Tag Archives: splc-Southern Poverty Law Center

Battle for the Mind and Who We Ought to Be: Portrait of a Graduate in 2030 Thanks to Charlottesville

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I have looked at the ready-to-go lessons on racism and hate and the attempt to make the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) Teaching Tolerance curriculum mandatory in all classrooms. In the comments to the previous post are plenty of links to the cited materials and one observant comment on how often the letters are signed with a reference to solidarity. If I go back and relink we will not be able to move forward into a unique discussion of how I believe this all fits together and how fall 2017 is more than the beginning of another school year. I have written about the UN’s Dignity for All by 2030 campaign that essentially calls on governments and institutions at every level to create and direct an economy and society based on meeting human needs. I usually shorthand it as the MH vision because it was Uncle Karl himself a long time ago who laid out the conditions for what he called little ‘c’ communism way back in the 19th century.

Guess What? Any student starting Kindergarten or PreFirst this fall with then 12 years of schooling will graduate in what year? I’ll admit I did a graph to doublecheck my calculation and the answer is 2030. How coincidental. What’s more we have the new federal education law kicking in with its prescriptions and most of the state plans are pitched in terms of what the personal characteristics of the student should be when they graduate from high school. Sometimes with the name of Learner Profile, Graduate Profile, or Portrait of a Graduate.

One of the articles being pitched for what Charlottesville should mean  http://behavioralscientist.org/charlottesvilles-battle-human-nature/ was written by the editor-in-chief who just happened to now live in Charlottesville. He was previously at the same U-Penn hatching Positive Psychology and the PERMA Positive Education template we have covered. He even worked with psychologist Angela Duckworth in her lab. You know as in Grit and Perseverence, the Character Lab,  the Growth Mindset Scholars Network, and the Science of Virtues?

That was just from the top of my head. Nesterak concluded that troubling article with this line: “In the battle for human nature, behavioral scientists have a pivotal role to play. They can and must help people understand the people we can be.” That’s certainly a reason for K-12 education to be about implementing the findings of the behavioral sciences, isn’t it? With nary a head’s up, much less actual consent. Let’s go back and discover that a 1998 book called Curriculum, Religion, and Public Education: Conversations for an Enlarging Public Square laid out the need for education and a new type of ‘democratic dialogue’ to create what it called the ethic of solidarity and italicized just like that. Remember this as you see constant references to #Charlottesville Conversations.

Also remember that just after that call for the ethic of solidarity we had this confession: “Education, like religion, is about the transformation of consciousness. Students entertain doubt, while teachers foster faith in human discourse and intelligence. In the process, individual and social transformation occurs.” Earlier in that essay, the author had defined something he called the ‘common faith’ and it is America’s ‘common faith’ that the curricula mandated after Charlottesville seeks to dramatically shift, to something more amenable to the desired MH society by 2030. The ‘common faith’ is “those beliefs, assumptions, and myths that provide the ‘glue’ for a society.” In other words, we mustn’t let the actual physical remnants describing in real time why the Civil War was fought and what its carnage meant to the survivors. The desired narrative should provide the ‘lenses’ or filters through which the past is seen. Notice that is precisely what all those letters and lesson plans intend to do. (My bolding)

“But what is to stop this ‘community of difference’ from devolving into warring factions? It is at this juncture that this ethic of solidarity enters the discussion. Solidarity has two essential features. First, it grants diverse social groups enough respect to listen to them and use all ideas when considering existing social and civic values. Second, it realizes that the lives of individuals in differing groups are ecologically interconnected to the point that everyone is accountable to everyone else. No assumption of uniformity exists here-just the commitment to work together to bring about mutually beneficial social and civic change.”

When I read an old passage like that and recognize it is currently being forced into reality, it’s hard not to imagine people who honestly do believe they have waited long enough for change they have been taught is their due. They must simply regard it as a burden others must now bear. In the last post we discussed how the City of Boston had laid out its intent to transition to the MH vision in the name of Resilience and Racial Equity. Another Resilient City, Dallas, helpfully mentioned its intention to adhere to the Kellogg Foundation “Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation” Framework. Since I happen to know that the new ESSA evidence-based regulations rely on a Kellogg Foundation Logic Model on Achieving Outcomes first created about the time of that 1998 book, I decided to locate the TRHT Implementation Guide issued in December 2016. It was the result of at least a 5-month process so President Trump is not the leader it hoped to have in the White House.

Before I start to quote what this vision is, I want to point out that SPLC is a listed partner of the TRHT so the Teaching Tolerance curriculum is a component and planned tool as well. On the Thursday, August 10, before the permitted “Unite the Right” march on Saturday, August 12, led by a former Obama Organizing for America enthusiast who had a conversion epiphany in January just after the publication of that Guide, the SPLC issued a Campus Guide to the Alt-Right. Really helpful and suspicious timing, huh? What is it that TRHT wants to do? Just what most college campuses, the Dignity for All by 2030, Resilient Cities, and others all say they seek as well. TRHT

“will help communities across the US embrace racial healing and uproot the conscious and unconscious belief in a hierarchy of human value that limits equal access to quality education, fulfilling employment, sage neighborhoods and equal housing opportunities, while honoring tribal access to equitable resources and quality health care. Unless the central belief system that fuels racial, ethnic, and place of origin inequities is challenged and changed, societal progress cannot be sustained over time.”

Changing that central belief in every US classroom is precisely what #Charlottesville Conversations aims to do and what learning standards like the Common Core make so much easier. Poor Heather Heyer. I wonder if she had any idea what the broader implications were of what was going on in Charlottesville that day or the powder keg that needed to be ignited. Nesterak after all stated that the “battle for human nature was about who we are and who we can be…it will continue online and in the streets, when Charlottesville is replaced by the next city.” The social trasformationalists need that next city to supposedly propel the Resilient or TRHT vision of “a new day, one based on a common humanity for all communities?” That vision needs a new form of education to get at “centuries of this [racial hierarchy] belief system [that] have consciously shaped our individual thought patterns.”

Here is an italicized MLK quote from the Implementation Guide which helps explains all the interest in turning students at all levels into Social Change Agents.

“Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. Human progress never rolls on the wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts…We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always right to do right.”

Charlottesville accelerated that timetable and is attempting to make the desired changes in individual thought patterns mandatory now for all students in all schools in every community. Just what the MH vision by 2030 needs to stay on its announced schedule. Poor Heather. TRHT Frameworks for Action and Guiding principles and Plans for Resilience probably thought they would get awful graphics from the tikitorch march and fighting to ignite the needed mandate. Now they have martyrs and students determined to Remember Charlottesville even though they are never to actually grasp its real significance or their needed role as change agents.

Or the function of time to implement all these plans finally.

 

 

 

 

Harnessing the Willingness of the Populace to Fill its Role in These Plans Via Deceit at all Levels

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Part Two begins with the UNESCO General Conference meeting in Paris that last week enacted what it already abbreviates as FFA–Education 2030 Framework for Action: Towards inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all. UNESCO is celebrating its 70th anniversary at this meeting and fully intends to use “Quality Education” to achieve its long time agenda of “Building Peace in the Minds of Men and Women”. That’s what Rapprochement of Cultures and Human Rights Education were about from the last two posts. I happen to have the up-to-date official definition of Quality Learning at the ready for us:

“there is an acute need to foster skills, values and attitudes that will enable people to overcome religious, linguistic and cultural differences, to coexist peacefully, and to discover shared human, moral and ethical principles…we attach great importance to enhancing quality in learning by..raising awareness of shared moral, ethical and cultural values, and promoting tolerance of differences [at least certain kinds of differences as the Oregon bakers discovered].”

It is that internalized belief and value system we all have that is being consistently targeted, isn’t it? They do intend to build peace at the level of the mind, or at least prevailing perceptions that it is possible. To discover why let me introduce you to a new definition of ‘culture’ and something I had never heard of–Cognitive Anthropology. See where footnote surfing gets us? To quote a cited book, Cultural Models in Language & Thought, “this school of anthropology came to stand for a new view of culture as shared knowledge [hence the boldfacing above]–not a people’s customs and artifacts and oral traditions, but what they must know in order to act as they do, make the things they make, and interpret their experiences in the distinctive way they do.”

