Parrhesia, Bill Ayers, Reinventing Schools for Meaning-Making, and Rewiring Teens’ Brains

Posted on May 19, 2020 by Robin

Does that title seem a bit like a Jeopardy Question that starts with an unusual word and then leads to a notorious name for click bait? I wish, but Parrhesia is a Greek word that was in the last post’s paper on how John Dewey’s Ethics of Moral Principles and Deliberation were to be incorporated per IEEE Standards (no one was to tell us about) into the ‘adaptive instructional systems’ being touted as the answer for the Pandemic’s need to social distance. Until a Vaccine!! The systems of ethical deliberation becomes a component via required practices adaptive instructional systems incorporate into supplied student experiences. These are to “allow participants to safely engage in parrhesia.” No mention of “Guilty as *, Free as a Bird” Ayers yet, as the definition is a democratic mode of being, that is “an ancient Greek concept…[of] telling truth as one sees it with honesty and integrity…parrhesia qualities include engaging in dialogue, questioning, having a passion for public affairs and human equality. Parrhesia requires intellectual courage and risk-taking in truth telling and pursuits of inquiry.”

Ok, then the footnote goes to a paper by Kerry Burch on “Parrhesia as a Principle of Democratic Pedagogy” helpfully placed on US education websites with the heading “Social Justice: A Language Re/Considered”, which seems to be something we should know about before assuming digital learning is the answer to all our problems. It starts with quotes from Cornel West (whose self-professed ties to the Marxist Humanist vision we have covered here at ISC) and Paulo Freire, whose name is associated with rejecting the so-called Banking Theory of Education. Bill shows up later in the paper, but not by his nickname or standing on a flag in a New York Times article published just before 9/11/2001. No, here’s the passage:

Few educational thinkers describe the kind of democratic personality traits [Dispositions or Attributes of cybernetic citizenship or Character Education?] that need to be cultivated today as elegantly as William Ayers. These traits cannot easily be brought about by relying on the mechanistic knowledge ordained in conventional approaches to ‘learning’ about ”democracy’. Ayers’ charts a different course: ‘We want to teach them to take initiative, to be creative, to be imaginative, to take risks, to question authority, to wonder about the world. This means fundamentally, in a school system based on democratic values, we really believe that the full development of all is a condition for the full development of each.’

Ayers said that and the footnote goes to a Winter 2009 published interview, but Ayers is in turn quoting from Uncle Karl and his Human Development Society vision of the premise for his little ‘c’ communism ideal. No wonder the Chinese and the UN love this vision of cybernetic citizenship, but what a mandate for ‘adaptive instructional systems’ to be cultivating in students to prepare them for parrheistic modes of being. Sounds a bit like the call for an Arational mind that we have discovered lies at the foundation of what is really student proficiency in a competency-based system. When we think of ‘adaptive instructional systems” for K-12, who thinks it is something that would please Bill Ayers and fulfill Uncle Karl’s plans? Who will be looking for “how the buoyant sociality of parrhesia would promote the creation of critically awake democratic personalities”?

Another paper I located called “The Ethics of Critical Inquiry: Educational Research Informed by Parrhesia” attributed this push to notorious French philosopher Michel Foucault, who in turn talked about Aristotle. Which one gets cited later for a similar vision with differing sales pitches and rhetoric does not seem to be about any disagreement on what is being sought through education. Instead, I believe, the different approaches stem from which name the audience, including people being solicited for donations, are likely to revere. Parrhesia here is an attempt to “contribute to social good and bring about positive change” by fostering educational practices that will create “an ethos of disrupting human subjectivities from within”. That sounds a bit disruptive to the student’s personality, doesn’t it? The

early meaning was to open one’s heart and mind completely to other people through his or her discourse…Parrhesia … became associated with transforming the soul of an individual. Most importantly the concept developed political dimensions indispensable to democracy. Parrhesia meant to engage socially and politically as a consequence of integrity of the heart. It required one to courageously say truthful things that are useful for all to hear…It’s not a ‘body of knowledge’ but a ‘body pf practices’ without reference to an external order…It allows for mediation between the ethos of an individual and the well-being of society. In short, it is through parrhesia that an individual constitutes him/herself as a moral subject in relation to others.

Just the thing if a moral revolution is sought at the level of the human mind, heart, and soul as Uncle Karl envisioned. If you don’t want resistance create a need for digital learning because of something like a Pandemic and then mandate ‘parrheistic practices’ into the programming the learning experiences provided by ‘adaptive instructional systems’ offer up. Now before we turn to the latter part of this post’s title I want to link to this article https://behavioralscientist.org/behavioral-public-policy-faces-a-crisis/ on the failure to properly respond to COVID-19 which calls for cultivating minds that can “understand complex systems in crisis”. Since we keep coming across the behavioral sciences and their desire to create a new kind of educational template going back to the 1950s at least, I thought that article’s confession that:

Behavioral public policy is rooted in the idea that biases, heuristics, and mental models determine behavior. If you reframe or alter individuals’ decision making context, you change their behavior.

We now know that is precisely what learning standards like the Common Core in the US or any tied to UNESCO’s ISCED globally and competency-based education frameworks are designed to do. The Pandemic simply makes this desire for “shared frames of reference” for meaning-making supposedly necessary. It’s to be perceived as a crisis, like climate change, that necessitates common ways of looking at the world and what must be changed to meet the demands of the crisis. Individual deviations are not allowed. Yes, tell that to Shelly Luther in Texas or that barber in Michigan.

Timely too is that the May 2020 issue of Educational Leadership published by ASCD, which is now independent of the NEA, unlike in 1985 when it first introduced an internalized common core as I covered in Credentialed to Destroy. The issue is devoted to “Learning and the BRAIN” and one of its articles called “Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains” lays out how “Connecting adolescents’ concrete work to big ideas may help shape their neural networks over time.” Research for the article was provided by the National Science Foundation, which certainly explains why they also funded the math and science constructivism covered in Chapter 3 of CtD, and the Templeton Foundation. It would explain the latter’s funding of the Jubilee Centre in the UK and its Virtues curriculum, which we have since tied to the Pope’s new Humanity 2.0 initiative and its new vision for education. Templeton also funded Martin Seligman’s Positive Psychology and Positive Neuroscience work, among other things we have covered.

Remember so long ago here at ISC when I mentioned a new vision of Dialectical Materialism, a mouthful term, created in the USSR by Evald Ilyenkov called Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete? We have now over time here at ISC tied to cybernetic designs, conceptual frameworks, and the now federally required assessment annually of Higher Order Thinking in virtually all US students. Now we have this new article informing us of the need for “Reinventing Schools for Meaning-Making”. What it bills as ‘narrative building’ by students certainly sounds like what the others described above suggested as parrheistic modes of being.

These curricular practices turn out to be expressly designed to rewire what the neural networks in teenage brains look like and what the students can do. In fact, by going to motivation, these practices act as an accelerant of future likely behavior. All of these intended interventions are probably helped by the co-authors connections that I have encountered in my research over time. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang shows up at both UNESCO conferences and Aspen’s NCSEAD on the need for social and emotional learning, as well as the NSF’s Brain Initiative. Perfect places to push a vision of education globally grounded in DiaMat that asks “How can we know when young people are building [brain networks]…predictive of success in school, self-actualization, relationship satisfaction, and other positive indicators in early adulthood?”

