Monthly Archives: August 2017

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.

 

 

 

 

Shocks, Stresses, and Yokeability: Resilience as the Balm Masking Total Control

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Is Yokeability really a word? Well, we need it to show why both admitted Progressive Change Agents, supposedly right think tanks, both political parties, and so many other influential people signed that Williamsburg Charter. Interestingly, the author stated at the end of the Godly Republic book that although he had heard of the Charter copies of it were “hard to find.” I am not surprised given the infamous vision it was actually committing us to funding, and our institutions, to creating. DiIulio stated it was not until 2005 “while visiting Calvin College” that someone gave him a copy. If Calvin College rings a bell, it is probably because that is where the current Ed Secretary, Betsy DeVos, attended college. As I have plowed through all these books about a faith-based vision that I did not really want to write about, but could not avoid, I realized that everyone seemed to want to instill the concepts, Ideas, beliefs, values, and habits that would create a ready-and-motivated-to-act Maker of History.

Moreover, even though those books I cited broke out the so-called faith-based vision to be partners in meeting human needs and to get taxpayer funds for doing so, I recognized last week as the Rockefeller Foundation rolled out its 100 Resilient Cities strategy at a late July meeting in NYC, that the so-called FBOs (faith-based organizations) were no longer being talked about separately as they were in the 90s and the Bush 43 years. Now they have a new acronym–CBOs–community based organizations. If we had not walked through the books linking all these FBOs to a new vision of humanity, transformational change, and a new form of citizenship, the true nature of the change and all the different partners would be hard to see. You may want to check out this site https://www.ujimaboston.com/ to see what the vision of the future currently looks like.

Likewise, the book I cited on Building a Community of Citizens had a companion book published in the same year called Educational Innovation: An Agenda to Frame the Future that used the state of Pennsylvania as the example and Transformational Outcomes Based Education as the technique to be used. Frankly, I got the best feel for what the Right and FBOs wanted to do in a very odd place–a 2013 book by Hillsdale College President and Heritage Foundation Board member Larry Arnn. Heritage is a signor of that “hard to find” Charter and I looked into the book The Founders’ Key because of all the deceit surrounding Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative and the Common Core as well as the tendency to attribute erroneous narratives to the so-called ‘Founders’ vision.’

We have come across the phrases self-governance, self-discipline, or self-regulation as the so-called new purpose of education. Arnn laid out a similar function under the title the ‘well-ordered soul”, which he viewed as an obligation of governments to create so that it “must settle into the characters of the people.” He quoted James Madison approvingly for saying that the “passions [of the public] ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.” Yikes! Arnn defined the “well-ordered soul is one in which the reason moderates and guides the passions toward good action.” We could ask who gets to decide what that ‘good action’ is, but that would require parents who grasp that math, science, and classical literature are actually not about the transmission of knowledge anymore and they might dispute that shift.

To get some sense of why I say the Right Pincer also wants Marxian Makers of History to transform the world that currently exists let me quote from Arnn in his Conclusion as it may be the single best example of what a dialectical view of history actually reads like. Moreover, this vision never had to be translated from German unlike Uncle Karl’s.

“History, then, is a story of circumstances playing on human beings. Human beings are shaped by these circumstances, and also they shape the circumstances back. We discover this through modern philosophy, a branch of science. Philosophy [putting theory into practice? action research?] becomes a form of making. It supplies the hope that we can shape our world to fit our will.”

I am not sure you or I belong to the ‘we’ or ‘our’ making such decisions and then enshrining them in ‘transformative’ or ‘innovative’ education. Let’s look somewhere else I found that same Maker of History vision as in “Stop telling our story! We decide what happens next. Because it’s our story now and we are making history ourselves.” I have warned before that during the Cold War, intellectuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain were pushing Marx’s Human Development Society vision on the West. That stage when all needs could supposedly be met because capitalism’s ingenuity had produced a magic technology (identified as the computer and intercommunications technology like the Internet). That post-capitalist stage was called little ‘c’ communism by Uncle Karl.

