Menticide: Deliberate Targeting of Our Frame of Orientation for Examination and then Assault Via Education

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One of the primary creators of Systems Science and thus a behavioral science pioneer was a biologist, Ludwig van Bertalanffy. He was very involved in reconceptualizing K-12 education in order to implement research coming out of what he called the “emerging psychology of man”. He also called it “a new science of man or general anthropology.” This new type of ‘education’ and new ‘science’ views “man as an active personality system.” Please note that the Workforce shift in purpose I covered in the last post would require that activity emphasis in all K-12 schooling. Not coincidental in the least. In 1966 lectures, Bertalanffy described Menticide as follows:

“If a population is manipulated in the right ways, it cannot transmit, to coming generations, values and freedom it has lost itself; and this is precisely what psychological manipulation aims at and has widely achieved.”

He should know since not only was he a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto shortly after it was created in the early 50s, but he was also a presenter at a 1957 conference on “New Knowledge in Human Values” held at MIT. Organized by the Research Society for Creative Altruism, it resulted in a book edited by famed, or notorious Humanist Psychologist, Abraham Maslow. Shortly after that book came out the NEA hired Maslow and his associate Carl Rogers to develop the new K-12 education vision we covered here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/psychological-approach-to-a-humane-politics-restructuring-the-west-quietly-and-effectively-via-ed/

In order to be able to spot the same vision implementing this desired ‘science of man’ in subsequent education ‘reforms’ we have to truly understand what was sought at conferences we were not invited to, even if we could get around the technicality of not being born yet. That’s what old books are for. Professor Robert S. Hartman also spoke about creating a ‘moral science’ and a ‘science of values’ by controlling the meaning people associate with words and images. As we read his intentions, let’s just imagine how much fun he would have had with his social engineering desires with access to today’s Digital Learning mandates, where the Images are controlled and dramatize whatever the creator desires for students to believe.

In the kind of naivete and hubris that can be hard to read in hindsight, Hartman said that “as natural science has changed the world, so moral science, once it is developed and fully known, is bound to change the world.” In fact, he believed that “There will come a time when the problems and conflicts that now plague us will be as forgotten as the tortures of the middle ages and the clubs of the cave men.” Talk about famous last words.

Hartman explained how the moral science principles “puts the spine in democratic ideology” and would be the “future science of moral humanity.” If it reminds anyone else of where the lesson plans for the UN’s Global Goals and the linked video for the World’s Largest Lesson from the last post are going, there’s a reason. Hartman related that he had written a report to UNESCO’s International Institute of Philosophy on the development of this value theory “over the last five years (1949-1955).”

I am asserting that the “worldwide intellectual potentiality” is still what is being carried forward by the Systems Scientists like Ervin Laszlo or Bela Banathy and embodied into K-12 via misunderstood terms like Excellence, Outcomes Based Education, Competency, and what GEFF is peddling. Another conference presenter, Erich Fromm (a member of the Frankfurt School of confessed cultural Marxists and transformational social scientists. See Tag) lectured on “Values, Psychology, and Human Existence.” In one of those jaw-dropping epiphanies that brings together so much, Fromm stated that such a human science would first change values. Then it would need to be able to get at–assess would be a good description for what is required–and then alter what he called “man’s frame of orientation.”

That single phrase so thoroughly captured precisely what all the actual Common Core/ Competency/21st Century Skills implementation is now pushing and has been since at least the 60s. I even used one of my very favorite bookmarks to mark the page. From APUSH “Conceptual Frameworks” to Social Studies ‘lenses’ to Cross-Cutting Themes and Core Disciplinary Ideas to Enduring Understandings and Whole Child, everything targets a student’s Frame of Orientation. Growth Mindset being required and exalted is just a way of insisting that the orientation and its frames must be malleable to the Learning Experiences supplied. When listening to the World’s Largest Lesson video or all the Climate Change hype, remember that Fromm told us that “even if man’s frame of orientation is utterly illusory, it satisfies his need for some [internalized mental] picture that is meaningful to him.”