Sound familiar? That’s what Competency gets at, what Higher Order Thinking Skills assessments evaluate for, what the Maker Movement and Project-based Learning have students emphasize, and what the local school administrators mean when they hype ‘quality learning experiences’ for all students. When the White House Summit this week on reimagining American high school showed a film Most Likely to Succeed   touting High Tech High in San Diego http://mltsfilm.org/ they were pushing a vision of education developed by cognitive anthropology research. The title of this post tells us why. Education–preschool, K-12, higher ed, and adult–is looking for “insight into those conditions under which cultural models [what Quality Learning internalizes. See above] are endowed with directive force and hence with ideological potential.”

Gulp. The essence of the phrase “sustainable development” is finding cultural models that can be internalized as values, beliefs, and attitudes that will reliably guide and prompt desired future behaviors. If that sounds authoritarian, it is. It fully intends to rely on ‘statutory enactment’ and ‘political regulations’ to be binding, but those things and ‘financial incentives’ cannot carry the load fully. Education for All throughout a lifetime, from cradle to grave, is needed to always be malleable and subservient to political power. No rebellions and no resentment, at least not overtly. In what may be my all time favorite phrase taken from a 2006 book Learning Cities, Learning Regions, Learning Communities: Lifelong learning and local government,  written by a professor and UNESCO consultant Nicholas Longworth:

“Top-down authoritarian structures are no longer in vogue and leaders in cities and regions will need to know how to harness the creative energies of thousands of people for the good. Shakespeare’s ‘tide in the affairs of men’ becomes also a tide in the affairs of local and regional authorities.”

Remember this as your Congress Critter or Senator Lamar Alexander hypes the ESEA Rewrite returning power to states and local districts and schools. Remember it as your State Governor files his WIOA plan, with its state and local boards, with DC. This is all consistent with the UN vision for achieving its 2030 Dignity for All agenda via Learning Cities and Learning Regions. The FFA mentioned above says so. We may not know any cognitive anthropologists or behavioral scientists, but the UN does, and it knows:

“Social life depends on the fit between what is socially required [see above and previous posts] and what is individually desired [Quality Learning games this]. So, too, the designs of those who would rule society and those who would benefit from this control over others, depend upon the willingness of the populace to fill its role in these plans. Therefore, states and other agencies promulgate ideology [Equity for All; Catastrophic Global Warming] persuading people to do what they otherwise might question or resist…To be successful, ideologies must appeal to and activate preexisting cultural understandings [Quality Learning again]…to be convincing, an ideology must pose as either legitimate or inevitable.”

Now we know why Outcomes-Based Education just keeps coming back as my book laid out and as a speaker from the well-connected Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education confirmed just last night. The stipulated outcomes are what can ‘grip us’ and act as an internal compass as Human Rights Education called it. That FFA stated that “Education is at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and essential for the success of all SDGs.” Front and center and running through everything, crucial to education, beginning ‘at birth’ and continuing ‘throughout life’ is the ‘concept of lifelong learning.” This time it is FFA bolding that phrase and luckily for us the footnote is on that page and not at the end. It was all-encompassing though and sent me scurrying for the cited technical paper. That’s when the Learning Cities and Regions came rolling out so here’s the quote:

“In essence, lifelong learning is rooted in the integration of learning and living, covering learning activities for people of all ages (children, young people, adults and elderly, girls and boys, women and men) in all life-wide contexts (family, school, community, workplace and so on) and through a variety of modalities (formal, non-formal and informal) which together meet a wide range of learning needs [what new state funding formulas all seem to emphasize] and demands. Education systems which promote lifelong learning adopt a holistic and sector-wide approach involving all sub-sectors and levels to ensure the provision of learning opportunities for all individuals.”

I was a history major and I recognize a variant of Mussolini’s infamous definition of Fascism, even if the State force is divvied up at multiple levels from the global to the local all the way to an insistence on student-centered learning: “All within the State, Nothing outside the State, Nothing against the State.” Remember authoritarianism is not rejected, just any perception of a top-down, centralized imposition. When I found that Lifelong Learning Technical Paper, it revealed a supposedly binding set of documents from 2013 called the “Beijing Declaration on Building Learning Cities” and ” Key Features of Learning Cities.” Locating these and reading through them it became apparent that I had been living through and attending meetings clearly implementing this Learning Region agenda. No wonder I accidentally learned so much as my book pulled together in alarming detail.

I now know that for sure and not just by inference because a few days ago the San Francisco region issued what it called the Roadmap http://www.bayareaeconomy.org/report/a-roadmap-for-economic-resilience/ that fits with every tenet aspiration of a UN Learning Region down to wanting to create a public-private partnership of elected officials and civic and business leaders to guide an Economic Development partnership that would be qualified to access federal funds as one of the 380 duly-qualified Economic Development Districts. Lots to build Learning Cities and regions on, huh? The report thanked those that have gone before and listed Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle, DC, and Los Angeles.

Between the last post and this one I went out of town and part of that trip involved driving Interstate 75 through Dalton, a reminder of the Aspen/fed Communities that Work Partnership http://www.aspenwsi.org/communities-that-work/overview/ that just commenced. WSI is Workforce Strategies Initiatives because in Learning Cities and Learning Regions, we all know that K-12=Workforce Development=Economic Development=Living itself under that definition of Lifelong Learning. Get enough physically juxtaposed regions and cities in one federal program or another, including Community Broadband that the close-by Chattanooga just issued bonds to finance, and our Learning Regions start knitting into a Learning Society committed via the law and education to Lifelong Learning–everyone, everywhere, all the time.

Quickly as I am running out of time, at the end of September 2015 a Second Learning Cities Summit was held in Mexico City and it set out the above as Guiding Documents for cities and regions to formally join the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities. Maybe our mayors or city council members do not plan to tell us though and simply go to conferences like PolicyLink’s October Equity Summit in Los Angeles where the principles are all asserted with federal officials mixing with local and with community organizers, implementing a global agenda without telling us officially.

Maybe the recognition comes from something like an ASCD Whole School Whole Community Whole Child Poster http://www.ascd.org/programs/learning-and-health/wscc-model.aspx once we know about the Lifelong Learning/Learning Region formal agenda and seeing how it fits like a jigsaw piece to a puzzle. When we read about “more collaboration and partnerships with families, industry and business, voluntary associations, people active in cultural life are needed,” we need to recognize this is not just some random public spiritedness and desire for collaboration. It derives from official global policy for a new kind of cultural model internalized within the mind and personality.

We will close with the aspiration laid out by the Chinese Vice Premier at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo that this UNESCO agenda of Lifelong Learning is to “facilitate the comprehensive and personalized development of each and every individual.” Now take the top-down authoritarianism rejection and marry it with the bottoms up intent of Human Rights Education. This is Part 2 of a Trilogy, remember?

The Key Features Framework has a Greek Temple graphic with Sustainable Development across six pillars that basically summarize elements of the vision as the Major Building Blocks of a Learning City and three steps laying out the needed fundamental conditions. The left side of the pediment at the top is “Individual Empowerment and Social Cohesion.” Get it? The collective is what empowers the individual, even if it is only an entitlement to basic skills. The right side joining it is “Economic Development and Cultural Prosperity.”

Now would be a good time to remember it does not say Economic prosperity. It would also be a good time to remember that new definition of Culture the Cognitive Anthropologists created set out above.

 

 

 

 

Bottom Up Peace Built By Education From Below Within the Student’s Mind and Emotions

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This is the start of a Trilogy where I cover precisely how the Rapprochement of Cultures, Human Rights Education, and Education for Democratic Citizenship as envisioned by the UN entities, make it all the way to your local school, public or private, and your child’s classroom, without anyone recognizing what is really going on. In the materials that back up this and the remainder of the Trilogy there is not a single mention of the International Decade of the Rapprochement of Cultures. As we will see though, RoC fits invisibly with everything being required. In fact, so does fedEd’s recent insistence that a biologically intact transgender boy must have unfettered access to a high school girl’s locker room. It also is a currently undisclosed initiative tied to the likely 2016 Democratic nominee for President financed while she was Secretary of State.

