Heart-Core Learning: Not Left to Chance or Adult Therapy and Thus Reimagining What It Means to Be Human

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Recently I have been writing fewer posts and talking more in between in the comments as I am inundated with confirmations in books and articles, going back more than 50 years, laying out a consistent vision. Books are the best means to lay out all the interconnections, but the toxicity of this vision and the clear determination to lock it in now at an undisclosed, and unforeseeable neural level, means I have to post red light alerts in the interim. Anyone else have a habit of watching the network news on a somewhat regular basis just to learn what the Powers-that-Be want us to believe about the world out there? That’s how I feel when I go through these explanations for the planned K-12 reforms hiding conveniently behind the Common Core banner. I believe I need to give everyone a heads up on connections like GEFF from the last post and all the various entities and initiatives that matter that are clearly tied to that Advisory Board.

In the comments to the last post I put up my original Bela Banathy posts from 2012. Those are pertinent to where we are going today that came out of the GEFF and ISSS connections. Before we move on I want to tie a crucial point from my book Credentialed to Destroy and these discussions and the current, actual classroom implementation. Remember the discussion of Transformational Outcomes Based Education and its links to Competency laid out in Chapter 4? Well, Bela Banathy worked under William Spady, the named Tranzi OBE co-creator, at the Far West Ed Lab in the 80s. They knew each other and Spady would have been quite familiar with what I have described in those two posts and what I am going to lay out today. Tranzi OBE in fact dovetails nicely with what are now being called by Rand and the White House as Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Competencies.

In other words, the ultimate social engineering Manipulation of the Brain and its synapses at a neurological level got to go on, despite bloodshed, with no one being the wiser. If someone noticed the fundamental shift it got attributed to Tranzi OBE without the broader agenda being understood. When the Columbine Tragedy occurred, Tranzi OBE and Spady were smeared and implicated. Spady moved out of the country to do similar work in South Africa and Australia and Tranzi OBE got renamed and broken into interconnected parts. The broader agenda went on. Nobody implicated Bela Banathy or the Laszlos or the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.

This is a quote from a 2003 paper Kathia Castro Laszlo (very involved at the GEFF Menlo Park conference) published called “Systems Science: Creating Transdisciplinary Knowledge for Conscious Evolution.” She talks frequently and forthrightly about the ‘human science’ that K-12 has quietly become in order to nonconsensually transform “social realities.” She excitedly points out that “humans do not need to be the victims of change–change can happen through us not to us” (her emphasis) and that we can “influence the direction of change through our intentions and actions.” Yes, using the guided perceptions created by the Cross-Cutting Concepts, Core Disciplinary Ideas, Enduring Understandings, and Understandings of Consequence, all coupled to cultivated responses grounded in emotions and deliberately created virtual reality images. Some freedom of choice, huh? A false perception of free choice when everything has actually been carefully manipulated, circumscribed, and controlled via the K-12 classroom.

Then, Kathia quotes Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi to say:

“for the first time in human history we can experience joy ‘while working for the most ambitious goal available to the human imagination: To blend our individual voice in the cosmic harmony, to join our unique consciousness with the emerging consciousness of the universe, to fold our momentary center of psychic energy into the current that tends toward complexity and order.’ Indeed, science and spirituality are coming together in the ultimate exploration of the meaning and purpose of human existence: Conscious evolution–the evolutionary phase in which a developing being becomes conscious of itself, aware of the processes of which it is a participant, and begins voluntarily to co-create with evolution.”

Now, I wish we could just consider such intentions to be poppycock, but the definition of Excellence in education as in Schools of Excellence and a civil rights obligation for Excellence and Equity tracks back to Csik’s definition of Excellence as combining what is desired, felt, and thought into action and behavior. Those two posts about Banathy all involve work he did with Csik that is linked to Columbine and Tranzi OBE, but stayed below the radar. We have Aspen Summits where Csik gets invited within the last 5 years and so do people from High Tech High. The 2004 ASCD System Thinking/ Chaos Theory/ ASC newsletter Patterns laid out a comparable quote from Csik about the “need for a new worldview” grounded “not in the traditionally taught evolutionary scenario dominated by competition and selfishness, but an understanding closer to the Darwinian one that sees cooperation and transcendence of the self as the most exciting parts of the story.”

Georgia has renamed what was its Common Core standards as the Standards for Excellence, probably without a politician in this state knowing where Excellence is actually going. The language about becoming conscious of itself is precisely what ‘reflection’ pushed by IB programs means. It is what Metacognition pushed by the OECD and a part of David Conley’s work on what the amorphous mandate “College Ready” actually includes. My point is that what may seem out there in terms of goals is getting written into statutes like the ESEA rewrites that passed Congress this summer or Charters that no one bothers to read. It is incorporated into mandated assessments that are being misleadingly called ‘tests’ to obscure the shift of K-12 education from the assimilation of knowledge into a human science to invisibly force transformational change.

Digging into Alexander and Kathia Laszlo’s work after what I had read that the well-connected GEFF planned to do turned up that about 1980 Bela Banathy began what he called Conversations on the Comprehensive Design of Social Systems. They took place regularly in Austria at a place called Fuschl and from 1988 on, in Pacific Grove, California, and those were called the Asilomar Conversations. At first they were centered on deliberately remaking the educational systems around the world, but gradually the aim became to redesign and transform social systems generally.

I have been digging through those records and all the confessions contained there, including that CASBS was tied to the infamous Tavistock Institute in London as is systems science generally. The 2012 ‘Conversation’, now moved to St Magdalena/Linz and held under the auspices of the now Gates Foundation-funded IFSR, laid out all the Tavistock connections and the desire to use Participative Design Workshops to push the education and social systems redesign agenda.

Now wonder people keep writing about going to a public meeting for discussion and feeling like they have been Delphied. In 2012 a Merrilyn Emery said in a keynote talk we were not invited to at the European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems research that: “There is one other property of human beings and that property created the need for a genuinely open systems science: it is the demonstrable fact of consciousness defined as ‘awareness of awareness.'” So we never get invited to any of these meetings but their confessions, insights, and intentions do get incorporated quietly into the required assessments no one wants students to be able to opt out of, the adaptive software in their digital learning mandates, or the real definition of College Ready.

A paper called “Opportunity Lost: Teacher’s Union Reform-Past, Present & Future” reported that the concept of “Education by Charter” was first presented in 1974 to the same CASBS affiliate-the Society for General Systems Research–that would rename itself as ISSS in 1988. That would be the Tavistock connected entity. I have a copy of the Ray Budde charter paper that was finally published by an ed lab in that busy year of 1988. It’s all about the use of the Charter to lock in a vision of education that few would consent to knowingly and willingly. I was able to locate confirmation  http://www.gbv.de/dms/tib-ub-hannover/509668720.pdf that Budde remained tied to GSRT from this 1982 Annual Meeting in DC. Budde spoke on “Applying New Findings from the Neurosciences to Education” and Bela Banathy on “Perspectives on Education in Systems Methodology.” Both were listed in the part of the program on “The Study of Social Systems.”

Today’s title came from this most alarming K-12 vision http://smartblogs.com/education/2015/09/03/know-that-you-have-it-keys-to-self-driven-self-loving-self-supporting-education/ . I could recognize the ties between its vision and what I recognized as being part of what is being quietly mandated for all classrooms, including Whole Child Initiatives, Positive School Climate mandates, unappreciated definitions of mental health and well-being, and Mindfulness practices. I will come back to this in the next post as once again the extent of the interconnections among the true vision being mandated are hard to cover in a blog.

Getting back to what appears to be an impossible vision being mandated, please click through to the Game Desk website and notice who is funding this Heart-Core vision. When AT&T, the Gates Foundation, and the National Science Foundation are among the listed funders, you do not have to be the author of one well-documented book on education and be in the process of writing another, to conclude this is coming to a classroom near you soon.

