Fostering Faithful Followers for Anticipatory Democracy Created by Reinventing Governments

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Anticipatory democracy may sound like a mouthful, but it’s really just a nerdy term policymakers created to justify governments at all levels becoming the decision-makers. We see it in the Inclusive Prosperity, America Next, and Dignity for All by 2030 vision from the previous two posts. Goals for our collective future are set out at forums we are not invited to and then officials decide how to get there from the present. Do you know what “Anticipatory Democracy and Aspirational Futures” http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/152-S06.pdf  always needs? It needs to develop a shared vision for the future across a broad spectrum of society that justifies governments as decision-makers. How can it do that? Well, it might want to seize control over the Internet now, but even before there was an ICT industry, every radical with transformational plans knew to look to education.

On February 17, 2015 the well-connected KnowledgeWorks put out its vision for the ESEA Rewrite wanting it to be grounded in Competency, including social and emotional ones, and for the federal, state, and local levels to operate together as a single system. http://knowledgeworks.org/sites/default/files/policy-political-landscape-k12-competency-education.PDF Sounds like polyphonic, progressive federalism to me as we covered in a previous post. Now I am assuming knowledge of Competency as laid out in Chapter 4 of my book Credentialed to Destroy and how it fits with the real Common Core implementation and learning progressions. What I want to do here is overlay the pertinent visions we are dealing with where people have confessed the need for New Mindsets, perceptions, and personality traits that will fit with their new visions of what governments at all levels are to be doing in the developed world.

Nobody was ever going to put us on notice or ask our permission. This was to be a fait accompli and somehow tenacious me has stumbled across it all with my constant listening and reading and musing over “why are they saying that? It’s not how the world has ever worked. What’s going on?” Now my reaction to the manipulative deceit of the language in that America Next report sent me scurrying back to a cited book from 1992 called Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector . It made me see what was going on in the name of Outcomes-based education and School to Work in the 90s in a whole new light. Remember how I have been bothered by the sudden ubiquity of all the references now to ‘Governance’ and our being governed? Read this (my bolding throughout this post):

“Governance is the process by which we collectively solve our problems and meet our society’s needs. [In other words it’s a euphemism for what Marx called the purpose of his Human Development Society]. Government is the instrument we use. The instrument is outdated, and the process of reinvention has begun. We do not need another New Deal, nor another Reagan Revolution. We need an American perestroika.”

Interesting choice of language in 1992. Since the Reinventing book also cites Harlan Cleveland multiple times, let’s overlay this post into what my book laid out on what seems to really been going on in the 80s and 90s and who was really to undergo the wholesale restructuring. In this new vision the “job of government is to steer, not to row the boat.” Well, that grabbed my attention given the number of times I have encountered the idea that Competency-based education is creating a desired keel at the useful level of the student’s mind and personality. This is the fundamental vision of what the 1992 book called “third-party government” where governments look to third parties to carry out the public objectives they have set. So please do not disingenuously describe it as free enterprise or limited government or conservative policymaking.

A confessed goal of steering society and “using public leverage to shape private decisions to achieve collective goals” is using sovereign power for personal manipulation and control over individuals. Pure and simple. This Entrepreneurial (R)evolution needs a Crisis, which is basically what a hyped ‘skills gap’ and high unemployment provides. It needs Trust in Government, which requires an absence of factual knowledge about the past. It needs Shared Vision and Goals, which is precisely where education again comes in. Where better to go about sculpting “the key element is a collective vision of a city or state’s future–a sense of where it’s headed.” That was John Parr, executive director of the National Civic League, speaking in the book. Parr went on to say: “If you haven’t put that [vision] together, it’s very difficult to make these innovative approaches work, because people become so confused about the role of government. They become very confused about why government is changing.”

If that quote is not hitting anyone else like a ton of bricks given all the hype on a new paradigm for education, how about the open declaration that the cultivated shared vision about the new role of governments “simply assures that enough of the community shares the leaders’ vision to overcome the opposition.” No wonder we keep hearing all those mentions of democracy. Has there ever been a more meaningful confession of majority rules? Now the Reinventing Government book left me breathless because it fit the facts I have noticed or laid out in my book so well going back to the 60s. It said the original version of this reprivitization/steering vision though had come from Peter Drucker and cited a 1968 book The Age of Discontinuity.