Think of the parrhesia invisible focus of ‘adaptive instructional systems’ and then ask the article’s question of “What kind of learning experiences strengthen connectivity across these networks?” Remember Bill Ayers’ mention of democratic traits above, which is why I bolded it? The ASCD article focuses on a similar target it italicized as dispositions of mind, which it goes on to say is not a new goal of education, citing to John Dewey among others. These are the stories or narratives the students tell themselves:

their inclinations to engage reflectively with issues and ideas, their tendencies to be curious and compassionate, and their proclivities to use what they learn to inform their emerging values…the patterns of thinking and feeling associated with these dispositions appeared to be influencing the growth of the networks of their brains.

Sounds like Parrhesia’s vision too, doesn’t it? That’s what education for meaning-making and tied to Big Ideas is targeting and it is what grounding adaptive instructional systems in John Dewey’s work also seeks to reengineer. No question about it anymore. This is not a peripheral aim and it’s not really about education per se. It’s education as a tool to reengineer at a neural level the citizens available for the global future. At the service of governments and their cronies.

As I will cover in the next post, it turns out that the stories we tell ourselves, and the concepts and categories of abstractions we use to interpret our daily experiences, are key to how we see the world and plan to act in it. Let me close with another quote from the EL article and just imagine the effect of the Pandemic on “The Stories Teens Tell” or at least what they will tell in the future.

…tying these dispositions to neural development, life success, and mental health gives this effort new urgency, and points us due north in an attempt to reimagine adolescents’ schooling. Evidence suggests that educators can learn to recognize, model, and support the development of these dispositions if they know what kinds of narratives to listen for and what kind of learning experiences lead to these patterns of thinking?

Now imagine the utility of standardizing ‘adaptive instructional systems’ in John Dewey’s work and Parrhesia will do for controlling the needed learning experiences to produce the desired ‘patterns of thinking’ and feeling for the new type of future citizen.

Gives new meaning to calls of May Day, May Day, doesn’t it?

Leveraging the Information-Sphere of Society as the Fulcrum for Involuntary Change

Posted on July 13, 2016 by Robin

Anyone else watching the tragic events of this summer in Dallas and Orlando and wondering why there is such a determined effort to mislead us all about the nature of what happened and why? To stir up group grievances and even hatred, even if the relevant facts have to be either ignored or lied about? Some days I think the only nice thing about understanding this program of wholesale change in people’s internalized mental models is having access to previous blueprints from my personal library of declared intentions. Today we will look back to a 1988 book The Cassandra Conference: Resources and the Human Predicament edited by Paul R. Ehrlich and John P Holdren. Recognize those two names? I thought so.

That would be the year before his book New World New Mind covered in this post http://invisibleserfscollar.com/how-disabilities-law-is-already-being-used-to-gain-ehrlichs-new-mind-and-the-future-earth-economy/ . Most people recognize Professor Ehrlich from all his hyping of pending environmental catastrophe that never actually happen, but did you know he also has a close working relationship with the very Stanford psychology prof, Albert Bandura (see tag), pushing education as a means for Resistance-Proof Biosocial Revolution in the June 14, 2016 ISC post? Pertinent to our story, in other words, so let’s remind ourselves of how John Holdren fits into our current onslaughts.

He has been at the White House https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/about/leadershipstaff/director since 2009 in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. It means that the League of Innovative Schools with its neurological focus reports to him as does Digital Promise. The BRAIN Initiative does too, as well as the NSF and thus its Science of Learning Centers. Last but not least, he oversees the nudge-oriented Behavioral Science Team and its push for a national Growth Mindset study.

Now that we have established both men’s pertinence to what is actually being pursued, let’s go eavesdrop on a chapter written by another name we should all recognize–Donella Meadows (see tag) of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth fame. The chapter was called “How Can We Improve Our Chances?” and it was seeking a means at more effectively shaping “the thinking and the policies of our society.” Tool Number 1 listed was developing new concepts to be used to frame public perception and discussion.

Wouldn’t it be useful to know now what Holdren, Ehrlich, and Meadows said was the “primary social leverage point” in their pursuit of fundamental social, economic, and political change? That would be “the source of ideas.” All three people and, I suppose, the Conference attendees in general, declared as follows so let’s listen in: “we are a part of, though by no means all of, that elect set of people in any society who are its idea generators–the people who interpret society to itself, set up its arguments, frame its issues, define its categories, coin its phrases.”

Just the declared intentions we want from someone in a position to specify, with federal funding, what will be the Next Generation Science DCIs–Disciplinary Core Ideas and CCCs–Cross-Cutting Concepts and Themes, to be imposed and then assessed for in all K-12 education. In fact, this quote from influential, but misguided, economist John Maynard Keynes was cited approvingly in full:

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”

Listening to President Obama (from yesterday’s speech that doesn’t really count as a eulogy any bereaved person wanted to hear) and the media’s portrayal of what led to Orlando, and how Minneapolis, Baton Rouge, and Dallas are somehow all equivalent ‘killings,’ it is apparent that all these events must be interpreted to make Group Equity the point. Neither politicians nor the media seem to want to give up the desired narrative, whatever the actual facts or the deadly consequences of the politically useful ideas. Useful that is if fundamental transformation is what is actually sought. This post actually starts a Trilogy to show that is precisely what is going on and how the language used fits with broader goals that track to the UN and its 2030 Dignity For All global focus.

Today though, we need to appreciate why the so-called Information Sphere is so crucial that we have politicians and the media determined not to let mass, intentional, planned-in-advance murder get in the way of their determination to Use Ideas to stir up useful group grievances and cultivate useful personal guilt. Both education and the media are the two critical components of communication in any society and we all need to understand what Ehrlich, Holdren, Meadows, and all the entities and institutions they have worked for since 1988 all knew and were relying on when they made their plans for us: “To prevail, we are going to have to use the power of ideas more skillfully than they do. That means, I think, understanding fully and profoundly, first how ideas create societies and, second, how they create our own selves and our effectiveness.”

So when http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=7876 Black Lives Matters calls for ‘quality education for all’ as part of its manifesto, it’s not about facts and teaching reading properly. It has a particular meaning that makes a student amenable to the desired fundamental transformations. Quality Learning was first proposed by not defunct in the least despite decades of being deceased, political philosopher John Dewey, and his plans for education I covered in my book Credentialed to Destroy. He too wanted to control the prevailing Information Sphere at the level of each student’s mind and personality. Back to 1988: “our terribly complex socioeconomic systems are shaped by two basic forces. The first is the physical operation of the universe…”

Guess what? Cause and effect in that physical universe is not affected as “what we say or believe about them has absolutely no influence on how they behave.” In this age of deliberate Mind Arson I would add that whether we even accurately know anything has no effect. Physical laws are “the least changeable parts of a system’s structure. They are the constraints within which a system has to operate; they are not the ultimate or guiding force.” These are not my italics, by the way, and the true guiding force is precisely the reason for all the hype about brain-based learning and student-centered education. Let me quote the next paragraph to the quote we just finished as it is so explicit:

“The source of system structure, the real leverage point for change, is its information–the shared, slowly changing, often unspoken set of social beliefs, and the locally available, always changing streams of specific information [Can we say ‘Individual-in-Context’?], which together influence all human decisions, actions, technologies, and organizations. The human information system works on the physical universe, constrained by its laws, but within those laws there is scope for all the varied inventions, organizations, and cultures that human beings have produced over the ages.”