When the book communism for kids was published by MIT Press in 2017 many of the same groups that push a false narrative surrounding the Common Core and education ridiculed the book as trying to bring back the already tried failed Communism of the USSR or Mao’s China. Since I knew that was not the real danger now and had learned to doublecheck the offered narrative I bought the book. It actually defined communism as the “society that gets rid of all the evils people suffer today in our society under capitalism.” It’s “never been tried before” says the book and what the book described actually fits with what I am reading coming out of 100 Resilient Cities, especially the recent Resilient Boston paper.

See why I am worried? And the same techniques we have encountered from the behavioral sciences that can supposedly create a Revolution of the Heart or a well-ordered soul via Tranzi OBE as I nicknamed it in my book Credentialed to Destroy are to be used to “generate desire…a form of desire capable of jamming images of a better world into every fracture of daily life, from subway rides to service jobs to global poverty. In every moment of social suffering, this desire demands a better way of life.” Use education then, visual imagery, and perhaps even virtual reality gaming, to create communist desire. The book did call for that and all the hostility to the individual in post after post is even more troubling once we recognize that this vision for communism needs “the cracking of the individual self, the end of our isolation…Would we, the collective subject of humanity, through communism, finally realize our own being by appropriating a world that actually belongs to us already, because we created it?”

The book laid out a desired goal “to collectively transform all social spheres” and to fulfill a “demand for social-that is to say, political and economic–democratization.” That is precisely what the hard to download but worth it Resilient Boston laid out. Education and working with local school districts is merely one component of this total transformational vision but it is an integral and explicit component. After all, to be resilient requires achieving racial equity per the plan and that “requires a comprehensive approach. Beyond working to change individual policies and practices, we must also transform our entire systems of thinking and acting…” See why MIT Press translated and published that bini adamczak book?

Nobody is mentioning Uncle Karl and resilience sounds so much better than the ‘c’ word, but the function and, quite frankly, the goals are the same. The goals of course require a political reorganization of society so that “Racial equity means ‘closing the gaps’ so that race does not predict one’s success, while also improving outcomes for all. Equity is distinct from equality in that it aspires to achieve fair outcomes and considers history and implicit bias, rather than simply providing ‘equal opportunity’ for everyone. Racial equity is not just the absence of overt racial discrimination; it is also the presence of deliberate policies and practices that provide everyone with the support they need to improve the quality of their lives.”

That really is what Uncle Karl called his communist Human Development Society vision and we have to be able to recognize what we were never supposed to even hear about in time. The Rockefeller Foundation in its 100 anniversary publication wrote about its social engineering aspirations since its founding and desires to steer humanity in new directions and we really ought to take them at their word. Anyone interested in the organized deceit around Climate Change should appreciate that it provides a rationale for the desired political control and reorganization of all those “social spheres of society”. An obligation for racial equity does the same.

Here’s the definition of a Resilient City and notice how the definition of stresses pulls in the desired Marxian desire to meet needs that the FBOs we encountered have also declared to be part of their religious vision and the Williamsburg Charter. Bolding in original.

“the adoption and incorporation of a new view of resilience that includes not just shocks–such as floods, nor-easters, and other acute events–but also stresses that weaken the fabric of a city on a day-to-day or cyclical basis, such as economic hardship or social inequality.

By addressing both shocks and stresses in a holistic manner, a city becomes more able to respond to adverse events and is better able to deliver basic functions in both good and bad times…We must acknowledge our history, heal our collective trauma, and advance racial equity, social justice, and social cohesion if we are to move forward as a truly resilient city. Building resilience starts with identifying our most important problems first and figuring out the best ways to tackle them together.”

Now think of that resilience vision being implemented by laws we are unaware of and education that we are being deliberately misled about. Think about the implications of a generation of schoolchildren and certain voters being told that the following quote is what Martin Luther King stood for. We all commemorate a holiday for him after all.