Now the 1992 book did own up to needing to change the “mental image of government” each of us has, but Drucker thankfully set out a graphic description of the kind of education for ALL students that would be necessary to fit his vision that “after 250 years, political theory and social theory” would once again join together. If that sounds like the historic concept of the individual is about to go poof, Drucker did call for a “new individualism” and a “new concept of freedom.” To clarify “the purpose of government is to make fundamental decisions and to make them effectively.” Next time you hear that “citizenship dispositions” is a stated purpose of Competency education and the Common Core, remember that Drucker wrote that “In a free society, the citizen takes responsibility, above all, for his society and its institutions.”

Drucker’s vision called for education and learning grounded in skills that would be the “cornerstone of tomorrow’s education for everybody.” This would not be an academic education grounded in subject content and he wanted the focus to be on nonverbal experience and performance. Like performance standards and assessments and learning experiences? What is now being described as Competency education suitable for the workforce or college open to all sounds like what Drucker called in 1968 his “education of technologists.” Education suitable for an equitable society where governments now do the steering and see that all people’s needs are met.

Drucker’s “education of technologists” had three essential components. Now when Drucker says “apply knowledge to work” or “using theory” he does not mean book knowledge. He means what we are now encountering as Enduring Understandings, core disciplinary ideas, cross-cutting issues, and other terms for the supplied Big Ideas and ‘lenses’ to be used to guide our interpretation of the world. Drucker wanted “an infinite number of people capable of using theory as the basis of skill for practical application in work.” What today we would call Project-based Learning and Competency-based education. If my interpretation of the likely end result of Fostering Faithful Followers seems a bit too cynical it’s because we have not yet covered the other two essential elements. “Equally important is the training and formation of perception and emotion in school.”

In the next post I want to talk about how the push to make Equity an essential obligation of the federal government makes this steering vision and collectivism necessary. We need to challenge that fundamental false premise before all that is left is a discussion over means. Meanwhile, I want to end with a quote that fits the current, actual K-12 implementation as well as where something in higher ed called the ETS Proficiency Profile is taking us. Remember what I always say about the purpose of policies and practices attaching to them even if the school and classroom users remain unaware. Drucker and the Reinventing Government authors were very graphic. Here goes:

“Perception and emotion are trained, developed, and disciplined only in the experience of performance, that is, only under the challenge of objective standards that exist no matter what the individual’s ability, inclinations, or proficiency.”

Those are standards in the sense of goals for everyone. That is a vision that allows for Student Success for ALL. It fulfills the current attempt to create a federal civil rights obligation grounded in quality education that provides Equity and Excellence.

And at its fundamental foundation it uses governments in the Developed World to steer economies and society to finally fulfill what Uncle Karl called his Human Development Society.

One last revelation from Reinventing Government in 1992–A Global Revolution–that fits with the worldwide push towards Competency.

“If the rise of entrepreneurial government is an inevitable shift rather than a temporary fad, as we argue, one would expect it in other nations as well. And to a startling degree, it has. A similar process of transformation is under way throughout the developed world.”

Using similar mechanisms for comparable reasons.

 

42 thoughts on “Fostering Faithful Followers for Anticipatory Democracy Created by Reinventing Governments”

  1. “What’s going on”, you asked; ” “why are they saying that? It’s not how the world has ever worked.”; here you are 100% correct. You won’t be able to figure it out till you sit down and learn about “Freemasonry” of which you said a while back that you knew nothing about. It is a required pair of lenses through which to view your own research. It doesn’t matter what anyone “believes”; beliefs deceive people all the time. It matters what “is”. Here is an interview of a member of one of my research groups, the publisher of “Forcing Change Newsletter”, one of the best researchers to be found, being interviewed by John B. Wells giving the best overview of Freemasonry I have come across, in about half an hour. I hope you have time to listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLWjaCWSrDs

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    • Thanks anon. I will keep it in mind but masonry is not YET at the tripping over stage that causes me to explore something. Right now I am concentrating on more things confessed about 1992.

      I am under the weather and will likely be posting less and shorter.

      http://toomuchonline.org/segregations-insidious-new-face/ is a good article to appreciate how much people who live in the ‘right’ neighborhoods are in the crosshairs.

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  2. I just got turned onto you and think you’re splendid. It takes some effort…some actual brain action to get your prose, but it is worth that.
    I am very sorry I’ve tossed the place I heard of you – I listen to talk radio…I am sure one of the important Talkers mentioned your blog. Good for you. I see you have no FaceBook likie things. I would love to Like you, though, to spread your word.
    I think you’ll enjoy this Brit at TED years ago. He explains IT with humor and intelligence. February 2006:

    Ken Robinson: How schools kill creativity
    https://www.ted.com/playlists/77/11_must_see_ted_talks

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    • Thanks LN. The most recent posts are essentially part of an ongoing dialog premised on the book now and with three years of posts behind them that are independent of my book. I had finished book when I started the blog out of concern over all the changes in real time in education that mattered, were largely invisible, and that were happening before I could get the book (that lays the foundation for everything that has come or is coming) in print.