The phrase “Bottom Up Peace Built From Below” is straight from the RoC materials and the remainder of the title fits with how to do it. To show just how long this has been sought in a way that feeds into the timeline in my book Credentialed to Destroy, let’s go back to the Democratic Education book then Princeton prof Amy Gutmann published in 1986.

“Teachers typically resist changing their teaching methods, often on the well-intentioned misperception that their obligation is to impart knowledge, not to develop the moral character of their students.”

What kind of moral character then is the new purpose of education and the schools and so crucial that parents must not be allowed to somehow ‘exempt their kids’? Character that will allow each student to recognize each other as equals “for deliberating and thereby participating in the democratic processes” for restructuring society going forward. That was Gutmann’s vision long before she became President of the Ivy League, U-Penn. The purpose of Preschool to higher ed for her was to create a “common set of democratic values that are compatible with a diverse set of religious beliefs.”

Democratic Education is all about ALL schools helping to “develop the cooperative moral sentiments–empathy, trust, benevolence, and fairness.” She goes on to cite the same John Dewey I cover in Chapter 2 of my book because of his ideal of a school “whose aim is ‘not the economic value of its products, but the development of social power and insight’ pointed to such a morality” in each student.  The presence of such values, cooperative sentiments, beliefs about others, etc are the very learner ‘outcomes’ to now be assessed by schools. How do I know for sure? Last week as part of that Youth Summit and in preparation for the UNESCO General Conference that opened this week in Paris, UNESCO and friends published a rather graphic report Curriculum Development and Review for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education to lay out plans to force EDC/HRE into every subject in every classroom all over the world.

In the bibliography at the end is a cite to a 2014 report called “Teaching Respect for All Implementation Guide” that caught my eye since I had just written the Rapprochement of Cultures post. Found it with UNESCO profusely thanking the US Department of State for “their generous financial contribution and continuous support in the development of the Teaching Respect for All project” that launched in January 2012. Maybe promoting HRE was more important than Benghazi security, but the always italicized Teaching Respect for All was financed and launched by Hillary or her subordinates.

Want to know what its definition is on what constitutes ‘individual achievement’ by a student? In the lead-in under “Part 1-Set of Key Principles for Policy Makers” is the definition that “through education” students will demonstrate the “acquisition and application of awareness, knowledge, skills, and values for the sake of a peaceful society in which individuals treat each other with respect.”

Those are not personal characteristics for students to acquire in addition to math, science principles, historical knowledge, or literature enjoyed for its own sake. ALL school activities are intended to create themes, practices, values, and beliefs needed for “learning to live together as one community.” Amitai Etzioni must be beside himself at what Bill and Hillary have been up to now using their power, influence, and our tax dollars. Remember UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova and her admission that education was about promoting ‘scientific humanism’?  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/decreeing-the-interdependence-of-environment-economy-society-and-cultural-diversity-in-the-21st/

A quote from her at the launch of TRforA (its new acronym) leads off “Part 2-Set of Key principles for Headteachers [Principals in the US] and NGO Managers” that “building respect in and through education [is] ‘essential for promoting a new humanitarianism for the twenty-first century.'”  Yes, indeed, we have the US State Department, under Hillary and President Obama, underwriting HRE globally and quietly in the US to “enable the education system to fulfill its fundamental aims of promoting the full development of the human personality [a term straight out of Uncle Karl when translated into English] and appreciation of human dignity, of strengthening respect for human rights and of delivering a quality education for all.”

In addition to the focus on Competency and values, attitudes, and beliefs laid out in detail in my book as the real Common Core implementation, this HRE mandate gives the rationale for fed ED suddenly determining in April 2012 (just months after launch) that IDEA be read to require PBIS and other positive psychology interventions in all classrooms with all students to avoid stereotyping. It also fits with the push to issue an Executive Order for Positive School Climate in late July 2012 and all the efforts to hype bullying and disparities in School Discipline offenses. Since I led with the transgender mention, let me quote the relevant part of the “key approaches necessary to successfully counteract discrimination.”

“Pupils and students may have multiple cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, or understandings of their sexuality, which means that these forms interact. These attributes are best understood as real aspects of their identities and as attributes that may be open to change or new interpretations. Pupils and students have a right to self-identify with cultures, sexualities, ‘races’, genders, or ethnicities in ways that feel authentic to them. The authenticity of one’s identity should never be dismissed or seen as insignificant.”

That is the philosophy driving the fed Office of Civil Rights and it is straight out of the HRE we financed. If they have a copy, so should we, but since UNESCO links are quite unstable you will notice I just give titles. Education now, apparently from little tykes on, is actually about “strengthening mutual tolerance and cultivating respect for all people, regardless of colour, gender, class, sexual orientation, national, ethnic, or religious orientation/identity.” TRforA targets “learners of 8-16 years old, and aims to build curiosity, openness, critical thinking and understanding among youth learners, thus equipping them with awareness, knowledge, and skills to cultivate respect and stop discrimination on all levels.”

Even if it takes false narratives or the kind of manipulative mental framing put out last week with regard to STEM. http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/k12-stem-learning.html If you are like me and rather drenched in facts and logic, we can notice that what is an accepted identity and beliefs is not for everyone, especially high school girls unable to mentally cloak a boy’s visible genitalia in the assurance that only social constructions matter. If anyone hopes the reference to ‘critical thinking’ leaves some subject matter intact, the very use of the phrase ‘critical race theory’ and ‘pedagogy’ makes it quite clear how intolerant tolerance intends to be.

“Curricula must dedicate time to sensitive issues, such as discussing stereotypes and recognizing injustices. They must take a reality-based [I can hear some of you snickering from afar] and relevant approach, which recognizes groups’ histories of suffering and marginalization, and provides learners with the critical skills to react to discrimination.”

I am guessing this is where perceived Microaggressions and White Privilege come in and I am supposed to feel bad about being a bookworm when I was younger or teaching myself to read. I actually think that “Curricula should fully incorporate education to fight racism, xenophobia and discrimination at every level, rather than teaching these lessons as separate subjects” may do quite a bit to bring back what was called the Generation Gap decades ago as older adults wonder why young people are becoming such ignorant, self-righteous twits. We may never see the phrase a ‘Whole Child emphasis’ the same again after reading another key approach that “Going beyond cognitive skills, curricula should equip learners to learn about the issues as well as empower them to act in response to racism and discrimination. Learners need to receive training in conflict resolution and in speaking out against social injustice.”

We are all going to need training in conflict resolution if we have to listen to young people deliberately educated to feel both slighted and empowered to transform an existing world they neither understand accurately or appreciate. Since only quoting the Implementation Guide’s key approaches can reveal the true horror of what is intended in the name of school transformation and student success to be appreciated, here’s another: “A fundamental commitment to create an emancipatory culture of schooling that empowers all pupils and students. This includes practices that allow pupils and teachers to work together to acquire, analyse and produce social and self-knowledge.” And we wonder why we keep being told the change to a competency-based emphasis is needed to be ‘internationally competitive’. That’s a framing that works and explaining the true purpose would likely send us all into a frenzy.

I mentioned the “Curriculum redevelopment” paper release last week  so let’s close with some of the aims it was also up front about. “The wider aim of EDC/HRE is the establishment of sustainable and participative forms of democracy based on respect for human rights and good governance.” Those human rights principles are described as “non-discrimination, inclusion and participation, and the rule of law.” That’s an affirmative, anti-individualistic view of the rule of law http://gluna.wildapricot.org/resources/Human%20Rights%20Day%202014 /The%20Rule%20of%20Law%20in%20the%20Universal%20Declaration%20of%20Human%20Rights.pdf  that is necessary as Harvard Law Prof Mary Ann Glendon described it so that “human affairs are not forever destined to be determined by force and accident, but that they can be affected to some extent by reason and choice.”

