This post arose from my watching two different videos in the last month that left me deeply disturbed at the implications. The first was Learn Liberty’s “Marxism Explained in 2 Minutes” by Deirdre McCloskey where she said “Ideas themselves create consciousness. It’s not an outgrowth of the world’s material condition and the class struggle as Marx believed.” All of my extensive collection of books on what I shorthand as the MH philosophy–Marxist Humanism–regard Marx as believing that Ideas matter very much because they guide and motivate action in the present to change the nature of the future by transforming the nature of society. After I finished researching this post, we had the 200th anniversary this past weekend of Uncle Karl’s birth. This generated yet more pushes like this https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/05/karl_marx_at_200_his_lethal_legacy_lingers.html pushing the idea that Marxism=Stalinism in Russia and that Marx did not believe Ideas mattered.
If Ideas do matter in the MH vision and especially if the needed ideas can be sales pitched as ‘conservative,’ ‘grounded in the principles of America’s founding,’ or ‘necessary for self-governance’, then the MH vision comes roaring into everyday perception and actions via a new kind of education that gets at the neural structure of the mind and sells it as ‘learning to think critically’. That last quote was from a recent Freedom Center video touting the need for a Code of Ethics in K-12 and rightly complaining of Indoctrination. My problem though is that if the admitted Left wants a child to perceive and act through White Privilege or Racism as the motivating Category of Thought and the so-called Right hyping for School Choice wants the Child to think using “Do the Good. Seek the Truth. Create Beauty,” they are both providing Categories of Thought. All these concepts are designed to change behavior in the present in order to transform existing society by altering prevailing consciousness.
See the problem? We have “conceptually synonymous lexical” phrases with the same function. If the MH vision is all about transforming ourselves and the world, we are headed down a troubling pathway with nary a head’s up as to what is really going on. I said there were two troubling videos. The other was a speech David Horowitz of the Freedom Center gave to a Young America’s Foundation luncheon on March 16 at the Reagan Ranch that was touted as “Unveiling the Left’s Agenda of Destruction”. Horowitz used language about America’s inspirational vision that “all people are equal in the eyes of God and therefore must be equal in the eyes of government and that they are endowed by their Creator with the right to Liberty” that reminded me a great deal of the humanistic slogans used in the MH vision.
That created my working hypothesis that if the Left and Right can create shared understandings and motivating ideals in a substantial group of people under a variety of names and rationales, then the MH vision, especially in its cybernetic form, can come waltzing into the America that we love, or other free societies, without people being aware. Saying Marx didn’t care about Ideas makes that easier to do. Taking noted MH philosophers who fled to the West and taught, like Leszak Kolakowski, and then misrepresenting their criticism of what they called they called wrongheaded fallacy of Institutional Marxism of Stalinism as being what Totalitarianism is all about as this paper did https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2005/6/leszek-kolakowski-the-anatomy-of-totalitarianism or giving essentially the same speech at a Hillsdale College forum in October 2017 on Soviet Communism and never mentioning all of Kolakowski’s MH work means that not only do Ideas matter, but few people even trying to listen in the 21st Century are likely to hear an honest representation of the continuing collective goals that must be accomplished via the mind.
Unlike Kimball, I did not study under LK at Yale in the early 70s, but I do happen to have his translated into English book from 1968 called Toward a Marxist Humanism so we do have some ability to still eavesdrop on what must have been said. Contrary to what McCloskey stated above the MH philosophy is very much desirous of “replacing economic laws” with the “influence of ideology”. We should be very afraid in 2018 with all the talk all over the world of evidence-based policymaking that LK wrote that “theoretical knowledge of society continues to be a condition for the successful struggle of the communist movement.” Remember how I keep warning about a little c vision that we keep encountering as a communitarian ethos hiding behind supposedly conservative terms like Liberty and Freedom?
LK wrote a great deal about the need to gain control over “man’s conceptual apparatus” so that what was True would not be about whether a theory accurately described existing circumstances. It would be measured by whether a Theory was useful in motivating action to Change Circumstances. “Is the model useful?” would become a new criteria of truth. That might explain all the false narratives we have encountered surrounding education reforms that seem to be financed by the same think tanks or philanthropies now driving a misperception of Marxism as a historic philosophy of how to change the future via Ideas that are believed and that drive changes in behavior. LK knew the necessity of getting at people’s “intellectual organization of material” that were “an integral part of the most elementary activities of the human mind.”