      My advice for new readers is always to go back to the first two to three months of the blog as you have time. Those are shorter, largely free standing posts explaining what I am seeing that is worrying me so. May, June, July of 2012 really get people used to social and emotional learning. What a dirigiste economy is. Why that kind of parasitic cronyism is so important to understand. That will later tie to what we now know are these sector strategies going on in the states to change the purpose of K-12.

      I am over my sitting up typing limit for a while. Play around in the earlier posts. See why e-Governance has been cropping up repeatedly now and its links to Open Data and e-Governance. The FuturICT conference post was also hugely revealing. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/science-fiction-made-real-were-we-ever-to-know-in-time/

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    • To LN — It’s Worth The Effort

      These are challenging times and though education has gone through a number of fads and social engineering efforts in the past, the current era is more daunting than ever. It’s very hard to untangle just how technology, emerging brain research, sophisticated psychological techniques and political agendas are influencing the education landscape today.

      What is clear is that a good number of people are troubled by the methods, the speed, and lack of transparency. This blog and the book help us see how, essentially, self-appointed people and groups are trying to steer toward an uncertain future — without evidence, without consent and without consultation.

      There is a Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/pages/Invisible-Serfs-Collar/1411815825739518

      While you wait for the book, I would suggest reading the 30 plus reviews on Amazon.com. One reviewer admitted: “The irony is that we don’t want this to be true.” It’s too scary and unthinkable, especially since children are involved.

      Talking to my dentist today, I was gratified to find that she understood what I was saying and expressed concern for the future. Our task is helping awaken an unbelieving public.

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      • Thanks Tunya. I have received reports that people uploading glowing reviews are having trouble posting them to amazon. Would love to hear if others are having same experiences so I can accumulate an appropriate reply. I would also like to know when people see presentations based on its insights without crediting it. Saw a formal Privacy Dossier powerpoint at a Stop Common Core event this past weekend that did that. I was stunned and it leaves people with a superficial understanding instead of what this blog and the book offer.

        More confirmation of what we are dealing–new civilzational DNA;wealth is for use, not for private profit (a good way to make sure wealth disappears and no more arises except material resources like gold or oil) is this recent short piece. http://www.shareable.net/blog/hampshire-college-launches-leep-program-to-advance-the-common-good?utm_content=2013-10-08%2013%3A46%3A48&utm_source=VerticalResponse&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=Read%20more%20%26raquo%3B&utm_campaign=Compare%20%26%20Share%2C%20Boost%20Happiness%20%26%20Cafe%20by%20%27Gift%27content

        And people pay tuition for this?

        What is the resulting credential actually worth if someone fails to get a job in government or at a foundation?

        Since it is all true and coming all at once and from all directions, we need to know this now. Do you know that a fair amount of the foundation for this Strive Together/Inclusive Prosperity/Promise Neighborhoods vision, apart from Uncle Karl who cannot be mentioned in the mainstream, turns out to be based on Rhesus Macaque research?

        No wonder they switched to CAGW models, now shown to not work either, as the supposed justification for the Human Development Society.

        Over my sit up limit for a while.

        One more link because it shows what is being attempted and why it cannot work. http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2015/03/03-income-inequality-education-rothwell

        We are going to “democratize entrepreneurship”. Make it equitable and then wonder why there is no needed innovation outside of destructive social theories and where prosperity went.

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          • Not joking in the least and it’s not just a single reference.

            “the effective functioning of the collective is essential to the healthy development of the individuals who constitute it. In many ways, this is as true of non-human primate groups as it is of human societies.”

            Sorry. Started coughing. Yes, it’s all about reconceptualizing the dynamics of collective and individual human development. Using data. Just like the White House Open Data initiative commenced on Day 1 and the UN’s new Data Revolution.

        • Hmmmm… Also this :

          “new civilzational DNA;wealth is for use, not for private profit (a good way to make sure wealth disappears and no more arises except material resources like gold or oil) is this recent short piece.”

          I am reading a fascinating book that makes a troubling but well reasoned argument that the seemingly non sensical ( to normal people ) economically destructive plans taking place are quite intentional because certain power brokers envision a truly ” transformational” economic model.

