Take a deep breath and hold on to your hat if you have one on. The amount of evidence I have on the story I am about to tell is overwhelming, but in a blog format I cannot really cite all of it. Those with my book will want to pull it out and reread the parts about Theodore Brameld’s intentions for education globally and Gorbachev, Harlan Cleveland, the noosphere, and the Club of Rome. The phrase Holos Consciousness is the desire of the related Club of Budapest and was laid out in Ervin Laszlo’s 2001 book, Macroshift: Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable World.
I ordered it after his son, Christopher, was cited as the main force behind the October 2014 Global Forum on Business as an Agent of World Benefit, and when I recognized how many of the important pushers of a radical K-12 education vision had been involved with Ervin’s pursuit of conscious evolution during the Cold War–the General Evolution Research Group or GERG. Two names really jumped out from the list of Honorary Budapest Members, Professor Nicholas Negroponte, a founder of the MIT Media Lab that we just keep encountering, and Robert Muller (whose World Core Curriculum from the 90s is the nightmare many have worried is where the phrase Common Core was designed to quietly lead.)
Now I am going to pivot for a moment to the report RSA issued earlier in the week that I assumed would tie into the already announced communitarian agenda of the future using Big Data. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/science-fiction-made-real-were-we-ever-to-know-in-time/ I knew it was on character education and social and emotional learning as the new K-12 emphasis. The actual report though had this provocative title: Schools with Soul: A new approach to Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Education. RSA promptly created the acronym SMSC education so we will too. SMSC “requires a robust, co-constructed and shared understanding of each of its components” in the literal sense of insisting we are now to have approved, and accepted by all, beliefs fostered via school (and media as well). Everything else I suppose is to be illicit. Foremost on the list of what must be jettisoned as SMSC comes to the forefront of the view of what education is to be in the 21st century are the “overt values of capitalism and individuality.”
That true aim of global education reform, which you may remember we just keep encountering in the small print describing definitions and planned practices, becomes even more apparent if you know anything about the two individuals chosen for intro quotes in that RSA report. Professor Unger’s is mild, almost fortune cookie material: “The commanding objective must be the achievement of a larger life for ordinary men and women.” Only a hint of his radical beliefs now told from his perch as a Harvard professor. We met Unger here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/multiple-recent-proclamations-laying-out-commitment-to-revolutionary-transformation-of-our-entire-society/ where I quoted his intentions laid out in a 2007 book. Here’s a sample from that post that fits in perfectly with the Helos Consciousness and the Education 3.0 we have been discussing in comments:
“Education, beginning in childhood and continuing throughout the working life, must nourish a core of generic conceptual and practical capacities to make the new out of the old. It must also equip the mind with the means with which to resist the present. For this very reason, the school should not remain under the control of the community of local families, who tell the child, become like us.”
Now Schools with Soul says that “more than any other dimension of SMSC, spiritual development needs a ‘stipulative’ definition that spells out how pupils’ spirituality will be developed at school…three categories…could usefully inform schools’ approaches: experiences, practices, and perspectives.” Long time readers will remember that many New Age practitioners attach all sorts of names to their pushes and then show up at schools or doing teacher development where it gets referred to as promoting Positive School Climate or anti-bullying or mental first-aid. Same practices and experiences being promoted. Same end-game transformed perspectives being sought.
In fact the second lead-in quote is far more overt than Unger’s. Stephen R. Covey is cited for stating that “We are not human beings are on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.” OK, you say, Covey is entitled to his beliefs. But how many readers would recognize that Covey’s books such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or his book just for teens are cited by charter schools and in ed reform presentations as embodying what schools now push to promote success for all? What they take into consideration in calculating whether a student is ‘achieving’ or has ‘Growth.’ The presentation I heard of Covey’s work was sponsored by AT&T and the local Chamber of Commerce as what the essence of the legislatively mandated “soft skills” would mean.
My point is that these fundamental shifts in the essence of what is felt and valued and believed are taking place now. It’s in the digital curricula and MIT Media Lab produced games to create empathy or social and emotional learning practices that are not even on a parent’s radar screen. RSA may be located in the UK, but that’s a report with global aspirations citing Michael Barber and his work for Pearson and many of the reports we have discussed on this blog. The shift is occurring now. It is about altering worldviews and mindsets, and we are not even being given a chance to consent, or a By Your Leave, or even a reference to the shift in an electoral platform. I am seeing conversion charters that use euphemisms to take away that very veto power from parents or local school boards that Unger aspired to obtain, and School Governance Councils created to do the same. It could be farce if children’s minds and personalities were not the actual target.
