Sometimes trains that appear to be running on parallel tracks or away from each other actually may be planning to meet up somewhere if we only had a more elaborate and long term map of the real train routes. That appears to me to be the case in two recent initiatives that on their faces could not be more opposite. The first is the Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development–NCSEAD–issuing a so-called “Evidence-Base for How We Learn” https://www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/evidence-base-learn/ and stressing that integrated social, emotional and academic development is not a database of personal attributes as the False Narrative keeps wanting to emphasize. It treats the student, their mind, and personality as a system that can be consciously manipulated via education to “appeal to our higher angels. The goal really is to lead all of us on the pathway to a better life, a good life.”
No one mentioned that “you will simply love it Comrade,” but that is a bit how the papers and discussions read. Like the Portrait of a Graduate visions, the personal traits of the student/system are front and center as a desire to “graduate young adults who are self-directed, intellectually engaged, and possess a commitment to personal and civic responsibility.” The vision is supposedly “consistent with how brains take in and process information.” Now I would add a caveat to that since I have been tracking CHAT-Cultural Historical Activity Theory–across the decades and from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, to New York City with Rockefeller Foundation financing, to San Diego when Carnegie seems to have taken over, to Rome, Italy and the 2013 ISCAR Summit. In the middle we have the original Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) mandates in the 80s (now in ESSA as an annual mandate for all students) and what was called the New Standards Project in the 90s that would morph into the Common Core we know now.
That was long-winded but the point is these ideas are trackable with a clear lineage and related tangents that have been covered at ISC through the years. I hereby declare myself a sufficient authority from all this tracking that statements about how this is how the brain DOES work are not true. The truth is that this is how the brain CAN be made to work if certain educational practices become required. The pithy expression is that “nerves that fire together, wire together”. If curricula highlights interpreting through supplied concepts, principles, and themes; forces an inquiry approach and ‘productive struggle’; or as with HOTS assessments, requires questions with no single answer but which deal with ‘ambiguity, empathy, and problem-solving,’ a certain part of the brain tied to emotion in the Prefrontal Cortex is what is being used.
My second train is the newly launched Child Abuse in the Classroom site which issued what is either an intentionally manipulative narrative on the the role of social and emotional learning and its ubiquity over the decades, or it is just ignorant of the entire push to make the student into a system. Perhaps it is a mixture depending on the person involved.Targeting certain parts of the brain has always been crucial to this manipulation, which you would never know from articles like this one. http://www.capitolhilloutsider.com/congress-passes-psychological-manipulation-in-an-education-bill/ The logic is not emotional manipulation on top of academics. The purpose of academics in this ‘Make a System via Neural Wiring’ scenario is to create the activities that allow the desired neural rewiring. Reading the CAC press release caused me to get my hands on Phyllis Schlafly’s original Child Abuse in the Classroom book from 1984.
Whatever Mrs Schlafly’s intentions in publishing that testimony from hearings around the country, the book’s mere existence seems to provide an evidence-base for using social and emotional techniques in the classroom without any real statutory protection. Here’s why: the so-called Protection of Pupils does not let us use our dictionary meaning of “research or experimentation program or project”. Instead it defined it as “any applicable program designed to explore or develop new or unproven teaching methods or techniques.” We have a book with testimony on how many years these techniques had been in use in certain school systems and just how effective the curricula and practices were in changing who the student was at an internalized level–what they valued and believed.
See the problem? The book created a paper trail that disqualified the described techniques from its definition of “research or experimentation program or project.” No wonder an SEL emphasis keeps recurring. It’s impossible to read the book and not recognize that the described techniques are still in use today with no effective remedy because their true role has not been accurately appreciated. They all go to the same part of the brain’s Prefrontal Cortex as the new ESSA HOTS mandate. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Plenty of testimony on the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum in those 1984 hearings. Lo and behold, FHAO is also what the Aspen Institute recommends in NCSEAD’s August 2017 report “Putting It All Together.”
When I was following up on a recent National Academy of Sciences publication touting a synonym for SEL called Character, it led me to a Notre Dame professor, Darcia Narvaez, who also turned out to be a fellow at that Jubilee Centre that has issued the Framework for Moral Development and the Knightly Virtues curriculum. She has a book that explained precisely how learning standards like the Common Core or Competencies really are to work so let me quote her. Remember standards and curricula now are all about experiences and activity-oriented practices like Project-Based Learning. Members of the Aspen Task Force are also tied to the Jubilee Centre.
“Experience shapes which neuronal systems become more habitually deployed. Because it is dynamic, the theory is helpful for understanding how early experience can shape personality, including moral personality…Neuronal circuitry is formed by what is activated most frequently based on experience…resulting in the favoring of some neural circuits (value systems) over others.”