          This will be a technocratically directed, closed loop energy based economy. People (units) will be paid in energy credits monthy? Quarterly? With which they will purchase all” needed” goods. Personal energy usage will be tracked by smart meters and the like. If one has surplus credits at the end of a given period those credits vanish so there I n accumulation of wealth. Yada yada…

          The trajectory is pretty clear. Makes cap and trade male tons more sense as a forerunner to the micro version potentially to be rolled out to the masses.

          The book is Technocracy Rising.

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          • No, but boy does it fit in with the book, especially aspects of the Club of Rome treatise I talk about in the book that were censored out in every copy I could find. By the way, it is a book a Fullan’s that cited the source. When I went to find it the other day, it was on ERIC. That means it is being relied on now. It is also a highly unstable link.

            UC-Davis, Stanford, and Howard Gardner of Harvard and learning styles are all involved. It’s all about the shift to the collective and says so. I keep overlaying all this into what is in the book. It’s like the bows, gift tags, adornments. Ultimately that Inclusive Prosperity vision is just an update to this determination that the individual must concede subservience to the vision planned for them.

  4. Pingback: Education’s E-Learning Epsilons, Techsilons: The Serf’s of State | Dawn Kazmierzak ~Connecting Families Who Choose to Stand

    • Thanks LL. Look at the list of people involved on page 3 including Jai Mehta that we tied to Fullan’s new paradigm and Michael Cohen of Achieve.

      Hewlett sponsoring means this is Deep Learning being assessed or what I short hand as the desired presence of the cybernetic net of concepts, associated themes and issues, and tied to visual images in the real world.

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    • Look what was touted in one of my afternoon emails. http://nationalequityatlas.org/

      By the way there is language in that LDH link that aligns with material I have from numerous sources from the early 90s that ties all this pointedly to the mindsets and practices and values needed for the Human Development Society. It even called it that before coming up with the euphemism of the Learning Society.

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    • Look at this from 1997 and all the references to Oregon in the contacts, plus Fair Test and Grant Wiggins. http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/assment/as800.htm

      As I just said to JT, equity forces education grounded in sociocultural theory. No wonder no one in Atlanta or Chicago or LA has wanted to teach reading properly. Cultural Marxism is not a tangent. It’s the excuse for forcing the transformative mindset in enough future voters to try to drive this toxic vision.

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        • It is recommendations 8 and 11 I wish people would truly focus on the implications of. Tested annually is to come to mean not an annual test, but monitoring on a yearly basis throughout school that can use formative assessments. Social engineering of the child at the most basic neurobiological and emotional and motivational levels in order to create a worker, citizen, and civilized human being as an early 90s version of all this phrased this.

          Perhaps you could attend in some suitable “I am just a post-hippie, granola mom” attire?

          I almost have a sense of humor back. That’s progress.

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        • Sounds like Participatory Democracy in action. You sign up so they can pre vet any potential trouble makers and then everyone present can collectively offer their ideas and impressions to the forum directors ideas where they will be made to think anything they offer will actually be considered. Even though it won’t.
          Yay!

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          • Ive been trying to speak to people about the opt out option. It is not a cure all. In some cases it is a valid move. At this point anything that thwarts or skews the Data is a good thing imho.

            I think certain sex Ed classes where the stated standards are clearly developmentally inappropriate and are designed to traumatize young minds for the purposes of making them more easily influenced by state mandated behaviors, are fair game for opting out.

            But parents need to be aware that assessing and monitoring is happening within class work/ time on computers, computer games, and I’m sure increasingly via teacher apps like Pearsons BOSS.

            Emphasizing how much data is being collected and in what manner to parents is so vital to getting them to understand the ” collective” snort, danger we are in.

            At a very practical level depriving the systems monster of data is crucial to making this glorious utopia planned for us all amount to a pile of beans.

            I propose another bumper sticker:
            ” Skew The Data – Not A Serf Yet”

  7. Robin – I don’t mean to hijack this thread with personal stuff – but well….I would like to seek your advice. I have been listening to Youtube videos about Common Core non-stop for 3 months. I started researching the documents and then came across your site. I am a professional engineer with three college degrees and a 6 year old in public school. I afterschool as best I can with high quality homeschool materials. Plus – I live in KY – first in last out is my expectation related to CC. If getting rid of Common Core is just the next step on the road to serfdom, with “social and emotional learning” and assessments for my child’s “disposition” right around the corner – how in the world do I protect my child! And how about all of the other poor children and their parents caught in this trap. I am feeling hopeless for my child’s generation…

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    • Hi Martha and welcome to ISC. This is admittedly a story none of us wish was true, but the level of documentation I have is tsunamiish so it is what it is. We get to have a factual discussion about it, which is what this blog and my book at a foundational level do.