Guess what? Everyone targeting the Information-Sphere via education and media memes and narratives has plans for a new culture that is politically controlled and coordinated at every level of government. That will be the focus of the remainder of this Trilogy. Meanwhile, we have the admission that in the Information-Sphere “things are very much influenced by what is wished, believed, and said.” That’s the reason for all the lies around race, Islam, Climate Change, how to teach reading, and so much else. That’s why it is apparently OK to stir people up so they falsely believe and feel they are under attack because of race and then turn around and falsely assure people that they are not at risk from some evil-doers because they are not adherents of a certain religion. Let’s quote our influential transformationalists yet again down to what they chose to italicize for emphasis:

“Over the very short term social systems are indeed dominated by their physical setups…But over the long term social systems are shaped almost entirely by the information-sphere, within the constraints of physical laws.” In the age of constructivist math and science those would be the unknown or misapplied (via Transfer to new situations!!) physical laws, but at least there will be no constraints from facts imperiling fundamental transformations. Does this sound giddy to anyone else? “Do you begin to see how easy changing a system can be, if the right information is just put into the right place?”

Why yes I do and now so does everyone reading this post. Does yesterday’s Presidential funeral oration and national and local news coverage suddenly make sense when we eavesdrop and learn “That is our work, to shape the information-sphere of society so that it supports systems of sufficiency, sustainability, and justice, instead of scarcity and waste, degradation, and oppression.” None of us apparently are the insiders who have been designated to be the transformational Idea-Generators although I think I am establishing my reputation as an Idea-Explainer, even if it is unauthorized by the Elect Set of People described above.

Might as well then reiterate the preferred method before we move on to the admitted goals. Remember also that for the Elect Schemers, a person is just another form of system:

“Systems arise, in the long term, from information and ideas. They can be changed most easily through information and ideas. Like the atmosphere, the information-sphere flows through us, through our minds, so thoroughly and constantly that we are hardly aware of it. We take information and put it out. Every word we speak, every action and gesture either reinforces and endorses the socially shared information-sphere or challenges and changes it.”

So much of what must now occur in classrooms globally tracks back to the people who we have just quoted. Let’s all start the rebellion against the schemers using education and the media to fulfill these plans where “with every word we are literally shaping reality for ourselves and others.”

At least we no longer need to speculate on the organized desire to control our very vocabulary and the concepts and categories we are to use to perceive the world and interpret our experiences.

Or as President Obama phrased it yesterday–‘our obligation to reach a consensus.’

No wonder no one wants Axemaker Minds in the room anymore.

Greed as the Driver to Force Education to Create Socially Engineered Human Beings under Federal Law

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Robin

The only good thing about the huge Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) dropped on Monday, November 30 that sailed through the House Wednesday evening, December 2, to move on to the Senate is that we finally have a truly fixed body of language to analyze. After writing my book Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon back in 2012 examining the actual implementation and what its true effects would be, and now this blog dealing with real time subsequent confessions, I have joked that ESSA read to me as smoothly as if it were written in Latin and I was Cicero.

Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that my reference to greed is merely the Pay for Success language that is unmistakably there, let me say the Greed I am talking about is not just for Success or Social Impact Bonds. It is Greed for Compliance that permeates ESSA. What local school districts and governments as well as states must agree to do, in schools and to children, in return for those luscious federal dollars. First though here is a news release from a well-connected organization bragging that just the Pay for Success components of ESSA add up to $2 billion a year. http://results4america.org/press-room/press-release-michele-jolin-evidence-based-policy-provisions-essa-game-changer-federal-education-funding/

Results for America with its ties to President Obama’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Engagement and Cass Sunstein’s Nudging initiatives along with the UK Behavioural Sciences Unit and its interest in cities (Remember my Learning Regions post November 11, 2015) http://www.bloomberg.org/press/releases/bloomberg-philanthropies-announces-first-cities-selected-to-join-what-works-cities-initiative/ . They also created a relevant vision back in March with Atlas Network member AEI. http://www.results4america.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2015-3-18-Moneyball-for-Education-Report.pdf

The co-author of that report, Bethany Little, is a partner at the same Education Counsel that is tied to Clinton’s Ed Secretary Richard Riley. It was hired by the Common Core’s sponsor, CCSSO, to create the competency-based education successor for the Next Generation States pushing innovative practices. Not a surprise then to see that paying for Success or just Compliance with the same reading, civics, or math constructivism that political radicals who call themselves Social Reconstructionists have fought for decades to impose on K-12 (Chapters 2-4 of my book, which is how I recognized what ESSA described) features so prominently in what ESSA really forces. The local school district, charter school or any eligible entity, wanting those luscious federal dollars to flow to their local economy (think of students as just the excuse), agree to do whatever is specified. Is that really returning ‘control’ to the states and local schools with just federal ‘guardrails’?

The answer of course is it depends on what those requirements are. In addition to the insights only my book covers that are now more pertinent than ever because of what is in ESSA, I think the best summary of what schools must do in return for federal dollars is contained in Title IV–21st Century Schools. Of course every state and school wants those funds so let’s see what they must agree to do. First, provide “access to, and opportunities for, a well-rounded education for all students.” Secondly, create “school conditions for student learning in order to create a healthy and safe school environment.” Lastly, provide “access to personalized learning experiences supported by technology and professional development for the effective use of data and technology.”

Anyone out there saying, “what’s wrong with that? Next thing she’ll be complaining about apple pie.” Here’s the problem. ESSA was trying very hard not to have any damnable sound bytes that might have stopped passage. Most of the egregious language in what passed the House or Senate originally is gone. Instead we get euphemisms. Fortunately for us Tyranny Busters with Axemaker Minds my research is like a glossary of euphemisms. Part 1 on well-rounded education is the UNESCO term used all over the world now to denote non-transmissive or examination type education. Instead education must now be geared to develop the human personality as a harmonious integrated being. (Tarbiyah calls this education for shakhsiyah (personality/identity) for anyone craving an explicit link to the previous post.)

Maybe not such a good euphemism then to fend off scrutiny from what is really being promised in return for federal dollars. Part 2’s promises also sound glorious and vague. Apart from implicating all the Positive School Climate and that nesting a la Matrushka doll model from the previous post, what do I really have against Part 2? Well, in researching that last post I spent time researching what is going on the UK. The madrassas there are terribly pleased about legislation adopted since 2000 imposing obligations of social cohesion and racial equality on every school and community. Ofsted is the inspector to check for school compliance in the UK and in 2009 they defined the legally required community cohesion that schools must also demonstrate as follows:

“…working towards a society in which there is a common vision and sense of belonging in all communities; a society in which the diversity of people’s backgrounds and circumstances is appreciated and valued; a society in which similar life opportunities are available for all; and a society in which strong and positive relationships exist and continue to be developed in the workplace, in schools, and the wider community.”

I know everyone reading will be shocked that this also fits with Intercultural obligations UNESCO adopted in 2004 and has now moved to force globally as part of its Rapprochement of Cultures decade and the initiatives from the last post. There goes the supposed ambiguity attached to complying with Part II’s obligations. How about Personalized Learning and that data obligation? That of course is where the true manipulation and reengineering of each student at a neurological level comes into play. I have written about this some and it is what my second book’s research covers in depth.

