Let’s start with a quote from November 2018 and an international adult leadership seminar tied to one of the creators of the K-12 MBE model referred to in the title and then tie it to the use of learning standards from the last post as ‘self-regulation’ and exactly what is being targeted as the missing elements in the Iceberg Problem. Sorry for the delay in writing, but I needed to be sure of how everything fit and one of my sources was a more than 700 page book. This is from a man called Werner Erhard who came up quite often when I was researching Esalen and Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and its ties to the K-12 actual template.
We can choose to be audacious enough to take responsibility for the entire human family. We can choose to make our love for the world to be what are lives are really about.
Each of us now has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us. It will require courage, audacity, and heart. It is much more radical than a revolution–it is the beginning of a transformation in the quality of life on our planet. What we create together is a relationship in which our work can show up as making a difference in people’s lives. I welcome the unprecedented opportunity for us to work globally on that which concerns us as human beings.
Those aspirations fit well with that Blueprint from the last post, don’t they? The quote came from the materials found here https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1263835&download=yes and it is a co-author, Michael Jensen, whose personal bio ties him to the creation of the MBE program at Harvard in the 1990s. By Autumn 2011, we can find an article by Michael Ferrari and Hazel McBride called “Mind, Brain, and Education: The Birth of a New Science” on “the benefits as well as the difficulties involved in integrating neuroscience into education policy and practice.” We parents and taxpayers have every right to be properly informed as to what is meant by the following terms and also the real links between this vision and Mr Erhard’s quote above. After all, as the article’s conclusion stated:
Educators and school boards are increasingly coming under media scrutiny and increased pressure to improve educational outcomes at a time when educators, policy makers, and the public have become fascinated with ‘brain research’. At the same time, governments and policymakers are promoting and supporting Evidence-Based Decision Making and Knowledge Transformation. These are ideal conditions for the Growth of Mind, Brain, and Education.
Do Tell. Notice the reference in that quote to Knowledge Transformation because it goes to the mouthful distinction between what those course materials call “An Ontological/Phenomenological Model.” Before I quote what that transformation means, let me remind everyone that Mihaly Csiksentmihaly [see tag] describes himself as a phenomenologist and it is his model of Excellence being mandated now in the US under civil rights calls for Equity and Excellence. It matters greatly that his model was pushed globally at the 2017 World Government Summit in Dubai as I covered here http://invisibleserfscollar.com/radio-silence-and-the-dog-that-did-not-bark-positioning-positive-education-globally/ . According to those course materials, an “ontological exercise…is about a transformation in who you ‘wound up being'”.
Since the course materials were created for adults, a comparable ontological/phenomenological exercise in children and teenagers through deliberately created learning experiences also goes to who they are at a neural level. Let me go to that 700 page book, Humans as Self-Constructing Living Systems, and what it referred to as ‘person-based self-regulation.’ That New Science article hypes the role of the OECD in pushing the MBE model and, like Professor Clabough from the last post, the OECD has said ‘self-regulation’ is the purpose of K-12 education in the 21st century. Let’s quote what that really means:
Humans have developed two interrelated social-regulatory methods: (a) to impose and enforce regulatory rules on social components through power and physical arrangements external to the organization’s components, whether social groups or individuals (e.g., through laws and punishment, police action, imprisonment); (b) to make the regulatory rules and processes properties of the components themselves so they become self-regulating in relationship to the social organizations of which they are a part.
I bolded that particular phrase because it is actually what George Will called Soulcraft and the rightful domain of governments, what Erin Clabough pushed as neural and second nature, and what we keep encountering as personalized, student-centered, competency-based learning. In the Karoly paper on the “Mechanisms of Self-Regulation: A Systems View” from the last post under “The Activation and Use of Standards” think of it as why the Iceberg Problem created an Appendix III on the role of learning standards to change the nature of K-12 education.
Having a goal (or a specific performance level to which one aspires) and being able systematically to surveil goal-relevant activities do not alone provide the impetus to self-regulated modulation of thought, affect, or behavior. Before the all-important comparison of the feedforward and the feedback signals can occur in human control systems, the goal or standard must be triggered, activated, or called up from long-term memory.