“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

Anyone else interpreting that quote from Resilient Boston to be fostering the needed “communist desire” instilled via education and new practices of citizenship at the internalized level of habit in a well-ordered soul? A suitably yoked soul for a resilient and transformed 21st century society?

 

Priming the Springs of Action: Reconstituting We the People Via Internalized Habits and Values

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Rather than continue on with what is going on now behind our backs in K-12 education globally, let’s go back in time first to pick up some of the ‘deep pillars’ from the late 80s and 90s that ground the supposed “social capital that is comprised of human character, competence and values.” In my book Credentialed to Destroy I laid out the template for what was called Transformational Outcomes Based Education. I also covered events taking place in the mid to late 80s in the West that suggested insider preparation for the “Fall” of the Berlin Wall and Communism. Today’s post should be seen as building on the Deep Pillars also laid out in the book. We need to grasp every aspect that political insiders, think tanks, institutions of faith, and other public policy forces who turned out to be involved, were quietly advocating and implementing to achieve a particular vision for the future.

This is from an essay “Citizenship: Transcending Left and Right” contained in a 2004 book Building a Community of Citizens: Civil Society in the 21st Century. I found it referenced in footnotes as I followed up again on the deceit surrounding the Common Core and other education ‘reforms’ currently. If this quote reminds anyone else of Amitai Etzioni’s New Golden Rule, he is listed as a consultant on the book. As we have encountered the Bradley Foundation a great deal as we have followed widely disseminated education narratives that happen to be false, I should note that their then President, Michael Joyce, also wrote one of the essays in that book.

“A closer look at these issues will reveal that today’s crisis of values has nothing whatever to do with ‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’ institutions. It is a by-product of individualism…The real source of these problems is in us, as we search for a way to integrate the modern emphasis on individual self-expression with a vision of values, community, and purpose that transcends the individual self–a way to integrate freedom and order.”

How often do we now hear the phrases ‘self-government’ or ‘self-governance’? We simply assume it means something having to do with our individual autonomy. Turns out we get to have a “new kind of politics” grounded in psychology and the “self-governance of individuals and communities…[a] two-dimensional value system underlies the self-governing approach to the world, which borrows the best of both capitalism and socialism and combines them in an integrated vision.” That would be an integrated vision of course to be imposed invisibly by Bipartisan laws few read, a new vision of education, and “a change in the spirit of individuals and the community that comprises them.”

Let’s skip to another book from 1998 brought to us by the Center for Public Justice that “pursues civic education programs from the standpoint of a comprehensive Christian worldview. The Center advocates equal public treatment of all faiths and seeks political reforms to strengthen the diverse institutions of civil society.” It turned out that Antonio Gramsci was not the only visionary to see Marching through the Institutions as the way to later prevailing consciousness and culture. So have groups, politicians, and think tanks many of us have simply assumed to be representative of Conservatism. It turns out though that the best way to get Marx’s Moral Revolution in place is to get religious faiths on board as well, control education, and redefine concepts like Liberty and Freedom we all think we understand.

Naming Educators as the Levers Shifting the Human Personality To Marx’s Moral Revolution

is the post I have to simply assume everyone is familiar with so we can move forward to what was laid out in then Senator Dan Coats’ 1998 Kuyper Lecture and printed as Mending Fences: Renewing Justice Between Government and Civil Society . It is once again selling the vision that liberty requires a certain kind of citizenry and democracy is a “set of habits…[that] depends on an internalized willingness to respect the rights and dignity of others.” All of our encounters with Classical Education about the principles of the Good, Character, and Virtues appear to go back to this vision where “these virtues require more than intellectual assent; they must take root not only in minds but in hearts.”