Imagine the transformative power of first prescribing, and then being aware of, what a student was internalizing as a Habit of Mind that would then guide his seeing “the world in such terms and from such points of view as are necessary for him to adapt to it and transform it usefully.” And predictably too in known ways if you happen to be the prescriber aware of what the Categories of Thought are that are being inculcated into a student’s “conceptual apparatus.” What makes something totalitarian is actually not the existence of a gulag, but rather prescribing the categories that “constitute the total apparatus of concepts permitted in use and [that] are imposed as the sole and obligatory system of organizing one’s thinking.” Anyone not recognizing that concern of LK’s having been made operational in the new federal law that applies to the next school year’s requirement that all students must be assessed at least Higher Order Thinking Skills and whether they guide behavior?
When Horowitz said in that same video mentioned above that the new Code of Ethics was needed because “You can’t indoctrinate young people. You have to let them make up their own minds,” I couldn’t understand how that rhetoric could be squared with how Learning Standards actually work or his call to Teach the students to Think Critically. Critical Thought requires the use of prescribed abstract categories. How is that actually making up your own mind? It seems more like the semblance of autonomy where the actual coercion gets internalized and becomes the driver of our decision-making but out of OUR sight (but not the prescribers in education, philanthropy, or the think tanks).
Here’s another quote from 1964 discussing the role of cybernetics in the USSR after Stalin’s death unlocked the Role of Ideas again. These same ideas were coming to the US, which is why Notre Dame’s Press published the book The Social Impact of Cybernetics and we should all be aware that “the abstract ideology or the utopia expressed in concrete terms plays a critical role in defining social purpose and hence in conditioning social decisions.” Acting on goals is one of the hallmarks of competency-based education all over the world so its ties to cybernetics and the real MH aims become clear when we read that “action upon the environment is regulated by a continuing process of perception in which the perceived external reality is compared with the end state to be achieved.”
Is Project-Based Learning then about academics to be learned or simply a means to change the child at the level of their mind and personality? If you think changing the child neurally will always come with rhetoric about social justice, any category of thought that seeks to impose a “viable system of value and perceptual relevance (ideologies)” will actually do. Notice the same language from Classical Education and the Barney Charter School Initiative being used back in 1965 from “The Development of Cybernetics” in The American Behavioral Scientist: “Hence in dealing with social systems in which men form the ultimate self-regulating components, we must deal with the problem of the adequacy of perception and of value to effective action within a natural and human environment. The analysis of men and societies as self-regulating systems brings us back to the perennial philosophic problems of the Good and the True.
We need to consider now whether all the deceit about the Common Core and now Marxism may well be hidden in language about ‘conservative thought’ or ‘principles of self-governance’ as used in this press release. http://www.bradleyfdn.org/Portals/1/PDF%20Files/GEORGE%20WILL_Press%20Release-23Apr2018.pdf .After all, one of the other historic terms for the MH vision that I did not have a chance to cover yet is the “socialism of self-management”.
What if self-governance, self-regulation, self-discipline, and self-management are all conceptual synonyms describing a person with the desired internalized systems of thought and value that can act as a steerable rudder for anyone with power who knows they exist? That would be the MH vision of Freedom and Liberty and that really should give us pause.
We are all in agreement though that Ideas do Matter. It’s why they need to be known and discussed accurately and not just in terms of their Usefulness for Social Planning Purposes.
Anyone see the new Lucky Charms commercial where a young boy dressed in a pink sweater and dancing around seems purposely androgynous? This commercial is aimed at children and runs on children’s television channels. Very subltle for sure but steering young children to accept this new pan sexual type of individualism. Ideas are powerful indeed.
This is why one of the pioneers of systems thinking, Kenneth Boulding, wrote a book on point called Te Image.
There really is tremendous targeting of the mental constructs that will guide thought unless someone is independently a voracious reader.