Mary Ann is one of Amitai Etzioni’s favorite law profs for obvious reasons. Remember how my Chapter 7 pointed out the real Common Core implementation was all about changing values, attitudes, and beliefs? Remember how that is what learning now means as well? “Efforts to promote EDC/HRE involve the development of dispositions, extending beyond knowledge and skills to include behaviours and actions. research has shown that such dispositions are fostered through participatory and learner-centred teaching and learning processes…” that would be the real reason lectures and textbooks have to go.

Somehow I am sure the now ubiquitous explanation of the antiquated ‘factory-model’ of school is just another group-tested framing meme to alter prevailing behavior without opposition.

See you later when we take on Part 2 on how this is all coming in now and invisibly.

 

 

Rapprochemont or Civilization Surrender? How to Force Global Solidarity Starting with Preschool Education

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In case anyone wonders how that UNESCO Roadmap to the Global Action Programme even came up in a discussion of what might be applicable in your neck of the woods, the just-ended Connected Educators Month touted that Youth Summit in Paris last week. Anyone unaware of CEM might want to know it ties to fed ED, virtually all the ed trade and professional groups, and the tech companies involved closely with the to-be-required digital learning. Poking through that Youth Summit and its materials taught me quickly that there is an EDC/HRE global initiative. That stands for Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education and it declares the “decisive role of school in shaping the young generation, transmitting cultural, moral and civic values and creating the premises for new social change.”

Initially I had written “wanted us to know” but let’s face it, none of these planners, summit attenders, UNESCO or OECD employees, etc, actually plan to tell us anything. We were certainly not going to be told that preschool through high school needs to provide a “shift in mindset and social responsibility” to deal with the peoples and cultures of the world and that this “holistic approach to rebuilding and reconciliation” and “integral human development”  cannot “be achieved effectively without unhinging the idea of nations and cultural communities from the nation-state.” And we wonder why APUSH does not want to glorify American exceptionalism or our Founding Fathers and is now promoting the concept of Dialogue around an Interactive Constitution.

Those were quotes taken from something else being kept quiet from us that was promoted in a session at the Youth Summit called “Mobile Cultures for Dialogue” that announced that in 2013 the International Decade of the Rapprochement of Cultures commenced. Think of that name as you look at the hordes now from Syria or North Africa in Europe or the arrivals in the US from Central America or the resettlements of Somalis and others from certain parts of Africa. Yes, all those migrations/invasions, depending on your perspective, do appear to be a part of the UN’s Post-2015 plans for all of us. UNESCO has now put up a Summary from its first Expert Meeting held March 24-25, 2015 in Paris to create a framework to implement the RoC agenda.

I know everyone will be shocked, shocked, not that there is gambling going on in Casablanca, but that UNESCO views “Citizenship education in a plural and interconnected world” as the means to implement this agenda. “Key message to be instilled: Human values drive a dynamic process to develop responsible citizens.” Apparently citizens who have divorced themselves from fealty to that evil nation-state. Before we examine what is coming at us unbeknownst and without our approval in the present, let’s go back to an interview Amitai Etzioni gave in 1999 that was uploaded by the University of Goettingen in 2013. Not only is Germany the destination of choice for these Migrants in search of a cohesive society to meet their needs, it, like the US, also appears to be Ground Zero for finally bringing the Active Society into fulfillment.

Since we all love a good confession from the politically connected, let’s just listen now to these past declarations of intent and methods of choice. “I was very connected to cybernetics. So the social cybernetics [science of control, remember?] which I tried to develop stated that one of the four conditions for successful social change is the support of the people. Therefore it was not a top-down concept. [or must not be perceived to be since we have tracked to the UN and the OECD]… Because the good society is communitarian [people] believe in shared virtues…you need true participation to set new mores…eight months is not a very long time for reaching shared understandings.”

Although media can help and UNESCO and Etzioni both have called on it to do so, education remains the primary tool for creating these values of solidarity and all this must be done at the local level as early as possible. Last week two papers came out in the US seeking to accomplish precisely what the Active Society needs and the UN entities and the OECD all want. https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/30051800/StandardsAlignment.pdf is tied to Etzioni as one of its co-authors is a JD/ Masters in Ed Policy candidate from GWU. Now that’s how you get to both recommend transformative practices for education and also create the legal mandate to make it bindingly so. Just what the Active Society and UNESCO recommend.

Doesn’t everyone want Standards for Nonacademic Skills that cover Preschool through Third Grade and start with Sharing, then “self-control, and then “building relationships with peers and adults.” Fits well if the community and collective action, instead of the individual, is to be the required means of political action. Notice too that the Early Learning Outcomes Framework was changed in June 2015 to add ‘perceptual development’ for the little tykes and to delete ‘general knowledge’. Might get in the way of pitching all these false narratives.

The Achievement Gap Institute at Harvard wants to move “Beyond Standardized Test Scores: Engagement, Mindsets, and Agency” http://www.agi.harvard.edu/projects/TeachingandAgency.pdf that in the name of Excellence, Effective Teaching and what will be measured to keep jobs, and Equity manages to make the new classroom focus creating the very kind of personal characteristics needed so that everyone feels their responsibility to others.

Since not everyone is as click happy as I am when I see a link, please notice that the cited mindset scholars network combines Growth Mindset, Grit, Perseverence, and Civil Rights expectations as a matter of law into what is slipping in there. Clicking further we find the National Mindset Study that is funded by Carnegie and is involved with the “brain’s ability to restructure itself” and for the students “to internalize those messages [provided] via writing exercises.” Ding. Ding. Ding. So the human brain will neurologically restructure itself over time in response to manipulative reading and writing exercises. This is thus a known way to create false beliefs and acceptance of carefully cultivated narratives that promote social and political transformation.

Etzioni wrote about the need for ‘authentic consensus’ and spoke of the need for the bottom-up support of the people and this is how it gets created. Early Learning Standards wanting to target Perception and social and emotional learning. That Harvard study seeks to focus on developing student’s ‘purposeful initiative’, Why does that matter? Because that bridges the gap between what the students have internalized as values and beliefs about the world and motivating them to act to change the world. That’s what now constitutes Effective Teaching. It’s not about knowledge. It’s about cultivating the beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors needed to either push for, or go along with, transformative social change.

Now we can go back to the Rapprochement of Cultures, which oddly enough is being financially sponsored by the same Saudi Arabia with no desire to take in any of the North Africa or Syrian refugees. It is formally sponsored by Kazakhstan, one of the world’s most notorious dictatorships, which is rather a tip off that this agenda is actually not about a goal to “enhance dialogue between cultures based on dignity, tolerance, and respect.” It’s only certain cultures, religions, and beliefs systems entitled to such deference and respect. For an idea who, we can look at the backgrounds and previous initiatives of the invited experts listed at the back of the summary or we can see what President Obama, Jeh Johnson, and a Merkel spokewoman said here http://linkis.com/dailycaller.com/2015/de8UL

When I originally outlined this post I actually mentioned a Tripod of needed false beliefs and narratives that this Rapprochement plans to push that refuses to listen to any facts, no matter how provable they are. Before I knew the background of the ‘experts,’ it was clear this initiative intended to impose a one way Affirmative Claim against the West to protect certain cultures and religions and to provide endlessly for any adherents that managed to physically make it within the borders. If you wonder why I went back to the Etzioni quote on not being top down, Recommendation # 6 calls for “ensuring civil society [Etzioni’s preferred term] is paramount in recognition of their pivotal role in transforming social norms, attitudes, and behavior, as well as nurturing peace from the ground up through promoting positive principles and ideals.”

That’s what those two cited papers do from just this week. It’s what the new required PBIS, Positive School Climates, and Restorative Justice practices do. Since Harvard and the state of Massachusetts are listed partners, and the location of, the UNESCO/OECD Center for Curriculum Redesign created by Charles Fadel, it is very unlikely that the paper is not part of the RoC vision for the “creation of a sustainable, socially-cohesive society.” If anyone thinks I am somehow just trying to pull at the heart strings by tying terrible visuals of the hordes in Europe or crossing the Mexican border to the education agenda, Common Core, and competency based education, let me close with a few more quotes. Not my bolding.