No need to wonder now why relevance, real world applications, ties to “authentic local and global issues” and “assessment primarily concerned with providing guidance and feedback for growth” are the new required focus for K-12 education.  http://www.ccsso.org/Documents/2013/2013_INTASC_Learning_Progressions_for_Teachers.pdf that is now being used for teacher professional development is just full of confessions on what teachers must be doing to the students so that they internalize what Fromm called a Frame of Orientation that will guide their future behaviors and perceptions. I especially liked page 27’s insistence that “the teacher understands critical thinking processes and knows how to help learners develop high level questioning skills to promote their independent learning.”

Apparently a neurologically embedded, deliberately created, and manipulated Frame of Orientation fosters independence and autonomy in this Orwellian vision of the future where Unknown=Independent. How does this creation occur? Why “the teacher understands how current interdisciplinary themes (e.g., civic literacy, health literacy, global awareness) connect to the core subjects and knows how to weave those themes into meaningful learning experiences.” There is an crucial confession here in this “Application of Content” vision. School subjects now exist in order to be the means for instilling the desired Frame of Orientation. Then students collaboratively practice projects and tasks until the new values and beliefs are locked in place at an unconscious level. “The teacher is constantly exploring how to use disciplinary knowledge as a lens to address local and global issues.”

That emphasis fits perfectly with the World’s Largest Lesson, but even more so with the UN’s expressed plans to use data, like a student’s frame of orientation and values, to also restructure the world’s economic, social, and political systems. To a UN bureaucrat, too many politicians, and most education administrators these days we are ‘systems’ to be redesigned with data. So apparently is everything else involving people. That is what the meeting in New York is about this week and the 15 year commitment where no one gets left behind that president Obama signed us up for is actually not really about stopping malarial deaths from mosquitoes. http://www.undatarevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/A-World-That-Counts2.pdf is the blueprint that confesses:

“It is up to governments to put in place the rules and systems to realise this vision, working with domestic stakeholders and in the multilateral system, at regional and global levels. Governments, through the legal systems they enforce, are the ultimate guarantors of the public good.”

Because it worked out so well for all of us when in 1928, governments signed on to abolish war. In more utopian hubris:

“it is governments that can balance public and private interests and create systems that foster incentives without creating unacceptable inequalities, adopt frameworks for safe and responsible use and manage the international system that can transfer finance and technical expertise to bring the least informed people and institutions up to the level of the most informed. And it is governments that are elected to respond to citizens on their choices and priorities.”

Mercy me, somebody spent way to much time absorbing theories and not enough time learning genuine history and its constants. Now wanting to be Pollyanna instead of looking this awful overreach straight in the face for what it plans, let’s assume this paper gets dismissed as merely “the UN” and president Obama will be gone in 15 months anyway. In 2012, the National Science Foundation created http://www.nsf.gov/cise/aci/cif21/CIF21Vision2012current.pdf establishing a Cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century Science and Engineering and we and our various ‘systems’ are what need to be socially reengineered. In 2014 grants “Laying the Foundation for Data-Driven Science” were issued. http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=132880 One of the bolded Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs) program is to “drive innovation in education.”

Headed by Ken Koedinger at Carnegie Mellon and funded as LearnSphere, this project is premised on “Educational data holds the same potential to guide the development of courses that enhance learning while also generating even more data to give us a deeper understanding of the learning process.” Whatever the personal intentions of individual professors, LearnSphere is precisely what Hartman, UNESCO, and Fromm hoped to one day have as a cultural tool for transforming human nature. Or at least trying. I am not done yet though. The CIF 21 document compares the kind of human systems data that will now flow from our Cyberinfrastructure to the astronomical mapping of an area of the universe known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The aspiration and intention is “from individuals and communities, to address far more complex problems of science and society than previously possible” and “advance innovation in society.”