Oh, and Western civilization when we read the intended shifts involved with that Holos Consciousness sought by the Club of Budapest. And we get there by having schools that quietly implement a spirituality focus without calling it that in letters home or robocalls to parents interpreting the school’s new vision and mission. Instead, the classrooms simply “initiate important conversations about what life is for, instilling a better felt sense for the myriad of human experiences, and some practical know-how on meaning-making for ourselves and others through rituals and practices.” You can do a search and check out how often now Mindfulness exercises are being pushed in the classroom, even on preschoolers and elementary kids. None of this is accidental and all of it is precisely in line with what the Club of Budapest regards as necessary for its agenda of planetary change.
Here’s the RSA definition of spiritual experiences, practices, and perspectives. Before I give it I will remind all of us that this fits with Mihalyi Csiksentmihalyi’s definition of the flow experiences schools should create in order to foster what he defines as excellence. Also that Csik is involved with Ervin Laszlo’s work on conscious evolution. Yes, Houston, we do have a problem, and indeed, the worst we could contemplate is really already here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/excellence-means-education-putting-what-we-feel-wish-for-and-think-in-harmony/
“Spiritual experiences are moments of aliveness, rapture and homecoming that make the world feel viscerally meaningful. Spiritual practices are the disciplined and creative activities that support human development–things we do to strengthen our inner lives. Spiritual perspectives are the value-rich visions of what it means to be here, to be human, our worldviews that contextualize our experiences and practices.”
In other words, these look a great deal like a student-centered classroom having media rich activities and a rich, relevant dialogue that focuses on the 4Cs of 21st century skills: communication, creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking. Parents will never notice the shift. If they do, Common Core is ever ready to be the excuse for the change in attitudes and dispositions in the student. I want to close this post about how such a fundamental desired shift can and is occurring almost invisibly with a point Zaid Hassan made in his book we discussed in the last post. He talks about the importance of a koan to obtaining personal transformation in Buddhism. As a serious nerd and scholar of what is really going on in education, I noticed the resemblance to John Dewey’s Indeterminate Situation and much of the planned assessment under the Common Core.
As I always say, same function, same purpose, whether admitted or not, so let’s look at what Hassan said was the purpose of a koan.
“In Zen practice, a koan is a particular kind of question that, on the face of it, seems not to make any sense. It’s used with students to provoke great doubt and gauge their progress in Zen. For example, ‘two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?’…the value of a koan is not in answering the question, for there is no answer. It’s that the Zen student, in struggling with the question, arrives at a new way of being, valuing, if you like, the very nature of the struggle. The struggle generates value, producing new insights and change.”
Such productive struggle, as educators call it of untaught or ambiguous problems, has a similar effect in non-Zen students. Some of them do not appreciate such deliberate social engineering while they are legally captives in a K-12 classroom in the least.
Now that we have seen how the Holos Consciousness can be grasped on a massive scale without anyone really noticing the shift while it is happening, we will go into the nature of the Macroshift next.
First: the buddist zen thing is same as dev psych lawrence Kohlberg.
Second: i am eeminded of the
” monads” of Piaget.
All big phonies, with theories and junk gibberish, yet embraced by the ed world who most never read any of it to be able to discredit it. Just indoctrinated with it. So we can say that the higher ed brainwashing really worked and now like you said there are enough change agents
( leadership for capacity building)
To put the final nail in the coffin.
Hmmmmm. Time to rumble
Yes, I wrote in the margin of Macroshift that the sought consciousness was Robert Kegan’s stages and Kohlberg was Kegan’s mentor. Also remember when Hewlett wanted to make sure that CC would reflect the desired ‘deep learning’ they hired Senge and Kegan to conduct the review.
I am not kidding about the mountain of connections.
SMSC is really just a reprise of the what the residential school system did to Aboriginals, isn’t it. Then it was “take the indian out of the child” and now they want to supplant whatever the parents represent. Colonization, pure and simple.
Karin–
I think Laszlo wants to take us all back to more of the aboriginal, preliterate, mindset. “…there are thousands of cultures in today’s world. Yet, with the exception of the few remaining traditional cultures, they all share a common trait: they gave rise to behaviors that are socially and ecologically unsustainable. This trait must now disappear–and its disappearance, like any other specific of human culture. hinges crucially on people’s consciousness.”