” 7. Promote the respect for the inherent human dignity of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers and enhance societal understanding of their value and contribution [to, sic] the impalpable dynamics of ideas and in enabling the rapprochement of cultures. Achieving a better balance between migrant rights and duties could result in peaceful coexistence and cultural diversity.”

Notice that ‘could’ because UNESCO is granting a human right to come anyway and an obligation for us to provide and change our existing culture via ‘quality education’ to change prevailing beliefs and values. Notice that the Rapprochment, said to be the biggest initiative UNESCO has ever undertaken, is intimately tied to that physical presence in nation-states that are no longer to have border or cultural primacy themselves. Now as I finish think of the NEA and their CARE Guide and the Southern Poverty Law Center and its Teaching Tolerance initiative that teachers are being taught to implement as part of the Common Core training.

” 8. Strengthen existing and nurture new forms of global solidarity, including through the media, which foster mutual understanding and tolerance, and counter hate speech, racism, xenophobia, radicalization, violent extremism and genocide. Voices of tolerance must be stronger and they must be better supported to maximize impact and reach.”

Education under RoC, that is in fact coming to your local schools with the force of law, “can be a means to resist and overcome political forces, in particular, identity politics that seek to counter pluralism within self and society.” Got that? Only a bigot would refuse this RoC agenda. If you think the hostility to existing nation-states is just in one place this is how Rec #2 ended:

“Social responsibility with respect to safeguarding and promoting culture also needs to be extended beyond the realm of the nation state in favour of its universal value for humanity.”

I am not jingoistic nor bigoted, and I did not go looking for this agenda of Rapprochement. It has a trail that leads to fed Ed and others involved in what goes on locally.

We no more have an obligation to ignore this Suicide of the West by Menticide than most of us would ignore the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife if we could stop it by speaking up.

So I am.

Questioning the Quandary of Equity: the Quality Education for Minorities Project Lurks in the Shadows

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When I said in the last post that we needed to talk about Equity as the constant goal across the decades of those seeking wholesale transformations, I had never heard of what gets abbreviated as the QEM Project. We saw Equity front and center in the Senate’s NCLB Rewrite, that supposedly conservative America Next education report, and as the new responsibility of the federal government mandating a switch to Competency for All. I was also responding to the framing of the purpose for Reinventing Government as being a means to advance Equity and the cause of Progressivism. This is how that book framed Equity in 1992 as the new purpose of public schools:

“they also exist to bring children from all walks of life together. This mixing of social classes and races is extremely important in a democracy; without it, we lose our capacity to understand and empathize with those who are different from us. When that happens, it is not long before our society loses its ability to care for those who need help. We become a collection of individuals,  not a community.”

We have been living for a while in an age where official policy is it’s not OK to function as an individual. Adjust to accepting the new designation as just another member of a community or society goes this stealth mandate. Nobody told us though, leaving us to wonder why we just keep coming across all these pushes for communitarianism as a necessary belief for the 21st century. Would anyone like to guess what change in practice and policy is seen as the premier way to advance Equity, integration, concepts of community, etc? That would be the various school choice schemes like charters and vouchers. In particular, we have these recognitions: “When governments fund programs or institutions directly, equity becomes difficult to enforce…When governments fund individuals rather than institutions, it is much easier to promote equity.” Keep that in mind whenever someone says “Let’s just have the money follow the child.”

That again was from the authors of the bipartisanly touted Reinventing Government. Another relevant, well-known book from that same seminal year was Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education. Sonia Nieto is involved now with Educators for Social Responsibility, Facing History and Ourselves, and the SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance program that we keep encountering in connection with the actual implementation coming in the name of the Common Core.  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/social-cohesion-can-commence-once-reality-is-born-largely-from-beliefs-and-boundaries-co-created-with-others/ and the next post confront those visions and Facing History has a tag. Back in 1992 Nieto had this to say about Equal education and Equity (italics in original):

“education must involve the interaction of students with teachers and schools [dialectical would be a synonym for what is envisioned], not simply the action of teachers and schools on students [the revered transmission of knowledge approach]. Equal education also means that the skills, talents, and experiences that all students bring to their education need to be considered as valid starting points for further schooling. Equity is a more comprehensive term because it includes real educational opportunities and also demands fairness and the real possibility of equality of outcomes for a broader range of students. Throughout this book, multicultural education will be considered as fundamental to educational equity.”

Remember that last sentence but in this age when the phrase White Privilege suddenly seems to be coming to every other K-12 classroom and college campus, let’s learn Nieto’s term when she is not complaining about current “economic, political, and social power.” Dysconscious racism is “a limited and distorted view of racism based on the tacit acceptance of dominant White norms and privileges that fails to take into account basic structural inequities in society.” So with Multiculti ed, only a wholesale transformation will suffice as the remedy and that remedy is now to be legally required as a civil and human right. Since Nieto’s vision of good, exemplary teaching for all students is to be our norm in all schools, we need to appreciate its tenets in addition to a mandate of active involvement of “students in real-life situations [that] allows them to reflect on their own lives.” Are you among the privileged or the prey? would be one way to shorthand the desired mindset.

* students are involved in issues they perceive as vital concerns.

* students are involved with explanations of differences in race, culture, religion, ethnicity, and gender.

* students are helped to see major concepts, big ideas, and general principles rather than isolated facts [now called ‘lenses,’ Enduring Understandings, or cross-disciplinary ideas]

* students are involved in planning their education.

* students are involved in applying ideals such as fairness, equity, or justice to their world.

* students are actively involved in heterogeneous groups [no tracking is fundamental to QME].

* students are asked to question commonsense or widely accepted assumptions [all that pooh-poohing of facts now comes in handy].

Problem solvers and critical thinkers just does not sound like such a great goal anymore does it, after that breakdown? Now I joke about tiptoeing through the footnotes, but honestly that’s where the gold pebbles and jewel admissions are. Nieto in a footnote mentions a January 1990 publication from the MIT Quality Education for Minorities Project called “Education That Works: An Action Plan for the Education of Minorities.” The QEM Project turns out to have begun in 1987 with Carnegie funding. Now remember Carnegie is the chief sponsor of Competency-based education now, including sponsoring the 2011 summit with federal officials. Marc Tucker of the National Commission on Education and the Economy (Carnegie-funding) was also involved in the QEM Project, which puts a new spin on all his work in the 90s on School to Work and new types of authentic assessments called the New Standards Project.

Texans need to be aware that MIT was one partner in QEM, but the other was the Marshall Center at the University of Texas. As I have warned, Texas did not actually need to be part of the Common Core to have its K-12 system in the same place as other states, if not ahead of the curve. QEM cared about the following groups by name: (1) Alaska Natives; (2) American Indians; (3) Black Americans; (4) Mexican Americans; and (5) Puerto Ricans. Two vital points about that list. First, Competency education and the Reinventing Schools Consortium involved in the February 2014 Dallas convening is being hyped as coming from work with natives in Chugach, Alaska. Now I know where the funding for all that expensive air travel came from. Secondly, Senator Ted Kennedy was also involved with the Action Council on Minority Education that issued this January 1990 report. That matters because Kennedy had always had an interest in amnesty for illegals.

Open that door and then use the presence to force a remake of K-12 education. Make that the “restructuring” of American education. Remember this report is after the 1989 Williamsburg education summit President George HW Bush called of the nation’s governors. This report came out before the official announcement of the proposed national goals. The idea was that all the restructuring and K-12 plans announced in the 1990 QEM report would piggy-back quietly on the national goals to be proposed later that year. We have the goals for public dissemination and then we have the QEM vision surreptitiously attached.