The adult leadership course materials spend a great deal of time undoing what is in long-term memory that is judged to be an impediment to the desired way of being. The materials lament that the neural wiring of the adult brain is too tied to the “realization of that past-derived predicted future“. The slideshare bolded that phrase as neural wiring is viewed as in the way of the Creating a Desired Future and “What Happens in the Brain with Such a ‘Created Future'”. K-12 grounded in phenomenology can go directly to shaping who a student will “wound up being” by pushing transformational learning that goes directly to controlling “who you are as a product of the beliefs you assimilated concerning yourself and the world, and the socialization and roles you learned.”
The MBE/ontological/phenomenological emphasis with adults has to “explore our worldview and frames of reference themselves–their genealogy, internal logic, uses–as well as assess the costs and benefits, and advantages and disadvantages…[in order to provide] the opportunity to discover and eliminate the constraints and shaping imposed by your worldview.” K-12, with the same emphasis, gets to head directly to ‘Go’ in most students and simply impose the desired worldview and frames of reference and then have the federal government (in the US) mandate all students have those assessed at least annually as Higher Order Thinking Skills. HOTS then has always been more about what will guide students ways’ of being, goal setting, and decision-making in the world than about what used to be known as epistemological or information learning.
No wonder lectures are passe and textbooks must be electronic and experiential. I want to end with an abstract from a May 2019 essay from World Futures that ties to the Global Education Futures Forum 2030 that uses language that also ties to that 1968 Bellagio conference at the Rockefeller Foundation villa. The Erhard/Jensen materials used similar language seeking to make the present about the future to be created, not the past. Alexander Laszlo stated his intention “to bring into being a world and future where all of us can thrive has been shared by numerous people. Yet despite these intentions, we have not yet been able to effectuate the deeper transformational change required for bringing this forth at the pace and scale now required.”
If that gain sounds remarkably like the Blueprint, both authors have fathers who have been at this Social Sciences Altering Consciousness to Change Social Systems vision for decades. Let’s finish with what Alexander (the son) described in January 2008 about how this transformation could occur in “The Making of a New Culture Learning Conversations and Design Conversations in Social Evolution.” You would need to target the “confluence of values, beliefs, ideas, and forms of expression characteristic of interpersonally aligned individual cognitive maps.” Alexander Laszlo said those arose “from a community,” but we have met them recently as Collective Cognition and it is what learning standards tied to competency-based frameworks and the Common Core create. They target the needed “psycho-personal and socio-cultural to bio-physical and process-structural” all at once.
If all the authors cited in this and recent posts are writing and speaking about the “importance of learning for the purposeful design of the future,” don’t we have the right to know about this hijacking of purpose? That suddenly classes labelled as reading, math, history, or science are more about a physiological change at the level of the mind and brain than they are about information transmission? When schools or even higher ed regard themselves as “learning communities to foment doing the right things” at a neural level in their students in order to effectuate a transformation to act to create “changes that will approximate their visions of the future,” we need to understand this deliberate targeting.
Especially since it turns out that actual factual knowledge and an Axemaker Mind in the student are the ultimate bulwarks against this neural and psychological manipulation.
Your first link is broken but this one works
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1263835
Thank you. I was worried about that, but had no good way to check and figured that was enough to help people find the source. As you can see, the authors asked that the ssrn source be linked to.
Apropos of nothing, everything, just read an ‘alternative’ view of BOEING’s ongoing engineering debacle. This person is calling the BOEING 737, a “diversity plane”. I think you could also call it a Tranzi OBE plane. Seriously, when I engage with my international student interns, I think, would I want to have this girl/guy as my surgeon, my attorney, or piloting a plane I was flying on?
I guess that is why the “Darwin Award” has been renamed the “Common Core Award”.