In the previous paragraph ( p 138) Laszlo states that “the mutation of the cultural information pool does not require the chance serendipity of success:it can be consciously planned and purposely promoted. Its conscious planning and purposive planning become a precondition of human survival in the twenty-first century.”
Nuts, but in the margin I wrote “Quality Learning.”
So the elite utopists want us sheeple to believe that “We are spiritual beings on a human journey…” into which I read that they want us to defer experiencing a “good life” until after we are rid of our physical bodies (after death) so that we will mindlessly fulfill the wishes of the elite, so that the elite can have all of our property, wealth and the benefit of our mental and physical labor (human resources) in order for these goddless elites to have their “heaven” here on earth. The elite do not think there is a God or an afterlife, yet happily distort the ideas of faith and sacred teaching to reach their godless goals.
And, it’s full steam ahead with Covey in the schools: its called “The Leader in Me”, (everyone is a leader, meaning all the students and staff) there already have been “buy-in” sessions for faculty, complete with conga line dancing lead by a jet-lagged change agent.
There are too many of those jubilant conga lines on you tube… Oh and folk songs too! It is bizarro world, it is life without ones own brain. It is fodder for snl but loren michaels would never touch that! Not on the agenda for him but funny nonetheless. Sad…
http://jenkintownchronicle.com/2013/05/22/common-core-open-mic-night.aspx?ref=rss
Oh.My. Is there any way out? Robin, this post makes me want to go pick up my children from school and never return them. Once again faith under attack. This makes it’s way in to classrooms in mindfulness practices, but also from teacher development? Is it coming from actual curriculum given to teachers or included in a sly way?
http://www.innerresilience-tidescenter.org/ is an example of someone who does teacher development and changes her descriptions.
Many major school districts push Spence Rogers training their teachers. He was the co-creator of Transformational outcomes based education along with William Spady. His Performance Excellence for All Kids–PEAK–materials state that the methods used are based on Csik’s work.
My experience is this type of teacher training creates a schism between the teachers who adore it and the ones who still want to transmit knowledge. The principal I dealt with who pushed Rogers would literally get a mystical look in his eyes at the very mention of his name.
It is all part of the shift from knowledge being the point of school to changing how people think. These books all say that. The professional development is about changing what teachers believe is the purpose of school, try to change how they think, and also change the nature of their interactions in school. Basically to make them believe this is a better method for our changing world or that a koan type question creates more flexible and memorable learning.
I didn’t write this to scare, but there will not be a magic moment when it ceases to be about content that parents can arise in anger. It is in motion, under disguise, but quite traceable. Still discussing Common Core as if it really is about what its sales pitch claims is dangerous to our kids’ minds. It allows all these other documentable changes to be put in place undetected. It lets plans like FutuICT move forward via the data produced.
Thanks for that bit of excellent, truly exceptional research. This old planet is covered with the evil spirits of cast outs. The Bible is right. Time to use the best muscles we have, our brains and save as many children in our personal zone as possible. Knowing the truth is scary, but emotions pass and we finally know what to do. It was and always will be, a spiritual battle.
You have such a gift, thanks for using it correctly, may God bless you.
Liz you are so right about standing firm, and in the gap, to save our babies, children or grandchildren, nieces and nephews, neighbors and or friends. May I add that Easter time, spring break for the kiddies, is a wonderful week to get one on one and eye to eye with our young’uns and try to undo some of the damage the schools have done since the start of the year. Debrief so to speak. And reeducate where necessary.
If they’re middle schoolers ask some pertinent questions while driving, like you always do, but make them Common Core specific. Just to see how bed it is in your district or schools.
There is a great variety in the extent to which the admin and individual teachers are implementing what is going on in their district. I know that in my Central
Florida district my old school, generally graded C and just barely, where poor behaviors and apathy in the classroom are rampant, the school is in jeopardy due to low AYP. cCSS is their bible and all the good little teachers, whom I left behind by retiring, are leaving the school or knee stepping to the kool aid drinking admin who is up to her neck in the propaganda.
However, at my grandson’s school, an A school for the 10 years it’s been open, he is experiencing a whole other world. I see the CCSS in LA, only snippets of the literature they used to read and analyze, very heavy on the template writing to prompts, and sad. But the Algebra teacher is not so bent, and is a buddy of mine who teaches the old way, even though there is no hard copy text book any more. .??? His Social Studies teacher seems to be teaching real history, not antiAmerican lies, and Jacob is really enjoying learning about the USA. We educate him in current affairs at home, and I talk to him about CCSS often, and will continue this. We homeschool the 16 year old girl, but notice that Florida Virtual, she has a few classes through this, is perfect CC propaganda learning. We undo as often as they do. She juggles it quite well.