      Kentucky is a Ground Zero state going back to the late 80s. There is a book from 1991 Smart Schools Smart Kids from 1991 by Edward B Fiske that lays in Chapter 9 about how Ky was taking the lead in piloting a new kind of accountability for results. That would probably be helpful for you to have.

      My kids are older, but plenty of the readers here have young kids and what they share online and off is that knowledge is allowing a dialogue with their children that is far better than being unaware. Secondly, with a 6 year old you are still in a position to provide your child with the number 1 way to immunize them–teach them to read phonetically and fluently. There is really good citations in Chapter 2 of my book on why this is a magic elixir and every transfomationalist is aware of it.

      I read a lot to my kids who loved all the stories. I highly recommend the 398.2 part of the library where the fairy tales and world stories are. Great vocab and exciting adventures. Your child too can wonder why the 3rd son is always the good guy. I got readers from the same place in Cambridge that publishes wordly wise and knew the logic “sounds have letters, letters do not have sounds.” Plus there are about 42 sounds. Sometimes the logic is one to one and sometimes it’s a matter of probability. I used Diane MacGuinness’ work to explain the logic to me. Then I spent maybe $150 total buying cute little paperbacks that systematically introduced those sounds and the letters that represented them.

      After that with all my kids we read real books side by side one page each so they got used to encountering words they had not seen in print, but in context and gradually they became fluent.

      That is as long as I have written in a week, but I write because I am passionate about trying to protect other people’s children. Keep in touch.

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      • Hello Martha,
        You are not alone. I have a almost 6 year old. The discussion helps process what is happening. Still difficult but it helps knowing you are not the only one who feels something is wrong on a deeper level.

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  9. Robin,

    From a 1908 work by H.G. Wells, New Worlds for Old:

    “It was left chiefly to the little group of English people who founded the Fabian Society to supply a third system of ideas to the amplifying conception of Socialism, to convert Revolutionary Socialism to Administrative Socialism . . . . From saying that unorganized people cannot achieve Socialism, they passed to the implication that organization alone, without popular support might achieve Socialism.

    “. . . .Socialism ceased to be open revolution, and became a plot.
    Functions were to be shifted quietly, unostentatiously, from the representative to the official he appointed . . . they worked like a ferment in municipal politics . . . . The reconstruction of our legislative and local government machinery is a necessary preliminary to Socialisation in many directions. . . . Scientific reconstruction of our methods of government constitutes a necessary part of the Socialist scheme . . . it supplies us with a conception of the methods of transition, and with a vision of a great and disciplined organization of officials, a scientific bureaucracy, appointed by representative bodies of diminishing activity and importance and coming at last to be the real working control of the Socialist state.
    .. . . the replacement of individual actions by public organization.”

    I found this in a fascinating online collection of newletters by Don Bell from the early 1970s. The descriptions of what was going on in education could have been written yesterday. Example:

    “When the teacher (under the newly established Planning-Programming-Budgeting System, or PPBS) has completed an instructional unit and has tested the students, the test results are assigned symbols and computerized. The information flows to a regional data collection and processing center, one of several in each state. There a student profile is built for each student in the region. In this master bank an enormous amount of information is permanently stored on each student….

    “After students have been evaluated for the first time to determine how well they have achieved the stated objectives, the programmer at the top will be in a position to modify, delete, or add to the objectives, to achieve a standardization of objectives for all classrooms in every school in any one subject. After three or four testings or evaluations, the programmer will no doubt have standardized the objectives for every classroom, and the usual decision-makers will be locked out of the process. The power of the programmer bypasses the board of education, the superintendent of the school, and the parents. Even the teacher loses out…the teacher will truly be a facilitator and a manager of the classroom, but not a teacher at all.

    “After each child is programmed with the pre-determined knowledge, values, and potential skills, he will be standardized and averaged out, leveled off at a base-line of mediocrity. Subject matter as we know it will no longer exist and very few other aspects of education will remain. The more than forty million children in our nation’s schools will be insensitive and unnatural, and will be capable of only highly directive behavior, each holding identical points of view…

    “Under PPBS management, the information input to the student will be limited; random encounter in the learning process will be eliminated; instruction will be highly prescribed; and programming toward a particular ideological, philosophical, political and social point of view will be the chief characteristic of the system.
    “The greatest threat to human freedom which faces man today is a new system of weapons for mind control. Man has always been subject to enslavement by force or by economics. The technological (including chemical) mechanisms now perfected provide a new dimension in enslavement, mind control, which will dwarf the first two. . . .”

    http://www.kingsbenchletter.com/donbell/

    Deborah

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