not even on a parent’s radar screen. RSA may be located in the UK, but that’s a report with global aspirations citing Michael Barber and his work for Pearson and many of the reports we have discussed on this blog. The shift is occurring now. It is about altering worldviews and mindsets, and we are not even being given a chance to consent, or a By Your Leave, or even a reference to the shift in an electoral platform. I am seeing conversion charters that use euphemisms to take away that very veto power from parents or local school boards that Unger aspired to obtain, and School Governance Councils created to do the same. It could be farce if children’s minds and personalities were not the actual target.

Oh, and Western civilization when we read the intended shifts involved with that Holos Consciousness sought by the Club of Budapest. And we get there by having schools that quietly implement a spirituality focus without calling it that in letters home or robocalls to parents interpreting the school’s new vision and mission. Instead, the classrooms simply “initiate important conversations about what life is for, instilling a better felt sense for the myriad of human experiences, and some practical know-how on meaning-making for ourselves and others through rituals and practices.” You can do a search and check out how often now Mindfulness exercises are being pushed in the classroom, even on preschoolers and elementary kids. None of this is accidental and all of it is precisely in line with what the Club of Budapest regards as necessary for its agenda of planetary change.

Here’s the RSA definition of spiritual experiences, practices, and perspectives. Before I give it I will remind all of us that this fits with Mihalyi Csiksentmihalyi’s definition of the flow experiences schools should create in order to foster what he defines as excellence. Also that Csik is involved with Ervin Laszlo’s work on conscious evolution. Yes, Houston, we do have a problem, and indeed, the worst we could contemplate is really already here.  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/excellence-means-education-putting-what-we-feel-wish-for-and-think-in-harmony/

“Spiritual experiences are moments of aliveness, rapture and homecoming that make the world feel viscerally meaningful. Spiritual practices are the disciplined and creative activities that support human development–things we do to strengthen our inner lives. Spiritual perspectives are the value-rich visions of what it means to be here, to be human, our worldviews that contextualize our experiences and practices.”

In other words, these look a great deal like a student-centered classroom having media rich activities and a rich, relevant dialogue that focuses on the 4Cs of 21st century skills: communication, creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking. Parents will never notice the shift. If they do, Common Core is ever ready to be the excuse for the change in attitudes and dispositions in the student. I want to close this post about how such a fundamental desired shift can and is occurring almost invisibly with a point Zaid Hassan made in his book we discussed in the last post. He talks about the importance of a koan to obtaining personal transformation in Buddhism. As a serious nerd and scholar of what is really going on in education, I noticed the resemblance to John Dewey’s Indeterminate Situation and much of the planned assessment under the Common Core.

As I always say, same function, same purpose, whether admitted or not, so let’s look at what Hassan said was the purpose of a koan.

“In Zen practice, a koan is a particular kind of question that, on the face of it, seems not to make any sense. It’s used with students to provoke great doubt and gauge their progress in Zen. For example, ‘two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?’…the value of a koan is not in answering the question, for there is no answer. It’s that the Zen student, in struggling with the question, arrives at a new way of being, valuing, if you like, the very nature of the struggle. The struggle generates value, producing new insights and change.”

Such productive struggle, as educators call it of untaught or ambiguous problems, has a similar effect in non-Zen students. Some of them do not appreciate such deliberate social engineering while they are legally captives in a K-12 classroom in the least.

Now that we have seen how the Holos Consciousness can be grasped on a massive scale without anyone really noticing the shift while it is happening, we will go into the nature of the Macroshift next.

Tuition-Paid, Taxpayer-Funded, and Faith-Based Schools Unite to Force a Revolution of Being

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The phrase “Revolution of Being” showed up recently in an essay from the 70s that then proceeded to lay out the education vision for how to transition to a radically different collectivist society. After realizing the vision fit with the 21st century education reforms we are now dealing with globally under numerous names, I decided to take a long walk to catch my breath. During that escape the term Creatures of the State came to me to describe my frustration that people either living at taxpayer expense or off the proceeds of untaxed foundations or university endowments feel so free to advocate for radical change while they largely get to ignore the likely toxic effects. Roberto Unger from our last post is an example but so are many of the people we are going to talk about today.

