Monthly Archives: August 2018

Serendipitous Admissions: Using Psychology to Impose Philosophy Makes Education the Requisite Tool

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Let’s go back and forth between the aims that nerdy writers and scholars say they want to do in the name of a new kind of authentic, holistic education and why, and the everyday how. The means and tools can be seen through learning standards and yesterday’s push under the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to shift to “phenomenon-based learning”. Let start with a means quote from Carter Phipps (who does executive coaching and leadership training in addition to his cultural evolution) in his book Evolutionaries: Unlocking the Spiritual and Cultural Potential of Science’s Greatest Idea:

“In his latest book, Evolution’s Purpose, Steve McIntosh describes developmental psychology as ‘the branch of social science that deals most directly with the evolution of consciousness. Indeed, this rich tradition…is critical for understanding the kinds of research, thinking, and perspectives that have given birth to our new appreciation of how the internal universe evolves’.”

Developmental psychologists create legally mandated learning standards whether imposed locally, by a state, nationally, or globally, so they get to specify how they want that so-called internal universe to evolve both for individual students and collectively for an entire generation of the population. Cool tool, huh? Likewise, they create curriculum such as what The Lawrence Hall of Science has created for Amplify Science that “motivates students by providing them with a sense of purpose and agency, and by engaging their curiosity.” In other words, it is a curriculum that is about targeting and changing the student’s internal universe and not conveying knowledge in the historic sense of education. Those same developmental psychologists get to decide what is to be “culturally relevant phenomenon,” which is awfully useful as we once again quote Phipps that “cultural evolution happens right here, in the collective interior life of humanity.”

How nice then to use learning standards like the Common Core or competency frameworks that no one but me seems to be explaining accurately to target that very “collective interior life.” As I was reading Evolutionaries I kept thinking that they were not planning for its audience to include someone who understood K-12 education reforms and its underlying legal mandates to enforce compliance so well. I think the Amplify Science paper also never expected someone to look at its supporting references and then track down the Symeonidis & Schwarz 2016 paper “Phenomenon-Based Teaching and Learning through the Pedagogical Lenses of Phenomenology: The Recent Curriculum Reform in Finland,” much less recognize the significance of grounding these reforms in the work of an M. Heidegger from 2006 with a cite in German.

Being a serious nerd who covered the nexus to Deconstructionism in my book Credentialed to Destroy, I recognized Martin the German (and Nazi) existentialist and his 1927 Time and Being with a little help from a translator search engine. Much like Phipps, phenomenology wants to “use complexity as a starting point” and for comparable reasons I suspect. A 2012 paper by a James Magrini on the promise of phenomenology and the  philosophy of existentialism to create ‘authentic education’ though it:

“might be related with great success to social reconstruction and critical pedagogy for social justice in education. For the values we are ‘creating’ and endorsing are never restricted to the classroom, they have an impact on the greater society and, most importantly, the potential that exists for for its change…in addition ‘to assisting our students in their preparation to fit into existing social, political, and economic structures’, as so much of our educational system is currently geared toward doing, we, perhaps especially those of us who teach philosophy, need to encourage our students to think about how these structures might be significantly changed for the better.”

Brought to us by students trained to act from emotion using provided concepts and categories of thought deliberately introduced to drive a belief in the need for cultural change and new social, economic, and political structures. Trained using so-called ‘Power Standards’ that most parents will not even know exist. Let’s face it, phenomenon-based learning in 21st century science has little to do with science as a historically developed and useful body of undisputed knowledge and everything to do with changing each student’s interior universe. In fact, that 2016 paper stated that this phenomenological perspective will allow students to “become mindful of their own learning and acquire strategies of how to learn, a joyful, creative and reflective activity to ensure a good life. Competence, the buzzword of the 21st century, lies at the heart of this conceptualization of learning, which is essentially constructivist and psychological.”

Sounds like that internal, supposedly personal, universe to me, but serendipitously, I had seen a 1972 book cited in the Esalen book from the previous post by W. Warren Wagar, our old friend from the gravely concerning and therefore tagged on this blog–World Order Models Project–that commenced the next year. So I tracked down that book Good Tidings: The Belief in Progress from Darwin to Marcuse to see if I could walk through his cited philosophy to discern just how far back this desire to use education to drive cultural evolution at the level of consciousness actually went. I read that over the weekend and, serendipitously again, Wagar too was influenced by Heidegger and existentialism.