Did you see this? https://www.fastcompany.com/40568839/the-gates-foundation-and-chan-zuckerberg-initiative-want-your-ideas-on-the-future-of-education
Of course it will be mandated via language in standards or a school’s mission statement or the school’s charter and parents will not quite grasp that it is neural rewiring. That’s why medicine is the desired metaphor.
From yesterday and the importance of Image in farming so that people do not create their own definitions and assumptions about what abstract concepts mean. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/how_to_tell_stories_about_complex_issues
“Paint a Picture in the Mind of Your Audience“
This gets at the role of Images in transformational learning of the type I am describing here. https://www.ericdigests.org/2001-3/journey.htm
Seems on track:
https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/cardinal-marx-impressed-karl-marx
The writers on the Right, especially if they are at publications sponsored by philanthropies like Bradley as is the case here https://www.city-journal.org/html/karl-marx-zombie-15889.html and, I believe, ISI that has published so many of Kengor’s books and possibly his Center for Values and Vision at Grove City, really do want us to believe that The Communist Manifesto was all he wrote. They want us to believe that economic analysis was the essence of his writings. Unfortunately for them, that contradicts a great deal of documentable discussions that we started tracing here.
This is not just a nerdy point. UNESCO has renamed the MH vision as the New Humanism and has created a template it calls Media Education to use to alter consciousness in the desired ways. It’s a good thing I had already tracked where media education was going in K-12 and its ties to a new view of history and its push to supply the categories our students are to use to think with. I was not picking on Horowitz> I simply recognized his Learn to Think Critically functioned just like this passage from French Marxist Roger Garaudy’s The Alternative Future where he complains (my italics): “Because of the institutional forms that it has taken in Eastern Europe, even Marxism has not been spared positivist contamination. Dialectic has been changed into its opposite. [Horowitz’s definition of What to Think?] Instead of a method of critical detachment from the given, an instrument to search out and create new possibilities, it has become apologetics, an ideology of justification.”
On the next page is a passage that pertains to education reform globally that is really about creating a new culture starting at the level of the mind and heart. It is grounded in something earlier in the book that fits with what the admitted Progs today have in mind but also anyone wanting to transform what exists, even if it is in the name of founding principles. I don’t think it’s an accident we keep finding a communitarian function behind all these libertarian sounding words.
“At the genesis of all revolutionary action lies an act of faith: the certainty that the world can be transformed, that man has the power to create something new, and that each of us is personally responsible for this transformation.” Earlier Garaudy said this and it is a direct contradiction of what Benson, Sorman, or Kimball would now have us believing. By the way, did you know the Templeton Foundation sponsored a conference at All Souls College in 2007 that Kimball and Kolakowski were both at? We know IMBES was launched at the Vatican in 2002. Are these misportrayals now of certain aspects of Marxism also connected to Positive Neuroscience and the Happiness/Subjective Well-Being work that certainly sounds like the MH aims?
“Marx’s contribution to the study of subjectivity is his discovery of the tension between these two antithetical terms: creation and alienation.The philosophical perversion of Marxism results from a false theory of knowledge, considered to be a reflection of reality [Not What to Think again as well as both Lynn Taylor and Donna Garner consistently misportraying constructivism in their writing about the Common Core], and a distorted conception of liberty
These conceptions are foreign to Marx’s thought. He fought against such a conception of knowledge in his Theses on Feuerbach, by stressing with Kant, Fichte, and Hegel the active nature of knowledge. He fought against such a conception of liberty by defining it, in The Holy Family as a ‘potency’ and by recalling in 18-Brumaire and Capital that men fashion their own history. Contrary to the positivism of his less gifted imitators and in the spirit of Hegel, Marx viewed reality not only as something ‘given’ but as including everything that is possible.
This is getting long but the latter is just like History Matters and Reading and Thinking like a Historian. It fits with where Classical Education and the Barney Charter Initiative are going and the way so many mission statements of parochial and independent schools now read. This is the next page passage mentioned above now that I have ‘framed’ it better.
“If culture today can no longer be formed as in the past–not by the sacral, nor the ‘humanities,’ nor the ‘human sciences’–what can furnish a foundation for the ‘general culture’ that responds to the needs of our time? This general culture will not foster acceptance of a given order but prepare man for increasingly rapid change in his life. It will emphasize not the assimilation of knowledge and systematized morality but critical intelligence and creativity. This general culture will no longer belong to a privileged few. Everyone will have access to it so that everyone will have the training and information necessary to take part consciously and creatively in society’s initiatives and decisions. [Sounds like ESSA and standards-based ed, huh?]