And as you will see with my resentment of the use of the phrase “secession of the successful” to describe the suburbs, especially those representing the prosperous northern arc of Atlanta, I am totally losing my patience with being lectured on justice and fairness by Creatures of the State who make their living from advocating for bad ideas. And usually lying about it to prevent taxpayer rage. Creatures of the State have no grounds to lecture the rest of us about our responsibilities as a community or what Equity requires. The phrasing in the title about the nature of the schools working together was in the Thanksgiving letter from the School District Super from one of those greatly resented areas of metro Atlanta. The one with the conversion charter that deceitfully mandates the Revolution of Being view of education on unsuspecting taxpayers. The pithiness of phrasing makes it quite clear the Super is repeating a declared intention that there be No Way Out from the use of ALL schools, every type, to ensure Mindsets Suitable for Radical Social Change.

I grew up outside Atlanta in Marietta and live in what is called the Sandy Springs area now so when the Regional Equity advocates last week cited a 2005 book by Kevin Kruse called White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism in connection with commenting on the move of the Braves baseball team to a new stadium, I got a copy. I am glad I did but I am going to need new walking shoes at this rate if I have to keep reading all these deliberately inflammatory statements. In an effort to attack the very legitimacy of the idea of the suburbs Professor Kruse stated (my bolding in frustration):

“the [black political power/white economic strength] coalition was, for the first time since its founding, no longer confronted with the resistance of reactionary whites. This was not, of course, because such segregationist whites changed their minds; it was because they changed their addresses. In the suburbs surrounding the city–away from Atlanta, away from the biracial coalition, and away from blacks–whites created the Atlanta of which the city’s segregationists long dreamed.”

Now Kruse did later call attention to the fact that much of Atlanta’s growth came from new arrivals, not Dixiecrats fleeing across the Chattahoochee to get better prices on white sheets for hoods, but he went on to taint the arrivals and their views all the same:

“Whether they had been involved in white flight or not, the new arrivals to southern suburbs like those around Atlanta came to understand and accept the politics born out of white flight all the same.”

With that slap in the face, along with stating that “[r]egardless of their origins, those who made homes for themselves in the suburbs generally held a common indifference to the people and problems of the city,” Kruse might as well be putting a large bullseye on those suburbs and their schools. He then took the “secession of the successful” line from Professor Robert Reich before he became Clinton’s Secretary of Labor.

“In 1991 Reich noted that the country’s most affluent were ‘quietly seceding from the large and diverse publics of America into homogeneous enclaves, within which their earnings need not be redistributed to people less fortunate than themselves.'”

Perhaps they moved to get away from the lawful larceny of Creatures of the State Professor Reich and do not particularly care what the color of their neighbor’s skin is. But throwing race into the mix makes one group look like the White Hats and the other Evil. More discreet than simply writing an explicit intro to the US edition of the radical book The Spirit Level laying out the real aims. But then the taxpayers in Cobb or North Fulton would know they are being tainted as uncaring segregationists by virtue of address and nothing else. In his Epilogue, Kruse went on to try to use the paintbrush of racism to taint the

“powerful new political philosophy [that] took hold in these post-secession suburbs. Finally free to pursue a politics that accepted as its normative values an individualistic interpretation of ‘freedom of association,’ a fervent faith in free enterprise, and a fierce hostility to the federal government, a new suburban conservatism took the now familiar themes of isolation, individualism, and privatization to unprecedented levels.”

Now I know this is self-justifying BS but this nonsense is the foundation of way too many graduate sociology or political science or education degrees. Then the credentialed Doctors living as Creatures of the State feel entitled to lie to taxpayers and force atrocious policies on suburban schools (public, private, or sectarian as the title affirms) and neighborhoods. It’s the Mindset of the Metro Atlanta Equity Atlas released Tuesday, November 19. I was there and the rage for seeking Social Justice and Equity was on full display. Released by the Partnership for Southern Equity with its ties to Emory University and its Center for Community Partnerships, Emory is fulfilling its role as an anchor institution as specifically discussed in the last post and Monday’s Anchor Institution summit at the federal Housing and Urban Administration. As in the day before the MAEA rollout.