Funny you should say that given the “Branching Out: Designing High School Pathways for Equity” link I put up a few days ago on the previous thread and its implication that math needs to be reconsidered to make it equitable for All. Suddenly it too becomes experiential so that students “experience Essential Concepts for Focus.” Notice too how the reconceptualizing of high school mathematics laid out here https://www.kappanonline.org/need-catalyze-change-high-school-mathematics-berry-lawson/ in discussing the Catalyzing Change push ends with the statement that the reconceptualizing is actually about
Who knew eliminating the algorithmic nature of mathematics could be so powerful? It’s how we create that desired new society! Did you know that “it’s about approaching math as the provision of a toolkit (OUTDATED), as opposed to developing a way of thinking (CRUCIAL). The former toolkit approach was defensible, and arguably unavoidable, in the millenia before we had tools for procedural math. But in today’s world, the crucial ability to be mastered is mathematical thinking.” That gets us people who don’t know what they don’t know and create debacles like the Max pretending to be the same plane despite radical changes where it mattered to performance. But, hey, the cockpit appeared to be the same to previous 737 so isn’t that facade what is really important?
Couple of thoughts, here.
A few months back I had a conversation with an old school, and highly-placed Japanese bureaucrat (the guys who actually run this country), which touched upon revisions to math instruction in this country. A very numerate person, this guy described the former methodology, which quite purposefully had students agonizing for weeks over higher-level challenges. My friend said he still remembered these struggles and that he believed that they “created new space in the student’s brain”.
On my own part, I recalled experiencing the same “new space” creation via struggles with the world’s great books. I question, now, whether the students I encounter would be capable of reading a dime store novel.
I suspect that absent that “space”, cockpit features are all that is apprehended, and even after the first massive systems failure.
Think of the ‘productive struggle’ as being about rewiring a part of the brain to use the provided categories of thought or Essential Concepts for Focus (41 per Catalyzing Change). Now the self-constructing living system is constructing its vision of reality using the very concepts intended to make them believe this world needs to be radically transformed. That’s what I mean when I wrote that this is not actually about history or math anymore. Those titles simply provide a conduit for desired concepts to be instilled.
Take a look at this that I worked on yesterday http://competencyworks.pbworks.com/w/page/67945372/Detailed%20Definition%20of%20Competency%20Education . Think about that Erhard/Jensen template of mastery as experiential and a form of Being, not knowing and then think what does CBE actually mean when it writes about “ensure [students] have mastered key content.” I am arguing that there and in the so-called “success outcomes” as just two examples this vision of education seeks to reengineer who the students are via curricula learning experiences that actually seek to alter their very Being through the images to be implanted via digital technology especially in their mind. Then those images get married to practiced behaviors (remember that Michael Barber/ Vicki Phillips link on Irreversible Change) until they are Habits of Mind.
Aren’t the references here to “Learners advance upon attainment of learning expectations (mastery) through personalized learning pathways” simply another way of saying you get to move along to the next planned set of activities once we can see through formative assessment of desired behaviors on open-ended, non-algorithmic opportunities provided to the student. Those demonstrate that the desired rewiring has occurred and the student can move on to more neural wiring to the now existing rewired brain. The Mind becomes t tool that is not really under the control of its user, but the architects laying out the Essential Concepts and tying these to emotions.
I also worked on this in the last few days. When I wrote CtD, the Georgia educators on a state panel I was on kept arguing that the ‘soft skills’ language in a new statute Georgia had quietly enacted at the urging of the state Chamber of Commerce was about students who come to school without knowing how to tie their shoes. I pointed out the statute said that soft skills was any type of personality qualities any international entity wanted to assess for and call ‘soft skills’. Very open-ended and subject to manipulation out of sight. Lo and behold we now have UNESCO acknowledging that ‘soft skills’ is simply another term for the Transversal Competencies it is pushing globally https://www.cornerstoneondemand.com/sites/default/files/partner/asset/files/skilla-transversal-skills-future-proof.pdf and that another term for those TrC’s is the personality qualities of each student. Success for All indeed..
Notice too all the interest in all these documents on how the students will critique the existing world and how they will act to apply the ‘content’ in the real world. At least with robots no one has any illusions that they are being programmed. With biological systems like humans with K-12 education tied to ISO standards, the existence and nature of that programming is much harder to see.