Narvaez also laid out how “intention and affection generate ‘narratives of vitality,’ regulating internally generated motives and the awareness of self and other in relationship. Such narratives not only structure the psyche but may contribute to the development of language.” A very powerful tool in other words and if the admitted Progressive Left is not the only one wishing to restructure culture and control the psyche, that’s a great deal of incentive for False Narratives about the Common Core, competency-based learning, and the actual purpose of SEL. No wonder we keep encountering the Personally Identifiable Information database explanation. It gets parents outraged and looking for a remedy. Meanwhile the neural rewiring tool remains a part of the supposed educational options we keep having offered up as our supposed choice to escape “government schools.”
Who needs a database of personal characteristics when the desired bullseye is neural rewiring invisibly installed in the brain and nervous system? Meanwhile, every group with transformational intentions in the here and now world, whether open Marxists, naive do-gooders, or religiously driven adherents wanting to impose a Heaven on Earth somehow knows this fact about this new view of education:
“Enduring states become traits…In a dynamic system, once the system is stabilized around a particular interpretation, expectancies are formed for future pattern recognition and action…A behavior at any given point in time is a function of the interaction of person with context, with its history and trajectory. Prior experiences and habits constrain present configurations and options. Prior experience constrains real-time interpretation and activations of connectivity across systems.
Learning in developmental time constrains learning in real time.That is, affective-cognitive structures that developed from emotionally laden situations form units of personality that limit future cognitive appraisals.”
Those ’emotionally laden situations’ were precisely what drove so many parents to testify back in 1984 and seek a federal remedy against these type of educational practices. We never will get an effective remedy against these intentional neural intrusions against ANY LEVEL of government until we grasp the aims of the student as a manipulable system. It’s no secret that many who seem to be active in weaving a deceptive interpretation of these education initiatives also like to wear their religious convictions on their sleeves. Nothing wrong with that except when the reason for the deceit is to allow religious groups to invisibly impose their vision using these powerful tools of behavioral science. The work of one of the more high-profile writers, Gary DeMar who created the Biblical Worldview Library, was cited in a footnote so I located Volume 3 of God and Government: The Restoration of the Republic.
DeMar was very hostile to what he called ‘autonomous reason’ and wanted to “bring into captivity all our thinking.” My noncompliant Axemaker Mind recognizes how he and those who agree with his vision for developing “an education program for dominion purposes that would cover the world. This means applying what we learn from the Bible to every area of thought” would just love the behavioral science/neural rewiring/systems science template that everyone but the parents seems to now know about. The purposes for manipulation now differ, but the planned techniques really do not. Again that’s a huge incentive to mislead parents about the nature of education reforms or to declare curricula “Common Core-free” even though it clearly aims at such neural manipulation when accurately evaluated. I want to close with DeMar’s definition of ‘self-government’ since that euphemism comes up so much, as well as the rationale for Classical Education since it sounds like such an alluring remedy.
“Notice the ethical dimension to education. It was not enough to teach the technical skills. For godly dominion to be extended, self-government had to prevail. Self-government is nothing more than keeping the commandments of God with a willing heart.”
Does ever parent and taxpayer appreciate that or do they still think classical education is about the transmission of knowledge? Hyping the Good, True, and Beautiful sounds so much better than matter-of-factly having the school vision state: “All teaching is goal-oriented. The Christian’s goal is not merely to fill students’ minds with facts that have no meaning, purpose or relationship to all the other facts in the universe; Christian education develops its goals from Scripture. While tests and degrees might be a part of all education, learning with a definite purpose is certainly the main element.”
That ‘definite purpose,’ to be internalized at a neural level to guide perception and motivate behavior, is what makes even religious education now about turning the student into a system. Maybe it is for his or her own good, but it’s not out in the open. Parents cannot have the much vaunted ‘say’ in their children’s education until they appreciate this neural aim and its consequences.
Hopefully it can be out in the open now because that is truly the only way to stop Child Abuse in the Classroom or, in front of a computer delivering virtual reality.
Best way to control those all important learning experiences and assess their impact in real time.
Regarding the observation, “Christian education develops its goals from Scripture.”
It is of dire importance to understand that “Satanic education develops its goals from Scripture” also, Satanism is comprised of inverted scripture to bring about the trans-valuation of virtue. All the major modern world shapers, Dewey, Freud, Keynes, Hitler, especially Marx, are a few examples, note they all have Faustian rituals as part of their history. What was good becomes bad and what was bad is now good.