Come to think of it, a founder of Esalen, had his Stanford life turned around by a colleague and friend of Heidegger’s, a refugee, Frederic Spiegelberg, who introduced him to the vision of the perennial philosophy contained in Eastern religion. You know, the one UNESCO does forums on with the Dalai Llama in conjunction with Harvard and the same one Pavel Luksha sees as creating a universal psycho-spiritual wisdom tradition globally using education that we covered in the last post? Now, if that seems like a lot of commonality, it’s the tip of the iceberg to the books and papers I have accumulated, but we need to move on. Plus, I hope, everyone gets the point now.  Good Tidings says ‘Discard’ instead of ‘Withdrawn,’ but its aims remain explicitly current. That’s probably why it was pulled from circulation, huh? Let’s see why.

Wagar was quite graphic about what he called the “telic process of the mind, in which man took control of his own evolution and moved forward deliberately.” Telic is just a fancy word from the Greek telos that goes to people’s purpose, motivations, and aims, which is exactly what UNESCO, with previous Rockefeller Foundation funding, has recently announced they are targeting in the name of Futures Literacy and the Discipline of Anticipation. Somebodies (plural) are quite determinedly pushing cultural evolution by using education to control consciousness and have been, per Wagar, for a long time. Contrary to the above rhetoric, or Phipps pretending that Evolution is just an idea whose time has suddenly come in our 21st century, we get Wagar describing a Korzybski as calling for “the perfection of a ‘science’ and art of human engineering,” which is, of course, how learning standards are now to work.

Has anyone asked any of us if we are OK with “the welfare of the race would be managed efficiently”? To listen to much of the False Narrative surrounding the Common Core and data privacy, such psychological human engineering is A-OK as long as it’s imposed somehow at the school or state level, even if the blueprints are global and decades in preparation. If the financiers of the False Narrative also believe, or want to make use of a widespread, instilled belief, that “the key to future progress, therefore, was ‘integrative thinking and behavior,’ ‘democratic planning for freedom,’ the engineering from an improved social psychology of democratic human cooperation [Remember ‘Soulcraft’?]…also came to feel that social and behavioral scientists would have to work hand in hand with churchmen to help provide the ethico-spiritual integration indispensable to social harmony.”

More interdisciplinary forums most of us will not get invited to. We all need to understand though that Wagar laid out, as so many others have, a desire to “make the supreme task of the behavioral and social sciences to make mankind conscious of itself, and therefore put the future of the race under the control of reason.” Education IS a behavioral and social science and it is the one most of us will encounter most often. It is mind and personality that is aimed at and a belief that our collective culture, human intentions, and aims are all malleable because “the possibility of progress is open to man because he was educable, and because he had learned to control his environment through the sciences…Human beings today were born with the same emotions and powers as savages…Since the variable factor, the factor that may be altered indefinitely, is the social conditions which call out and direct the impulses and sentiments, the positive means of progress lie in the application of intelligence to the construction of proper social devices.”

That’s what learning standards are, as well as phenomenon-based learning curricula, or formative assessments. They are just three real-life examples of “proper social devices” for human engineering of the psychological internal universe of the student in order to implement normative philosophies of the future such as social reconstruction and social justice.

I could go on, but the rest of these quotes simply reenforce the recognition that the rest of us need to grasp as well. If political authority, at any level, and cultural institutions like schools, universities, and churches are all being led to believe that “In man, evolution has entered a new phase, no longer biological, but moral and spiritual” and that “‘psychosocial’ progress” can be made by compelling what those moral and spiritual practices are to be until they become instilled Habits of Mind, we need to recognize those aims.

Because those aims have NOT been discarded or withdrawn, unlike so many of the books that laid them out.

 

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Main Threat & Main Challenge Lies in the Organization of Our Individual & Collective Minds

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That quote came from a fall 2017 slideshare down in South America by Pavel Luksha, the Director of the Global Education Futures Initiative where he went on to post in his next sound byte that “The frontier of evolution of the [sic] humanity is thus the self-guided evolution of consciousness.” Now someone can accuse me of simply mining for inflammatory comments as to what is planned for K-12 education and its true aims and Pavel Luksha is not showing up at school district planning strategies, but education consultants who have been working with him at forums like the one on Silicon Valley in 2015 I wrote about or GEFF forums in Russia are. The GEFF plans “that aim to change global model of education at scale” thus may have a way into your local schools, public or private.

Aspirations of “Improving collective understanding and collaboration capacity of human groups through new modes of (collective) consciousness” are not in fact grandiose declarations if those common understandings and capacities make it into prescribed learning standards and new definitions of student achievement and frameworks for success. Luksha ended the slideshow with a picture of Buckminster Fuller and this quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Too many parents are still listening to hype about Student Success, or a Portrait of a Graduate in a state ESSA plan, or a vision statement from a charter, parochial, or independent school through the existing reality of education that they experienced.