You folks who post here are my lifeline to other school systems as I am losing contact with my old middle school after nearly 30 years of blood sweat and tears there. I salute you all, and of course Captain Robin, for your continued research and investigating and even translating into non-jargonese for those whose minds are not public education bent like those of us once or still in the public schools systems.
Oh Robin, Thank you for your alerting , enlightening, and steadfast dedication to the subject of education. Holding on to our children while in the public school is a challenge these days. Not only are the schools molding the minds, the entire culture is warping the very fabric of identity. These are very trying times. I feel strongly that there is subversive activity going on in our music. movies . advertising, media and politics. The lies and deception. I believe to that our very psyche is being tampered with subliminal messages that effect our subconscious. Your’e on target with all you share, You have a very astute following. Being pro active , vigilant and lots of prayer will help us to get through these times. So uplifting to see responses from concerned and awake individuals here.
You are welcome Deborah. Welcome to ISC. I would like to add it is not just public school. In fact many parents are finding an even quicker transformation in private and parochial schools. Accreditation has a grip on them as well.
If you look at the materials I posted along with commenters last week on Knowledge Works and their Learning in 2025 intentions, it says explicitly that by 2025 all private and parochial schools will be required to show student growth. Translating that out of ed speak, it means the focus must shift there as well away from a knowledge transmission orientation. The child is the focus and in particular changing them developmentally so that their perspectives and beliefs and values, attitudes and feelings, and thus behaviors all shift. Altering worldviews becomes the goal of all education to create both action and then support for the kind of wholesale political, social, and economic transformation I write about.
The Manifesto of Planetary Consciousness, which Laszlo drafted in 1996 along with the same Dalai Lama we are seeing at education conferences sponsored by CASEL,says that the key factor in changing reality comes ‘from within.’ “The critical factor in the choice of our common destiny is the thinking, the valuing, and the perception of individuals; the shape of our consciousness.”
That’s what is called the Holos Consciousness. I am not guessing here or merely drawing links because they fit. The Social Labs book I wrote about has the Intro by Joi Ito, the current director of the MIT Media Lab. One of the back blurbs is from Cherie Blair, who I recognize as Tony Blair’s wife. MIT Media Lab is also the entity Gates is funding to develop the MMOG part of the classroom implementation of the COmmon Core–Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming. MIT is also a partner in the global Redesigning Curriculum project that wants to redefine what is math around what is easily accessible to women and minorities.
We are at war with the goal being the “revolution in consciousness” the Club of Budapest and so many others seek. To the extent people are aware of the Common Core, they are being told it is a dispute over which level of government should set the criteria on the knowledge students are to know in K-12. What a con job this all is.
Yet so many people want to keep this just a talk about education as if we can have a philosophical discussion while we are under assault with more aggressive warfare planned. And we want to knit while we ought to at least be putting on the noetic equivalents of helmets and body armor.
I give so much detail precisely to help people get over the denial so they can begin to protect themselves and their children even if it is to hire outside tutors or arrange certain experiences like trips to undo the nonsense fed at school. Honors IB English should not be discussions about the need to raise the minimum wage. The teenagers had no idea how easy it is to adjust by creating software that does the job of that too expensive employee. They are just supposed to be advocates, not actually informed about the reality.
Although in many ways I actually respect contemporary social theories of learning that say they want to inspire creativity, agency, and competency in children, this is all very much at the level of theory and anecdotal practical implication. American schools are very much about building a standardized student that will become a docile, Capitalist worker. You mention sociocultural theory of play and indeed, it gets a lot of “play” in academic circles but almost NO traction in policy. Children play less and less in school and take more and more standardized tests. We know this as fact. Officials, like Duncan, might pay some lip service to cultural theory but will inevitably implement policy that leads to the competitive, standardized curriculum we have all become familiar with, e.g., Race to the Top. Compulsory public schooling in the West, after all, has roots in Fordism. It has from it’s inception been about tracking children into available jobs.