This is another quote that goes to your point: “everything God wants his creatures to know has been given in Scripture as a Blueprint for living.” Later, DeMar, clearly recognizing how closely this Christian Reconstructionism aligns with the Social Reconstructionists like I described in Credentialed to Destroy states that “Biblical faith finds its great power–as does its imitator, Marxism–in the conviction that history is going its way.”
We are back to political power wanting to circumscribe what the mind may know to what does not undermine its intentions. It is man as a maker of history with only the reasons he must be a directed system changing depending on the Planners. This passage reminds me of Antonio Damasio’s hostility to reason exacept he does not mention the Bible. “In most respects the Enlightenment was an intellectual rebellion against God’s word–the Bible–all in the name of the authority and infallibility of man’s unbridled and independent reason.”
Damn straight and proud of it. When we train students or anyone else to think ideologically and at an emotional level until it becomes a Habit of Mind, there is no regulator to recognize these are bad ideas. In this case we are being lied to by virtually everyone about what is going on. No wonder no one is allowed to question education administrators anymore. Let’s get the results of the gulag with no need to send anyone to Siberia. We’ll instill an acceptable worldview and then let the people believe they are still in charge of their decisions–a free agent unaware of their mental chains.
Isn’t that the definition of an “invisible serf collar”?
Best metaphor EVER!!
Think of learning standards in light of this DeMar quote (italics in original): ” In each case a standard of authority must determine truth from error. Man has two choices regarding authority, with the second being no real choice: he chooses either Scripture as his authority for all decision-making. or the word of man. Finite, fallible, and fallen creatures need a benchmark so they will not stray in decision-making. The term benchmark is used by surveyors. Once the benchmark is established all other measurements are taken from this single point. If the benchmark is wrong then all the measurements will be distorted.”
Speaking of distorted, I would say this worldview certainly qualifies, but we have the language of education reforms–standards, benchmarks, and measurements aka assessments. No wonder the False narrative seems so fond of formative assessments.
What are we to make of the first sentence of Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance; July 13, 1787: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/nworder.asp
I think that is a valid statement, but here in the late 20th and now the 21st century, we seem to have had a hijacking of what those words mean. Now they are being used to mask what is clearly the MH vision without anyone admitting openly that that is what they are doing. We have talked before about Antonio Damasio and his Descartes Error book.Several of the sources I mentioned not only referred to him and his analysis (I knew the flaws in those cites because I had read numerous of his books) but a new name and one I saw several times, much like Alasdair MacIntyre. The book was called Emotion and Reason and it gave a publication date of 1992. When I looked into it, amazon said book was published in 1962. That’s important because numerous sources openly acknowledge that is when both Marxist Humanism as a philosophy and its handmaiden, Humanist Psychology launched in the West with the NEA sponsoring the latter.
So I find the book since Narvaez is citing and so is NCSEAD as support for reason being grounded in emotion. It had been out of print and was brought back in 1992 deliberately via the author’s estate. To my opening line of this post, I can now say that the map has arrived showing how CAC and NCSEAD and the new relaunch of CAC are all really headed for a common rendezvous point we are not supposed to recognize I am on the last chapter and just took a break to let this all sink in.
This is religion as a synonym for the little ‘c’ communism of the Human Development Society. I know it when I hear or read it described and this book is based on lectures John MacMurray gave in the early 30s in the US and UK. Someone either knew their German or the English translations were earlier than Daniel Bell has written. It also sounds like DeMar writing about all spheres of influence. One more point I did not mention at the time but when I read Don Eberly’s 1994 Building a Community of Citizens: Civil Society in the 21st Century, one of the essays “Building Blocks of Our American Culture” troubled me so much I looked up the author–Heather Richardson Higgins–that I looked her up. She is an heiress to a trust created by the Vicks Vaporub fortune and a trust tied to her was behind the book and PBS special on the rise and decline of Marxism called Heaven on Earth. She is involved now with both the Acton Institute and the Philanthropy Roundtable–both quite influential in ed reform. Back to MacMurray and you will see why I thought again of her. Enough to find that essay again and my note that she was redefining what constituted Liberty in a manner similar to the Templeton Foundation that is behind numerous NCSEAD contributors.
[Jesus] “accepted the task of a social revolutionary–to establish among men a new and universally human social order. But he realized this is the religious task of creating universal communion among men, and not merely as the task of creating a new social form. This realization dictated his method of revolution. It ruled out certain methods as ineffective for the creation of communion. It did not rule out any sphere of life from the scope of the revolution. The task was no other-worldly task. It was not the creation of the Kingdom of Heaven in Heaven. There was nothing mystical or peculiarly ‘spiritual’ in it. It was the task of creating conscious community among all men everywhere–nothing less; and it necessarily included all the conditions, economic, political and personal, which are involved in this.”