All over the world they fail to realize that a new model is being set up using enough old rhetoric to obscure the enormity of the sought shift or its revolutionary declared intentions (if, like me, you know where to look). It aims to shift “living systems” like people, but also cities and workplaces by targeting “human intentionality and social structures” while we assume the familiar is what is intended. Meanwhile, UNESCO, foundations, ed supers at a district level, and school heads are, as Luksha’s slides also showed, targeting “Psycho-technologies (including spirituality & religion)” for deliberately designed change along with “Institutes /Norms/ Rules/ Soft Tech.” Since Luksha stated it was in an effort to shift us all to a “Thrivability” or “Wisdom-Based Society” and GEFF’s tentacles extend all the way to the local level on an organized basis, we should listen to this planned:

“shifting to ‘horizontal’ net-centric world ‘working for 100% of humanity…without ecological damage or disadvantage of anyone’ (B. Fuller). Implies involving everyone and all in a ‘revolution of consciousness’. Technological advancement is necessary but secondary to the development of individual and collective human potential.”

Since one of my life mottoes is to recognize when we are on the menu so we can recognize how we are to be captured for eating, and this aspiration for some type of planned cultural evolution via education to alter consciousness, has kept coming up since I covered UNESCO founder, Julian Huxley in Credentialed to Destroy, let’s use a quote of his brother’s, cited early on in a book on Esalen, The Upstart Spring, that I stumbled across during an offline discussion on the commonalities between what is going on in K-12 globally and required management training and coaching practices that kept linking to Esalen and Integral Philosophy. If all these collective institutions like schools and workplaces, especially involving multinational corporations, are suddenly requiring participation in practices designed to alter consciousness and prevailing understandings in common ways, we have every right to recognize those intentions and track through to the beginning of such plans for a “psychological revolution.” Here is Aldous in 1960:

“Let us begin [said Huxley in his kindly Oxonian accents] by asking a question: What would have happened to a child of 170 I.Q. born into a Paleolithic family at the time of, say, the cave paintings of Lascaux? Well, quite obviously, he could have been nothing but a hunter and a gatherer. There was no other opportunity for him to be anything else.

The biologists have shown us that, physiologically and anatomically, we are pretty much the same as we were twenty thousand years ago and that we are using fundamentally the same equipment  as the Aurignacean man to produce incredibly different results. We have in the course of these twenty thousand years actualized a tremendous number of things which at that time and for many, many centuries thereafter were wholly potential and latent in man.

This, I think, gives us reason for tempered optimism that there is still a great many potentialities–for rationality, for affection and kindliness, for creativity–still lying latent in man; and, since everything has speeded up enormously in recent years, that we shall find methods for going almost as far beyond the point we have reached now within a few hundred years as we have succeeded in going beyond our Aurignacean ancestors in twenty thousand years. I think this is not entirely a fantastic belief. The neurologists have shown us that no human being has ever made use of as much as ten percent of all the neurons in his brain. And perhaps, if we set about it in the right way, we might be able to produce extraordinary things out of this strange piece of work that a man is.”

I bolded that line because I think a great way to accurately decipher the purpose of all these education reforms grounded in ‘cognitive science’ with holistic aspirations that started in the 1960s in earnest after Huxley’s speech, and in earnest in the 80s just after The Upstart Spring was first published, tracks to what both Huxleys had in mind. It’s also what UNESCO clearly has in mind now in the name of Media Education, Futures Literacy, and the Discipline of Anticipation. It’s what Pavel Luksha and GEFF have laid out. What if all these aspirations and their commonalities keep coming up because no one accurately told us where Uncle Karl’s hoped for battleground for transformation really lay?

In the 1930s professor Sidney Hook published a book he called Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation that he refused to allow to come back into print during the remainder of his life. The publisher of the reprint, the humanist Paul Kurtz in 2002, shows up at several points in that Esalen book and then at 21st century UNESCO conferences. If altering consciousness via education is everyone’s actual aim, let’s see why:

“all social action and change is mediated by ideas in the minds of men. Ideas, therefore, cannot be passive images; they must be active instruments…The scientific approach to society involves the continuous application of ideals to the functioning of institutions and the continuous testing of those ideals by the social consequences of their application…Processes of social transformation are thus at the same time processes of psychological transformation. The dialectic principle explains how human beings, although conditioned by society, are enabled through activity, to change both society and themselves. Intelligent social action becomes creative action. ‘By acting on the external world and changing it,’ says Marx, ‘man changes his own nature.’…

Human nature does not change over night. It develops slowly out of the perception of new needs which, together with the limiting condition of the environment, determine new tasks and suggest new goals. But the new needs themselves do not emerge suddenly into human experience. They arise out of an attempt to gratify the old needs in a shifting environment and find conscious articulation only in the active practical process by which man both changes and adjusts to his environment…This theory of perception was necessitated by his [Marx] philosophy of history. If human beings are active in history, then, since all human activity is guided by ideas and ideals, human thinking must be an active historical force.”