One more tie so the inexorable nature of this juggernaut is indisputable. Remember MIT prof Alex “Sandy” Pentland from this post?  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/redesigning-education-globally-to-humanize-personalities-and-make0each0one-of-us-more-susceptible-to-peer-pressure/ He is not only involved with the UN groups that produced that What Counts report and many Working Groups, including Education and Workforce Development, to gain implementation at state and local levels. He is also involved in the Kavli HUMAN Project as an advisor.  http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/big.2015.0012 It’s not just a Big Data project to “Understand the Human Condition”.  It’s not just that Kavli used that same analogy to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It also seeks to yield “detailed behavioral phenotypes that characterize the myriad ways in which humans express their genetic endowment in different environmental settings.”

And we wonder why Opt Out is to be no longer allowed once a state or district gets “meaningful formative assessments” or why we all need SMART energy meters.

Because we and our children in Preschool through higher ed are to be part of “a discovery dataset that would revolutionize the social and natural human sciences.”

Now I’m done.

81 thoughts on “Menticide: Deliberate Targeting of Our Frame of Orientation for Examination and then Assault Via Education”

  1. In essence this is indeed the child catcher seen now through the lens of a spectroscopic mass spectrometer. With legions of sadistic minions lined up to put the markets in. Oh wait, trained empathy will surely keep the sadists at bay, right?

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    • That’s the cool thing about Framing Orientation. It affects what gets noticed and what gets ignored. So those false beliefs will guide how a person sees the world until they are actually in peril and thus forced to rethink. Good thing, the world is currently such a placid place with people all over the world singing “Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows” at the mere mention of the word American or even Westerner.

      Joyful goodwill abounds.

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  2. This is full on, in your face, “WELTANSCHAUUNGSKRIEG” (worldview warfare) which was the main tool the Nazi’s in taking over Germany. I think hanging around to try to fix this, and handing one’s child over to these people to work on their mind, is as John Taylor Gatto puts it, “a mad idea”.

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    • I am glad you used that word–Worldview. If you look on page 11 of the INTASC document under “Key Assumptions Underlying the Progressions,” you will read “…teachers must know their students, how they grow and develop, their preferred ways of learning, their strengths and needs and their worldview.

      That’s what has to get changed–the student’s worldview. When such change occurs, that is what Learning or Student Growth now mean.

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  3. Its a small thing but Im claiming back our language. My children are not “Learners”. They are at this time in their lives “Students”.

    It’s so much easier for these Planners to presume right and might over individuals who, once identified as ” Learners”, are unconsciously seen by the disseminators of this poison as essentially passive receivers of desired frameworks for thinking .

    Individuals defined as “Students” are inherently understood via history of language to be more mentally active in their accumulation of knowledge. But we cannot have that. So Students must now be Learners.

    If teachers and local adminstrators or even the credentialing kapos were forced to replace words like Learners, Learning Experiences, Engagement, Positive School Climate and the like from their talking points and papers with alternate/normal vocabulary the vapidity and or evil intent behind plans would be seen for what it is.

    Frankly, most of them would not be able to supplement any alternative words letting the cat out of bag that they have no idea what they are hustling on our kids.

    Learners Progress, looking ever forward, as they march in circles. No need to look left or right, up or down. They are One Perfect Unified, Organized Organism. @@ @@ @@
    0 0 0
    —- —- —-

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    • Make sure you read this link from earlier thread. http://landing.deloitte.com.au/rs/761-IBL-328/images/deloitte-au-ps-education-redefined-040815.pdf

      Remember how other countries do dates and this is an August 2015 document. Pushed here as the vision by Will Richardson’s “Developing Modern Learners” newsletter that also touted the jettisoning of the SAT and ACT.

      Learners is a word akin to molding clay. We should remember the dystopian results of disfigurement created in the Ayn Rand “Comprechicos” short story.