Luckily for us this http://www.educationdive.com/news/new-measurements-promote-efficacy-of-personalized-learning/409798/ states Gates has spent $5 billion promoting personalized learning. Part 3 is not terribly ambiguous either in its intentions. This is especially true when the chosen evaluator Rand is also who the White House chose to create the Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Competencies it wishes to make the new focus of education. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/confessions-of-a-coordinated-cabal-intent-on-psychological-rape-with-impunity/

Rand was also the chosen evaluator for the federally-financed Change Agent Study in the 70s that was used to create strategies for effective implementations of the behavioral sciences in schools going forward. I am sure none of their Effective Schools template is embodied in ESSA.That would be why the new chosen statutory phrase is ‘evidence-based.’ It is how the compliance of the local schools is to be judged. Literally as in “is the school or district providing programs, activities, and experiences that comply with these listed objectives for 21st Century Schools?” Compliance and greed is how the Social Reengineering gets forced with hardly anyone, I suppose, truly aware of what Congress is mandating.

The real problem is the total reimagining of economies in the 21st Century by think tanks supposedly on the Right and Left, by governments at every level, and on a Bipartisan and Bicameral basis (as Congress is describing its support for both ESSA and 2014’s related WIOA (see tag)). In a 2014 report called “Impact Investment: the Invisible Heart of Markets” the true vision of the 21st century global economy is laid out. This is what both WIOA and ESSA (as well as other legislation and programs) intend to quietly force on the US. It is to be quite lucrative as well for the insiders, foundations, and investment banks cited in the report. Would anyone be shocked to know Gates and Soros are both involved and all the UN entities and the OECD?

As former Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is quoted as saying “This is ground zero of a big deal.” Under Paying for Outcomes, we learn that “impact-driven organizations need access to markets in order to generate income from the products and services they offer.” Me too, please. It’s thus not people creating a market for things they want. It is governments creating markets by mandating that every person in the world has a right to have their needs met. Think of impact investing as trying to monetize poverty for the benefit of politicians wanting political and social control and high-net worth individuals looking for a certain return. To quote:

“the largest markets, however, could be provided by governments paying for impact. There is an urgent need for a revolution in government purchasing, with paying for the successful delivery of specific outcomes at its core.”

Precisely what Ofsted looks for or Rand. What impact investing or as it is now called in the US–Moneyball for Government–needs is specific standards or measures of ‘success’ or when objectives have been ‘achieved.’ Can anyone say Common Core or Competencies? In fact, it was the constant recurrence of words used in both the House and Senate ESEA Reauthorization drafts that first caught my eye. This is also how charters, and whether they get renewed or the lucrative ability to expand at taxpayer expense, really work. Fascinatingly enough though the well-connected KnowledgeWorks that is tied to Education Counsel and thus Moneyball issued a frightening Forecast 4.0 this week. It not only made reference to Impact Investing as the “New Civic Funding,” it also mentioned under ‘Educating for Impact’ that “What if School Social Impact Scores became critical metrics for attracting funding, partnerships, and community engagement?”

It would also go well with a forced community cohesion mandate a la UK or all the communitarian obligations in Positive School Climate and Democratic Education too. There is a lot of information in this post so let me close with another document that came out today as the UN announced a “Global Alliance to Monitor Learning.” Interesting timing, huh? With ESSA just passing the House, but there is a mention of A4L. Not a lot of new acronyms in my world at this point, but that was one. When I looked it up http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Documents/assessment-for-learning.pdf , it showed me a Theory of Change that fits completely with what ESSA has just set up to send money to local communities in return for compliance with the UNESCO vision. The one no one locally has to even now about.

Quality Learning for all children and youth turns out to be first about Activities, then Intermediate Outcomes, Outcomes, and finally Impact. All in a document tied to the Brookings Institute and its sunsetting Learning Metrics Task Force. I wrote about LMTF and its use of Competencies and the nice Rockefeller Foundation letting them use its Bellagio retreat. That would be the same foundation that coined the very term ‘impact investment’ back in 2007.

How coincidental, huh? Behind a push globally along with others about using tax dollars to force “measurable social outcomes” including reengineered human personalities. Each to be primed and motivated for fundamentally transforming existing social, political, and economic structures.

Perhaps to a motto of Not Serfs Yet, we should add “And No Ambiguity Left as to True Intentions.”

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

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Robin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on November 5, 2015 by Robin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Robin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I am.

Obscuring Coercive Control and the Active Society Launch: Heralding Lethal Arrows as Rays of Light

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Robin

To appreciate just how much our beliefs guide our perceptions and actions, let’s assume that we know something is coming at us in the sky, but we cannot know precisely what until we are at risk. At that point it may be too late to duck or put on armor and use a shield. Safety requires we make assumptions beforehand. If we are fully armed, we risk deflecting truly helpful rays of light. If we believe nothing bad can happen, the lethal arrows can slay us while we remained unawares until the last moment. Perception matters, especially when the expressed desire is for wholesale social, economic, and political change without any recognition in time. To avoid timely and effective resistance, the architect for the global transformation blueprints to what was described in 1968 as the Active Society, sociology prof Amitai Etzioni, insisted on a need to “rely less on direct coercive control.”

Control needed to be indirect and out of sight and especially embedded in situations where its presence would be binding but unappreciated. I wrote Positive School Climate in the margin of the book at that point and administrators insisting that all classrooms use Restorative Justice Practices as part of an obligation to practice positive behavior tenets. It’s coercive and intended to control future behavior. Desired attitudes, values, and beliefs get practiced until they become unconscious Habits of Mind, but what parent would be tracking at this level? What lawyer would follow the statutes, regulations, orders, and case law declarations to figure out the binding template if they did not have a school district for a client or work in the public sector? It was a good plan, but what is created to be binding has threads that can be followed authoritatively.

To anyone who has ever called me a conspiracy theorist, I do not theorize, except in my kitchen when I am winging a recipe. I am, however, a very able Tracker of Openly Declared efforts at Colluding to use Political Power to bind people and places against their will to a vision of the future. Here we go again describing events that have occurred within the last week that have kicked the creation of the Active Society into high gear. Professor Etzioni wrote that the Active Society, in order to sell the necessary collectivism, would need a guiding vision. He asked “which creeds have sufficient transcendental force to overcome tribalism?” Tribalism had nothing to do with the Apache nor is it an excuse for a casino in a non-gambling state. Tribalism was a belief that the pertinent community to which a moral obligation of care and meeting needs was one’s family or at most the nation-state.

That was unacceptable during the height of the Cold War, when Professor Etzioni sought to make the moral community the entire globe–all of humanity. Education needed to become about creating values that would extend to “all men” and creating an authentic consensus around the need to act to create the desired transformations–locally, sub-nationally, nation-states, and then globally. This is the so-called Third Way superseding both capitalism and socialism and last week the transition began in earnest. For once, let’s move chronologically. On Thursday, October 22, the OECD released “Schooling Redesigned: Towards Innovative Learning Systems.” It launched with this rather graphic admission of transformative intent:

“In the past, education was about teaching people something. Now it is about making sure that individuals develop a reliable compass and the navigation skills to find their own way through an increasingly uncertain, volatile, and ambiguous world…how well education systems develop knowledge, skills, and capacities and of what kinds, is increasingly centre stage in public debate.”

I am not sure using duplicitous terms like Rigor, Higher Order Thinking Skills, Student Growth, or College and Career Ready is what I would call a center stage debate. I would call it an attempt to declare something to be the subject of consensus when it would not be at all if the true goals were accurately described. Remember that the useful Authentic Consensus can be as false as can be if the point is for defenses to be down as the lethal arrows approach. I cannot cover the whole report but number 6 of the 7 Learning Principles laid out for this vision of coordination among “global and local players” was to use assessments that had formative feedback mechanisms to create the desired knowledge, skills, capacities, and values. Number 7, by the way, was “promote horizontal connectedness across learning activities and subjects, in and out of school.”