Hi William,
I have to disagree with you about no traction in policy. That’s what Education 3.0 is premised on and I listened to a district administrator explain that was what Fulton was doing so they “could leap over what Forsyth was doing with computers and media.” He went on to say that was why the new Chief Innovation Officer for the District had been hired from Green Dot in LA. Since the same individual, a Patrick Burke with his urban planning degree, is listed as part of the Steering Group committed to ensuring that all school districts in the 10 county metro Atlanta ARC jurisdiction commit to CHAT style innovative practices in their schools as part of the “economic development strategy,” I am not just guessing here.
The nature of the new assessment is not standardized in terms of knowledge unless we count those supplied Enduring Understandings. Concepts to be the lenses for examining what ever happens or might. The assessments are experiential and activities and usually group. Confirmed that and the consequences of making that “student achievement” with the number 2 at the state DoEd a few years ago, just after Ga got its NCLB waiver.
Maybe where you live it is not yet theory being put into practice, but it is where I live and where many of my readers live. You should see my offline conversations with alarmed teachers and parents.
Also the NRC document Education for Life and Work first laid out here in July 2012 when it was released http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/so-now-common-core-rejects-individual-thinking-to-embrace-soviet-psychology-ecology/ . It makes adopting CHAT instead of a model of individual thinking as supported by mounds of solid research the official federal policy.
As I have said welcome to ISC. I suspect you have as dim a view of the Chamber of Commerce’s announced ad buy to try to coerce remaining critics of the Common Core to shut up or be ridiculed as I do. Silencing dissent is unAmerican. Silencing it with inaccurate propaganda and duplicitously defined terms is fascistic. It is all a reminder that the Chamber is a trade group wanting political power to run the economy, not individual choices.
I would agree by the way on your comment on Fordism as influencing compulsory public schooling. Competency now has much the same standardized function, but it is being created not by CAI, but by formative assessments via the conputer that get at the Whole Child.
Also remember both Duncan and Bill Gates spoke at the Obuchenie, I mean Teaching and Learning Conference 2014 this past week in DC. http://www.teachinglearning2014.org/conference/speakers-and-content-strands/
I also noticed Joshua Starr was a speaker. He now heads that Consortium I have written about.
If you read the presentation topics and session titles as I did it shows theory very much in practice as well.
So, how to stop it?
Those for the Common Core, and all that goes with it are able to speak with a single (Bill Gates) funded, unified voice. Those against are scattered about, not always sophisticated enough to shape the debate-such as the guy in Georgia would couldn’t name 3 standards he was against, and didn’t have the sophistication to A) read the standards and B) reframe the question to get people to know that “the standards” are only the beginning of what’s to come.
Is there any network of unified voices? Is there any thought of getting this to a wider audience? Michelle Malkin comes to mind.
I’m not being critical mind you, but practical. I have no answers, other than a wish that the information contained in this blog could be every bit the talking point to rebut every Gates influenced talking point that Common Core advocates are spouting, because they are more organized in support, than the opposition is at this point.
I experience the effects of cybernetics on my 12 year old boy. I live to contain this addiction public schools and the world around him create. It’s been four months since I pulled him out of public school. I’m not really sure how to handle this cognitive heroin withdrawl. The boys in middle school all have devices. They all have their heads down. They all go home to plug in and the change has already occurred. It is not enough to try to re-educate a child indoctrinated. My son says the only reason he wants to live is to have a cell phone and his own computer. I heard news of another cell tower going up in close proximity to an elementary school in
California. 11 children diagnosed with brain cancer. I relate the technology to genocide. I’ll never have a cell phone.
Thanks Robin
Oh, sqirl, what a sad story. Please keep in touch. Have you tried something involving the wilderness with spectacular vistas and arduous physical activity?
I worked on this some more over the weekend in between playing mom (all my kids were home. Hooray!) and all of my instincts about the importance of the visual from reading Jane McGonnigal and Galperin’s theory and what Talyzina were explicitly verified by Seymour Papert’s book (also involved with MIT Media Lab and Edutopia is now promoting his work) The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer.
Papert confirms that the goal is to remake the nature of what constitutes knowledge and tie it to concrete experience. Remember Willis Harman who wrote Global Mind Change and has a tag said that the body considers virtual reality to be just a experiential in its effects as physical reality. And much easier to control since it will reflect the intentions of whoever created the software.
Like the MacArthur Foundation in its Connected Learning work, Papert emphasizes remaking school so it is more accessible to the kind of thinking most often utilized by women and minorities. I think that’s an excuse to make the developmental approach primary without saying so, but there is no question from many directions that a fact-filled, logical mind capable of creating its own conceptual understandings and modifying when the pertinent circumstances change is viewed as the enemy.
Good luck.