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    • Look at this https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/holdren_citizen_science_memo_092915.pdf . Oh. My. Word. Notice page 5 mentions casually “mapping 3-D structure of neurons in the brain.” Perhaps functional MRI while a person is reading over the new types of Common Core ‘performance assessments”?

      And it’s now an example of STEM activity that fosters STEM literacy. Well, it is if you count knowing buzz words and applying them on prompt as desired.

      Saw references to it in this article. http://www.routefifty.com/2015/09/open-science-state-localities/122444/?oref=rf-today-nl

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      • The mapping the human brain info is on page 8 and the STEM descriptions are on pages 10-11. It’s the activity, not the knowledge, that becomes the point while also fostering false beliefs about the underlying science influencing a given environment.

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        • “Mapping the Human Brain. Based in the Seung Computational Neuroscience Lab at Princeton
          University, EyeWire (NIH) investigators are solving the mysteries of the brain with the help of
          the public. Over 150,000 people around the world have played what has been called a “3D
          neuroscience coloring book” — a puzzle game anyone can play without having any knowledge
          or experience in the field of neuroscience. EyeWire researchers aim to eventually map the
          human brain, but for now they are starting with the retina. Players are mapping the connections
          between retinal neurons, helping researchers understand how neurons process information.
          Players have already helped researchers understand how a mammal can detect motion, which has
          remained a mystery — until now. EyeWire researchers hope their work can lead to advances in
          blindness therapies, the development of retinal prostheses, and other benefits.”

          Maybe it’s just my suspicious mind, but I’m betting that the players of this neuroscience coloring book game are “practicing science” the way lab rats practice science. They don’t have to know anything about science, either. On the other hand, they are rich, rich, rich in data — and protein if you are starving.

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    • No MC its not a small thing! Its a huge thing! Without language distortion/destruction they cannot fool everyone. Deception within language and changing definitions using vague term after vague term in sentence after sentence in paper after paper is the house of cards all of this is built on. Your declared match can torch it for our salvation if others do the same, you go girl!

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      • The Re-Imagined Project gets quite specific that they intend to create a competency for each of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions domains. For all the hyping language and false narratives, menticide is truly the right word.

        I am amazed with how much my grown kids want to just hang out when they are home. I guess I should be pleased they do want to come home although crab cakes last night and white bean pasta Friday night may have helped. Tonight’s request is penne a la vodka. Ketel One field trip.

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        • Its a good thing they want to hang out. The Best Thing.

          Along the lines of approved language…my daughter who is applying to college had one of her admissions essays edited by a trusted teacher. He rewrote virtually the entire essay. And not for the better. His version was a manifesto to economic justice using all the requisite ACT vocabulary.

          She took “some” of his ideas and used them but kept largely to her original piece which was well done. She still sounded like herself and not a mid level apparatchik.

          What really took me aback about his edit was that I thought this was the LAST teacher who would agree to restricting language much less encourage it in his students in order to meet with approval from others.

          Foolish me. The indoctrination has reached a critical mass .

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    • Listen to this short confession from ISTE. http://www.jackstreet.com/jackStreet/WCED.Sykora.cfm

      Notice the number of times Sykora uses the description “myself” like this makes her sound erudite. She probably says condescendingly “between you and I” as well.

      Ohhh, kids can use mobile devices. What intellectual giants that makes them. Here is an article Sykora wrote in August on refreshing the standards. Look at that graphic for students. https://www.iste.org/explore/articleDetail?articleid=514&category=Solutions&article=ISTE+Standards+refresh 21st century learning meets workforce readiness under wioa meets Richard Paul’s Framework for Critical Thinking touted by many involved with that new Drilling to the Core book Pioneer has put out. I do not think it is limited to North Carolina then. Notice though that ISTE and digital learning keep the Common Core as a bridge long after a state renames its learning standards to something else.