Yet again, we have a vision where civil society institutions are supposed to “protect against individualism, turning our attention to the needs of others, the benefits of cooperation, the necessity of trust, and the value of the common good.” All citizens and especially students with their still pliable minds and hearts need “those ideas and sentiments” that will free “individuals from the solitude of their selfishness.” When I wrote Credentialed to Destroy I laid out the transformational vision of Social Reconstructionists. I cited to admitted progressives who had been explicit about their intentions. Turns out so have the so-called Right and institutions of faith and they have resurrected a Dutch politician from the 19th century, Abraham Kuyper to do that while pretending a reconstructionist aim is simply a matter of faith. (Italics in original in Mending Fences)

“There is a common good greater than individual rights, and society must actively and tirelessly seek it. Kuyper exclaimed, “We shall not be satisfied with the structure of society until it offers all human beings an existence worthy of man.” In a beautiful passage Pope John XXIII defines the common good as “the sum total of those conditions of social living, whereby men are enabled more fully and more readily to achieve their own perfections.”

But I did promise deep pillars and we have remained in the 90s, haven’t we? In my tiptoeing through the footnotes, I not only found the books cited above, but also a 2007 book Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future. Written by John DiIulio, Bush 43’s first faith-based czar, it had an Appendix I had never seen referenced before from June 25, 1988. The document was called the Williamsburg Charter: A National Celebration and Reaffirmation of the First Amendment Religious Liberty Clauses and whatever the 100 highly influential people who signed the charter thought they were endorsing, the actual function of the document is to commit to an internalized Marxian moral revolution. Yes, I am sure as I have read a lot of the language when no one is pretending anything other than driving the deep pillars the Human Development Society would need in values, beliefs, emotions and other motivators of future action.

Yes the references are a bit oblique at first, tucked away into phrases like the “remarkable opportunity for the expansion of liberty” and a desire for the “ordering of society” around common “commitments and ideals” that all people are to live by. It is inherent in the language too that “rights are universal and responsibilities mutual.” Remember the definition of ‘precepts’ from the last post and their current sudden ubiquity, as we go back to the paragraph that follows “A time for reconstruction” heading:

“We believe, finally, that the time is ripe for a genuine expansion of democratic liberty, and that this goal may be attained through a new engagement of citizens in a debate that is reordered in accord with constitutional first principles and considerations of the common good. This amounts to no less than the reconstitution of a free republican people in our day. Careful consideration of three precepts would advance this possibility.”

First, the criteria must be mutual which gets translated to mean that the “intention of the Framers” is not enough. We reconstituted citizens must also internalize as  habits “consideration of immutable principles of justice.” Should we look to Kuyper or a 1930s Pope as quoted above? Secondly, the “Consensus must be Dynamic”. One wonders if an earlier draft said Dialectical instead, but that might be too obvious to get all 100 signatures. We are told that “Reconstitution requires a shared understanding of the relationship between the Constitution and the society it is to serve.” We the People must affirm those principles in practice. Supposedly this mandate is NOT authoritarian because it is civil society imposing at the level of hearts and minds in order to “contribute to the spiritual and moral foundations of democracy.”

That’s clearly John Dewey’s definition of democracy which explains why one of the Rockefeller heirs wrote a book about him and his work driving a Religious Humanism vision that I keep hearing being mirrored in Faux Narratives. The third precept is that the “Compact Must Be Mutual”. Suddenly, “the First Amendment…is the epitome of public justice and serves as the Golden Rule for civic life.” Personally, I think being told by so many public officials that a “general consent to the obligations of citizenship is therefore inherent in the American experiment, both as a founding principle (‘We the people”) and as a matter of daily practice” is certainly a violation of the spirit of the phrase “the government shall not…”

Let’s end there as these quotes place so much of what I documented in my book and then later on this blog into their true transformative functions. The empathy push from the last post makes so much more sense if we now supposedly have a “responsibility to comprehend” the perspectives of others. Pushing a common core of mandated values, attitudes, and beliefs fits with a desire for “a broad, active community of understanding to be sustained.”

Take a look at that Williamsburg Charter in one of the variety of places it can be found. It will do wonders toward our finally achieving an accurate “community of understanding” about what is truly going on in education and why.