Remember I did not have this book when I wrote this post. I suspected a tie to the MH vision but nothing like this and it explains so much. Think of your phrase “religion, morality, and knowledge” that meant something else in 1787 now being read by someone who believes in this vision of ‘mature religion’ that is now just what the various faiths have now shifted to. I am guessing this passage dates back to the book’s original publication as a First Edition in 1935.
“There are three features of the contrast between the mature conception of religion and religion as we know it to which I wish to draw attention. Mature religion is all-inclusive, it is concrete and it is creative. It is in the first place all-inclusive in contrast with the limited character of contemporary religion. For us religion is one aspect of human experience, contrasted with others, such as the scientific or the artistic, the political or the economic. Mature religion would not stand in contrast to these: it would include them. The distinction that we draw between the religious life and the secular life would simply seem grotesque. The question whether religion should or should not interfere in politics would be maningless. For religion is not an aspect of life which can be contrasted with other aspects: it is the integration of all aspects in one whole.”
Makes the signatories to that 1987 Williamsburg Charter suddenly make so much more sense and also why I recognized the MH vision in it. The Strange Bedfellows make perfect sense with this vision of the role of Mature Religion and its role in transforming the personal and social.
Want to see a current example of the dialectic dressed up as cultural evolution? https://www.culturalevolution.org/docs/ICE-Growing-Out-of-Americas-Divided-Culture.pdf
Notice too the definition of Worldview and its role in terms of the Good, True, and Beautiful. That means Classical Education, which so many pushing this new Child Abuse in the Classroom have also been pushing as the remedy for the Common Core, is also about the creation of a worldview and cultural evolution. Love the iceberg graphic too since it is what Spady used to illustrate Tranzi OBE. I knew that graphic came out of system science. Now we have this admission that the unseen larger part of the iceberg represents the unconscious aspects of the worldview that are shared and collective.
This paper from the same person from last year https://www.culturalevolution.org/docs/ICE-Evolving-Right-and-Left.pdf turns out to be tied to the Bradley Foundation and Hardwired to Connect via the Blankenhorn quote on page 2.
The iceberg graphic is also a part of Edwards Deming’s Total Quality Management portfolio, the qualities of which were also applied to education in the 90s.
Also, I would like to quote from material that Gary North, Reconstructionist/Dominionist extraordinaire and fellow traveler of Gary DeMar’s, had posted on his website as late as July 10, 2014 in relation to advertising the “Ron Paul Home School Curriculum” that was being promoted for use in Christian schools as well. The quote ( which seems to have disappeared from the site ) goes like this:
“So let us be blunt about it, we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. The they will be busy constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God. . . .”
The uses of the techniques being protected now can lead to this exact outcome, which sounds a lot like the implementation of Islam’s Sharia law.
Virtues and character education. It all sounds nice and is, as you mention, Robin, very prevalent in public discourse. Yes, it is bound up in the Classical education and the Great Books education.
But do you know that there are robotics philosophers here in Australia? One such philosopher (Prof Rob Sparrow, Department of Philosophy, Monash University) appears in the following podcast: Virtue, vice, sex, and robots (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/the-immoral-fantasy-of-robot-sex/8945496). The undercurrent of his discussion seems to me to have less to do with robots and more to do with a concept of virtue as it applies to human beings (robots are the vehicle for the discussion). He says that he favors Aristotle’s view of the virtues that one must not only do the virtuous things, but think them as well (sounds like the Christian idea of how to act as well). The person who only acts in a virtuous way, but thinks thoughts that are not virtuous is not virtuous. This may sound well and good, but it may have unintended consequences. What if the virtues are constantly shifting or being redefined to accommodate an ever more politically correct list of things you must do to be virtuous? What if, simultaneously, there are programs of more and more invasive self and group reflection on these virtues? How will the psyche and equilibrium of the individual be when faced with this scrutiny of one’s inner thoughts and changing virtues?
Another issue is, as mentioned in this post, that the virtues do indeed have an aura around them that tends to conjure up thoughts of religion. Traditionally, how we should act and what is right and wrong (the ethics and morals) were imparted by religion. The virtues have their power by the goodness associated with the word, ‘virtue’, but what if they can be re-defined incrementally over time not to be virtuous?
I have been out and will answer your observations later, but wanted to make sure you and anyone else Down Under see that the just-released World Development Report is all about education globally. https://gemreportunesco.wordpress.com/2017/09/28/learning-to-realize-educations-promise-a-look-at-the-2018-wdr/#more-10915
I think that we should all give thanks to the World Bank and its selfless efforts to help mankind. It is with joy that I learned the report above is aligned to their education strategy, ‘Learning for All: Investing in People’s Knowledge and Skills to Promote Development’.
you forgot kumbayah.