      This from the ISTE annual conference this summer ties this vision of Re-imagining Learning to Jobs of the Future. https://isteconference.org/2015/?id=95858030 Workforce Readiness strikes again.

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      • “Fortunately, the information and communications technology revolution and the spread of broadband coverage nearly everywhere can quickly make such time lags a thing of the past. As indicated in the report A World that Counts: Mobilizing the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, we must modernize the practices used by statistical offices and other public agencies, while tapping into new sources of data in a thoughtful and creative way that complements traditional approaches.
        Through more effective use of smart data – collected during service delivery, economic transactions, and remote sensing – the fight against extreme poverty will be bolstered; the global energy system will be made much more efficient and less polluting; and vital services such as health and education will be made far more effective and accessible.
        With this breakthrough in sight, several governments, including that of the United States, as well as businesses and other partners, have announced plans to launch a new “Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data” at the UN this month. The new partnership aims to strengthen data collection and monitoring efforts by raising more funds, encouraging knowledge-sharing, addressing key barriers to access and use of data, and identifying new big-data strategies to upgrade the world’s statistical systems.”
        http://www.todayszaman.com/op-ed_the-data-revolution-for-sustainable-development_399509.html

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        • For anyone not aware this is what the phrase “the Internet of Things” is all about. Our gadgets produce data about us whatever our knowledge or intentions. Companies now contract with other companies and state and local governments to analyze this data. I know because those analytic companies and data crunch companies all announce their intentions and contracts in publications I track.

          Did you see this? http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_awe_makes_us_generous

          It reminds me of how crucial controlling the internalized mental image is to all these behavioral science plans. Supposedly the picture of the Earth from space coming from moon was crucial to enviromentalism’s ability to hype its claims and thus fundraise and change behaviors. I also think that is why the media is so determined to discount those PP videos as ‘manufactured’, So much effort has gone into pushing the audiovisual over the printed word in dictating the mental image. Those PP videos threaten that.

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        • I was poking around yesterday with the implications of what has come out just this week and seeing what else an anthropology prof by the name of Virginia H Hine had written apart from a 1977 piece she wrote for the Ford-funded Center for Democratic Institutions (just like CASBS) that was published in World Issues. I came upon something called the Temple of Understanding that I decided was not the rabbit hole I wanted to go down, whatever the trails to it or from it.

          Then I came across a reference to this document UNESCO created in 1968 to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001281/128156eo.pdf

          I got a chance to read it this morning and the extent to which this is still clearly the agenda almost took my breath away. Luckily my dependable kitty companion by the window purred “Breathe, Robin, breathe.”

          Now I know why Education Week, last Friday on the day this session of the UN opened, decided to do a story on Human Rights curriculum. That was part of last weekend’s reading. You may remember I put up some links.

          I have read references to Watson in terms of physicians not needing knowledge of chemistry and biology anymore because they can look up what is needed. Yuck.

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          • Section VIII is fun. Focus on history of UN with outcomes of social justice and international democracy. “Awaken the young to the consciousness of their responsibilities”.

            The whole document does read very much like what we’re seeing being played out today. Sort of scary for a something written in 1968.

          • As my husband was once again replacing the printer cartridge this morning, he asked why I liked hard copies so much.

            Because I work with the language. Having read that, I am now quite sure that the developing personality mandate is what is now being sold as Grit, Perseverence, and Growth Mindset. Knowing the implementation so well let me recognize what is in that document for how it looks now. Then I followed it up with the confessions of intent here http://www.communityschools.org/assets/1/AssetManager/Better-Learning-through-Community-School-Partnerships.pdf and I felt like I had been looking at a supernova this morning. Went grocery shopping after that.

            The crucial fact about the Common Core is the Habits of Mind it requires. Wow. Fits with the 1968 document saying it does not need to be well-stocked, only well-organized. I am not sure the student will have the blueprint of what has actually been instilled.