My question is did anyone unconnected to DC and the K-12 education vision of that time (which would mean that now Senator Lamar Alexander had to have known) know we had this QEM Project vision attached to all the federal pushes in the 90s and what is coming in under the banner of the Common Core now? I have never seen a reference to it before Nieto cited it, but it certainly makes everything make so much more sense. I would seriously love to hear from readers who lived through those earlier reforms on whether this attached Stealth QEM Agenda was ever discussed or even acknowledged.

This matters because the required QEM vision of education for all becomes the necessary type of K-12 education to shift to what I recognize as Uncle Karl’s Human Development Society. In 1991 it was renamed with the much more soothing name of the Learning Society and laid out for all of North America. I will get to that next time. Let’s close with a quote used to lay out the Challenge for Education that Works. Attributed to FDR, it stated that “We seek to build an America where no one is left out.”

Remind anyone else of federal legislation nicknamed as No Child Left Behind that was also based on the vision of education in Texas? How about the sentiment advanced by the UN recently in its Dignity for All by 2030 vision to guide post-2015 restructurings of education, economies, and societies generally?

We have a great deal of commonality here that appears to have been lurking in the shadows. Ready to bind us without any overt discussion.

Not anymore.

 

 

Propagandizing the K-12 Classroom to Create Desired Worldviews for Change: the New Anti-Bias Standards

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If we think of the Common Core as a bucket or a banner instead of pretending it is about the transmission of knowledge, its function becomes much clearer. All the changes that would cause an outcry if pursued separately, and in many cases already have created widespread popular rejection, get to Come on Down Anyway as the game show announcer would say. A science fiction geek might explain the Common Core as a cloaking device allowing controversial shifts to be put into place without exposure. Especially if the new materials are all “web-based” and just waiting to be downloaded.

We have already encountered the Southern Poverty Law Center and its social justice/Teaching Tolerance curriculum numerous times, most notably here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/social-cohesion-can-commence-once-reality-is-born-largely-from-beliefs-and-boundaries-co-created-with-others/ SPLC has been even busier than we recognized though and has also created the US’s very first ABF–Anti-bias Framework-and Literacy-Based K-12 Anti-bias Curriculum called Perspectives for a Diverse America. http://www.tolerance.org/sites/default/files/general/Perspectives%20for%20a%20Diverse%20America%20User%20Experience.pdf

Now before I start raising anyone’s blood pressure by describing the ABF’s intentions, let’s go Down Under to a K-12 pilot Global Change Agent Michael Fullan was involved in about a decade ago. It was called the Dynamic Paradigm of Learning and Change and it “identifies key aspects of the need, nature, and means of changes in identity, dispositions and orientations to the world and others, to be required of educators [that’s the real reason why tenure is being taken away or greatly restricted now in the US], in order for them to be able to assist young people [that would be the children we entrust to adults and pay vast sums to actually know something] to achieve similar transformational outcomes.” Got that? Psychological changes. Shifts in values, attitudes, and how the world and other people are now to be perceived.

Education Queensland came right out and phrased the kind of Learning and Personal Change being sought in the individual student through K-12 education as a “new way of being” to be “required” of teachers and students. Remember Backward Mapping from our previous post? Well, Perspectives and the ABF offer “the opportunity to infuse CCSS implementation with social justice values.” How? Well, remember Literacy is now to be taught Across the Curriculum and the ABF has 4 domains: Identity, Diversity, Justice and Action. Does that sound alarmingly similar to “identity, dispositions and orientations to the world and others” to anyone else?

Each teacher now gets to, or must if his or her principal insists, use the Anti-bias anchor standards and “grade level outcomes of the ABF for backward planning” and “engage a spectrum of social justice topics and cultural and [italics in original] social emotional competencies–critical in today’s diverse classrooms.” Yes, that would be the real reason to eliminate tracking of the more academically talented and to require a Whole Child Classroom focus. If you think this is an outlier, remember that the NEA worked with the SPLC on its CARE Guide http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/shaping-a-mind-is-more-important-than-stuffing-it-grasping-the-psychosocial-key-to-fundamental-transformations/ .

The “rich text” available for download highlights and fosters the “exploration of identity, authentic accounts of real-life experiences, intergroup understanding, historical empathy, the awareness of prejudice and injustice, individual and collective struggles against injustice and–finally-action against injustice.” They do mean that latter part about forcing action by the way as in “Students will plan and carry out collective action against bias and injustice in the world and will evaluate what strategies are effective.” Hey, you didn’t think ‘engaging’ classwork was just going to be about video gaming, did you?

And we can all be relieved that the Perspectives topics “will go beyond the more common issues of race and ethnicity to include wealth and poverty, disabilities, religious discrimination and immigration.” Plus, as an added bonus to make sure that the desired changes in consciousness do occur, Perspectives “encompasses…less covered, equally important themes like gender, sexual orientation and class.”  It is supposedly the first “curriculum of its kind to offer an explicit blueprint designed to move students into the position of advocate.” Not to worry though. I can find no indication that the curriculum includes a Che Guevara beret kit or Mao’s Little Red Book as a Graphic Novel to hammer home that these are required orientations and dispositions.

Good to know then that the curriculum’s “marriage to the Common Core will allow it to be widely implemented.” The ‘backwards design’ approach of ABF and Perspectives does sound better than the List of Twenty Things Your Child Must Now Believe and Be Willing To Do, but it merely masks the nature of the sought change through the K-12 classroom. We can just imagine all the hateful things students will hear about the “dominant culture” and how they will just blossom as they are told repeatedly to “develop positive social identities based on their membership in multiple groups in society.” Students may not be able to identify precisely why the US pushed to separate from Britain and form a new country, but they will now learn to “recognize that power and privilege influence relationships on interpersonal, intergroup and institutional levels and consider how they have been affected by those dynamics.”

Feel the Outrage! is such a useful tool if transformative action is the End Game being sought. The outrage might be misplaced. It may be destructive, but those are mere details. I can just imagine how students who have been piloting this framework and thus getting to use the classroom over years to “identify figures, groups, events and a variety of strategies and philosophies relevant to the history of social justice around the world” would feel if a School Board then felt empowered to step in and tell them to remember the parts of American History that encourage patriotism. Walkout maybe? To commemorate what Gandhi would have done? Any other parent think they might slam the door in the face of a child “inspired to go home and talk to their parents about purchasing clothes from companies that practice ethical manufacturing”?

Of course that confrontation may be the first alert to the nature of the fundamental psychological changes going to the core of a child’s ‘being’ occurring in the classroom. By then it may well be hard to reverse, which is, I suspect, a big part of why the Common Core label makes such a fine cloaking device. “Web-based” means even the School Board may not know. I want to close with some related confessions that fit with the desired changes being sought that is probably not on your radar either. In 2004, a book by Seattle educator Barbara Ray Gilles called Nurturing Civilization Builders: Birthing the Best Schools in the World.

Gilles was kind enough to admit why we are hearing so much about collaboration as a necessity and the need for schools to create Communities of Learners with a single shared understanding after perspectives have been shared. She pointed out that “school classrooms encompass the largest community that young people experience.” If changes in “identity, orientations and dispositions” are sought, and globally that is in fact what the new purpose of K-12 education has quietly become, then the behavioral psychologists have come to recognize that the herd effect is needed. It both forces the change initially and then reenforces it over time.

Gilles again: “when you combine the individual wills of each person in a group focused on a unified goal, a ‘group will’ occurs that is greater than any individual. This collaboration is necessary to bring about a massive transformation in consciousness.” Gilles called the End Game she was backward mapping from Living Democracy. It fits with the vision of a New Kind of World we keep encountering as an End Game. Her motto of “Nurturing the compassionate genius within while co-creating a world that works for all” also fits with what SPLC claims is possible and the new goals of education change.

Gilles noted that “our values determine what we pay attention to, which in turn determine our behavior and create our habits.” That is true and there can be no question (going back to Milton Rokeach and his definition of Competency) that changing values is the fundamental purpose of all these planned classroom shifts.

The question becomes whether the World actually will change if this becomes the purpose of K-12 education globally or whether we are simply disarming our young people mentally and psychologically.