Look at this. https://brainupdate.nih.gov/2019/11/19/the-brain-initiative-at-neuroscience-2019/#more-2154
30,000 attendees from 75 countries in Chicago, Illinois. This better be on our radar.
Yes, indeed….
Oh, yeh, I thought of a BOEING story. Many many moons ago I was contacted by BOEING’S global OD department. They were looking to build a team of OD facilitators in Japan, and to address on-going issues with construction of 770’s…if memory serves.
I presented for the interview as scheduled…and, no one on the call. I later learned it had been mis-scheduled because the project lead, actually, the global head of a department BELIEVED that Japan shared the same timezone as Hawaii.
They never did solve those issues at the plant.
This will not solve them either. https://curriculumredesign.org/ccr-receives-funding-from-mathworks-for-21st-century-mathematics-courseware/
Mathworks stuff could be good. What would be best is for it to be self-paced, so the able kids can run ahead. I believe Mathworks makes Matlab, and there’s plenty of fun that kids can have with that.
Shhh don’t tell the educrats that, or they’ll put equity controls around it to prevent exactly that. Our district is getting some math software that could be fun (from the description) but the plan is to use it only for RTI — to help kids who have fallen behind. Nothing to let kids run ahead.
I worked on the MD11 Flight Management System, in a team with other engineers that included some private pilots. I’ve also worked in other aerospace products. I think I have a fair understanding of how pilots think.
They are control freaks about their plane. They want to know every single thing about their aircraft. And that’s as it should be.
The thought that they would be flying a plane, with 100 or 200 souls on board no less, without being told that an automatic control system had been installed that, without their knowledge, would adjust the rear stabilizers to nose the plane down and would not even tell them — nor were they ever warned that this was possible in their training — is INCONCEIVABLE. It’s so far beyond shocking, even these control freaks would not think to ask about such a thing.
One pilot could get his plane out of a dive. The control system had put him into that dive. Nothing worked. I am sure he could not even imagine that his stabilizers were angled as they were, as they went down and all perished.
This does not excuse him from not having read his briefings and knowing the applicable checklist, however. The pilot failed too.
Hi David,
My understanding (could be wrong) is that the changes in the stabilizer system had not been communicated in briefings, and this is why two planes went down, and a third crash was only averted because the pilot drew from his military experience to figure out why the plane was not responding as expected.
The article I read on this was written by an engineer who stated that BOEING had cut costs by outsourcing engineering functions to third world countries, which, coincidentally, satisfied their ‘diversity’ mandate.
Here is an interesting exploration of SEL.
https://quillette.com/2019/10/25/mediocrity-for-all/
And a quote from Fidel Castro after the revolution:
“The peasant must learn only what we have decided to teach him and nothing else. Our main aim in the field of education should be to teach him to be completely integrated into collectives. He must get rid of his taste for individualism and his stupid love of independence.”
Thank you for the link and quote Russell. About the time Castro came to power and the Marxist Humanist template launched globally back in 1962, the Ford Foundation began to fund an initiative called Futuribles that fits with the aspirations in the last two posts and the point I am trying to make about how learning or performance standards actually work. I went back to the 1967 book that came out of Futuribles called The Art of ConjectureThis morning to check why that book reminded me so much of language I am seeing now. I found this that goes to why governments want to manipulate mental images in students as well as adults:
Guess who is a keynote panelist today at the WISE Summit on remaking the nature of education globally?
https://www.wise-qatar.org/wise-2019/ Nicholas Christakis!
This avalanche of stupidity is almost too much to bear. I am wondering if they will configure the Nobel Prize award categories to reflect these changes, as in the award for ‘Mathematics’, would be replaced with an award for ‘Mathematical Thinking’.
The stupidity is intentional. It’s getting to where perhaps most parents should homeschool at least for elementary. The worst brainwashing, and they don’t teach much real stuff in elementary. Teach them the 3 R’s and they’re well prepared for middle school and beyond.