Martin Seligman was on that Aspen NCSEAD panel as was Angela Duckworth and now we have a U-Penn PhD candidate in Education Policy that specializes in Positive Psych pushing Mindfulness. http://behavioralscientist.org/the-mindful-student/?mc_cid=f3159d8c2b&mc_eid=e5a76e5a55
Notice this is the same publication wanting to push Charlottesville Conversations in order to create a Battle for Human Nature. The editor was the one touting Barry Schwartz’s 1987 book.
Not in this post but relevant is the fact that the Templeton Foundation backs Narvaez’s work as well as funding Seligman’s Prospective Psychology and Positive Neuroscience work. I also found the answer on why Macmurray’s work is so clearly Marx’s Human Development Society decades before the work was supposedly available in English. It was originally published in 1932 for the first time and shortly thereafter he was invited to a religious conference to reconcile Marx and religion. So he was the first to write about these new, previously unknown works of Marx that were so attuned to consciousness and state of mind in the English language. The same works were not translated and published in English until 1956. The book from Daniel Bell was written in 1957 while he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto. That’s how we know CASBS was always trying to use the behavioral sciences and education to create the desired consciousness. That is also the unrecognized until now real story behind what Child Abuse in the Classroom was describing.
Unfortunately for us now, it is the same kind of consciousness Classical Education, including the Freedom Project Academy that is so involved with this CAC reboot seeks to foster. At one point DeMar is quoting Mavrin Schlossberg who we encountered when I read Christian Worldview and I recognized in February 2016 that Classical Education was using a cybernetic template so that students would learn to interpret and perceive through the assigned categories of thought grounded in emotion.
John’s comments about the World Bank being benign and benevolent must be in jest. The World Bank is biggest manipulative change agent in the world today. When Dean Rusk was the President of the World Bank I remember him saying that their would be channeled only to those countries who signed on to initiate the policies and programs that the Bank approved. That hardly puts them in the “benign and benevolent” category.
I think he was kidding, but did you notice all the references in that document to neuroscience? Also that one of the sections starts with this quote: “No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.” You cannot get at those internalized realms without an SEL focus because that is not a knowledge aspiration.
Secondly, the cited author of this thought, Emma Goldman, was a well-known anarchist and political radical who was involved with an attempt to assassinate Henry Frick, Andrew Carnegie’s partner. That’s who the World Bank is getting ed advice on the aspects to target from. That’s little better than Uncle Karl himself. He wrote about revolutions, but Emma Goldman acted to create them.
Here is the quote I was referring to in my comment to John. “Reminiscing in the 1960s Macmurray pinpointed his decision to begin an in-depth reading of Marx’s early work to a conference held in October 1932 which brought together a number of leading religious and lay thinkers to ponder the question of the rejuvenation of Christianity in the modern world.” So from the very beginning of access to Marx’s work on the Human Development Society people wanted to tie it to a religious mission as well as a desire to shift the nature of human consciousness. So whether someone like DeMar actually understands the background of what he is pushing, or people pushing Classical Education, or even that Tarbiyah Project for Islam that I recognized as having the same aims as Tranzi OBE, the aims are the same as what Karl Marx said would be needed and so did Macmurray.
I am not the one who found Macmurray. It is the NCSEAD as well as Narvaez with her ties to Character education and the Science of Virtues funded by the NIH as well as the Jubilee Centre who cited Macmurray as the source for their statements on how reason has to be grounded in emotion. Turns out everyone who pushes that has transformational intentions at both the level of human consciousness as well as the broader social and political institutions and the economy.
It is indeed a desire for the revolution to proceed at the level of the mind and culture without anyone being the wiser. And I got in the way without really meaning to. I actually thought people wanted to know the truth of what was and is going on in the name of education. I had no idea there had been such a sustained attempt to create false narratives and reenforce them. Makes for an even more fascinating story, doesn’t it? I just finished the Macmurray book and it is also clear he was contemplating the role of the Ascnding from the Abstract to the Concrete theory back in the 30s. It’s not Ilyenkov’s invention. He was simply refining how to get at consciousness so history can become dialectical and planned and centered on what Macmurray called the “communion of community.”
I was indeed joking (really sad inside, though). Robin, there are also allegations that the robotics philosophy professor I mentioned earlier is a leftist radical as well. Does that surprise? No. The violent subvert and cause chaos with their violence, while the articulate will use word magic and subversion. We must always do two things: look to history for analogues and bring them to light and always workshop proposed changes to our system – who has requested it, what are their professed aim and secret ones (who benefits) and what are the probable outcomes of the changes. Then we trust in our analyses and not the professed ‘kumbayah’ intention.