And so it is. If we do not understand its role well enough to grasp why Sidney Hook himself italicized the word thinking back in the 1930s, having those thought processes of concepts, ideas, and ideals manipulated for political purposes in the 21st century is exactly what will continue to go on in earnest. Tying these aspirations over decades and continents to recently, Education Week ran a story on August 13 that “Meditation Isn’t Just About Self Help. Here’s What Educators Need to Know”. It wanted to make sure yoga, meditation, and mindfulness standards (sometimes as part of anti-bullying or Positive School Climate mandates and others as part of Physical Well-being State Standards) were not merely being used as a “distraction to get people to adjust to oppressive conditions.”

Oh, no, these requirements are needed to change consciousness just like Aldous Huxley, Esalen, and Pavel Luksha’s presentation all had in mind. The post ended with a call that these practices are a necessary component to education now to cultivate the necessary “critical consciousness. We also need the knowledge and skill to challenge norms and structures perpetuating inequities. Integrating both mindful reflection with social-justice action has the greatest potential to shape coalitions, build collective empowerment, and mediate a new standard for education.”

That new standard is all about altering prevailing consciousness, or, as an earlier post noted, regulating subjectivity at the individual level of the mind and the cultivated ideals instilled in the personality at the level of ideals, norms, and habits.

Is that what anyone is recognizing when they think of Student Success and Achievement or Competencies in the 21st Century? Time to wake up to get ourselves off the revolutionary transformation menu.

Surreptitiously Subjugating Our Locus of Control: Whose Choice?

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Tracking what is really going on in education through what is being legally mandated means I frequently know what is crucial long before I fully grasp why the shift in practices is so important. It lets me know through the decades and all over the world, that whatever the current name and given rationale, certain aspects of people’s Identity formation, the basis for their decision making as they live their lives, and what motivates them to act and guides their perceptions are being systematically targeted. When I wrote Credentialed to Destroy I had grasped that Transformational Outcomes-Based Education (Tranzi OBE) and constructivism targeting how the world and reality is viewed were being pushed all over the English-speaking world in what appeared to be a coordinated effort to drive now drive human evolution, along with its institutions, via planned changes to culture rather than genes.

Genes just take too long for transformation plans apparently and if I have learned anything in just this year’s posts alone, we have many people in a hurry to redesign how the world works. Just last week was “Forty Years of Wicked Problem Solving” that will really make use of the new HOTS mandate in the US federal ed law that was designed to be virtually impossible to Opt Out of. Why must everyone be subjugated to such a prescription of what concepts they use to analyze wicked problems that have no fixed answer or have never been taught to the student? I think Brian Head supplied that answer in the above paper when he admitted that “the nature and significance of the policy problem is shaped through debates on ‘framing’. [No need for debate if the frames are mandated learnt predispositions set out in learning standards]. This is crucial for how the debates about problems, contexts and responses are represented…framing [is] a way of selecting, organizing, interpreting and making sense of a complex reality to provide guideposts for knowing, analysing, persuading and acting.”

So nice of governments now to dictate that, isn’t it? All in the name of High Standards and Success for All we get our very subjectivity itself mandated and then put under regular surveillance via poorly understood assessments for compliance. Apparently if someone doesn’t get caught as a K-12 student there’s always higher ed and management leadership retreats targeting that very same locus of control. Everybody suddenly wants to get at and manipulate our “perceptions, values and interests” that control “how issues are scoped” and how we will likely interpret our daily experiences. Over and over again we come across a belief that in the 21st century we must all ultimately have “shared understanding and shared meaning about the problem and possible solutions.”

What better way to do that than to use learning standards and competency framework to:

“develop this psychological capacity…to not only model and manage its external environment, but also to model and manage its internal adaptive processes. It can develop mental models of the pre-existing physical, emotional, and mental adaptive processes that determine how it behaves and acts. The models will enable it to understand consciously how its pre-existing adaptive processes operate, what useful effects they have, how they might be modified, and what the consequences might be. Through self-knowledge they will develop the capacity to gain control over their internal adaptive processes. Increasingly, this will enable them to manage their physical actions, emotional and motivational states, and their beliefs and other mental processes in whatever ways are necessary”

to fit with whatever learning experiences a school mandates and whatever objectives and outcomes it now imposes. That passage really struck me because the Principals and School Supers most aggressive in pushing this vision tend to be the ones being promoted now to ever more lucrative job opportunities. Is this what any parent imagines as higher student achievement? Yet every legal instrument from statutes, to charters, to what HOTS assesses, actually gets at manipulating, and then tracking via data whether the desired adaptions are occurring to these internal adaptive processes. If the same new prescribed “norms, moral beliefs, and other rules of behaviour” can become instilled across a large group as “learnt predispositions” governments will have successfully created a common internal manager guiding future behaviour with nary a heads up, much less consent.