This is a vision that already assumes we are “a collective” and “a society that grossly overvalues the mind over the heart.” It fits right in to where Csik, Bela Banathy, and the Laszlos, just for starters, have all said repeatedly they intend to use K-12 education to take us to.

In order to obstruct the use of K-12 education as a nonconsensual Human Science, we have to wake up to the reality of that very deliberate shift going on all around us.

With the United Nations convening on the Post-2015 plans for us building on all this later this month, there is no time to wait.

 

121 thoughts on “Heart-Core Learning: Not Left to Chance or Adult Therapy and Thus Reimagining What It Means to Be Human”

  1. Robin, this is one of your clearest and, therefore, the most gut-wrenching of your posts. The blatant inhumanity exposed by the links you pulled together is horrifying in its intensity and intent.

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    • Thanks CP. The connections are clear in my mind now and it’s beginning to feel like there were all these parties we were not invited to.

      The irony is one of the links lays out that after World Wars 1 and 2 cybernetics and systems science were developed so such a holocaust could never happen again. I think this deliberate mind arson and neurological manipulation makes us pawns of those who absolutely have no interest in peace.

      I am sticking to my belief that the way out is widespread recognition of these facts and agendas. I am not alleging anything, just quoting.

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    • CP-here is more proof of the synthesis going on around the Orwellian phrase School Choice. https://www.redefinedonline.org/2015/09/berkeley-liberals-education-savings-accounts/ back in 1978 . Fours years after Ray Budde saw the use of charters to lock in the desired shift to restructure the nature of education away from the assimilation of knowledge.

      http://jaypgreene.com/2015/09/09/coons-and-sugarman-called-for-esas-in-1978/ is a poli sci PhD with ties to several ATLAS Network members excited about the 1978 push.

      I was thinking about yesterday’s touting of Special Ed students taking the same assessments, but still misleadingly calling it tests and a Breitbart article talking about Teaching Tolerance and the Anti-Bias Network. Old news for ISC readers. Then I realized it must be a play to tout vouchers and charters as the solution and especially gain support for the ESEA Rewrite when it appears agin. Much like how WIOA was misleadingly portrayed as being about jobs for the disabled so they could lead independent lives.

      The real significance on this recent ESEA push http://www.noticeandcomment.com/Improving-the-Academic-Achievement-of-the-Disadvantaged-Assistance-to-States-for-the-Education-of-Children-fn-292468.aspx is not about the same ‘tests’. Calling performance assessments ‘tests’ is either ignorant or intentionally designed to obscure the non-academic shift. No, it’s the insistence that the same achievement standards must be used for all students. That fits, in other words, with Lamar’s ECAA and its odd language on Challenging State Academic Standards. That requires achievement standards grounded in performance for ALL students. It’s not that anyone is about to ask too much of Special Ed students. The point is to make the focus behavioral even for the most intellectually able students since ALL students must be held to same standards and those standards must be capable of being met behaviorally.

      I think part of the obfuscation is no one wants the privates or charters to be asked if they too are using the Change the Child, Whole Child, Positive School Climate template. We know the answer, which is why astute questioning must be off-limits until the ESEA Rewrite has been signed into law.

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      • Bingo! All students will be required to perform in ways that demonstrate their ability to solve real world problems related to climate, poverty, racism, classism etc. Further, IMS Global has partnered with ED to create the new APIP and AIF standards, which are designed to address the preferences and needs of every learner, including those with disabilities. If folks had a better grasp on the development and purpose of these next gen assessments, they’d realize no one is taking the exact same “test.” This is only possible if they’re not assessing facts & knowledge. This also clarifies why the standards are based on skills, not content.

        Thanks for this post…so much fell into place as I read through it, though the Smartblogs link left me unsure of whether I should laugh or cry. It all seems so ridiculous and yet so many are jumping on the fuzzy, warm, feel good ED train.

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      • The progs appropriate everything and turn it into weapons against freedom. I believe the term “school choice” was introduced into the lexicon in the 1950s by Milton Friedman. His object was certainly expanded freedom for students and families. He, like the rest of us, was unaware of the Fabian turtle (or the Greek hedgehog, if your prefer) slowly (and now, not so slowly) doing its work…

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        • About two years ago Jay Greene used some research that I eventually tracked back to George Soros’ Open Society. I raised the issue of why the Friedman Institute was citing research that tracked back to Soros. The answer was that they were founded in honor of Milton and thus did not need to answer my question. Needless to say, I noticed last year when the head of Friedman came to the Economics Club at the Federal Reserve of Atlanta to speak. I have been slowly coming to my synthesis conclusion based on hard evidence over several years.

          Speaking of the family business, which is what the Laszlos seem to have going on around systems science, I noticed the last name Christakis attached to this piece and also the link to designing social systems. http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/09/the-dangers-of-visible-inequality/404689/ Question became is this Alexander’s son? Sure would explain the ease popping through the Ivy League and also links this then to ISS, ICFR, GERG, Bela Banathy and Csik and Alexander’s Structured Design Dialogue work we have covered and reenvisioning of MOOCs.

          https://dialogicdesignscience.wikispaces.com/file/view/AnEpicJourneyFEB2013Version5.0.pdf not only confirms the answer is yes but Alexander is very graphic in the links among urban design, connections to Rand, Club of Rome, etc. remember that the Club of Rome Christakis helped found and the Club of Budapest interested in cultural change that Ervin Laszlo and Nicholas Negroponte of MIT’s Media Lab helped found are sister entities. Small world, but a very entertaining read. People really do talk outside the country.

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          • Oh, yes. I didn’t even pause to glance at the Friedman Institute. Their answer to Greene simply makes my case, that the progs co-opt everything.

          • Yes freedom now means a right to have your needs met and autonomy is that coupled to this social engineered neural net grounded at a lasting physiological level. Orwell just wasn’t imaginative enough.

            For the longest time I kept wondering why these ‘conservative’ groups kept having Michael Horn as a speaker. Answer: being conservative is only a fund raising gimmick that let’s them guide the synthesis and get naifs to defer to their positions.

          • I looked up Michael Horn and found talk on disruptive education which took me to Acton Academy. Searched on this blog but haven’t seen it mentioned. Any thoughts? Seems to follow the 21st model to a tee but curious your thoughts. 2.5 hours a day of individualized computer instruction for core subjects wow. I swear we soon will gave robot nannies because we already have robot teachers. My child has this now with iPad learning. Hate it but stuck at moment. Ordered your book. Way behind but hope to catch up.

          • I have looked at the Acton Academy because they are speaking at a conference I am going to in October. It was created by a graduate of Harvard B School, which is also where Horn went after Yale undergrad. Innosight, where Horn works, is also tied to the Clayton Christensen Institute where he also works. Christensen is also a prof at Harvard B School and anytime HuffPo does one of those cutting edge ed stories you will find Christensen’s name listed for the support along with Linda Darling-Hammond, Michael Barber, Pasi Sahlberg, Ken Robinson, Leon Botstein and others.

            The third author of the Disrupting Class book, beyond Christensen and Horn, is Curtis Johnson. Johnson was involved in Minnesota’s creation of charter schools and is now involved in Regional Equity and this CitiStates vision. http://citistates.com/ If this looks like the Rockefeller Foundation funded and Brookings-sponsored Metropolitanism, it is and Curtis gets invited to the Bellagio and US conferences. All about designed social systems at all these pushes and what kind of mind is amenable to it.