That is one way to describe guiding the student’s perception of the real world and how it works. Let’s move to Friday’s news dump with the White House and fed ED announcing a November summit to redesign American high schools. That is the day after the OECD Redesign Schools paper and several weeks after UNESCO released, on September 29 just after the official approval of the Post-2015 agenda at the UN’s opening, a vision to guide the redesign of secondary schools globally. Called “Unleashing the Potential: Transforming Technical and Vocational Education and Training,” TVET in all schools and for all students “must be the master key that can alleviate poverty, promote peace, conserve the environment, improve the environment, improve the quality of life for all and help achieve sustainable development.”

TVET will go wonderfully with the WIOA federal legislation on July 2014 that no one still wants to talk about, even as the State Plans come due within the next several months. The required local workforce boards, development around sector strategies, and which groups are in line for special treatment also dovetails with the TVET/UNESCO vision. Probably not coincidental that UNESCO calls for A Shift in the Development Paradigm and cites Amartya Sen who in 1989 helped Amitai Etzioni found the Society for Advancing Socio-Economics going forward. Sen’s approach is declared to be the UN’s approach to rejecting the “economic and material view of development that dominated the past century.”

This more “holistic and humanistic view of development…presented human development as a process of enlarging people’s choices and enhancing human capabilities and freedoms.” One is not free, in this view, if one’s needs are not being met and this TVET reimagining of high schools and call for planned economic development is all about economic justice and social equity for all. Now it is Saturday, October 24, and fed ED has embargoed its Testing Action Plan for release at noon that day. Since I am pretty sure that timing was not to provide reading material for bored football fans with long drives ahead, it appears to have been timed to make it to the Sunday edition of the New York Times. The Times hyped it as directing states to stop overtesting.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/Assessment%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf is the actual plan and as you can see, it calls for the very kind of formative assessment that the OECD laid out as the desired mandate for School Redesign two days earlier. The Plan, of course, also limits states from much testing of substantive knowledge anymore and thus prevents much chance of a well-stocked mind of the sort UNESCO began criticizing back in 1968 (two posts ago). How are these federal ‘guidelines’ for contextuating what must go on and doing it at the local level? Global mandates coming out of the UN and the OECD and being put into place by federal directives of what is desired, but unappreciated because of the slant of the news coverage even for those with some awareness.

I could say on Sunday the political authorities rested but apparently GEFF advisor Tom VanderArk was busy tweeting that a 2014 paper called “Accountability for college and career readiness: Developing a new paradigm” fit the fed’s Testing Action Plan perfectly. It, too, was all about formative assessment of meaningful learning (likely to guide perception and future behavior) and using activities that would help create the desired perceptions, knowledge, skills, values, and capacities that would create a likely motivation to act and act as desired. These get called ambiguously assessments for learning. Notice that the fed’s action plan gives no parent any right to see all the data flowing from all these to be required formative assessments. Also notice that the NYT story I saw admitted that the Common Core initiative was really about specifying desired ‘skills.’

We are up to Monday, aren’t we? I was planning to write about all this dovetailing and how it fits with the launch of the Active Society and the reengineering via education of people to be the malleable desired systems yesterday. Then I discovered that October 26 was the opening in Paris of UNESCO’s Youth Summit to follow through on the “UNESCO Roadmap for Implementing the Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development.” Another lost invite where we could have cruised the Seine. That Roadmap opened with this chilling confession of what is really intended:

“Political agreements, financial incentives, or technological solutions alone do not suffice to grapple with the challenges of sustainable development.. It will require a wholesale change in the way we think and we act–a rethink of how we relate to one another and how we interact with the ecosystems that support our lives.”

Now who needs to theorize about global conspiracies with these kind of explicit confessions?

I will cover the implications of what is going on this week in Paris in the next post.

In time hopefully for us to take precautions against what are clearly lethal arrows.

Quoting Che Guevara and Importing Personalizedategic from Russia Seems Odd for a Cold War Victor

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Robin

Buckle Up. Once again we are being played now in a way that fits the Blueprints from decades ago. Let’s look together so we can shield ourselves and our children from the deliberate assaults on our very Consciousness. In the last post, when I chose the “Incarcerated by their Minds” quote, I knew it fit with the expressed goals for what a Whole Child emphasis and Student-Centered learning were really designed to do. What I did not know yet was that ‘Consciousness as a Prison’ that needs to be broken out of was a favorite metaphor of many of the New Age writers and Systems Thinkers we have encountered. The 1968 SRI study we began looking at in the last post recommended a 1978 book New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society. In a Chapter on how to see through to the prison, it laid out what needs to change and why as follows (my bolding and comments in brackets):

“inner structures, to deep-seated changes in states of mind, points of view, custom and routine, personality and consciousness…this is the level where the Six-Sided Prison can be found.

This third level of history isn’t impossible to change; but it is the hardest to change. It is…a ‘transformation of culture so large that it isn’t an event any more.’ No wonder most political activists have chosen to ignore it! [but not education, sociology, psych, or poli sci profs].

And yet–and yet–if it’s true that governments and economic systems determine the nature of events, as the Marxists say, then it’s also true that the third level of history determines the nature of the governments and economic systems, and the context, the atmosphere, the quality of events. [Remember the omnipresent PBIS and Positive School Climate with only the rationales varying].

If we simply ignore the third level of analysis until ‘later’ we’ll end up with no social evolution at all, in any deep sense. And we may end up with a stronger Prison.”

I mentioned the Cold War, a theme I developed extensively in my book, but Mark Satin in 1978 cited that Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the other Russian dissidents were actually pushing a “material limits to growth” and “calls for political and economic decentralization” that sounds much like what the UN is now calling Localization per the last post. Turns out someone has planned a Local/Global spin for a while because Chapter 16 of Satin’s book was called “Localization: Celebration of Diversity” with a vision for community-based decision-making that could be something Amitai Etzioni, the Ford Foundation, or the Brookings Metropolitanism vision would call for today (because they are). The Russian component of the New Age Politics book ended with this vision–

“Once understood and adopted, this principle diverts us–as individuals, in all forms of human association, societies and nations–from outward to inward development…”

There’s a rather constant drumbeat for this now apart from all the social and emotional learning and restorative justice practices in schools and classrooms we have looked at. This is bigger and from every direction as adults and all institutions get targeted. Last Thursday I was at the “Wisdom, Moderation and Opportunity” put on by an Atlas Network affiliate, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, with speeches with ties to other Network members. The Luncheon Keynote Speaker, Arthur Brooks, president of AEI, insisted that to be a Conservative required having the Heart of a Servant. A true, little c conservative, would probably know from history that telling people what must motivate them is authoritarian, not conservative. Those systems thinkers we met in the September 28 Menticide post pushing how to force Creative Altruism into future human personalities would have loved that speech.

Call it Conservative and then describe a long-pushed Progressive, Internationalist, or Communitarian Idea seems to have been a common theme among speakers. From citing constantly an obligation to meet people’s needs and aid their well-being to the audience hissing when a questioner asked Nevada legislator Scott Hammond, about the actual student choice in his touted “near-universal Education Savings Account legislation,” there was a decided emphasis on a vision of the future that fits perfectly with what Uncle Karl called the Human Development Society. Which is fascinating timing as Friday, the Great Transition Initiative (has a tag as I have previously tied this to the OECD and what the PISA assessment is really driving) released this jaw-dropping paper. http://www.greattransition.org/images/GTI_publications/Foster-Marxism-and-Ecology.pdf

If I covered everything in that confession that tied to these various programs and education initiatives I have been describing, it would turn this post into a book. Instead, let’s go to the section called “The Great Convergence” and remember the Re-Imagining Education link from two posts ago from the Bipartisan Convergence Center. In the GTI link we are told:

“Development, particularly in the rich economies, must assume a new form: qualitative, collective, and cultural–emphasizing sustainable human development in harmony with Marx’s original view of socialism. As Lewis Mumford argued, a stationary state promoting ecological ends, requires for its fulfillment the egalitarian conditions of ‘basic communism,’ with production determined ‘according to need, not according to ability or productive contribution.’ [Footnote is to Marx and his Gotha Programme book].