The three principal concerns of this general culture must be the organization of information [Disciplinary Core Ideas?], aesthetics [well-rounded education?], and prediction and planning for the future.”
That’s enough typing but the vision fits perfectly with what the Common Core, competency-based ed reforms, and student-centered learning actually do.
Not only is this directly on point with what I am trying to warn about, but one of the sponsors is the ubiquitous Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/renewing-humanities-understand-21st-century-world/
What new tools should we use to reflect on ideas from history, literature, journalism, science, and the arts? And how do we make sure that new technologies and platforms enable all members of society to be included and have opportunities for deep reflection and understanding?
The New America Foundation is the link to search engine overlord through Schmidt. CASBS is where MH and cybernetics have been laundered into the behavioral sciences since it was created with Ford F money. It’s why so many of the blueprints will have the author talking about his time there. It’s also where systems thinking was created.
This Humanities Center was where Bill Bennett was before he went to DC to be first at the National Endowment for the Humanities and then Ed Sec where he launched Project Education Reform: Time for Results with its emphasis on conceptual knowledge.
Robin,
In the past you’ve been kind enough to take time to respond to email questions and I’m grateful. Your up to date reporting on this ongoing process of surreptitiously changing the values, attitudes and beliefs of students and employees for that matter is much appreciated.
I have two copies of your book in case one that I’m sharing does not make it back to my bookshelf.
I’m not a protagonist. I am in full agreement with the ending statement of your May 7th blog post, …ideas do matter. It’s why they need to be known and discussed accurately…
That statement is precisely the inspiration for the following questions.
Are you are saying that it is the method of thought (or receptivity to manipulation) that is being engrained in students that is the big story? Not a specific ideology?
You’ve piqued my interest in your occasional reference of the Barney Charter School Initiative as a participant in the spread of MH thought. Am I getting that correct?
If the “desired internalized systems of thought” is the culprit, please delineate the evidence in BCSI.
This is not a challenge. It is a simple request for specific evidence of implementation not a broad language description of mission or goals.
I look forward to documentation that I leads me to the evidence: as defined in Webster’s Dictionary not the “Evidence – based curricula and interventions” to which you’ve referred in earlier postings.
Thank you,
Hi Burt,
The long response to mad mommy’s question above is essentially a continuation of this post as will be the next post. Yes, I am saying it is the method of thinking and not an ideology that is the essence of both cybernetics and cognitive science’s efforts to use education to create the desired internalized web of conceptual categories and implanted illustrations coupled to practiced values to motivate and guide desired future behaviors. Those sought behaviors are to be transformational to the world that exists in a manner consistent with what Marx and all these others have written as being the MH vision. The banner can be Liberty and Good, True, and Beautiful or it can be White Privilege and Social Justice but the desired visions are not really different.
I first had my attention brought to Barney when it opened Atlanta Classical Academy in cooperation with the social justice. Racial Equity-focused Atlanta Public Schools which I found curious. Then I read their mission statement and it was all about using the curriculum and school activities to change the student, not the transmission of knowledge for its own sake. I then looked into their schools in Colorado and the pillars provided of what they hoped the child would become (taken down since I called attention to it) and that piqued my interest further. Then I read an interview in a piece Joy Pullmann did with Terrence Moore for the Federalist involving training for parents and teachers to be involved in Barney Schools outlining the role-playing activities and conceptual subject-matter orientation of what they consider to be knowledge and I recognized it as a conceptually synonymous description of DCIs–Disciplinary Core Ideas.
After several months of painstaking research in February 2016 I write about 4 or 5 posts on this topic with documentation and quotes and comparing it to the cybernetic template. Somehow in the summer of 2016, someone wanted those discussions to no longer be avaialble and this blog came under an organized attack that quite literally seemed to come from Russia. The search engine overlord then put up a header about Malicious Site to anyone doing an ISC search. An inquiry then turned up that google (which via New America is behind that Humanities program to guide thinking in the 21st century) insisted those posts had contaminated code and needed to be taken down to get the header removed. A professional who looked at the code said that was not true but they were removed. I still have the hard copies though as well as all the books with the info that was apparently deemed unapproved.