I think you will find this program interesting. https://platform.coop/2017 “The People’s Disruption” might not seem related until we recognize Juliet Schor and Marina Gorbis or that KnowledgeWorks coordinates with Institute for the Future to create the frameworks guiding where ed is supposedly going in the future.
“Experiments with cooperatively owned online platforms are demonstrating that democratic business models can be a dynamic force in building a more equitable economy for people across various income, race and class strata, starting with the most vulnerable populations.
The platform co-op movement disrupts Silicon Valley’s disruptors by shifting the focus toward fundamentally fairer forms of ownership and governance. The retirement of Baby Boomer business owners presents an opportunity for mass conversions of those businesses into co-ops. Existing cooperatives are increasingly eager to join the digital economy. Over the past few years, the burgeoning of platform co-ops, community currencies, worker’s tech, the solidarity economy, B-corps, and credit unions have shown us that alternative economies are not only necessary but possible.”
Robert Heilbroner, by the way, was one of the first authors I reached for as I was trying to grasp how education reforms were tied to Marxism but not the “means of production” variety hyped by schools. First place I ever encountered the man as a maker of history version. Yesterday I got an email from the alumni director at my college that is striving from the President down to make sure we are all cultivating humane instincts for all humanity during these ‘difficult times’. She nonchalantly used the anecdote about students going to Austria to conduct “cultural-historical studies” to discern what creates toxic environments. Thorough immersion and somehow we alums are supposed anyone on the campus payroll as our moral and intellectual superior?
It is amazing how we have striven for centuries to learn nature’s secrets, how we have tried every form of social organization with untold millions lost, how we have technology beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Yet we still come back to megalomaniacs and their mad-scientist minions herding us onto another plantation or animal farm. ‘Co-ops’ for goodness sakes. Have we progressed to this? Back to serfdom!
I’m not surprised by the program, given that the New School is involved. This is from their ‘About us’ (I could not have put it better myself):
The New School for Social Research believes that research and pedagogy should advance economic justice, promote understanding of social change and social movements, and train the next generation of scholars and leaders to influence public debate. Its commitment to progressive values, academic freedom, rigorous scholarship, and critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School lies at the heart of The New School’s history and draws upon the vital legacy of the University in Exile.
They certainly do have a particular bias, don’t they? Marxism?
I actually walked by the New School without intending to on sunday on my way to some brunch reservations. All this deliberately undulating architecture and I told one of my daughters that it really was Ground Zero for planning the Revolution with a capital “R”. This is my original Gorbis post http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/weak-humanscomputersexpert-modelling-of-captured-data-is-this-your-approved-vision-of-the-21st/ and I have always found it fascinating she was able to come from the USSR at 18 to study psychology at Berkeley. In the papers from the original Bellagio/ Rockefeller F sponsored 1968 conference on remaking the world backwards mapping from the MH vision using systems science, one of the papers refers to the recent creation of the IFFF as a vehicle for the desired change. Nothing accidental here.
I know you follow the WEF, in 2013 they decided to have an additional gathering in addition to Davos that was called the New Champions Conference in Dalian, China. Gorbis was a speaker there in the session called “Building Innovation Ecosystems: Rethinking the role of government and industry”. She also led a session on Science 2020. Perhaps the latter is about using the behavioral sciences to effect the desired biological changes to control the hard sciences in the name of the “common good”.
Have you seen this for the bieenial global summit coming up? https://www.wise-qatar.org/2017-summit-education-coexist-cocreate
Cocreate a new world. Do these people know any history? Do they even know what the word hubris means?
This Data Science for the Social Good conference at U-Chicago was a week ago, but notice it confirms how misguided the Child Abuse in the Classroomhype is in its push to highlight PII and a restoration of FERPA as the remedy. https://dssg.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/tanweer.pdf
Again we see the twisting of scripture as well as the twisting of moral boundaries and acceptable human thinking or knowledge bound by each groups own set of ideals. Whatever the vision, MH to Amish thinking there remains right and wrong human actions. Each group has their own set of rules intolerable by one another. Why not converge them and develop one kind of human capable of embracing all human flourishing and personal activities. No more right, no more wrong only accepting people of any kind of moral value. They have set up their own boundaries and determined where the mind is allowed to travel as long as it stays within the proper amount of individualism fencing. Like cattle with an electric fence.