          • Great find. Will finish reading it tomorrow. The UNESCO connection is the only plausible explanation for the ubiquitous and urgent call for learning skills to solve problems that don’t yet exist.

            Yes, Watson began in the medical field but there’s even more data in education, which will serve to advance cognitive computing. So, IBM launched…Codename: Watson Teacher Advisor. They promise to strengthen teaching across the United States by offering pre-vetted lesson plans. Good thing because soon we won’t have teachers with enough content knowledge to make their own (not an insult to teachers but rather a comment on the direction of our schools of education). IBM will have 100 P-TECH “community” schools in the US and Australia by next year.

            And my heart breaks for those in Oregon. Sad beyond words.

          • Look at this article continuing the duplicity surrounding federalism and the ESEA Rewrites. This time from the National School Board Association. http://www.learningfirst.org/restoring-federalism-education

            Protecting the authority of the local school boards rationale shows what a scam on the taxpayers, students, and this country education policy is. It also dovetails with that Pioneer paper Bill Evers of the Hoover Institution did hyping return to the states and locales in the name of federalism and conveniently leaving out the crucial facts.

            We have had a systematic effort all over the country at the state level to quietly strip local school boards of their authority to contravene what we now know for sure is the UNESCO, let’s shift the US to Marxism and do it at the level of students’ minds, vision.

            If this NSBA hype and the Evers paper are in fact not coordinated they are leading us to the same place from the “Left’ and the “Right’ and with similar timing. Neither tells the full story and disregards the pertinent damning facts. It also all fits with enabling that re-imagined ed paper I linked to yesterday and Kelli Young being a keynoter at iNACOL to tout it

          • Your governor was at a meeting in NYC on September 25 of mayors and other representatives of ‘subnational’ government entities recognizing that they are where the Agenda 2030 vision will be carried out. http://grist.org/cities/does-the-united-nations-new-global-sustainability-agenda-mean-anything-for-cities/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_cities

            I have clicked through and read some of the underlying papers out of ICLEI and what the term ‘localization’ means to this UN agenda. They are in a reply to MC below where I first brought up the Strong Cities Network Justice has created.

            The 1968 UNESCO vision seems to fit our 2015 reality in K-12 for a very good reason.

          • Mike86: Section VIII also includes advice on how to promote the UN itself to the kids.

            Sleazy. But then leftists never have any actual humility.

          • And the Congressionally snctioned and reports to White House Office of Science and Tech Policy Digital Promise has become Digital Promise Global and does not seem to be just about US anymore. http://www.digitalpromiseglobal.org/

            League of Innovative Schools is a part. Sounds global to me. And it is http://www.digitalpromiseglobal.org/about-us/

            Wow. No wonder there has been a drive to disempower local elected school boards. Got home to watch UGa-Bama football game and with the results so far decided online was less stressful.

            OK, there we have it on the Board membership. http://www.digitalpromiseglobal.org/team/ Links to Rockefeller (founded Asia Society), Ford, and Carnegie Foundations and the World Bank. No wonder the local schools conversion charter reads like it does. The ‘local’ hype truly is a masquerade and the extent to which our politicians and public sector has sold us down the river for their personal pots of gold and power would be traitorous if so many were not using the law to sanction this Hostile Takeover known as the soothing “student-centered learning” and Competency.

      • “Every great school needs a well defined mission and culture …”

        actually no, I am familiar with a number of great schools, and not a single one of them has a well defined mission or culture. They have vaguely defined missions and cultures, implemented by (and also in fact defined by) some really exceptional people.

        Clearly defined culture and mission, for a school, is a recipe for mediocrity. It may save you from utter failure, but it will also prevent breakout success.

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        • In the Fostering Communities of Learning vision, that culture and mission become the vision that MUST be shared by everyone.