If that seems a bit too timely, I can attest that Emory was one of the anchor institutions mentioned in the Good Society series of articles laying out the new social, political, and economic vision we are to be quietly transitioning to. In the name of Equity in fact.  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/motto-of-living-well-as-an-individual-is-not-functional-anymore-must-find-ways-to-live-well-together/ is the post where I describe that vision as well as the PolicyLink/Center for American Progress vision of The All-In Nation. PolicyLink turns out to be another sponsor of MAEA. Its head wrote the “Moving From Data to Action” page.

But the original sponsor of the MAEA concept was stated as a NeighborWorks America. So of course I came home and looked it up. http://www.nw.org/network/aboutUs/history/default.asp is the history of this taxpayer funded entity going back decades to the creation of HUD and shift in federal housing policies. Could we make the case that it is entities like NeighborWorks that led to the subprime bond defaults and played a large role in the financial meltdown of 2008? By all means, let’s keep pursuing Equity at all costs and go for broke. Literally between the dollars spent and the minds destroyed.

MAEA has a lot of maps. The speakers want the people who have less to know it and be resentful of the geographic areas that are wealthier or whiter. No one said anything about printing directions to houses but it is almost that bad. Currying a real belief in the fallacy that “some have more because others have less.” Now MAEA mentions a new HUD proposed rule on mapping geographic areas (as MAEA does) on lots of criteria so people will know where they wish to live. Then MAEA calls objections to the rule “a racially-fueled ‘Not in My Backyard Panic'” and goes on to criticize an “editorial in Investor’s Business Daily [that] claimed that this kind of mapping implies that the homeowners are racist if they choose to live in a suburb with little affordable housing.”

MAEA, then showing its own respect for others on issues of race and class, follows that IBD quote with this sentence: “Here, the term ‘affordable’ appears to be code for the presence of Black residents.”

Honestly, what a horrible document and a horrible mentality. With MAEA, Atlanta joined Denver; Portland, Oregon; and Boston as cities with these equity atlases. I doubt they will be the last.

So as we start this holiday week of Thanksgiving let’s once again be grateful we are monitoring this intended Revolution of Being in real time.

In all its manifestations.

We may not like what is being sought but we are unaware no more of these official policies or how they join together.

Again let’s be thankful for that awareness while there is still time for rebuttal.

 

Multiple Recent Proclamations Laying Out Commitment To Revolutionary Transformation of Our Entire Society

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By recent I mean within the last week.  Either as an early Christmas present or to give us cause for giving thanks at the complete lack of any ambiguity whatsoever we have explicit cites, open proclamations, overt coordination with federal agencies, a veritable cornucopia of intentions that should eliminate any dispute as to what is going on. Only an electronic color billboard in Times Square could be more explicit. It is indeed slam dunk time in our effort to show that the education reforms known as Common Core or 21st Century Skills or social and emotional learning are actually a means of gaining much broader transformations.

And to show that this is truly a bipartisan attempt to make political power the harness for anyone seeking economic power in the 21st century, the first paper I am going to cite came from a blog run by Jay P. Greene tied to a number of what are considered to be Republican think tanks. Not exactly where you think you would encounter a recommendation that would lead to a “truly democratic consciousness to guide the process of socialist development itself.”

On Monday Jay posted a cite to a new NBER Working Paper called “Fostering and Measuring Skills: Interventions that Improve Character and Cognition” from U-Chicago Profs James Heckman and Tim Kautz with a blurb about state achievement tests not getting at these types of important skills. Pulling up the actual paper since I knew what can lurk under such euphemistic names I discovered lots of troubling sponsors but especially the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Founded and funded by George Soros among others including Drummond Pike from the Tides Foundation and Amartya Sen of capability as a human right and other famous names who decidedly do wish to move economic thinking away from anything other than Statism and economic planning. Bad enough connections to be troubling when cited as guidance on what should be going on in the K-12 classroom.