            Acton Academy is basically the ultimate public-private partnership and the same people have started some kind of business school. All b schools have now been targeted in a UN-pushed initiative headed by yet another Laszlo–Christopher, Alexander’s brother. I wrote about PRME here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/finale-of-the-dangerous-mindset-trilogy-spreading-the-contagion-to-fundamentally-alter-how-we-think-and-live/ , but it expands on what was put into place at Harvard, MIT’s Sloan, and Stanford in the 50s and at Wharton once Ackoff and a friend of Christakis’ he writes about with an odd name began the Social Systems Design work there by the 70s.

            http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/digital-trilogys-end-and-perhaps-ours-revolutionary-transformation-as-explicit-goal-of-the-national-ed-tech-plan/ may help with what digital learning is really getting at.

            I am not picking on Horn by the way. As Chapter 4 makes clear I have met him several times when he has come to Georgia to speak and asked him questions to make sure I am not mischaracterizing what he is saying. Also notice that he and Sanjay George are listed as being heavily involved with the 2011 Carnegie and Gates funded Competency-based Education summit that fed ED was also involved in. Never did he disclose that as he pushed Competency as the solution in 2013 to the uproar over the Common Core.

      • The following is excerpted from a short book I just read written by a teacher about his experience with the ccss as he was sent by his Arizona School Board to be trained in Chicago by the experts. ( The Cult of The Common Core by Brad McQueen)

        “In answer to questions I had about a student writing sample, my Common Core handler blurted out, “We don’t ever care what the kids’ opinions are. If they write what they think or put forth their opinion then they will fail the test.” I have always taught my students to think for themselves. They are to study multiple views on a given topic, then take their own position and support it with evidence. “That is the old way of writing, “my Common Core handler sighed. “We want students to repeat the opinions of the ‘experts’ that we expose them to on the test. This is the ‘new’ way of writing with the Common Core.” I discovered later that this was not just some irritated, rogue Common Core handler, rather this was a philosophy I heard repeated again and again. I pointed out that this was not the way that teachers teach in the classroom. She retorted that, “We expect that when the test comes out the teachers in the classroom will imitate the skills emphasized on the test (teach to the test) and employ this new way of writing and thinking.” I began to feel sick. What had I gotten myself into? This new way of thinking was to make our students into little brainwashed automatons that will just spew back a position on any topic given to them?

        The author gets this much. I wish he understood even more. But it helps me to know that the word is getting out.

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        • Language is the tool for thought and CC relies on the fact that for most kids what they are exposed to at school will circumscribe what their vocabulary will be and what ‘facts’ they know. What they weite straight from a passage selected for just this reason will form the tools that they have to interpret their experiences and guide what they notice or ignore going forward. I keep thinking about the SPLC/NEA CARE Guide or the V3 Social Studies Framework or what those AP Conceptual Frameworks really intend.

          http://year-in-review.davidson.edu/inclusive-pedagogy-practice/ is from something my alma mater sent out Friday. This is all about dictating what students are to believe not know. How many 18-20 year ols, excited to be admitted to a Top 10 college, will be anythng other than molding clay for whatever views, beliefs, and values the profs and admins push on them?

          Bertallanffy made a point about how professors are the manufacturers of the glasses used to interpret experiences and perceive reality. That was and is to be the role of General Systems Theory. Now Common Core and Competency are expanding these aims down into preschool. There is no way to read that MINNesota Literacy paper being touted except as a decision to undo what even Bertallanffy called man’s highest accomplishmnt-man’s symbol making and using capacity.

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      • Robin,

        I’m sort of beside myself because I recently learned that the lower school at my kids’ k-12 private school, which has been stalwartly anti computer has introduced iPads for all the kids 1-5 to use at school in various classroom settings.

        I mentioned to a parent, attempting to start a conversation about this, that I was not so sure more screen time was the direction we needed to be headed with regards to educating our youngest students.

        She immediately parroted back what was clearly the lower school admin’s schpiel about digital lessons being wunderbar because they ( new ed catch phrase running close second to engagement) ” meet the kids where they are”. ( Engagement by the way in my school has come to be a synonym for Participation. The Head of School used Engaged, Engaging, Engagement no less than 8 times in his Welcome Back speech to parents on Back To School Night last week.)

        She went on, ” but this way the students can progress at their own rate” and it SO much easier for the teacher who has to teach to differing levels of comprehension of subject matter.

        Technically, I could not argue with her. She is not wrong. And she is in a private school where her children will not in the immediate future be forced to sit in front of a computer for 3 hours a day to practice proper behavioral and thinking skills.

        These kids for the moment are not being tracked by state data to be channeled into specific career or college pathways. ( although I wanted to ask her what software company was the school using because IT IS collecting data )

        But they will be if we keep heading down this path.

        How do I begin to explain the end game to her much less the head of lower school who is adopting this crap because her summer retreat facilitator or ADVIS accreditor made it sound like the holy grail?

        Their ed experience for their kids is so bubbled and rarified and the deception is so organized that they will look at me like I am a paranoid numb nut.

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        • Go back and reread the part of the book where I wrote about what Vygotsky and also Howard Gardner recognized would never bloom in the first place unless language symbol systems were used. Then begin to raise the question that digital learning=experiential learning and aren’t we going backwards as a culture if we ignore all those things we cannot apply our senses to and experience directly and via virtual reality. Then ask what’s the difference in watching a dramatization and coming up with the mental images from reading a story.

          Without being obnoxious, we have to do the reverse of what the facilitator did. Instead of focusing on this new participatory vision, think about what is being lost and how useful it is.

          Reread what Jane MacGonnigal of the Institute for the Future said the intentions were in this post http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/when-gaming-intends-to-shape-and-distort-our-perceptions-of-everything-around-us-viva-la-revolution/

          Also remember this one and what the National Science Foundation wants to shift to as part of its cyberlearning initiative. That too was a horrific conception of ‘literacy’ suitable for mental slavery.

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          • Also remember there is an adjective used historically to describe education involving the use of tools. It is vocational education, whether the tools are metalworking equipment or an I-Pad. People can understand that using a hammer is not mental, but they fail to appreciate the true nature of the computer.

            I also suspect that accreditation is being threatened for every school, public or private, not on board with the digital learning juggernaut. The desire for Mind Arson and new ways of ‘thinking’ is just too consistent through the decades.

          • Computer as vocational tool reminds me of something I read in the last few days and for the life of me I cannot remember where but….. Obuchenie or Teaching and Learning would be more transparently appreciated and understood by people if the word Teaching was replaced with Training. Training is in fact what is intended for both instructor and instructed. Closed loop learning for all involved. But it wouldn’t do to have that fact be too readily apparent would it?

  2. I know this has been discussed. Given your current post/subject it seems fitting to look at the conference again.

    http://www.bx2015.org/#!speakers/c1y3s

    Did you catch the RSA blog on belonging to community? Determining who is part of a community. One point said those who have never lived here yet somehow feel they are and identify as being from the community. If that works I identify with Bora Bora. All of this feels a bit like that Jim Carrey movie”Liar, Liar”. There is a scene where he is trying to lie, quite unsuccessfuly, about the color of a pen.
    21st century skills, meta cognitive skills, non cognitive skills, 4Cs, College and career ready, you name it all not knowledge no matter what color or fancy new name they assign to it.

    Good to see Spady come out. He’s been creeper lurking. Videos show him fully immersed in his new agey thinking.

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    • I have been to Bora Bora so I am on board with that geographical association. Never again have I seen stars like I did there. Wasn’t looking except with no light pollution it was breathtaking.

      Speaking of High Tech High, apparently it came up as the lodestar of educational aspirations in a presentation to the Michigan State Board of Education yesterday. http://edjurist.com/blog/michigan-a-top-10-education-state-in-the-next-10-years.html

      So much telling language there. I was poking around the Education Law annual conference from 2014 in San Diego and it was quite forthright that the mission is to use the law to advance education policy. Now that we understand what education policy is and has been pursuing the law in this area really is the handservant of socialism and collectivism.