Will they be capable of dealing with the Evil and Bullies of the World?

With all our talk of honoring diversity and challenging oppression and injustice, aren’t we pushing an educational template that simply makes it easier to oppress and dominate most people?

If the individual mind is disarmed, what will be our real recourse?

House of Tomorrow: Targeting Behavior Change Requires Move Away from Declarative Knowledge

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If you hang out in the dungeons and attics of the Transformation Blueprints like I do, one of the omnipresent confessions that is crucial, but not making it into the public domain YET, is that classroom activities and experiences are now “aims-based” or “goal-directed,” not “subject-matter based.” History, math, literature, or science course names still get used, but it hides the new broader purposes of social change. They have ceased to be, unfortunately, ends in themselves. The very phrase “standards-based” over the last two decades is also intended to hide what is indisputedly a shift to a personal behavior emphasis that is still too obscured.

This post is designed to remedy that and build on the facts and declarations laid out in the recently finished APUSH trilogy as well as particularly Chapter 7 of my book–“What if Common Core Actually Limits What Everyone Can Know or Do While Targeting Feelings,  Beliefs, and Values Instead?” The Question that Grows in Pertinence on a Daily Basis. Often times the best way to illustrate what is being required in education is to consult a professor in another area, who is unlikely to mask his statements about what is intended. Do you remember the London School of Economics where that troubling Fabian Stained Glass window has now found a new home? As a symbol of reverence, not infamy, unfortunately.

Back in 1994, LSE’s then Director, sociologist Anthony Giddens, kindly explained the role of History to political radicals in a book called Beyond Left and Right. It matters because not enough of us appreciate that the Fall of the Berlin Wall, death of Mao, or dissolution of the USSR, never altered the widespread desire for History to be progressing somewhere. If facts get in the way, education becomes the preferred tool to get the process headed in the desired direction again. Tell me this quote is not behind the spirit of the activities I spelled out in the previous posts: “For socialists, the past is not comforting; it is valued at most because it has provided the means whereby we can actively move on to grasp and appropriate the future.”

If you make K-12 education about altering and creating desired feelings, values, beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors (performances or learning are the preferred K-12 euphemisms obscuring this reality), education can supposedly create the conditions for the House of Tomorrow. http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_198312_mcnay.pdf  When I write posts explaining the NEA CARE Guide created with the Southern Poverty Law Center to use in the Common Core classroom or the Aspen Institute’s  RETOC-Racial Equity Theory of Change, tie those intentions to highlight race, class, and ethnicity to create feelings of grievance or guilt to Giddens telling us that Marxism’s allure for so many is and was the “metaphysical idea that history, in its more consequential and revolutionary moments, is made by the oppressed.”

If that quote seems a bit too ‘metaphysical’ for anyone’s taste, let’s simply make real-world problem solving the focus of K-12 education, and see if the classroom over time doesn’t create a consciousness precisely as Uncle Karl would have wanted. In 2013 the Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability published a helpful confession from Erin Redman complaining that traditional education and declarative knowledge like facts, lectures, and textbooks were too “value-free, didactic” and “one-way methods of communication” (instead of the now glorified classroom ‘Dialogue” among ‘Equals’).  Education in the 21st Century is supposed to be about long-term behavior change from an unconscious basis at the level of each individual. Those Aims or Goals require “require real-world, experiential and problem-based learning.”

Thanks for the honesty even if it is tucked away. Keep in mind the calm assertion that “Behavioural scholars have, however, clearly established that the linear, information-deficit approach [aka Transmission of Knowledge of the Best that has Been Thought or Done by the Sages of the Past] to education is insufficient in promoting behaviour change.” Since we have been concentrating on what these Aims and Goals do to history coursework, let’s end with the recommendation that this Normative view of the purpose of curriculum results in a suggestion for “shifting away from scientific facts as the primary discourse in sustainability.” That ‘s why it’s so important to emphasize feelings and the Whole Child.

It is why Procedural Knowledge gets so hyped now in the form of the Skills Deficit. That is the needed action-related process knowledge and how-to skills useful for real-world transformations. Effectiveness Knowledge now gets hyped because Beliefs about the Need for transformations in the present to alter the future are very much influenced by “perceived consequences associated with different behaviours as well as beliefs about who is responsible for given outcomes.” That’s the Aim that really finds factual knowledge to be an obstacle since it might prevent viewing the assigned Villains as culpable or notice that local politicians will blow even more money if given ever more planning power.

But then I am no teenager and we have already concluded I would be on the first shipment to Perception Re-education Camps to extinguish Factual Knowledge as an Impediment to Fundamental Change. The typical adolescent will be easy prey though for classrooms built around: “One of the central ways for enhancing effectiveness knowledge is by focusing on problems that are locally relevant and at a scale with which students feel empowered to act, while also examining the positive impact of individual and collective change.” Lack of much factual knowledge, unless the parents have stepped in or the child is the rare fluent, voracious reader, means that a capacity or willingness to conceive of any negative impact is unlikely happen in most classrooms anymore.

Finally, “social knowledge (i.e. norms) encompasses subjective and local knowledge including the motives, intentions and actions of other people. In order to enhance social knowledge, it is critical that sustainable behaviours are positioned as the normal and the desired way to act.” Objective, norm-referenced tests of knowledge have to go away quietly in this sought scenario for the future since they center on Declarative Knowledge. Radicals always needed alternative assessments to examine whether the desired behavior and attitude changes were occurring and what strategies and concepts are used when there is no correct answer and not enough information is given. Today’s Rigorous Assessments merely build on what was known as the New Standards Reference Examination in the 90s http://www.cse.ucla.edu/products/reports/TECH470.pdf Created again by the Mother of both Higher Order Thinking Skills as well as the related term Rigor, Professor Lauren Resnick.

We should simply view them correctly as Cultural Activity Research on our kids with our tax dollars. Remember the ISCAR 2011 Conference in Rome, Italy? It’s all about Aims-Based Education too. Transformational Aims with Political and Social Purposes. Just like the Common Core or 21st Century Learning or Competency-Based Instruction now. It’s all about Behavior Change if we climb down to the dungeons or up to the attics or just trace back to the footnotes in the typical Aspen Institute Report.

Those interested in fundamental transformations in the political and social spheres that is the Progressive View of the Role of History now need the tool of K-12 education, if not preschool as well, to reach those same Aims and Goals. It’s why so many education graduate degrees today openly trumpet their grounding in Change Agent Theories. To make students the mass carriers of new cultural memes and behaviors without most parents or the typical taxpayer even being aware of the shift. That’s the purpose of all the Orwellian language that has me climbing down, then up, and flipping back to those footnotes again and again.

I may have to understand all this at a very nerdy level just bursting with facts and wordy declarations of intent to once again try out notorious theories in the real world, but that is not the level where most people live. When I explain what is intended in order to get real traction in the real world, I always have to find ways to bring these intentions into the everyday lives of my readers. Unfortunately, though, I am not the only one who understands that crucial point.

In fact, the shift away from Declarative Knowledge to granting parity to subjective ways of knowing and interpreting, along with that targeting of Procedural, Effectiveness, and Social Knowledge we have just talked about, is all about meeting people and students at the level of knowledge that “guides conduct in everyday life.” Just the arena, in other words, if long-term behavior change is the admitted (if only quietly shared among insiders), new Goal or Aim of K-12 education.

Behavior Change Architects intent on Political and Social Transformations to kick History Back into Gear on the Planned Pathway of Change would need to appreciate each person’s “subjective experience of reality.” To get at the perception of reality held by the “common-sense of the ordinary members of society.”

That’s what alternative ‘high-quality’ assessments like the NSRE above got at and what the Common Core and formative assessments get at now. It’s what adaptive software gets at as well.

Then we have performance standards under their variety of masking names like College and Career Ready or Next Generation Learning to capture and then remediate over time behaviors, values, and attitudes that are not desirable for transitioning to the Planned Pathway for History.