But that’s actually not the big reveal. In footnote #6 if you pull up a copy you will see the cited authority backing up the statements about skills to now be cultivated in classroom and measured via new assessments. The second sentence says “the modern literature traces back to Bowles and Gintis (1976)…” Now I am familiar with that book and I first wrote about it back in February  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/promoting-alternative-thinking-strategies-is-this-really-mental-health-first-aid/ so I immediately recognized the significance of saying that the Grit Perseverance push (yes that Glenn Beck program on the DoEd report last March that raised such a ruckus), Growth Mindset, non-cognitive skills, positive behavior, character education–all the various names these mandates hide under including College and Career Ready go back to a book written by two self-proclaimed Marxist profs of their future vision of education to transform the US away from capitalism. That’s the cite and that’s the purpose of all this and the book again is Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life.

So all these programs are ultimately grounded in gaining that new consciousness that will promote Gintis and Bowles’ belief that “Capitalism is an irrational system, standing in the way of further social progress. It must be replaced.” G & B also hope that via education the sought revolution can be mostly without blood shed. So of course these intentions now get pursued stealthily with excuses like an anti-bullying agenda and Positive School Climate. How ironic.

Last Wednesday Harvard Law Prof and Brazilian Leftist politician Roberto Mangabiera Unger gave a most alarming lecture at the Royal Science Academy in London. It sent me scurrying for his 2007 book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound which sure enough laid out his determination to use education to:

“accelerate and direct the permanent invention of the new that we are able to overthrow the dictatorship of the dead over the living and to turn our minds more freely and fully toward the people and the phenomena around us.”

Oh I hope Unger is not the professor who taught US Constitutional Law to President Obama or the First Lady when they were all at Harvard Law together. Not with his expressed intentions “of ambitions for the transformation of humanity” or “direction for the development of the moral experience of mankind under the reign of democracy and experimentalism.” Although that kind of experimentation does rather fit in with a HUD presentation two days ago, November 18, by Gar Alperovitz’s Democracy Collaborative. Now don’t worry. The Annie E. Casey Foundation provided the funding for the actual Anchor Institution reports. Don’t pay any attention to the fact that the Anchor Mission Dashboard lays out a Womb to Tomb Transformative economic Vision that keeps mentioning the words “equitable” and “minority.” Nor that it fits with the Regional 21 or the new Promise Zones 2nd term initiatives. Purely coincidental.

Just like it’s entirely coincidental Unger describes his education vision like this:

“Education, beginning in childhood and continuing throughout the working life, must nourish a core of generic conceptual and practical capacities to make the new out of the old. It must also equip the mind with the means with which to resist the present. For this very reason, the school should not remain under the control of the community of local families, who tell the child: become like us.”

We could make that a goal for all students and call it a common core. Excellent means to invisibly and gradually transform the present to alter the future. And I know just the overpaid consultant who will use the School Governance Council concept and a school district conversion charter to make that vision so. While the high-achieving suburban communities with high taxes to benefit the schools remain entirely ignorant of the real aims. Perhaps if more parents and taxpayers read this Unger quote they would better appreciate the last word they may want to hear is “innovation” in connection with schools. This is certainly innovative:

“democracy grants to ordinary men and women the power to reimagine and to remake the social order. That is why under democracy prophecy speaks louder than memory. That is why democrats discover that the roots of a human being lie in the future rather than in the past.

In a democracy, the school should speak for the future, not for the state or for the family, giving the child the instruments with which to rescue itself from the biases of its family, the interests of its class, and the illusions of its epoch.”

Honestly I think Professor Unger should be the last person criticizing people led by illusions.

Can’t you see now why it is so important to create no effective recourse to a local school board or politician from all the initiatives coming in as education reform?

I don’t go looking for these things. Just monitoring the actually required classroom changes keeps turning up all these self-proclaimed radicals hollering the whys behind  their policies and practices to anyone who will listen or read their words.

May enough parents and taxpayers recognize all this in time.