      Behavioral Insights is Cass Sunstein’s area and I believe he is teaching now at both the law school at Harvard and the co-sponsor of that forum-the Kennedy School of Government and Public Policy. I guess that helps explain how the UK and the US can make subjective well-being the new focus of governments.

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      • Get those tickets to Helsinki now. http://www.oecd.org/education-industry-summit/programme/

        First ever and they pick Finland. Because it’s so easy to access and travel to?

        Look at Randi Weingarten of AFT attending and Karen Cator who heads the US Digital promise Congressionally mandated initiative and the League of Innovative Schools. http://www.oecd.org/education-industry-summit/participants/

        The Common Core may not be ‘global’ but it is inextricably tied to 21st Century Learning and that certainly is. Weingarten and Cator’s presence just verifies what we already know.

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        • Nothing like getting an email with a school lock down notice and reported undetermined loud noises. Talk about making a parent panic. Just got the all clear. Sure hit home today.

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          • Hope it was well-handled. We had a gun incident last year at the closest middle school (this is the district with the charter that brags about using Kurt Lewin’s techniques) and it was handled abominably. Then we get the phone call about how everything is being done to keep our kids safe, which is total BS in any district pushing Tranzi OBE and behavioral change at a neurological level. These admins do not want kids to be killed, but they mostly want their promotions and lucrative pensions. Those all require pushing the behavioral model, instead of the assimilation of knowledge.

            So the well-connected parents took the gun story to the local tv news. then the admins were mad the parents had recourse that made them look bad.

            The reality is the typical admin at the super or deputy central office level, either intentionally or obliviously, hurts children for personal profit. If it was sexual abuse they could go to jail and no one would say their teaching or counselor degrees constitute the permission. But the abuse is psychological so the rewards roll in and the children no longer feel like school is a safe place or that adults employed there have their back.

            And it is only going to get worse until parents and others who claim to know what is going on quit acting like this is still about how to best teach content to students.

    • I have been noticing how frequently metacognition or its solipsistic synonyms pops up these days.

      Here is the 3-minute history lesson I presented during Public Comments at the state board meeting yesterday:

      Competency-based education is fully enthroned in Colorado. The Center for American Progress defines it as “an outcomes-based approach…where the emphasis is on what comes out of postsecondary education—what graduates know and can do—rather than what goes into the curriculum. With a competency-based approach, you do not begin preparing a course syllabus by identifying content and readings. Instead, you begin by identifying competencies and then select the content, readings, and assignments to support student attainment of those competencies.” (A “Disruptive Look” at Competency-Based Education). This describes to a T the methodology used by the Colorado Academic Standards. Competency Based Education is another iteration of Outcomes Based Education, which suffered an ignominious defeat in the ‘90s but came back to fight another day under its new name.

      During the last Board meeting, it was acknowledged that the legislature went down the Competency path at the request of the business community. This accounts for the fact that education in Colorado has been pushed away from traditional academics – the mastery of a body of knowledge – and toward a hybrid of technocratic education and socialization, otherwise known as 21st century skills.

      But CBE, although presented as a home-grown methodology designed to meet the needs of local business, is not just a Colorado, or indeed an American phenomenon. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, based in Paris, promotes CBE through a Competencies Programme and through the highly touted international PISA assessments. A working paper of the OECD defines 21st century skills and competencies as “those skills and competencies young people will be required to have in order to be effective workers and citizens in the knowledge society of the 21st century.” Thus we have “workforce readiness,” a phrase that evolved out of the “school to work” push of the ‘90s. The purpose of education is to prepare, not Marx’s “workers of the world” but Microsoft, Intel and Cisco’s “workers of the 21st century.” It is also to prepare them to “unite,” as it observes with approval that “young people are already experiencing the new forms of socialisation and social capital acquisition that Information and Communication Technology developments are contributing to.” (21ST CENTURY SKILLS AND COMPETENCES FOR NEW MILLENNIUM LEARNERS IN OECD COUNTRIES EDU Working paper no. 41 12/18/2009)
      Thus, the educational vision of Colorado is virtually indistinguishable from that outlined in a paper issued in Paris in 2009. OECD papers on Competencies date back at least as far as 1996. Although Colorado business has supported CBE, the idea did not originate with Colorado business. The identity between the Colorado business community’s vision for education and that of an international organization in France developed almost twenty years ago further erodes the fiction that education reform in the United States has been “state led.”

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      • Great presentation Deborah.

        If they were honest and said we have the students practicing making plans and carrying them out until they become habits as what K-12 education has become under the pretentious term ‘competency’, parents would catch on better.

        There is a long OECD paper on Metacognition that has come out within the last 6 months to a year. Fits right in with this presentation.

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  3. Hi Robin, I am working my way through all the old posts and I am up to August 2014 and I noticed some one talking about broken links! Have you heard of this web site, the way back machine? Here is the link for this site which can find broken links and it works, https://archive.org/web/
    Very good web site for researchers.
    Be good cliff

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    • No, but as you know my research makes it perfectly clear that NOT teaching reading properly is the whole idea. It interferes with the desire to dictate the content and parameters of the neural net.

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      • Speaking of not teaching reading or any content well or having a teacher transmit facts didactically….. My 9th grader came home from school yesterday in a giggle fit explaining how her Algebra 1 teacher has shown them youtube videos explaining math concepts to them for the past two days in lieu of teaching herself.
        But yesterday was extra special because the students were all given pipe cleaners to demonstrate some concept. My daughter made herself pig ears and a bow tie that she proudly wore throughout the class.
        After my daughter wiped the laughing tears from her eyes she said, ” Mom, I know Im in the lowest level math class but Im terrified she is not going to teach us anything. Im going to have to go to another teacher for explanations”

        (And I am paying for this.)

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    • I have the book. He does an excellent job explaining the reading piece in layman’s terms. He does not see that the allegedly conservative side of the political realm is just as invested in radical ed as the left. Still a good read. I repect(ed( Sam Blumenthal immensely )

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    • Good timing. I just read the IBM paper pushed by the Center for Digital Education that we know is actually a subsidiary of e_republic with lots of ties to state and local public sector pols and employees. I would link but it has to be sent after registration. It is the kind of confession that K-12 is all about workforce readiness. No mention of IBM’s Systems of Systems work that I described in the book or that it got hyped at the ISSS annual conference about two years ago.

      It’s pretty nauseating, but also full of useful confessions. It’s called “The future of learning: Enabling economic growth.” It also talks about the ties between K-12, personalized learning, and the regional economic development plans. Those good old Sector Strategies straight out of WIOA.

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    • Those neurosynaptic computers that mimic the living brain should add that is the living brain after it has been remade into a closed system via Competency-based education and a Whole Child emphasis and a refusal to teach reading phonetically, etc.

      I have so much stuff now from the early days of AI when no one was pulling any punches on what they hoped to achieve via K-12 education. I am about to finish a 1960 book, once again with a shout-out to the authors’ time at CASBS, which even declares that they intend to create a “science of human planning.” Unfortunately the function of what is being described fits with the competency-based template perfectly. It really helps to know the actual implementation plans extremely well. I read the intentions and know exactly where and how it is being implemented today and what its new name or names are.

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      • New assessments for the 4 C’s?

        “In collaboration with research partners at the University of Connecticut, P21 has just released a research series on key aspects of conceptualizing, developing, and assessing each of the 4Cs of Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, and Creativity. The briefs outline findings from research about what we already know, what we need to know, and what we can do to embed 4Cs into practice.”
        http://www.p21.org/our-work/4cs-research-series

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        • All now downloaded. I am not sure if I have pointed out on the blog just how much each of the 4 Cs permeates the language used in these seminal documents and books over the decades.