Not to mention what all the social and emotional programs being sold as Character Education or Bullying Prevention or Positive Behaviors for the Whole Child do.

Am I finally reaching the everyday recognition of what is coming at all of us?

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.

 

 

Social Cohesion Can Commence Once Reality is Born Largely from Beliefs and Boundaries Co-Created with Others

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“Around Us” was the last part of the quote the title comes from. The next line is “Although we need these boundaries and beliefs to function, we should not take them too seriously.” I suppose that flexibility may be the most succinct definition of the hoped-for Growth Mindset we have encountered yet, but this post is not actually about Carol Dweck. Remember Robert Theobald from our last post? In 1997, still awaiting the long sought revolution, he published yet another book reworking success: new communities at the millenium that laid out in its conclusion the “new belief structure” that would be necessary for a “radically more positive world” where each of us has a “core future commitment to the maintenance and development of social cohesion.”

Since my unusual, but terribly reliable method, of tracking the Common Core via its required actual implementation in schools and classrooms has turned up in just the last week repeated attempts to impose Theobald’s vision, the Baha’i values and compliance vision, and the cybernetic theory of doling out information in a controlled manner to create predictable future behavior we had best move on to the invisible how.  Since the last two have been covered in previous posts, let’s see what Theobald thought would be the New Belief Structure in place by 2011. I can assure you in education, radical intentions and methods do not go away. They don’t even always get new names. First though I want to use the guiding belief that we have now seen recurring consistently as the marching banner since the 60s taken this time from Theobald (quoting Pope John Paul II from 1994):

“If in his providence God had given the earth to humanity, that meant that he had given it to everyone. Therefore the riches of creation were to be considered as a common good of the whole of humanity. Those who possessed these goods as personal property were really only stewards,…since it was God’s will that created goods which serve everyone in a just way.”

Inspirational man, but somehow his sense of where wealth actually comes from was clearly warped. Anyway, this sentiment provides the perfect rationale for massive redistribution both within affluent countries and from rich to poor countries with no thought that anything vital might vanish in the process. Theobald turned this into a fundamental global governing “idea that great wealth and deep poverty were unacceptable in a just society.” He sold the idea that this New Belief Structure should become “one of the  great rallying points for a changed vision adopted by a growing segment of the population.” Yes and continued intentional mind arson and perspective shifting as the mission of K-12 and higher ed combined with weak job growth and explosive student debt only drives the allure of that same rallying cry now.

Central to this New Belief Structure and New Images of Citizenship in what Theobald called “common ground work” was:

a)controlling our ego needs and growth beyond them;

b) learning to screen reality through our own senses and the stories and myths we have learned;

c) emphasizing our collective intelligence and using our diversity to support the emergence of new systems;

d) acknowledging the importance of spirituality; and

e) “Recognizing the importance of using values–honesty, responsibility, humility, love, faith, cooperation, and a respect for mystery–as a compass that guides our choices.”

Values again. That common core we keep encountering globally. Guess where I found it just this week as an agenda item on a recent School Board Working Agenda in the Metro Atlanta School District with the duplicitous Conversion Charter we have looked at? In the new Student Code of Conduct. When parents sign off at the beginning of the year that they have seen the Student Handbook and agree to abide by it, they will now actually be signing off on listed “Character Traits” with language about desired values and morals and ethics without likely appreciating the wholesale transformation from the inside-out they have just sanctioned in their children.

At least Hong Kong citizens got somewhat of a head’s up when Kohlberg’s  Theory of Moral Development and Universal Love became a controversial component of the new definition of citizenship mandated via education, all we Americans get are vague references to Student Behavior or Positive School Climates. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/hiding-educations-theft-of-individual-freedom-behind-the-positive-school-c/

This post was always going to be about values since I have had UNESCO’s instructional modules to make that a central focus of ed globally for about a month now. I was just laying the groundwork with our Baha’i discussion since UNESCO itself said religion must change back in 2007 and that spirituality was a necessary component of Global Citizenship.  I wanted to make this post about why the Southern Poverty Law Center would recently issue 2 different reports within weeks of each other trying to taint opponents of the Common Core http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/publication/public_schools_in_the_crosshairs.pdf and Agenda 21/Regional Land/Equity Planning. http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/publication/agenda_21_final_web_0.pdf

SPLC is clearly engaged in a coordinated effort to prevent people from accurately perceiving admitted facts and declared intentions. We can think of Common Core as the Means to a Quiet Revolution and a Tool to Alter People’s Values, Attitudes, and Beliefs. Agenda 21 and Catastrophic Manmade Global Warming are the Excuses for Why the Transformations are Necessary and Tools to Control Physical Space and People’s Behavior. I can wish more of the critics SPLC cites were paying attention to the objections I am carefully laying out, but anyone’s accurate reporting of openly declared intentions or coursework is not theorizing about conspiracies. So what is SPLC really up to?

Remember how I call Common Core an explanation ‘bucket’ that obscures all the real intended changes like Positive School Climates, making social and emotional learning the primary focus, or making education about using a digital device instead of academic knowledge? Classic Bait and Switch has been my drumbeat in my book and now on this blog. I knew SPLC had created a racially oriented and economic justice focused curriculum. http://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/teaching-tolerance What I did not know until I started looking into their incentives to issue such misleading reports was that SPLC had partnered with the NEA to create TDSI–Teaching Diverse Students Initiative or that SPLC was partnering with the accreditors of teacher ed institutions to ensure its adoption in all teaching credential programs. Lots of incentive, in other words, for the SPLC to malign critics of effective tools for wholesale radical transformations.

Basically what SPLC is obscuring is the heart of the actual planned implementation in classrooms across the US under the mischievous banner of the Common Core and what now counts as Student Achievement and Growth. How about working with Glenn Singleton to create ‘dispositions’ in students pursuant to “Beginning Courageous Conversations about Race”? That can be one of the Character Traits district administrators now get to require from students under those new mischievous codes of conduct.

Recognizing the intended mischief from Fulton’s proposed new Code of Student Conduct and having asked detailed questions of administrators to make sure I understood precisely what was to be imposed, I came home to think about the potential for that Character Trait Code given what I knew of Fulton’s Charter, accreditation, and the intentions of TDSI.  file:///D:/Downloads/PRRAC%20-%20Race%20_%20Racism.htm Not to pat myself on the back, but it really is no exaggeration to say I speak ed fluently and usually understand the underlying theories now better than all the edudoctorates in the room. After all, most of them now are credentialed because of what they are willing to do to us and our children and this great nation, not for what they actually know.

The phrase–“Student’s Quantity of time on task engaged in desired behavior” may earn a doctorate these days when repeated constantly, but it probably should not be spoken out loud to parents. It does sound like social engineering. Nor should “Nothing as valuable as a good theory for social change” Kurt Lewin be quoted by name publicly as an example of the useful Freeze, Unfreeze, Refreeze behavioral manipulation strategy to deal with current teachers not on board with the technology shift.

If administrators think it’s OK to coercively brainwash adults, just imagine the plight of the children entrusted to their care in a world where changing the child is now the whole point of what is student achievement. Anyway, nobody can say I do not put my angst about where education is going and what the inevitable consequences will be to fruitful use. Yes indeed. Within an hour after leaving that meeting, I had the CARE Guide the NEA created with SPLC to “move beyond the restructuring of schools to the ‘re-culturing of education.” http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/CAREguide2011.pdf

That would be the real  focus of K-12 that SPLC needed to protect. It explains the importance of Core Values to the Vision. That would of course be the vision “Creating Change through Social Justice” and dramatically redefining the purpose of schools and negating academics as traditionally understood. Unless it is useful for new purposes like preparing students for everyday life, or perceiving ‘power relationships,’ or learning to exalt the ‘collectivist perspective’ and reject the ‘individualist perspective.’

We have a lot to talk about that is to be done under the cover of what counts as Excellence or a legally required closure of the Achievement Gap. It’s not what we are expecting and it certainly is something we need to fear as long as we remain unaware.

I have run too long again. Next time we will walk through that 174 page core document together.