Sorry you were caught in the filter, but I am now back in town. I took one of William Spady’s books with me to read on the plane and noticed how often he referred to Daniel Goleman and his concept of emotional intelligence as what ‘authentic’ education should be cultivating. When we first covered CASEL here at isc, long before this latest NCSEAD push, I recognized what was intended from listening to Richard Davidson talk about the effect of the desired classroom practices on the Prefrontal Cortex. Now we have this from yesterday. http://behavioralscientist.org/meditation-changes-mind-body-novice-yogi/
Now if these practices are mandated as conducive to physical well-being or a Positive School Climate or mental health, whatever it takes to get the practice in place, the physical effects described are the intent, whatever the justifying explanation. These people really do not want there to be any more Axemaker Minds. The Spady book, even though published in 2001, had been recently cited by the Convergence Center as “What We are Reading.” Spady made it crystal clear that all these visions, now installed into ESSA and state plans, are to enable the Human Development Society.
The people on the plane must have thought the old lady was nuts as I scribbled observations into the margin of the book.
Notice here we have Goleman pushing mindfulness in the Harvard Business Review about a week ago. https://hbr.org/2017/09/heres-what-mindfulness-is-and-isnt-good-for
I had remembered Davidson had done a program with the Dalai Lama, but apparently Goleman too has written a book about his vision for good in our world. That matters to ed again directly because the Dalai Lama and Nicholas Negroponte are the authors of the Holos Consciousness the Club of Budapest (the Club of Rome’s cultural affiliate) pushes that is the antithesis of the Axemaker Mind. I have an old post on that as well as tying it to Ervin Laszlo and thus GERG.
I think it is far to now say that the Holos Consciousness fits with the submissive mind tied to emotion that these various faith groups are also pushing. I have read Goleman’s books as well as Laszlo’s and all these FBO aspirations and Arnn’s. By the way did you see Hillsdale and Arnn did a presentation last night with Hugh Hewitt hyping the Barney Charter School Initiative as the answer for all that ails K-12?
I know I have repeated myself several times, but this connection does not seem coincidental. Please read the theme of the 2107 WISE sumit below (a link provided by Robin in an earlier comment) and hold it in mind:
‘This year’s theme, Co-Exist, Co-Create: Learning to Live and Work Together reflects the commitment of WISE to address important education challenges in times of disruption and economic uncertainty stemming from conflict, mass migration, growing inequality, on-going, rapid technological change and other forces.’ (https://www.wise-qatar.org/2017-summit-education-coexist-cocreate)
What follows is a part of a transcript of a podcast I referenced in an earlier comment about racial and unconscious bias (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/racial-bias-on-the-brain/8851582#transcript)
‘Lynne Malcolm: So what’s an example of the type of training that you can use to change people’s minds and perhaps reduce these seemingly unconscious biases?
Pascal Molenberghs: I guess the strongest effect that I found through studies is when they’re categorised people and let them come together to work on some superordinate goal. So when people have to come together, so rather than, for example, saying white and black, we are just saying we are all humans and we all have to work together for a common cause, and especially if that cause is achievable and if people can overcome the difficulties and a task is successful, that kind shows then that there is typically a reduction in biases between groups.
But I guess the most important thing is how people categorise themselves. Once people start to make distinctions between group A and B, then often people show a bias. So in that sense it might be important to re-categorise people as belonging to the same group.
So what are the take-away universals here? Well, as I see them, erase categorisations, using education, rule of law and social sanction. If that doesn’t work, then throw everyone in the world together in some utopian soup of cultures, needs and crises. Meanwhile, the children will be taught a similar thing at kindergarten, school and any other space by the use of group training, group projects, group assessment, sensitivity (emotional) training and personal self-reflection to weaken the mind and resolve associated with any individuality. Then at work, they will accept the policies of diversity, inclusion, fairness and community. Spare a thought for those older workers who must mouth and act out their acceptance to keep their jobs. For some it would be business as usual, but for others it will be hell.
These links are a must see and they speak for themselves:
1) https://twitter.com/hashtag/teachingstrategy?src=hash
2) https://twitter.com/facinghistory
3) https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED
4) http://www.gamesforchange.org
I found this one particularly telling ith where these graphics lead. https://twitter.com/hashtag/sketchnote?src=hash
Talk about showing what is meant by the words “internalizing”.
This is the original Facing History post http://invisibleserfscollar.com/changing-the-filtering-perception-the-way-we-see-the-world-is-key/ that is clearly more relevant than ever. It’s a good reason to have created the dynamics and optics of charlottesville absent the poor paralegal’s death.
I then covered it again http://invisibleserfscollar.com/continuing-our-conversation-on-the-planned-psychologizing-of-each-student-via-the-classroom/ about a week later and after I hit post and went to pick up my youngest at high school from exams, we learned of the tragedy at Newtown elementary school.