Now that we understand more about the plans for Media Education and how crucial the search engines and social media platforms are to creating the desired noosphere (remember I used that aspiration in CtD) the need to get those posts out of public circulation makes perfect sense. If you do a search involving unesco and media education it should pull up a report of theirs called “Media Literacy and New Humanism” that lays out how controlling the nature of thought itself as well as the values inculcated as Habits of Mind is the way to get their renamed MH template in place. As an aside, if you are not familiar with AEI’s Values and Capitalism initiative, you should get on their mailing list and look at their program content. It reminds me again of the MH tempate and Joy Pullmann, who pushes BCSI, is involved with it. The Bradley Foundation, whose Encounter Books published her book (with Roger Kimball as the publisher. The previous publisher, Peter Collier, is involved with the Code of Ethics campaign wanting to teach us How to Think. He also wrote a book with Horowitz on the Rockefellers in mid-70s with their cooperation) on the Common Core which I regard as a mixture of wrong or irrelevant, is mentioned in this post.
Bradley also financed Peter Berger’s work. That matters as he is best known for his Social Construction of Reality which is precisely what everyone seems to want to so what you believe and value becomes your rudder and not what is. https://scholar.csl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1095&context=mdiv is an example of the kind of forthright discussion that exists once we become aware that the nature of Marxism and its use of language and mindsets to seek transformational change is being systematically misrepresented by writers, think tanks, and higher ed. It is a 1968 PhD thesis called “Marxist Humanism in Dialogue with Christianity”. Worth looking at. I also found a 1970 NYT articles forthrightly discussing all the recently published books on that very topic that we are now being told did not exist.
One of the books I am still going to write about and was going to cover after Christmas, before I injured my knee and managed to derail my life plans for several months, is a 2007 book by Steve McIntosh called Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution: How the Integral Worldview is Transforming Politics, Culture, and Spirituality. It laid out how the concepts of Good, True, and Beautiful in the very way that Classical Ed, including BCSI, tout as being a means to get that integral worldview that will transform the future. That creates a convergence if you remember because Ken Wilber is tied to the Integral Worldview as well and his philosophy partner is Robert Kegan.
Kegan, if you remember, was mentored at harvard by Kohlberg whose Stages of Moral Development are being enshrined in schools all over the world as values and character. I covered their presence in the Hong Kong Citizenship curriculum the Communist Chinese imposed after they took over and it is an essential component of the true common core of the type Goodlad envisoned and I covered in CtD. It is Kegan;s Key Competences being pushed by the OECD all over the world and it was he and Peter Senge (Mr Systems thinking) that the Hewlett Foundation hired to ensure that the SBAC assessment created with federal funding for CCSSI would be assessing the desired Deep Learning.
Deep Learning=Classical Ed’s use of concepts and character to guide future decisionmaking=cybernetic template to control behavior based on provided information instilled within the mind.
By the way, UNESCO a few weeks ago announced its intentions to Transform the Future by targeting “human decision-making.” If you were me and the only person with all this documentation and all these stated aspirations and provably false or synonymous misrepresentations, what would you do?
I write, even when its Mothers Day and I am supposed to be relaxing. I was worried enough to write CtD and now what that book and its sequel allow me to see is truly mindblowing. It all basically boils down to the behavioral sciences, when implemented through education and the media, allowing people to be compelled without their ever sensing the chains or yoke of compulsion. Since its founding CASBS seems to have been pushing this invisible, inside-out noetic manipulation to push the MH agenda. Their presence just keeps coming up when all I am doing is tracking implementation plans through the decades after they have been cited in confessional footnotes.