          Think of a skulling team on the Charles. The independent child shooting hoops is unacceptable. Everything is a primer for collectivism and Ann Brown, a Vygotsky scholar, developed Fostering CoLs after a trip to the USSR with Courtney Cazden (Discourse Classroom with its shared meaning push) and Michael Brown of CHAT and translator of Luria’s autobiography into English. All have tags.

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          • Having been the cox on one of those 8’s (and thus thrown into the toxic, I mean muddy, Charles by the rowers when we did better than expected in the Head of the Charles race) I can tell you that everyone in our boat had voluntarily and with full freedom bought into the vision and the mission of our boat for their own individual reasons. Nobody’s mind was manipulated, in fact there were lots of opportunities to quit, and the coach was anything but soft and encouraging.

            Otherwise we would have done much worse.

            The new educrats may imagine they can produce that result with their methods, but it’s impossible.

          • This is a vision of what personalized learning means and how tied it is to the child’s ‘interests’. http://www.personalizelearning.com/2015/09/wildlands-school-personalizes-learning.html There is a reason for that. Jerome Bruner’s mentoring prof, Gordon Allport, another systems thinker, explained it would be necessary for education to be about developing the personality. He explained that back in the 50s and we know from the 1968 UNESCO paper that it saw developing the personality as the goal of education.

            We also know that Lamar Alexander’s Every Child Achieves Act mandated personalized learning for all kids. In other words, Congress is legislating UNESCO’s vision without saying that explicitly and making it binding on states and local districts and schools. Returning control to states and the local in a new kind of federalism is not making them the place for fulfilling Uncle Karl and UNESCO’s vision. Yet that is where we are.

            Notice how closely this fits with what the New Tech Network and Maker Movement push. Have two kids home this weekend and lots of errands they want run, but the sought vision permeates these videos and illustrates the how to the Convergence Project’s Re-imagined Education that Tom VanderArk linked that is above on this thread of comments. It is only about 11 pages. I worked on that yesterday while stuck in a carpool line for my youngest for 90 minutes.

          • Can i just note the gross amount of people profiting engaging in this absolute charade of a business surrounding like predators like wolves our towns schools and children. Can i please note this before i either scream my head off or eat every last macaroon i painstakingly made for a party requiring me to serve something from my freezer! Too many carpetbaggers and paracites to name and they all write their ” we MUST” papers i could just vomit.

    • This must be Friday afternoon news drop. Had to run errands with two different children and came back to this new report that came out today urging a new TANF framework to help eliminate the effects of poverty on infants. http://www.clasp.org/resources-and-publications/body/TANF-and-the-First-Year-of-Life_Making-a-Difference-at-a-Pivotal-Moment.pdf

      They truly are not kidding about the Cradle to Grave or Womb to Tomb phraseology for taking charge. Good thing money DOES grow on trees in DC and, perhaps, in the landscaping at Gates Foundation HQ.

      Too tired to read tonight, but the implications need to be put with that community schools vision and the HUD vision I linked to this morning. It is College Fall Break and I have many favorite meals to cook and errands to run over next few days. Hopefully though she will sleep late and I will get a post up. Otherwise we may just have to chat in the comments.

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        • Head Start was already shown to have only a short term effect on children’s academic achievement. How is this any different?

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          • Actually, our experience with entering kindergartners with a year or two of Head Start under their belts is that they’re behind. The only thing they can do is count to ten like parrots. They have no idea what they’re saying. Write a 3 on the board: deer in the headlights. Told to pick up four pencils, clueless. Staff of ours who have worked at Head Start tell us that they are forbidden to do anything remotely academic.

          • You and other readers may want to see if something comparable is going on in your states. https://sites.google.com/site/gaschooljusticesummit/

            What incentives were there to properly teach reading in Atlanta Public Schools or any other urban system if the end game reward for failure is little c communism where the “state” will meet all needs in an economy of well-being?

            Note the acute desire to disarm all of us, mentally and physically, and then use the disarmament as a reason for ever more intervention.