          I know the book called attention to P21 and GEFF has held them out as a global exemplar for their agenda. One of the many egregious pushes that tracks back to Tucson.

          A HOTS mandate means assessing for the 4Cs when properly understood. Thanks. I know what I am doing for 9/11.

          Evil from any direction must be properly understood.

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          • Thanks for the link, L.L. Funny how the 4Cs have been used for years now to justify why we must embrace CCSS but they are just now doing “research” to define them.

            People in EDville really have no idea who is giving the marching orders or where these concepts originated–so these reports will be enough to convince them that the 4Cs are new & shiny 21st century breakthroughs. Sad.

          • Make sure you pay particular attention to the Creativity and Critical Thinking papers. The meat is in the Bibliography where Csik of Excellence fame in this post is cited as an exemplar of Creativity. So is Vygotsky. Then we have Robert Sternberg, whose work on wanting to combine affect, action, and emotion into thought cited repeatedly for his work on Creativity. I can still remember Sternberg as a supporting blurb on Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset book as I was appreciating they were both Vygotsky scholars. What euphemisms can we come up with to hide the nature and consistency across the decades of the e work we do?

            Sternberg was especially timely as Marzano cited a 1977 book Sternberg wrote Intelligence, Information Processing, and Analogical Reasoning: The Componential Analysis of Human Abilities in the Thinking Skills Framework he did for McREL in the mid-80s that I have. That Sternberg book just came yesterday. So the cybernetic mind gets Idea Laundered and pushed especially as Creativity and Critical Thinking.

            The Critical Thinking paper makes it clear that the NC plan based on Richard Paul’s Framework is also the P21 Plan. Paul is cited repeatedly in the Bibliography as is Sternberg. I guess it is good to have lots of hats in New Haven, CT. They all function the same though, keeping that head warm. Anyway, there is a Dewey quote on reflection that reminds me of the quote in this post on “awareness of awareness” from the 2012 European Cybernetics Society.

            The real confirmation on the NC Plan though comes when Faccione’s work (discussed in comments of last post with links) and the Delphi Paper from APA is mentioned, but then the California Test of Critical Thinking Skills and Dispositions that started in 1990 is not at all in the accompanying discussion on assessment. Then CTCTSD is cited in the bibliography. That’s precisely the kind of obfuscation that would go on if the California model id being quietly nationalized under the “Repeal and Replace” strategy state by state discussed explicitly in the NC Plan Youtube video. It fits what is going on now in Massachusetts and Texas too. Plus the paper also cites Arthur Costas’s Developing Minds book, which I also have. I got it after I listened to and read about the NC Plan. We also know Costas and Richard Paul were part of the Delphi Report Commission. Following up on Faccione’s work, he now says it is being marketed by Pearson.

            One other thing I want us to think about. I saw yesterday that Jim Milgram had done an interview on the difference between content standards and process standards. In a world of learning standards and a Thinking Skills curricula and the Achievement Standards Network defining what now constitutes a ‘content standard’ and ECAA defining what state standards have to do, is that historic distinction still relevant? Is discussing it now given what is going on both a red herring and shining the spotlight in one place while the real action is going on elsewhere in the hoped-for darkness?

          • One more point, the Communication paper makes it clear that techniques and tools created for special-needs students are now being applied to mainstream students. That fits with our upthread discussion on the wrong emphasis being put on special ed students taking the same assessments.

          • Research Triangle as exemplar of the Turchenko vision, now known as Triple Helix.

            Plus, my alma mater, davidson, has been hyping Inclusive Pedagogy and recognizing the implications I pulled up this. http://www.learninglandscapes.ca/images/documents/ll-no14/ll-no14-final-lr-links.pdf

            Interestingly, the plan, which the Duke Endowment paid $40 million to push, also hypes the role of SACS reaccreditation on the new vision. Again fitting right in with my book.

          • http://osbha.org/2015-school-health-conference

            Sure to find some of that mind bending here as well. Notice the involvement of the Obummer care outlets.

            Today a day of remembering from the birth of my first son 18 years ago to the tragic events on this day. My Dad and brother shipped out not long after. Tonight birthday cake and drag races.

          • That dialogic design wikispaces link above to Alexander Christakis, when it talks about designing social systems, explicitly includes healthcare and education along with communities themselves. It assumes that what is wanted can be achieved as long as the requisite changes in human values occurs. Hence all the role playing. Did you read the history role playing assignment in the P21 Critical Thinking paper? Truly sickening.

          • Jim milgram like Stotsky and pullman and others would have us marching in circles keeping us from the edges of the truth in the dust of our footstepsso we cannot get clarity, thats their job….

          • Upcoming mindful leader conference. The speakers are influential from Google to savvy Csikszentmihalyi students.
            One speaker leads this group, see video.
            http://ibme.info
            The students look like robots to me. In my best robot voice…. must change world, global warming and bring just utopia to everyone . Astounding to see how many are involved in education.

          • I have been watching that conference for a while. I have seen the same phenomenon though in adults like school board members or those who get involved in regional commission work that undergo lessons on reaching a consensus. Instruction that they have an obligation to get to a shared vision. People do not realize how much their Affect changes.

            A book came yesterday from a lecture series Von Bertalanffy gave back in 1966. Like Ervin when writing books being published in the Netherlands, he is not holding anything back in laying out the intentions. I really can see the role of the 4 Cs in his vision. Some of the most important parts of those papers is the Glossary created.

            Back to finishing the book of lectures. Nothing quite like an open affirmation that GST is directly pertinent to the psychosocial and amounts to a new theory of psychology. Yes, implemented by ‘educators’ intent on revolutionary change, motivated by greed, or oblivious to the implications of what they are requiring because they were poor students themselves.

          • And there on the Board is Mark Greenberg, the creator of PBIS.

            Greenberg is now pushing Positive Psych in conferences and initiatives all over the world. PBIS is mentioned specifically in ECAA.

            And here he is recently linked to CASEL http://www.researchgate.net/publication/5261862_Enhancing_School-Based_Prevention_and_Youth_Development_Through_Coordinated_Social_Emotional_and_Academic_Learning

            Or this international conference in Lisbon. http://www.fmh.ulisboa.pt/ensec2015/images/pdf/ENSECFINALPROGRAMVFF.pdf

            Can we say “Global”?

          • Robin,
            The P21 Critical thinking paper that exhibited the role playing lesson in History Class caught my attention because what they did not say about the AIM academy is that it is a school for children who have severe reading/learnng disabilities. Their brains have been well and truly scrambled by hideous teaching pedagogy .

            Most of these kids are quite bright but they have had their left brain so critically handicapped that they automatically process everything through right brain perceptions across the board. This teaching obviously is only feeding the handicap and making it stronger.

          • Thanks for sharing those crucial facts on what I picked up on as just an appalling view of what it will now mean to ‘teach history’.

    • Thinkitup aired on several major network channels last night. So Gates pushes a global ed reform, markets it, pays to get it off the ground and then asks for communities to raise more money (because taxes won’t cover the shift to digital schools, teacher re-education wraparound services etc) and this how things get done in a world where the purpose of education is learning how to solve problems for the common good.

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      • JT-even worse are all the communities issuing bonds, i.e, long-term indebtedness to buy technology or rebuild perfectly good schools away from the classroom model. The payback is supposedly the increase in value to society of more people having 21st century skills, which we know is bogus. That debt will come fue just like the civic centers built to attract conventions that do not come.

        I think people forget how much bond indebtedness is being incurred that will be hard to pay back, but is easy to service now based on this cronyistic, we can redesign people, places, and economies model.