To All, and I just have to articulate this to SOMEONE.
I made the decision, today, to accept no more student interns from the U.S. While I do understand that the education crisis Robin has outlined so carefully, is of global dimensions, my experience with these kids suggests that the U.S. is now producing second-generation ‘incompetents’.
Robin, we have talked a lot about competency models that eschew actual knowledge bases. The outcome I have seen is that kids do not know ‘how’ to build the knowledge bases they will need to perform real jobs. Not a clue….
They do not understand the concept of transferrable skills, e.g. that improved research, and analytical skills would serve them in the next role, and the next. Their conceptual/behavioral mandate seems purely to their ‘relationships’, and to the expression of their own experience, which WE KNOW is as valid as anyone else’s.
I am wondering, now, if any rehabilitation is possible, or whether they will simply be warehoused as drones in tech firms. Note, I cannot see that they could learn a trade….and, particularly the males. Additionally, they seem to have NO SENSE of urgency as to their future employment having been assured by their mentors that they will all be brilliant entrepreneurs. ARGH!!!
I don’t this these kinds of projects will help your concerns. https://www.middletownpress.com/middletown/article/Intense-research-projects-teaching-Middletown-14853607.php I suspect it leads you to recognize why you are seeing what you are.
If I do not get a chance to write this week, with various family obligations, I wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving.
Yes, that pretty much describes the ‘thought’ processes I am seeing in my young wards.
It also explains why members of my so-called profession, coaching, cannot apprehend that this function did not spring out of certain dope-addled heads at the Esalen Institute; that its performance requires a specific set of compentencies and BODIES of KNOWLEDGE.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Thanks. You will find this new grant interesting. https://www.templeton.org/news/the-neuroscience-of-self-determination No way this is being pushed without manipulating these processes being the actual goal.
Maybe after they learn even more about the brain, they can use the “principles-based” civic textbook with them. https://www.templeton.org/grant/a-nationwide-principles-based-high-school-civics-textbook
As The Art of Conjecture put it in the 60s when the Ford Foundation launched its Futuribles initiative, Ideas are what we use to construe reality so by all means if we want to sculpt those mental models we must spoon feed the prevailing Ideas. And to think I had the audacity to infer my own Ideas from all that history reading I have done over the decades. But then the history of both CtD and then this blog has been me demonstrating that the proffered script is neither the actual intention nor the likely result.
I am going to add this as it fits with some of my conclusions from mulling over the math materials on transforming its nature that I have linked since the last post as well as how it ties to the above as well as the function of Whole Language in reading. The provided Image created by digital technology will have the same role as Ideas in the humanities or SHEG. This quote would seem to confirm that insight and it also fits with what the Erhard/Jensen ontological model referred to as a Conversational Domain.
https://www.illustrativemathematics.org/curriculum/ is the source and that name fits with my earlier insight from reading the language in the High School Transformation paper. I am not sure we as a society anywhere in the world will be aided when Math is used to create Images consistent with envisioning transformational change instead of relationships that ensure that bridges will stand with the foreseeable weight imposed or how to get rockets home from space. Maybe the NASA scientists who got the severely disabled Apollo 13 home using imagination and sliderules might have also understood the risks of all this advocacy for transformational change to an equitable society.
Oh gosh…do you remember the interview with the NASA guy who said, ‘we’ no longer have the technology to accomplish a moon mission? Did ANYONE scratch their heads at that bizarre statement?
Another thing that I think rots young minds are stories of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs…
I have worked with a lot of CEO’s, and can tell you that Mark Zuckerberg is NOT running that company, though he does do an ok job of playing an autistic wunderkind…
Call me crazy, but I think a person needs to have mastered a phenomenal number of knowledge bases to run, even, a pop stand…and, I JUST DON’T see the depth or potential for depth in certain people.
This article was featured in today’s GovLab newsletter. https://ssir.org/pdf/Winter2020-Supplement-Han-Problems-Power.pdf Talk about an ontological aim and notice the Model T Foundation funding as part of their Realizing Democracy project. “Fixing democracy demands the building and aligning of people’s motivation and authority to act.”