Such a shift away from capital accumulation and towards a system of meeting collective needs based on a principle of enough is obviously impossible under the regime of capital accumulation. What is required, then, is an ecological and social revolution that will facilitate a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality.”

That agenda is the UN’s Vision 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals that our political leaders have already signed us up for. They are not citing Marx or basic communism, at least to us, but this is the grounding nevertheless. As Foster admits “In this Great Transition, I believe socialists will play the leading role, even as the meaning of socialism evolves” [Required Heart of a Servant, perhaps?] as we all are shoved, with deceitful definitions and government programs no one tells us about, for “establishing more egalitarian conditions and processes for governing global society, including the requisite ecological, social, and economic planning.”

Existing inequalities and hype over Climate Change then are just excuses to plan and tell most of us what we can be and what we must do. When the Frameworks Institute last week put out a report “Talking Human Services” http://frameworksinstitute.org/assets/files/humanservices/nhsa_mm_final_2015.pdf , they intended to reframe prevailing perceptions in ways that fit with this desired communistic Human Development Society. They simply left that part out of why something is ‘desirable’ or not. The Notorious Che Guevara comes into this vision because of a 2008 speech John Bellamy Foster gave in Australia that was published as http://monthlyreview.org/2008/11/01/ecology-and-the-transition-from-capitalism-to-socialism/

Foster made it clear that the emphasis, per Che, would not be economic development but on the “need to develop socialist humanity.” That’s the part the UN leaves out when they tout Human Development as a goal. It means “a revolutionizing practice that revolutionizes human beings themselves.” When the Georgia DoED speaker stated that PBIS and Positive School Climate were not going away, he meant that the entire emphasis of school, starting in preschool, has changed. Social and emotional learning are not add-ons. The mandated shift is this revolutionizing process that targets ‘inner development,’ internalized images of how the world works, and appropriate future goals.

The obnoxious audience response to a heartfelt attempt to bring pertinent facts to the sales pitch of School Choice was a reminder to me that the current head of the cited ESA designer–the Friedman Foundation, Robert Enlow, is just one of a myriad of figures who keep popping up with ties to Seattle Pacific University. Others were Richard J Spady and Richard Kirby. (Civilization Building Leadership and the UNESCO-tied ed vision Nurturing Civilization Builders) That latter book cited a Tatyana Tsyrlina who is now Tsyrlina-Spady and an adjunct at SPU. In 2009 she started the Russian-American Education Forum, an online journal that first came up when I was looking at Arizona charter schools. It can be read in English or Russian, which means odd words come up like Personalizedategic.

I am quoting in particular from the November 1, 2010 Newsletter http://www.rus-ameeduforum.com/ but any of the newsletters describe a supposedly Russian vision for education that is being implemented in US schools. It explains the reasons for the task emphasis that figures so prominently in the actual Common Core implementation (Chapter 7 of my book) and also the real rationale behind “student-centered learning.” As students master each task, it “has some personal meaning for each of them.” Remember inner development? Well, the Russians do because they give us the reason for Rigor and assessments where there is no single correct answer.

Under “Personality-developing model,” we finally learn that “Personality development is possible only when a student’s level of knowledge and skills cannot meet the requirements of a given educational situation.” This gap then pulls a student’s “needs and motives” into play and forces the student to “exercise introspection and stimulates their self-reflection.” The “self-reflection is a primary contributor to personal development” and gets at the inner dimension–“the inner learning process, and its interconnected structural elements” consisting of “students’ activities, personal experience, and self-reflections.”

This Personality-Development model “helps students accumulate necessary skills and experience related to self-realization, self-organization, self-regulation, self-control, and self-management.” It sounds just like what the CCSSO is calling Competency-Based education in the US and what UNESCO calls the same thing globally in English-speaking countries.

It also “forms and develops personal values and has a strong effect on both intellect and motivation.” Sounds like everything our transformational social engineers need, so what’s Personalizedategic? That’s the final model that relates to the real world and remembers that “one of the main objectives of education is to prepare students for future adult life.” Sound familiar? It also explains all the various Redesign of High School initiatives. How about “the teaching process should include a system of interconnected, complementary situations that stimulate students’ personal development and challenge them to design key life strategies.” Now remember, this is translated from Russian into English in what could hardly be a better vision for mental disarmament of a once, and maybe future, foe.

Examples of life strategies are “choosing future profession, choosing a college, or realizing personal plans. Strategies are most likely successful when students know how to identify and utilize their personal traits, I-concepts, and real life situations, for the promotion of their success in the real world.”

Big shifts in the nature of education. Revolutionary shifts. Every one of these shifts targeting inner development gets hidden by terms like College and Career Ready, Student Growth, Every Child Achieves, and Success for All.

Now look at everything the UN is pushing and the events in Iran and Syria and think about what Putin knows about the true nature of the Cold War and how to invisibly overwhelm a population without firing a shot.

No wonder he is so cocky and chose to come to New York City in September for the final rollout of what has been building up for so long.

Incarcerated By Their Minds: False Narratives, Compulsion Via the Law, and Believing in Unicorns

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Robin

When I looked into Tim O’Reilly, whose company was touting the Haunted by Data video from the last post, he turned out to be a great admirer of a professor Alfred Korzybski. Now that was a new name on my horizon, but his point that the brain’s neural networks, coupled to available language, constrain how each of us interprets our experiences, was not new at all. It fits with Classic systems thinking as well as the reason for Whole Language reading instruction under its various names. There is a story told about Korzybski that fits right into why transformationalists want to Frame Orientation via a “Well-Organized Mind.” Here goes:

“One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. ‘Nice biscuit, don’t you think,’ said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog’s head and the words ‘Dog Cookies.’ The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. ‘You see,’ Korzybski remarked, ‘I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.'”

False narratives can make Dog Biscuits seem palatable and turn actual healthy practices into something we avoid at all costs. Just the tool if transformational economic, social, and economic change are sought, but being open and overt would likely result in effective opposition. In 1968 the US Office of Education awarded SRI International at Stanford an Educational Policy Research Center grant to “investigate alternative future possibilities for the society and their implications for education policy.” The resulting scenarios were later written up with this 1973 quote from a Fred Polak being a lead epigraph to frame the plans:

“Awareness of ideal values is the first step in the conscious creation of images of the future and therefore the creation of culture, for a value is by definition that which guides toward a valued future…”

If that seems a bit scifi and premeditated, the actual study stated that its specific purpose was “to chart, insofar as possible, what changes in the conceptual premises underlying Western society would lead to a desirable future.” Well, that purpose certainly puts a new spin on what the acronym NAEP–National Assessment of Educational Progress–was really planning to monitor when it was created in the same time frame. Perhaps we should just start assuming that when it comes to K-12 education, in the US and globally, false narratives are the norm and have been for decades. Last Friday I was at a False Narrative Extravaganza being billed as the Fulton/Atlanta School Justice Partnership Summit “Pipelines to Pathways: The Problem, the Solutions, the Actions.”