I would agree that it is the essence of cybernetics and cognitive science to manipulate thinking, full stop, but the exercise is inextricably bound up with the ideological purpose. Cybernetics is the method, ideology is the aim. The ultimate dignity and uniqueness of the human being, with his faculties of memory, intellect and will, is to be overridden, not through brute force or placing his face in a cage with rats to be tortured until he agrees that 2 plus 2 equals 5, but through subtler means, subtler than soma, subtler than an encounter session in Big Sur in 1972 or in a North Korean POW camp in 1952. There would be no point to the exercise unless it were to produce a new species of human being happy to be reduced to a linked computer station in the World Consciousness Network. Of course there are also the inducements and reinforcements of money, power, the sense of innate superiority and the consequent entitlement (to do anything, no holds barred) that accompany those engaged in this undertaking.
The ideology or Understandings of Consequence or Enduring Understandings go to perception, but they also impact goals and purpose, even if they are manipulative Guiding Fictions.
We have talked on this blog and offline about the consistent correlation between school districts pushing these methods and interference with the mind’s Images and what motivates a person to act. Knowing Kenneth Boulding’s role in systems thinking, which Tranzi OBE is a variation of, and his push to control Images in the mind as a tool of behavioral science, I saw a few weeks ago, that his wife, Elise Boulding had written a book Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World She writes about the anlytic use of metaphor, which is one of the things it is so important to manipulate. The book came out in 1988, before the mass school shootings began, but after the GERG template called Achieving Excellence was being piloted in Colorado school districts including Littleton where Columbine is. I find this acknowledgment so telling.
“Therapists will recognize these devices as among their familiar tools for working with disturbed individuals or in family therapy. The new view of the situation that comes from moving away from words and towards expression through the creative arts (role playing) has over and over again liberated people trapped in rigidly repetitive pathologies so they are able to invent new ways of behaving. These devices need to be made equally respectable as tools for approaching serious social problems.”
Boulding discusses the ability of these new created rules to alter “political and judicial order of each society” which certainly sounds like what the Rockefeller Foundation laid out in that 1968 meeting at their Bellagio retreat on Lake Como that also sought to later thinking. The emphasis on Project-Based Learning makes even more sense when we read that “While it is not practical to turn every problem situation into an orgy of artistic creativity, some experience with this kind of activity alters basic mindsets and humanizes problem-solving. When a generation trained to think in these ways…”
This is one last quote that fits in with where Horowitz’s What to Think leads. I will cover this in more detail tying it to the MH philosophy in the next post, but in the mean time. Here’s another quote we should be aware of before pushing Learning How to Think as the answer.
“We can either retreat behind the technological shield and only accept packaged knowledge or we can try to know the world we live in by exercising our minds in several different ways to compensate for the fact that we cannot know everything experientially. If we really want to ‘know’ in a fresh, unprogrammed way, we will need a template for ordering information so we aren’t overwhelmed by it, a system for mentally filing data so it adds to our knowledge without cluttering our minds”
That gets us back to the title of this post and Frameworks declared desire to fill ‘cognitive holes.” The problem is these supplied metaphors may be motivating, but they are frequently inapt. Without the cluttered mind of lots of facts, there’s no trigger to recognize the inaptness of the concepts and categories of thought being used.
Wow. That last quotation is a beaut. “We will help you to think ‘out of the box’ by providing you with the filing cabinet (box) and pre-labeled files to ‘help’ you make sense of all those facts that can, like, really overwhelm you.” The package will free you from packaged knowledge!
Do these people need help in Learning How to Think, or do they think we’re that dumb? Have their own minds been dulled to incoherence, or are they depending on the dullness of bobble-heads reading this?
This is the school Betsy DeVos is visiting today. http://www.thefoundersacademy.org/ The template of concern is not just limited to BCSI. I also noticed it with Sacred Heart after I sat next to Hugh Hewitt when I testified against the Common Core back in 2014 in Orange County, California.
My goodness those Round Tables function just like the Swedish Study Circles when it comes to fostering the kind of common understandings required by the MH template. Here’s another quote from Unger’s Religion of the Future that essentially resstates what Learning to Think Critically really means:
” In a free society, the individual has the educational equipment, as well as the economic and political occasion, to cross the frontier between the activities that take the framework for granted and those that bring it into question. He has been educated in a way that enables the mind as imagination to become ascendent over the mind as machine[Horowitz’s disparagement of What to Think]. He has learned to philosophize by acting, in the sense that he recognizes in every project the seed of some great or small reformation. The practices of society and of culture multiply opportunities for the affirmation of this preeminence of the mind as imagination over the mind as formulaic device.”