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  8. I haven’t read it yet — just logged on to paste this link to a funny post on The Onion. http://www.theonion.com/article/new-magnet-school-opens-students-interest-receivin-51206. The only problem is the title — New Magnet School Opens For Students With Interest In Receiving Competent Education. Robin’s readers all know about the Newspeak meaning of “competent”; I made it the subject of my last tutorial to the State board. But despite the un-clued-in use of the term, the article pokes fun where it should. Sometimes it take a little boy pointing to the naked emperor, or the court jester, to state the obvious.

    Maybe I’ll read it again for courage (adult beverages just put me to sleep) before tackling Robin’s link about reading, above.

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    • “What sound does popcorn make?”

      We all may need to go back and reread the part of my book where I talk about Amartya Sen ans UNESCO’s new definition of literacy.

      Also notice that the reason given for Full-Day Kindergarten is time to educate the Whole Child.

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        • Should I post my Penne a la Vodka recipe? It’s from the Gourmet cookbook, which took it from a restaurant in Positano, Italy. I usually have to at least double it and I make it with Ketel One. The vodka goes in early with the onions and mostly cooks out, but the look on people’s faces when they see me pour 1 1/3 cups of vodka into a pan is priceless.

          Seriously, I knew how much Whole language was back, but the intention is absolutely to control not just the concepts that guide perception, but the very vocabulary that will guide thought unless there is supplementation at home.

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          • Since helping my son re-learn phonics and witnessing first hand a reluctant, struggling reader begin to read for the first time with pleasure and ease, I have zero tolerance for this garbage. So grateful I came across “Why Johnny Can’t Read” before I had my kid tested and just before I came across Robin’s book. It took no time to teach him the phonograms and a year of reading aloud to break him of the awful habit of guess reading. What they’re doing to these kids is heartbreaking.

  9. Looking into this comment and link

    “”Robin
    on September 12, 2015 at 4:42 pm said:
    Look what I found http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/dubos-rene.pdf

    You connected him offline to Lamar Alexander. Turns out he was a prof at the Rockefeller Institute. Remember Lamar went to law school at NYU .””

    i found these
    http://www.newswithviews.com/Nelson/kelleigh188.htm

    http://www.businessinsider.com/lamar-alexander-aide-arrested-2013-12

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  10. Its funny ( not funny) when a woman on permanent “Brain Break” wants your children to take “Brain Breaks” in school ( empty rather than fill kids minds) at the behest of his phony holosness emperer of Utopia with no clothes. Are ya feelin me?
    Her brain has been rinsed in the sewers of hollywood and aired out in the stench of the garish monasteries. She never thought to read up on Tibets history or his hollowness either. http://chinatibet.people.com.cn/96069/7683649.html

    http://dalailamacenter.org/blog-post/heart-mind-2013-parents-perspective-goldie-hawns-mindup

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    • MM-because of how physician such as Dan Siegel-part of the Convergence Center’s Ed Advisory Panel, are arguing that mindfulness practices are essential for mental health, the mental health and well-being mandates in Lamar’s Every Child Achieves Act will force all these practices into all classrooms. This is on top of how the Positive School Climate gets used to do the same.

      When I look at the Thinking Skills Framework Marzano created for McREL in 1985 that is tied to what Critical Thinking actually means, I can see the Mindfulness training as well. I have ordered that book Lamar reverences. If I can read Alice Bailey clinically, I can read Dubos. When you first raised his name though I recognized it as consistently being part of the bibliography to all these systems science papers and the core of an Asilomar or Fuschl and now IFSR conversation.

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      • Robin,

        I don’t know if you have ever heard Jeannie Georges speak about her experience in Indiana with Marzano and his Tactics For Thinking but this interview is useful in terms of providing ‘some’ of the background to Marzano and HOTS and all that jazz.

        She was well ahead of the game in 1985 when she recognized that the Washington State school district which was offering the sensitivity training , Teachers Teaching Teachers, for Indiana educators was also using Marzano’s Tactics and effectively hypnotizing students for desired behavioral change.

        Last spring I was able to secure a 1986 edition of Marzano’s Tactics for Thinking Teachers Manual. Before it was split up and hustled under different guises. It has a special place in my heart.

        http://abcsofdumbdown.blogspot.com/2014/05/2-interviews-of-interest.html
        or

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      • Robin,

        ( I thought I posted this earlier but it went missing so if it winds up duplicating I apologize )

        Anyhoo…I don’t know if you are familiar with Jeannie Georges’ 1985 research re Marzano and his Tactics for Thinking/HOTS/Critical Thinking but this interview she gave is pretty informative.

        She was ahead of the game in 1985 when she identified that his Tactics were hypnotizing kids so that they would be more receptive to internalizing desired behaviors etc…

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFApDGMPW5I

        Late last spring I scored a 1986 copy of Marzano’s Tactics for Thinking Teachers manual. I had been told most copies had been destroyed or buried deep so no one could put it together anymore. Frankly, for a while I wasn’t sure I had the right book. But yeah. I think I do. Mwhahahahahahaha!

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        • It has to tie into what I have and there is a reason for destroying it. Funny, you mentioned hypnosis because I thought of that when I read his relaxation discussion. Likewise, another CASBS tied book had a discussion of hypnosis in it and again the exercises were comparable to what gets pushed as healthy mindfulness exercises and positive climate practices.

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        • This is Marzano’s cv . http://brockinternationalprize.org/nominees/Marzano1.pdf

          It is interesting how much work he was doing on HOTS in early 80s . Same time period as the predecessor task forces that led to Lauren Resnick’s famous 1987 report.

          Also do not forget that Marzano bought RISC–the Reinventing Schools Coalition that is pushing Competency-based ed so hard. Insisting it was created in Chugach when Alaska became the laundering point. Plus like the King Kamahemaha project that also went on in the mid-80s. it used native populations to see how it could work. KKP was not just Hawaiians. It also included either Apaches or navajoes from an Arizona reservation.

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          • YES! In fact while I was stalking this Tactics Manual I found last spring I stumbled on a video demonstration of how an Alaska school was using Marzano’s techniques. It was awful. Just awful. I’ll see if I can’t dig it up.

      • Yes and we lost the Sock It to Me girl, Judy Carnes, last week.

        I put a link for you up this morning earlier in the thread pertaining to reading.

        I have also been looking at this and other things this morning. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED290761 Measuring Thinking Skills Through Classroom Assessment from 1986 originally. The fact that the lead author is Rick Stiggins means that formative assessments is the preferred way to get at HOTS, which means this is mostly out of site. Stiggins work now is extensively on formative assessment and meaningful assessments.

        Essentially this Thinking Skills curriculum tracks back to many Common Core opponents as we saw with NC Plan and also hits the goals of the Opt Out crowd. That would certainly explain why they are working together as I noticed at Teri Sasseville’s forum in Georgia in February 2015.

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        • Ye Olde, Problem = CCSS + Reaction = Opt Out/CCSS Stinks (duh) = Solution —> Competency Standards for social justice, formatively assessed to be less disruptive (winky wink) and Mental Health ( embedded Thinking Skills/Thinking Scripts – grey matter is washed and scrubbed while student meets practices real world competencies )

          Hegel Lives. All Hail Hegel!

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          • Yes, except they screw up the synthesis. I was reading part of a 1995 Diane Ravitch book on Standards put out by Brookings. She misrepresents the New Standards Project, which is what I was checking on before outlining next post. Then Ravitch in a footnote mentioned that Resnick’s boss at the LRDC, Robert Glaser, had written a per called “The Integration of Instruction and Testing” for “The Redesign of Testing for the 21st Century: proceedings of the 1985 ETS Invitational Conference”. I knew from my STELLA research that 1985 fit with when ETS went looking for high schools to pilot HOTS so I decided to find that book.