Transformation Ready to Proceed, in other words, and it was full of influential people from lots of Atlanta police officers, Georgia Supreme Court justices, juvenile justice judges and administrators and school district officials. The ‘incarcerated by their minds’ comment was actually from the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice about needing to shift the focus from punishment to “reform, reshape, and rehabilitate those individuals [juvenile offenders] to become productive citizens.” It was a prelude to a presentation by a Georgia DoED Deputy Super and a former school psychologist, Dr. Garry McGiboney, called “Changing the Conversation About Student Discipline” to promote PBIS and Positive School Climate [see tags for previous posts on point] as “what it takes to heal these broken kids.”

‘Broken’ because they are growing up in “unsafe environments and unstable homes.” After all “people and their environment are NOT separate things,” according to Dr McGiboney. “Behavior is a function of the person and their environment,” and to reiterate the point, McGiboney cited notorious Frankfurt School social psychologist Kurt Lewin [tag] as having created a formula for change. To make things even more interesting, False Attribution Theory then came in (by name) as Dr McGiboney complained that too many administrators looked to “understand the behavior of others by attributing causation to feelings, beliefs, intentions, and personality” instead of the “situational contexts” kids have grown up under. “Attribution of cause” affects the “doled out consequences”.

So if someone who grew up in bad circumstances misbehaves at school, their poor behavior gets excused as due to “environment.” Children who grew up in better circumstances and behave well in the classroom nevertheless need PBIS in every classroom and a Positive School Climate in every school so their values, feelings, beliefs, intentions, personality, attitudes, etc. can all be targeted and rearranged by the school. I guess if a student is not Incarcerated by their Mind when they come to school, they certainly will be by the end of a preschool and K-12 grounded in these psychological and mental health practices. Dr McGiboney actually sold this as “school climate matters to student outcomes.” Well, of course it does since SEL is now a crucial component of how ‘learning,’ Growth, and ‘student outcomes’ are measured.

The audience would not know that though and simply listening to the presentation they would believe that PBIS and Positive School Climate were nifty Georgia ideas and not federal mandates and requirements under Georgia’s NCLB federal waiver. Not to pick on Dr McGiboney, but I was down at the State DoED the day after they got that federal waiver. State officials that day did not seem too happy I knew that the School Climate Center guidelines required schools to have a social justice emphasis. What can I say? I read a lot. That is also how I know that all the hype about how PBIS and Positive School Climates will help reading achievement contradicts Georgia’s NCLB waiver. As I noted in my book, it explicitly made sure that an inability to read would no longer be a basis for holding a student back from promotion.

That’s one way to increase graduation rates, huh? Dr McGiboney closed with a truly poignant story about a potential suicide incident at a high school that was physically in terrible shape–dirty, broken windows–, in other words, a terrible physical environment. He related that the girl asked him if “he believed in unicorns” and he said yes, because he believed she needed to hear that. Years later, she reached out to him and talked about how she had pulled it together and lived a successful adult life. Her turnaround and the importance of environment then once again became the pitch for PBIS and Positive School Climate.

PBIS, Restorative Justice, Positive School Climate, and social and emotional learning generally are all targeting the personality and values. Tragic story and lots of false narratives used to sell something as a good idea that is actually another way of pushing the UNESCO vision we met in the last post without admitting that. Few in the audience understood that these measures are not in addition to an academic focus. They are actually a substitution for it as the new purpose of school and education. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3744335/pdf/nihms-493001.pdf , supported by multiple federal agencies and grants, confesses the intention to blur the distinction between student learning and mental health outcomes. All are deemed part of student success.

In 1987, then Princeton Professor and now President of the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, Amy Gutmann, published a book–Democratic Education. It laid out a new vision for K-12 and higher education and worried about the still prevalent and “well-intentioned misperception that [teachers’] obligation is to impart knowledge, not to develop the moral character of their students.” It is my belief that all these various rationales we keep encountering on why all schools must use PBIS as a core component in each classroom and Positive School Climate practices in every school attempt to stealthily use the law as an enforcer. The required agenda is actually the UNESCO vision as well as what Gutmann laid out as the necessary right of the State “to shape the political values, attitudes, and modes of behavior of future citizens.”

Hide it under the alluring title of “Character development” as well. http://character.org/ Everyone knows too many kids now have deficits in this area. Selling this political agenda honestly would create objections. So we get all these false narratives and problems where the offered solutions are always headed in the same direction. Change the student at the level of their mind and personality. Call it conscious social reproduction and insist that it is about altering the future, just like SRI also had in mind. If the phrase Incarcerated by their Minds still seems a bit strong, how should we describe this intent: “To cultivate in children the character that feels the force of right reason is an essential purpose of education in any society.”

This is Guttmann’s vision of conscious social reproduction and its ties to education. Every child must be educated “to be capable of participating in collectively shaping their society.” She does believe in the ability of the majority to bind everyone as long as each person gets to participate in policy deliberations. Public policy directs society and the economy. People have a human right to have their needs met. In Dr. McGiboney’s vision where environment is all, there should then be no more ‘disruptive behaviors.’ Back to Gutmann, we have all schools, public and private, with an obligation to create “a set of secular beliefs, habits, and ways of thinking that support democratic deliberation …compatible with a wide variety of religious commitments.” Parents have no right to object either.

I am closing this post with the disclaimer I do not know who at that Summit was aware of the broader agenda I have covered in this post. Because the vision though fits precisely with where the UN has said we are all going by 2030, my guess is a few are aware this is all a sales pitch backward mapping from desired transformations to get to a new vision of the future. It is also Atlanta, home of the new Civil and Human Rights museum, so it is probably not a coincidence Gutmann’s vision ties so tightly to what Martin Luther King called the “Beloved Community” [tag] vision for the future.

Pipelines to Prison and School Discipline Problems in 2015 have been worsened by these previous educational reforms that had no interest in teaching reading or math properly. Now tragic bad individual behaviors are selling a vision where school and education are not really about knowledge in the traditional sense at all.

I simply want all of us to be able to recognize a Dog Biscuit, whatever it is being called, before we take that first bite.

Disguising the Rise of the Oligarchs Via Competencies, New Values, a Thinking Curriculum and Other False Narratives

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Robin

Unapproved personal knowledge is a meme-buster. If you are not sure why I say that think of the images of the South Carolina flooding and then attach the descriptions of “freak weather-related” vs “caused by climate change.” One affects us emotionally and makes us want to do something. Known, unassigned stores of fact can destroy a given narrative. Let’s use two examples from just this past week. Has anyone seen a picture of the Oregon shooter’s mother? If we simply got our news from the evening networks, we would not know the mass murderer was mixed-race, just like our first Black President. Facts in the way of the narrative.

Part of the research into the sequel to my first book Credentialed to Destroy means that I have had to become an expert on Big Data. Let’s just say I have a lot of unapproved, demonstrably true facts at my command. So when this video https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/haunted-by-data came to my attention as a touted solution, I immediately knew it was a tactical keynote. The speaker misstated the nature of the problem to get a solution authorized that would actually make the problem of personalized data even worse. Words to the Wise: with behavioral data, it is the ongoing flow that is crucial to insights that allow neurological rearranging. Remember we have Learning Progressions to stipulated outcomes or Competencies. Once there and locked into place at a psychophysiological level to prompt and guide future behavior, the Oligarchs do not need to keep monitoring.