Think about this quote against the true nature of competency-based ed for K-12–
Fits right in with that WISE Summit quote on Unlearn Relearn: What it means to be Human.
Responding to David’s 3 R’s observation above.
I learned to read at ‘3’ and don’t remember how this was accomplished. I was diving into real and big books by 8. I thought these contained magical worlds that I wanted to know about.
Robin and I have discussed the reading aversion that is evident in my student interns. They balk at anything over 500 words.
Are they literate? Yes. Have they mastered this skill such that they simply employ it as a valuable tool? No.
This is across the board. I don’t think they even trouble themselves to follow current events. I mention a story that has been in the U.S. news over months, and they ask me what country this occurred in.
I have given up on research assignments because I know they will explore the first 3 resources Google suggests and go no further.
I have laid out some of the reasons why I believe that the desire not to teach reading properly was tied to a desire to limit and control the Ideas in circulation for the typical member of an age cohort. We then know what Ideas and Images guide perception and control the interpretation of experiences. Very useful if transformation of the student at the neural level of their KBVAF is desired. https://whatedsaid.wordpress.com/2019/11/30/the-biography-of-a-central-idea/ from New Zealand came in today
Read that carefully and then this–
What you are asking of students is contrary to what they have been told, what they have experienced, and what they have felt, repeatedly. They want the world to change for them. What makes the world work successfully and what fractures it most every time were never part of the upbringing of most.
Thanks for this…
It causes me to think of the much-touted ‘new’ distributed ‘leadership’ model, “holocracy”. I am enduring this as part of a coaching group right now, and know that I will end up pushing projects through…because NO ONE will make a decision and ACT.
It also reminds me of reflections of Rogers & Maslow regarding the disastrous results of their handiwork, e.g. tasking groups of mental patients or students (same difference) to manage themselves.
And, finally, it reminds me of an exercise in student empowerment that occurred at my now, ill-fated, graduate school; this being when students were tasked with the management of the Administration Department….and neglected to check email for months at a time or to follow equitable procedures in responding to admissions applications.
And, finally, finally, and this is the most delicious,…it appears that the OD Network, founded by Edgar Schein has collapsed globally. I guess this is a ‘doctor heal thyself’ moment.
Take a look at this from my holiday emails. https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/54853/why-its-imperative-we-all-learn-to-be-emotion-scientists
Notice that aspiration to change an entire culture. That’s what positive psych is really about and Seligman did not used to hide its clear links to the Humanist Psychology of Rogers and Maslow. That London Bridge attacker was at a seminar on transformational change from relearning. We have very dangerous beliefs about behavioral sciences running amok these days and no one with a 5 foot tusk spear to defend us in either the K-12 and higher ed world where I try to expose the truth or in business consulting and coaching of adults where your expertise lies. It’s clearly the same model though as we talked about in this post on what was recognizable from the Erhard/ Jensen ontological framework.
who is going to teach me to deal with my anxiety as I read this blog? How is someone like me going to explain any of this to my 30 something son and Daughter in law?
The depth of this is so stunning, that breaking it down to small bites of information seems impossible.
Not to mention that they will think I am certifiable and won’t believe a word of it.
I cannot be the only grandparent who is experiencing this .
My 2 year old grandson is a student, and next September, my then 18 month old grandson will be going to a Jewish private school. I had been happy about it thinking that at least they will be getting values that I understand based on tradition, history, and faith. But in the mail today I got an invitation to a grandparents’ luncheon there.
I had been avoiding your blog b/c I cannot transmit this information and I only become more anxious and more hopeless.
But today, I picked up your blog again because the buzz words went straight to my heart.
Join us for a fun hands-on program
Exploring our Life Skills curriculum which
Your grandchildren experience weekly.
We will have min-sessions in Coding, Emotional
Intelligence, and Mindfulness/meditation
This is BS and maybe my grandkids are better off going to public school so they can learn about gender fluidity. It is choosing between how do you want to have the lives and minds of your grandkids destroyed. Public or private. Homeschooling is not an option for these people.