            Sure enough it has all sorts of admissions that dovetail with what I have been nailing down all week going back to the late 50s and grounded in what is being called “systems science, cybernetics, thinking skills, and cognitive psych. All describing the same thing. It also fits with what I know is the actual CC implementation from my book.

            But, hey, I is just a “populist education researcher” per this August 2015 APP paper. Linking me with bloggers that would never link to my work. https://www.americanprinciplesinaction.org/wp-content/uploads/Common-Core-Report.pdf

            It is an interesting narrative on the Common Core that continues the fiction that Texas chose to reject the CC instead of not needing it because of its work since the 90s as part of the New Standards Project. To me the paper is setting up the NC Plan as well as formative assessments as the answer to the strawman of ‘standardized tests”. As usual, local gets hyped while the power of accreditation gets ignored. We can learn a lot from what gets included and omitted from a narrative. Yes, hegel does live and Uncle Karl too.

  12. Freaky Prophecies From 1888

    I was driven to retrace Robin’s thinking about John Dewey and what inspired him and how it is that his vision in education predominates to this day. See Jan 07, 2013 — 19th Century Blueprints for 20th Century Tragedies: Is a Repeat Pending in the 21st? — http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/19th-century-blueprints-for-20th-century-tragedies-is-a-repeat-pending-in-the-21st/

    The connection was made that Dewey and thousands were very much influenced by Edward Bellamy’s utopian romantic novel, Looking Backward: 2000-1887. While most readers at that time enjoyed the novel, others joined one of the 165 Nationalist Clubs that arose to help spread socialism. Dewey’s contribution in affecting the curriculum and methods in public schools has had lasting effects.

    Starting to re-read my copy of the book — intensely underlined and annotated 2 ½ years back — I am shocked how prescient much of it is. Robin’s use of the strong word “blueprint” is not far off as to the book’s effect on both the 20th C and now the 21st C.

    Do people still read Bellamy’s book, Looking Backward? Is it readily available? Is it assigned reading and up for discussion — in High School, College? Has it become embedded in the psyche of “thought leaders” ? Those leading 21st C Learning initiatives ?

    I’m at page 39 and just had to stop and make a comment. We are worrying about data collection via computers and IPads. The finessing of assessment of the 4 Cs (collaboration, critical thinking, communication, creativity) is getting fine-tuned and field-tested (Are there protocols in place in testing young human subjects? Do parents provide permission?).

    This is what threw me. The story goes that after 100 plus years the US society was changed, without violent revolution, till now (year 2000) the state is the “sole employer”. Nothing is “compulsory”. Citizens are “volunteers” for their jobs. Here is a quote:

    “ . . . parents and teachers watch from early years for indications of special aptitudes in children. A thorough study of the National industrial system, with the history and rudiments of all the great trades, is an essential part of our educational system.”

    My question is: While in the collectivized world of 2000 as projected by Bellamy in 1888 the work world would be pretty well KNOWN and able to be categorized and centrally planned, how come there is so much certainty today about our UNKNOWN future that we’re being coerced into implementing the 4 Cs into the captive young audience in the free world? And, downplaying the basic skills, the 3 Rs?

    In the 60s when I worked as a psychometrist (vocational testing) in the National Employment Service (Canada) we did use the DOT (Dictionary of Occupational Titles). But, for a long time now, that no longer applies — the central job allocation service or the DOT.

    What’s going on here? Is statism, collectivism, central planning, whatever — rearing its ugly and outdated head? Through the schools? Who’s pushing?

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      • This fits with comment to Deborah and is from even earlier 1985 . http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED270788.pdf

        So ‘classroom assessment’ is now called ‘formative assessment’ and all the hype about the local just gets us back to this 1985 vision of Rick Stiggins and fed ED. Also apparently the critical thinking skills push began in 1980 when the Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities recommended that critical thinking be included in the US Office of Education definition of basic skills. I guess someone at the Rockefeller Foundation thought it would go nicely with their funding of the World Order Models project during the same time period.

        I feel like a detective this sunny Monday morning. Just call me Sleuth Robin.

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  13. Tunya,
    Speaking to your question for myself the answer is,Yes, Yes and Yes. As to who is responsible? Million dollar question but I would phrase it this way and I am quoting here from the author of a book called Truth Is a Lonely Warrior. ( not too shabby so far).

    He attributes the planning and goals we see manifesting today to the “establishment” and he defers to the Columnist Edith Kermit Roosevelt, granddaughter of Teddy R.

    ” The word establishment is a general term for the power elite in international finance, business, the professions and government, largely from the northeast, who wield most of the power regardless of who is in the whitehouse. Most people are unaware of the existence of the ‘legitimate mafia’. Yet the power of the establishment makes itself felt from the professor who seeks a foundation grant, to the candidate for a cabinet post or state department job. It affects the nations policies in almost every area.”

    Its clear to me that the power is in this nation may be localized predominantly in the northeast but the agreements and their articulation are globally focused in the hands of the elite. They are the people who fund and initiate the tax exempt Foundations everywhere which peddle their policies and influence via myriad think tanks and NGO’s etc…

    This group of like minded despots has perpetuated their beliefs and plans over the past century ( or more ) though many of their founding members have died. Their ideas persist in the same way that other organizations of belief have survived over time, Christianity, Judaism, Marxism etc… Individuals die but ideas live on when they find fertile ground in the minds of the living. If those fertile minds have money, power and influence …?

    Oh man ! We got Trouble. Right here! We got trouble.

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  14. What Authority?

    That’s an amazing answer. Some kind of mass hysteria is being engineered to massively change human nature through the education systems. To bring forth a transformation toward global citizenship. Just through “money, power and influence” ! What is the endgame?

    Going back to the book, Looking Backward, is it “excessive individualism” (p24) that is the problem, as identified in 1888?

    Thanks, mc, for explaining that behind this deliberate effort are massive funds behind “tax exempt Foundations everywhere which peddle their policies and influence via myriad think tanks and NGO’s etc… “ All without any crisis or need or urgency identified. We can just weep about the wasted wealth that could instead help the world’s needy populations.

    From where I sit I would say there is NO authority, NO justification, NO rationale for such wastage !

    Coming back to the “mass hysteria” syndrome that is being propelled. That is an amazing phenomenon !

    This 21st Century infection is spreading only within the education field. The man-in-the-street knows NOTHING about what’s being imposed upon the young.

    I agree. This is very troubling. And, “we got trouble”. You characterize these people behind the scenes as despots. But despots have accomplices. There is a 16 C writer, Etienne de la Boetie, who wrote the booklet, The Politics of Obedience. This is what he concluded:

    “Let us therefore learn while there is yet time, let us learn to do good . . . I truly believe that I am right, since there is nothing so contrary to a generous and loving God as tyranny — I believe He has reserved, in a separate spot in Hell, some very special punishment for tyrants and their accomplices.”

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    • Tunya,

      NO authority of course. No justification. No rationale. Its all manufactured crisis to a desired goal which is, I believe, simply the will and belief of entitlement to control. Everyone. Everywhere. Always.

      For myself, a historian-type, having always taken the long view I have looked at the megalomaniacal intentions of these people through the ages as a critical mass of sociopathic individuals with financial means and sometimes charisma to enact their druthers. As I approach the half century mark I have begun to feel their malevolence in a less secular way.

      I do believe they are Evil.

      I agree that the average Joe is unaware what is happening in Ed but the brainwashing of society in other contexts, so that we would be immune to appreciating what is taking place ,is being enacted on many fronts. Think: Sustainability, A21 development, Bike Lanes, Yoga will Save The World and the Happiness Project. Diane West’s book The Death Of The Grownup explains some of this well I think.