After that Big Data works just fine for social and economic planning purposes. That last one comes from a report on Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy that just came out from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. http://www.rewritetherules.org/ Once again actual knowledge of what has transpired in the last several decades and what impairs and helps create prosperity is a tremendous obstacle to accepting the prescribed actions by the politically influential. Finally, the US is embarking on adopting Qualifications Frameworks just as I warned about in my book. Only the names are changing to create a better narrative I suppose. On Monday the first ever National Credentials Summit was held in DC. http://connectingcredentials.org/summit-recording/

Like Stiglitz, this is a group of people interested in redesigning and planning a ‘fragmented system’–this time in the name of those who want a credential that will guarantee them a good job. Once again factual knowledge impedes the panacea being spun, but it is a chance to see Anthony Carnevale [see tag] as more than just the author of those Workplace Manuals for the Bush 41 Labor Department that still guide the admitted to vision now of K-12 education as workforce training. We get to see how much former governors just love to go to work for trade groups pushing a politically planned economy or education reforms. Even former Prime Ministers like Gordon Brown find post-office full employment via the Rise of the planning Oligarchs.

Last week the GEFF connected advisor Tom VanderArk linked to the final version of the Bipartisan Convergence Center’s vision for us. http://education-reimagined.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/A-Transformational-Vision-for-Education-in-the-US-2015.09.pdf It is just full of both false narratives justifying the need for transformation, as well as true declarations of intentions to change the children so that they are adaptable to the kind of changed social and economic systems Stiglitz and the Lumina Foundation (that called for the Credentials Convening linked to above) had in mind. In that planned, collectivist economy and society that still intends to use nonprofits and private companies to fulfill “the needs” of the people, unauthorized knowledge is in the way.

That report explains how the “learner-centered paradigm for learning functions like a pair of lenses that offers a new way to look at, think about, talk about, and act on education.” I bolded that part of the phrase because the ‘pair of lenses’ analogy is what the last post said was a means of framing an individual’s orientation at an unconscious level. Unapproved, personal facts get in the way of our simply putting on the prescribed ‘pair of lenses’. That report confesses the intention to use K-12 education to prescribe the specific core knowledge, skills, and personal dispositions ALL students are to internalize. Did any dictator in history ever aspire to more intrusion, unless we count keeping everyone but a designated elite (the oligarchs) completely illiterate?

Complete illiteracy is easy to notice. Prescribed ignorance, tied to useful false beliefs and regularly manipulated emotions, and then all coupled to doled out allowed core knowledge and practiced, approved behaviors, is what we are really looking at here. Unapproved knowledge impedes the Rise of the Oligarchs in our Vision 2030 UN-led world and it must not be allowed. http://www.iclei.org/details/article/advancing-sdgs-at-the-local-and-subnational-level-input-to-un-negotiations-on-post2015-development.html is a confession that the UN, mayors, city councils, and school administrators all know that most of the 2030 vision will be carried out globally at a local level. They have even coined the term ‘localization’ for this deliberate disguise for planned global control via local administrators and politicians.

http://landing.deloitte.com.au/rs/761-IBL-328/images/deloitte-au-ps-education-redefined-040815.pdf from Australia is a reminder that this planned ignorance and the ties to workforce development are not limited to the US. We can also go back in time to the report UNESCO created in 1968 to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Called “The Right to Education: From Proclamation to Achievement (1948-1968),” it made “the full development of the human personality” the new purpose of education globally just like Uncle Karl envisioned as a necessary component of his sought Human Development Society or little ‘c’ communism. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/who-knew-karl-marx-had-a-human-development-model-or-that-it-fit-our-facts-so-well/

Not to be paranoid, but when that Re-Imagined Education Project mentions its “vision of all children learning and thriving to their full potential,” it certainly sounds like a rephrasing of the ‘full development of the human personality’, doesn’t it? When it calls for a “Coordinated Network of Institutions, Organizations, Agencies, Associations and Federations, and Businesses” it is using the word ‘network’ to replace the word ‘system’ used in all these other cites. The intention to fundamentally redesign, plan and direct is the same. This Network “offers open-walled, relevant, and contextualized learning resources and opportunities to learners and creates avenues for learners to be involved in and engage with the community.”

Sounds like what the Credentialing Summit is calling for as Seamless Pathways in a no longer ‘fragmented’ employment system. It would also fit with the communitarian, promote the Good of Others in daily behaviors, requirement that we found in the definition of Career Ready Practices. Let’s stay in the present for one more quote: “Additionally, this network promotes collaboration and communication amongst entities working to support learners’ health, nutrition, safety, and wellbeing.” Since those needs can only be met if the learners’ entire family also has their ‘needs’ met (see http://www.communityschools.org/assets/1/AssetManager/Better-Learning-through-Community-School-Partnerships.pdf ) , we are back to an obligation to meet such needs for all families with children. Just like Marx laid out, as well as the UN in that 2030 Vision all of our elected leaders signed on to about a week ago.

The UDHR is already showing up in much of the curricula coming in under the banner of the Common Core and Global Competency. Does everyone appreciate that it called for “economic and social equality” back in 1948 and empowered UNESCO to achieve it via education and planned changes to prevailing culture? That communitarianism was always at the center of the imagined future global vision and that only politically connected Oligarchs thrive in such a society? Essentially everyone thriving becomes a means of ensuring there will be no unauthorized breakouts of individuality or genius innovations. Here is the Oligarch plan via the UN and now ‘localization’ from 1968:

“When liberty, equality and fraternity are achieved, so too will be achieved the free, full development of man’s personality within the community; and thus man will be considered as an end and not a means. [BS narrative alert]…Duties toward the Community (Art. 29 of UDHR) For man may claim his rights, in the name of freedom and justice, only in so far as he consents to assume his duties, and becomes aware that the members of every human community are all interdependent.”

That’s why the focus keeps coming back to personality, even if the excuse is bullying, a Positive School Climate, Workforce Competencies and Soft Skills, Grit and Perseverance, or Character Education. Again to 1968: “the permanent task of education remains: to form the personality of every human being–the personality that will allow him to resist the loss of his individuality in his work and his leisure-time occupations, and to set forth, be it modestly, upon the conquest of the good things of the world. And these are not material goods only, but also intelligence, beauty and goodness.”

I guess the last three are what is hiding in the present as those to-be-stipulated Dispositions. It will not be the individual student or any of the rest of us picking them out and, once again individual, unapproved stores of knowledge impede the plans. That is why UNESCO in 1968 called for “not a well-stocked but a well-organized mind.” Organized around the designated core knowledge, approved themes and concepts, and supplied principles and values–“it presupposes a certain limited sum of basic knowledge, deeply rooted and constantly available.” Basic knowledge that creates a “capacity for action.” That would be action though along approved pathways of course.

Education then, in 1968 and now, in the US and in every other developed country, “forms men and women who will become the active agents of progress, ready to face what has never been faced before. Culture forms a close link between the concepts of education and the future…Culture, no longer the privilege of an aristocracy, is becoming the leaven of democracy. Every worker is a citizen. Specialization must on no account be an obstacle to the grasp of broader problems.”

Because broader problems should only be understood through the lenses of approved core knowledge. This ignorance and manipulated narratives of course greases the path for the Rise of the Oligarchs.

Genuine, Unapproved Knowledge–the ultimate 21st Century Rebellion of the would-be serfs.

Invisible Serfs Collar

"a group which desires to be strong has no use for the man who claims to think for himself."

Category Archives: UN Millenium Development Goals