Unger is considered to be the father of Critical Legal Studies so it is deeply concerning when people who purport to be conservative advocate his techniques involving the mind, even if they never mention his name. https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/23/books/toward-a-super-liberal-state.html Unger taught Barack and Michelle Obama when they were at Harvard Law and he did not consider Obama radical enough as President.
Here we have more active misrepresentation plus the deliberate use of Communism and Marxism as synonymous terms. https://acton.org/publications/transatlantic/2018/01/15/3-reasons-martin-luther-king-jr-rejected-communism
This is consistent with my current hypothesis that along with the harlan cleveland work in late 80s I chronicled in CTD, the MH philosophy went underground to come in as a civil rights mandate under the Equity and Excellence push. Fits with this Robert George and Cornel West program on MLK in May https://www.baylor.edu/washington/index.php?id=951374 and West’s use now of euphemisms. Good reason for the False Narratives surrounding the Common Core. That initiative and Faith and Public Plocy is tied to aei’s Values and Capitalism that Joy Pullmann is involved with and to the Witherspoon Institute that pushed the false Closing the Door on Innovation campaign to mislead on the nature of the Common Core in 2011.
No one is supposed to recognize the MH template. I didn’t know there was such an active coordinated campaign to protect the MH implementation while pretending it does not exist.
In light of the tragedy in Santa Fe, Texas I am putting up the link to this old post from the early days of the blog. http://invisibleserfscollar.com/how-much-innocent-blood-will-it-take-to-stop-sel-manipulation-for-political-gain/
By treating the mind and the student’s personality as a manipulable system that can be rewired to change behavior without any appearance of coercion we have set these tragedies in motion. We must get at the political motives behind these psychological techniques.
And here we have an admission from within last week that I am correct that the phrase “founding fathers principles” is being used to mask a new radical democracy reimagining of what the future might be. http://www.coordinationproblem.org/2018/05/from-hayek-to-lavoie-and-the-quest-for-a-political-philosophy-for-the-market-process.html
Last time I linked to Boettke it was because he was waxing on about his work with and respect for Kenneth Boulding, Elise’s husband. It brings together what History Matters is doing and that Institute for Human Studies and the Mercatus Center with what CASBS under Boulding and Ralph Tyler commenced.
This is from a unesco initiative that started with Rockefeller F funding and lays out the importance of of what they are calling the Discipline of Anticipation in a 2014 Narrative Report called “networking to Improve Global/Local Anticipatory Practices–A Scoping Exercise”. Anyone not sure how this ties to learning standards should note that ATC21s head Anthony MacKay was at the Bellagio Convening. Now he heads up GELP, is involved with OECD’s Schools for Tomorrow (thus tied to Fadel and the Center for Curriculum Redesign), and also with the National Commission on Education and the Economy (Marc Tucker who was behind the New Standards Project precursor to the Common Core)’s International Benchmarking Project on learning standards. This fits with HOTS, DCIs, Good, True, and Beautiful from Claasical Ed like BCSI, and Reading and Thinking like a Historian.
“Human efforts to appreciate the nature and functioning of anticipation in the world around us are undertaken on the basis of specific concepts and practices (tacit or explicit). This is the field of knowledge that explores, invents, accumulates, and transmits the frameworks and information that make up our understanding and experience of anticipation.”
https://www.marshall.usc.edu/sites/default/files/fiss/intellcont/Fiss%20and%20Hirsch%20ASR-1.pdf lays out the transformative potential of creating “shared discursive sense-making”. That’s what a conceptual framework does, whoever is pushing it. That it originated with the Rockefeller F before the Bradley F joined in should give us pause. So should this recent City Journalarticle hyping Hamilton and the Rockefeller F’s telling of history through it. https://www.city-journal.org/html/american-history-renewed-15835.html
“The concept of framing captures the processes by which actors influence the interpretations of reality among various audiences. Frames constitute ‘schemata of interpretation’ that ‘organize experiences and guide action’, providing coherence to a set of idea elements. This process of giving meaning is fraught with conflict, as interested actors and entrepreneurs articulate particular versions of reality to potential supporters, bystanders, media, and targets of change.”