      Ignorance, magical thinking, and denial of what is, are proliferating because a critical mass of adults in our culture are not actually grown ups. Boundaries are blurred, they want to be rescued from tough decisions and distraction and entertainment fill the void and foster mush minds everywhere. Being cool is valued more than cool discernment. We have been collectively groomed to this for easily 50 years.

      Despots do have accomplices. You are so correct. And what terrifies me is that these behavioral psychologists going back 100 years and now their devotees have figured out quite well how to propagandize, seduce and brainwash the masses without them being aware.

      Many in our culture have become unwitting accomplices to their serfdom. Education is THE most efficient manner to achieve despotic goals for a compliant populace but they have been working on us in other ways for an exceptionally long time to this end.

      Eclecticmn posted a fantastic article and link in the comments of Robins previous post. In that article there is a link to a book which I immediately purchased entitled Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control by A.M. Meerloo, M.D.

      Consider what Meerloo writes in this paragraph and think how many times in the course of a day we encounter the word ” Sustainable” in all its vagaries and emotionally laden suggestiveness. This is one example of the game most people do not realize they are playing.

      “According to official Pavlovian psychology, human speech is also a conditioned
      reflex activity. Pavlov distinguished between stimuli of the first order, which condition
      men and animals directly, and stimuli of the second order, with weaker and more
      complicated conditioning qualities. In this so called second signal system, verbal
      cues replace the original physical sound stimuli. Pavlov himself did not give much
      attention to this second signal system. It was especially after Stalin’s publication in
      1950 on the significance of linguistics for mass indoctrination (as quoted by
      Dobrogaev) that the Russian psychologists began to do work in this area. In his
      letter, Stalin followed Engel’s theory that language is the characteristic human bit of
      adaptive equipment. That tone and sound in speech have a conditioning quality is
      something we can verify from our own experience in listening to or in giving
      commands, or in dealing with our pets. Even the symbolic and semantic meaning of
      words can acquire a conditioning quality. The word “traitor,” for example, provokes
      direct feelings and reactions in the minds of those who hear it spoken, even if this
      discriminatory label is being applied dishonestly.”

      https://archive.org/stream/RapeOfTheMind-ThePsychologyOfThoughtControl-A.m.MeerlooMd/RapeOfTheMind-ThePsychologyOfThoughtControl-A.m.MeerlooMd_djvu.txt

      And for my generation ( those born from say 1965 on ) Cultural Relativism and Marxian cultural evolutionary thought, was soft sold into school curriculums from the 70’s well into the 80’s before efforts to formalize the “Transformation” were initiated . The ability to think logically has been hampered for 40 years now.

      Oh yes we got trouble. The Music Man’s Think System was more prescient than anyone could have appreciated.

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      • For later generations say those born in the late 70’s like myself who were lucky enough to be taught to think at home, school became a strange place. I do think obviously the ones who learned to read fluently made it out with little damage but most turned out with no logic, surrounded by peers who could not think straight and were given assignments to grade themselves with no real instruction and a diploma at the end. Some of us still remember the odd testing that Anita talks about.
        That has lead the NW to be a leader in this change. What is being described here largely describes the populace in Oregon. Thanks to Stiggins, Conley, and a host of others covered in discussion here. I stick with my theory that this state has always been an experiment. We continue to push forward with the solution to testing madness is formative assessment pushed by Stiggins and the DOE, with union assistance of course.

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  15. At http://nyti.ms/1l90saG there is an article that was published today entitled “Lauren Powell Jobs Commits $50 Million to Create New High Schools” that accounts for the funding of the transformation of our schooling process as you have been discussing in these comments. Linking Jobs to the Emerson Collective and linking its managing director, Russlyn Ali, to several relevent organizations (USEd asst. sec. and advisor for equity and civil rights, vp of Education Trust, liaison for pres. of Children’s Defense Fund–Marian Wright Edelman ?–and asst. dir. of the Broad Foundation, etc.), presents a very interesting picture.
    And as an aside, Carlie Fiorina’s favorite philosopher is Hegel! She shared that nugget with a group meeting at the Aspen Institute.
    We’ve circled the wagons, but I’m beginning to run low on arrows for my bow.

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    • Yes because I have his Developing Minds book from 1990 that obviously gets renamed. I also mentioned above that he and Richard Paul were both on the Delphi Panel involved with the California Critical Thinking Report back in 91 I believe.

      If all this feels like the right track because it’s so consistent, it is earth-shattering to be actually reading these and other cited books from their footnotes and bibliography.

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  18. Speaking of new high schools…there are now anti common core folks buying Strauss’ ridiculousness about Ted Dintersmith being unlike Bill Gates in his vision, especially considering the article lauds High Tech High. Dintersmith co-authored his new book with Tony Wagner at Harvard’s Innovation Lab and also a senior research advisory at Linda Darling Hammond’s Learning Policy Institute. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/11/not-bill-gates-meet-ted-dintersmith-an-education-philanthropist-with-a-different-agenda/

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    • Funny you should mention that book, as one of my ed newsletters this morning touted it with this blurb “There’s an increasingly strong argument being formed by respected voices in education that the globally networked technologies of our time demand a fundamental shift in schools back to the progressive, constructivist, constructionist ideas of Dewey, Montessori, Malaguzzi, Papert and others. Two recently released books highlight that trend.”

      Remember Strauss works for Bezos and amazon has one of the world’s great Big Data stashes. How could he not be on board with transforming the global economy using a product-Big Data-that is is specialty.

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    • http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=66914&privcapId=19597&previousCapId=19597&previousTitle=CRV

      Background is early Venture capital for IT companies and has a PhD in engineering from Stanford. That means he has drunk often and deeply from the well of systems science and whether the so-called soft sciences can be made into hard sciences via a psychology grounded in neurophysiological change. Precisely what digital learning, Linda Darling-Hammond, the OECD, and Competency all have in mind.

      Fits well actually with today’s post. VC’s just love the Public-Private Partnership vision where governments pull the levers of the economy. Fits with the GEFF summit in Silicon Valley in April as well.

      This says he was a delegate to UN General Assembly in what is probably supposed to read 2012. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm6967676/bio

      Remember Ban Ki-Moon, the UN General secretary has not only published Dignity for All by 2030, he has said repeatedly that education is the way to force all the desired transformational plans.

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  19. It’s Individualism vs Collectivism

    The definitions of both these terms — individualism, collectivism — will yield the methods.

    Individualism, obviously, is “live and let live”, and leave individuals alone.

    Collectivism, understandably, needs sheepherders for those who stray, disobey or otherwise show independence of mind and action.

    That is why one of the biggest growth areas in the field of public education and its maintenance is “leadership” generally. Here we have whole new university sections in education faculties focusing on “leadership”. Here is where coaches, consultants, facilitators, etc., etc., etc. are gaining their “skills”.

    “Assessment” methods is a big topic, because that is how young children will be tracked to evince their predispositions and how to keep them working in groups, becoming peer-dependent, etc.

    Utilitarian economics is a given: “The aim of civilized society is to do the greatest good to the greatest number . . . the individual must subordinate his own desires for the benefit of all.”

    New narratives and talking points for these coaches, herders, are part of the attainment in classes and training.

    Norming — helping persuade the public, government, political leaders, media, etc. to get behind the 21st C Learning transformations. Words like collaboration and creativity will roll off the tongue. Don’t let’s forget “critical thinking”. Everyone is for it. Yes, but remember, critical thinking in this new way of thinking is critical theory — the whole social justice agenda — change the world!

    New think tanks are arising dedicated to “sheep herding”. What is Learning Policy Institute with Linda Darling-Hammond about?

    With home education and Education Savings Accounts on the rise, “the system” does not like the leakage!

    [This is a reply to Jane, above, Sept. 16 comment.]

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