If that seems to be overly ambitious, let me quote that “a distributed internal manager is formed of a set of hard-wired predispositions that are reproduced in each of the members of a group of organisms…[Student-centered learning sounds so much better,doesn’t it?] A distributed internal manager clearly has the potential to organize a group cooperatively…so that they treat others in the group as self… or by hardwiring specific cooperative behaviours in individuals.” In other words, all these plans we keep encountering from UN Sustainable Development Goals to supposedly Balanced Communitarian visions in the name of Founding Principles, Learning Liberty, or a New Golden Rule can all be put into effect through the right type of prescribed learning experiences.

In this vision “each individual is controlled by its particular set of predispositions”, which he or she may not even know were instilled intentionally from preschool through higher ed. The group as a whole can only be controlled and coordinated if a “common set of predispositions is reproduced across the group.” How does the Common Core ever actually go away if it is about hardwiring learnt predispositions? If we wonder why, we have a confession that “if we had different emotional goals and motivations, our technology would be different, as would our systems of government and other social arrangements.”

Sounds like learning standards and competency frameworks then prescribed for the vast majority of students would be a highly effective way to invisibly alter ‘civil society’, just as so many of my links have laid out is the current aim. Just have education or that weekend seminar or management retreat target the “internal adaptive goals” of students, an executive team, or all too often, the elected members of your local school board or private school trustees go through learning experiences that are actually designed to alter their ‘psychological software’, even if the supplied promotional materials and consent forms deny that. It’s the practices that matter and when those practices and participatory experiences whether in a school, woods, or luxury hotel are designed to force someone to “drop their emotional attachments to any ideas, attitudes, beliefs, norms, values, religious systems and moral principles,” we have a targeting of this psychological capacity to change internal adaptive processes.

This ‘distributed internal management’ is an excellent way to prescribe planned and coerced transformations starting at the level of the individual mind and personality without their being the telltale levers of control of a gulag or overt censorship. We should all be alarmed to know such plans exist and that they fit how learning standards work so well. “The hold of the manager over the individual would be greatly strengthened if the individual’s mental modelling of the world led him to believe that the codes and norms were in his best interests” is not a phrase any parent wants to read as the school year starts, but it is essential to grasp how these plans actually work. This is not just a matter of the UN and admitted progressives wanting to use education to fulfill John Dewey’s desire to instill the habits and dispositions essential for his vision of democracy.

I have been looking at Classical Education for a while and the deceitful narratives designed to support it. It too, at its core, seems to want to alter the fact that “particularly in the last two hundred years, a significant proportion of individuals in more complex human societies has developed a strong capacity to use internal linear modelling to critically evaluate their own beliefs.” Apparently that will not do, because our “behaviour is now guided largely by internal reward systems that are mostly self-centred, except for the legacy of the kin selection and reciprocal altruism mechanisms.” Those don’t reconcile us to the desired communitarian ethos prescribed for the 21st century so we get the Good, True, and Beautiful instilled for us and new definitions of Freedom and Liberty. It’s for our own good you see. Needed to solve those wicked problems as a matter of public policy.

Learning standards, properly understood, have “the potential to change how each of us sees ourself, what we do with our life, and the meaning and purpose we see in our individual existence.” Too important to be a matter of personal choice, these have become a matter of prescribed public policy imposed surreptitiously using the law to force compliance with a vision that isn’t our own in most cases.

Shouldn’t we all be aware? If “our thoughts, beliefs, motivations and emotional states, as well as the methods we use to influence them, must become objects of consciousness” so that we can be forced to develop new “psychological software”, don’t we get to at least see what is to be altered and why?

Isn’t actual knowledge, instead of prescribed conceptual ‘frames’, the only way to avoid what has been quietly put in place in a most coordinated manner? Especially with the commencement of the new school year?

Parents may well be rejoicing in achievement that can quite frankly be more accurately seen as brainwashing when properly understood.

What happens to the student or adult who is forced into adopting “new psychological software” despite their reluctance to change?

Somehow it seems likely to be more impactful than a notation “doesn’t have a Growth Mindset”?