Students are the “targets of change” and student-centered learning that is ‘personalized’ and ‘competency-based’ is designed to get at just those ‘schemata of interpretation.’ There’s no controversy though because seemingly everyone wants to standardize and control those frames of reference without acknowledging that is what learning standards are all about, in addition to the grounding of analysis in emotion.
In other words, I am worried for good reason.
Is anyone hear familair with NLP as a cybernetic tactic?
Explain your understanding of that acronym please.
Are you talking about this? https://fongtien.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/nlp-psycho-cybernetics/
This is not quite the meaning I am using, but it is related. To be a human system, whether an individual person, workplace, city, or other aggregate of people, requires common goals (SDGs or a Mission statement are examples), common understandings (which is why semantics and these specified framing concepts and prescribed categories of thought matter), and the rule of law (to impose those goals and to adjust to the results as we see in evidence-based policymaking).
I use cybernetics in the sense of using the mind and personality to create a steerable rudder. It has always been seen as a tool of the MH vision even when it is hiding as I am seeing now, which is rather fascinating really. You have people like Cornel West who used to be more upfront about the Ethical Dimensions of Marxism now using conceptually synoymous lexical terms IF one was aware of the MH vision in the first place like prophetic pragmatism and New Left Romanticism.
I was working on that angle yesterday. Unger refers to what Kolakowski called institutional Marxism that was centralized, dogmatic, and full of bureaucracy as ‘classical Marxism’ is this interview I read yesterday. https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/01/roberto-mangabeira-unger-what-is-wrong-with-the-social-sciences-today/
I guess we can say that I am both horrified and fascinated by what is clearly a very massive, coordinated cover-up of a philosophy that used to be openly acknowledged. I guess the behavioral sciences want the theories and techniques without the infamy. I don’t blame them but every time I hear the hype now over the ‘administrative state’ it’s hard not to hear the MH criticisms of institutional Marxism’s inefficient bureaucracy and demeaning centralization. Pretty sure that’s not an accident either. https://www.heritage.org/event/deconstructing-the-administrative-state-how-corporations-and-big-government-collaborate
This from yesterday should also help answer your question. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-05-14-why-google-maps-not-netflix-or-amazon-points-to-the-future-of-education
I think Larry Berger is trying to minimize where the assessments are as well as just how much the Common Core and its state successors tied to competencies are training the adaptive algorithms to create these data points. I wrote about Michael Horn in my book. He was the first to clue me in, by hearing him speak, as to how CCSSI was a feeder to the real ball game–competencies–and that digital learning was not simply an on-screen way to access information.
Hello. I’m new to your blog. I must say, not having ever been in the field of education, I find this all quite interesting but heady. Have you ever written about Norbert Weiner who has been called the ‘father’ of cybernetics? I came across a letter he wrote to the United Auto Workers president in 1949. To me, the letter comes across as a not-so-veiled threat. https://libcom.org/history/father-cybernetics-norbert-wieners-letter-uaw-president-walter-reuther
In the letter, Weiner mentions his then, soon to be published book titled, “The Human Use of Human Beings”. I have the book, but must admit, I haven’t yet read it.
I have written about Wiener and I have read that book. It’s less alarming, as he understood how cybernetics and controlling the internalized meaning system of the mind, could be abused than the Mind Brain Education template created via IMBES in 2002 at the Vatican.
If you do a search in the blog function search area on Norbert Weiner it should pull up that post particularly, but also the IMBES post. There is a fascinating aspect to how learning standards really work and what is being attempted here at the level of the human mind. It’s also mostly without accurate scrutiny as most of the people writing about it either misinterpret what they are describing because they lack the underlying understanding of cybernetics or they deliberately mislead parents because that’s what they get paid to do.
A more current single-volume overview, that I read about two weeks ago after it was cited in a footnote, is Heinz Von Foerster’s The Beginning of Heaven and Earth has No Name: Seven Days with Second-Order Cybernetics. It is based on interviews in the last days of his life and was translated from German even though he had lived in the US for decades.
Amitai Etzioni, known now as the father of communitarianism, actually has a background in the early cybernetics conferences. The communitarianism is a means to translate the goals is an accurate way to look at it.
Welcome to ISC and have fun poking around.