Here is what Child Abuse In the Classroom said about FHAO . I marked it because I was unaware this program had been around for so long. “[FHAO]…is clearly designed to alter students’ attitudes on political and social issues, and uses pre-and post-testing to evaluate student attitudinal outcome. The intent of the program is deceitful. Through psychological manipulations, frightening films, moral dilemmas, the use of Professor Kohlberg’s moral reasoning, situation ethics, the use of Milgram shock experiments, role-playing, the use of personal journals, group criticism sessions, and so forth, 14-year old students are bound to be negatively influenced.”
Still are, but none of this is now “new”, nor is it now “experimental”. It works and the language of the statute doesn’t protect against psychologically manipulative or exploitative classroom practices generally Personally identifiable information is not the essence of what is targeted. The current CAA hype takes parents in the wrong direction as they look for remedies and does nothing to clarify what has always been the real reason for these practices. To claim that everything seeking Behavior Modification is about Skinner is to have a Dummies Guide to Modern Psychology understanding of these issues where someone only looks at the index and doesn’t even read the book, only the Index and Table of Contents.
If Skinner had the same goals but different methods and a completely different theory of the mind that what the behavioral scientists factored into FHAO or Kohlberg’s work [Robert Kegan, Ken wilbur’s partner was a student of Kohlberg’s, and Kegan is a key part of the real global ed template] or even Mastery Learning and now OBE when accurately understood all employ, it is c- work to keep labeling them all Skinnerian or Pavlovian.
It also ignores what constructivism is all about.
I should have known that it would have been on your radar, but I was seething and didn’t check. It’s one thing to infer but another to see it so methodically set out. What should I have expected with so many professional and determined people all concentrating on achieving some goal?
Did you see this?
https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/blog/post/new-partnership-explores-data-sharing-between-students-education-business
No, but that data infrastructure already exists if we understand how the Common Education Data Standards and what IMS Global does are properly understood. Someone sent me this yesterday https://www.utahnsagainstcommoncore.com/whole-cities-turned-common-core-learning-centers/ and asked what was wrong with what she was saying. That was my reactions in part, Jakell is not grasping or laying out accurately how CEDS and IMS actually work. Remember the AISP program at U-Penn that is a comprehensive database not just tied to education relies on CEDS and IMS Global. This is absolutely not about PII either. That road show financed by Lumina with its social justice and 75 city metro convening in Dallas in January 2016 with Strive Together is about creating demand for using the data already being gathered.
John will appreciate this as it is a global initiative that ties to UNESCO’s Learning Cities work I have written about and also the Earth Science Partnership and MIT as I remember ICSU was a main partner of the Belmont Challenge when I started this blog to warn about it. https://www.icsu.org/cms/2017/04/Policy-Brief-No.6-FG_FIN3ed.pdf has just come out and it actually ties to what that Utah site advocates for–“higher standards and local control” if we look at the first entry in the bibliography. Learning standards and competency frameworks create the needed localized set of rules polycentricity needs to be how the MH template gets invisibly installed under the needed rule of law in the 21st century.
I read Tarko’s dissertation for George Mason–remember neuroeconomics? and their admiration for Kenneth Boulding–and also Ashby’s book over this weekend while my college kid came home to nest and decorate our house for Halloween. Did you know Ashby’s book was reissued in 2014? Did you know he was President of the General Systems Research Group from 1962 to 1964? That would overlap with Boulding launching his MH vision as the vision for the 21st century and he co-founded GSRG while at CASBS.
From the article, “the systems approach (SA) to urban health and wellbeing [think of Urie and BEST]…is an adaptive, recursive, cognitive mechanism at work in nested systems of various social, ecological, territorial, technological, or cyber spaces. [aka anywhere and everywhere]. The SA is a co-evolutionary process of, let’s call it, a ‘data metabolism,’ transforming data into knowledge and knowledge into procedural and structural change 9referred to as ‘action’ among human agents0 in response to external system changes. The mechanism of the SA is a driver of evolution.”
Nothing to do with Darwin, this is the cultural evolution beloved of DeMar and others with his mindset, Karl Marx, Gramsci [March through the Institutions], and also Julian Huxley who founded UNESCO. If you remember I warned about this in Credentialed to Destroy as an aim of the Social Reconstructionists. What we know now that I did not grasp and did not want to when I wrote the book is that plenty of the leaders and active adherents of the world’s religious faiths also wish to pursue a reconstructionist vision using education and a particular type of learning standards to gain the necessary control over the mind, consciousness, and the internalized sources of motivation and perception.
The new Child Abuse in the Classroom is merely yet another organized attempt to fundraise off the created concern while still having access to the decried techniques.
By the way, notice that we once again have ties to U-Chicago https://www.aacu.org/jason-tyszko-biography . That prestigious university the Rockefellers started from scratch.