My son’s wife is way too progressive minded to find anything wrong with any of this.
Reality no longer exists. And I am beginning to believe that the progressive, neuroscience, master minds and mental health experts along with the LGBTQ etc activists are waiting for everyone our age to die, so there will no longer be anything that resembles WISDOM!
Truly if I told my son that any school today is going to literally CHANGE your child, he won’t believe me.
I plan to go to this luncheon to see what is going on.
Perhaps I will grow a pair of balls and challenge the school on this. But I don’t think I have the skill set to do it as I become tounge tied and can’t articulate. The other problem is I don’t know where to start as this has so many layers I get lost in it and just sound foolish. I can assure you lots of these progressive grandparents will think this is just great.
Maybe this is the Hell I live in now because I was one of those searching people in the 80’s and did est training.
It was like a cult. And after weeks of it the only thing I remember was the last 5 minutes of it when the instructor said, the bottom line and the point of it all is to “get” that
“IT IS WHAT IT IS.” That is all I remember.
I have come far from that person I used to be and am a solid axemind, but that will die with me and never be passed on as this entire mindset that is being pushed has infected everyone. I am scared!
Seeing Werner Eherd’s name “triggered” me. (Joke)
Master Minds who know better than us, and seem to have been born to “change” the world never ever go away.
Thank you so much for your heartfelt response and remember as a grandmother the number one prophylactic to creating and retaining an Axemaker Mind is being a fluent phonetic reader with stores of lovely stories in your own mind. Be the grandmother who makes books a wondrous experience.
Secondly, I thought this link might help give you something objective to share without blurting out suddenly “it’s about rewiring the brain to meet the UN’s plans for 2030 and the SDGs”. It’s not about a World Parliament, it’s about governance via practices and experiences deliberately instilled in the mind and personality with innocuous sounding reasons as you are seeing. https://www.gettingsmart.com/2019/08/weve-got-it-backwards-starting-with-content-rather-than-learners-doesnt-work/ should help.
Also, here is something else objective for you to have as it appears to me from what you describe that your grandchild’s school is building on this, even if its leaders have never actually seen. http://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/teaching-and-learning/learning/aar-cycle/Anticipation%20Action%20Reflection%20Cycle.pdf . I pulled all those materials just before my mother was hospitalized and then was too distracted to write about them. The hype about “collective well-being” fits with what I am working on now as well as where I see the ‘mindfulness’ hype as going. Notice there is a link there for the fuller note which I printed out late last summer.
One last thing, awareness of the purpose of the processes being employed serves to negate the ability of these processes to have the desired neural effects. Take that to heart and reach out here anytime you think that my nerdy knowledge can give you both context and possible remedies.
Thank you Robin. I really appreciate your response. I will check out those links.
This is just out and is an apt description of what is being used now for children as well as adults and the reasons for the shift. I also want to point out that Siegel’s books are frequently cited for use in creating a mandated Positive School Climate. https://www.learningandthebrain.com/blog/presence-meditation-daniel-siegel/
There is really not a dispute on what the aim of these reforms is. There is only ignorance as to the existence of all these declarations or the fact that the law is being used to make these practices mandatory. That means that the desired neural changes are mandatory, which is an authoritarian dream, especially with little recognition of what is taking place all over the world.
Also notice that this conference in NYC in May explicitly starts with a reference to Maslow and his vision. https://www.learningandthebrain.com/conference-406/Schooling-the-Self/
I do maintain that Maslow recanted “self-actualization” or at least expressed extreme doubt as to this being an end goal of ‘education’. I will dig up this paper for you…written just before he died and went to HELL.
Context: He became the victim of the monsters he had created at Brandeis, the kids who believed that intense emotional experiences of ME, ME, ME, obviated actual learning.
His line was: “I might as well go work in a chewing gum factory.”
Rogers made similar statements…
This will help your concerns. The National Education Policy Center is pushing for the creation of Social Justice reading groups. Gotta reach that shared understanding. https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/publications/reading-together
From the Southern Poverty Law Center.