          • That’s some good inside info about what Head Start really is.

            Could be that Head Start is doing the wrong things, and maybe it used to be better.

            Or it could just be selection bias as to who attends Head Start. Maybe those kids would have been even worse off (in the short term, in kindergarten) without it.

            Usually, I believe selection bias accounts for a lot.

          • Head Start was envisioned by Benjamin Bloom and Wilfred Bion. Bloom of Taxonomy fame and I wrote a very alarming post about Bion’s vision about two years ago. I can locate it or you can use the search feature. Bion’s vision, last time I reread that post, resonated even more now.

          • I was poking around at the info from the Strata Hadoop Big Data conference that just took place In new York. Apparently President Obama gave the opening remarks at a previous Big Data conference and this is the video from the White House. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL055Epbe6d5aWZSOZAZ4MX5xXKEvlT6y_&v=vbb-AjiXyh0 It is short and he is quite animated about what all this data can be used to do. My experience is that he only gets this animated when his sought Fundamental Transformation is underway.

          • I attended Parent’s Night at the high school this week. My ninth grader’s honors math teacher said she would cover the CC material since there will be a CC-aligned Regents exam at the end of the year, but she would teach it in the old fashioned way with an older textbook. She said the CC text covers things in a very rote procedural way, but that good math students already know what they are trying to do and can think about how to get there — not the CC emphasis apparently.

            Sounds like Head Start teaching kids to count to 10 by memory but not knowing what those ten words mean.

          • You can contrast that rebel teacher’s approach with this from a Learner Conference In Manila that just concluded. https://whatedsaid.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/from-doing-school-to-learning-2day/ It fits with the INTASC training teachers in the US are getting that I linked to in this post. Luckily your high school teacher is not YET following that vision.

            If you click through to link as I did it looks like a US INACOL conference or ISTE. Notice there is an upcoming Learner2 conference for Africa In November in Johannesburg and in 2016 in Milan, Italy. Both the upcoming conferences are at American international schools. The African link states that Learner 2 was established in 2007 in China for teachers of students in international schools. Remember Shanghai led PISA in most recent go-round. Were they using students from these same international schools? It would fit with what PISA actually assesses for.

            This is from a recent PISA slideshare LL sent me offline. PISA intends to “assess student’s capacity to extrapolate from what they know and creatively apply their knowledge to novel situations.” In other words, PISA seeks to get at what student has internalized mentally and via emotions in their nervous system responses that guides perceptions and acts as motivation to act. Personalized learning a la that Wildlands link seeks to create what is internalized. So does formative assessment.

          • David count yourself and your kid lucky with your math teacher. My 9th grader is in the lowest level Algebra class. And yet her teacher thinks that starting off the year with 4 weeks of pre-calc math ‘concepts’ is valuable for them. Yes, Chapters 9 and 10 of their text make perfect sense to students who finished last year mid way through chapter 5 and basic factoring. And many of these students struggle in math NOW because they were subjected to similar asinine spiraling math methodologies taught to them in elementary school. The following is what she explained to me as her best practices approach :

            “It is customary to start big and then work small in the US. The larger idea is functions. Then we will study several members of the function family: Lines, radicals, parabolas, and rationals. In terms of the sequence of chapters, It makes more sense to group ideas of each member of the function family. For example, studying lines (chap 3) leads to systems of lines (chap 7). Graphing and solving quadratics relies on three methods (factoring – chap 5, principle of square roots – chap 9 and quadratic formula – chap 9). Ultimately, grouping like topics together reinforces the ideas and puts them in context. By the same token, chapter 5 (factoring) has absolutely no connection to systems of equations (chapter 7). However, students do need to have a handle on radical functions in order to tackle quadratics functions, which is why we conquer chapter 8 before chapter 9. ”

            Torture.

          • Can you say “Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete”?

            Remember David Coleman said that the Common Core was about creating the narrative. The students become trained to interpret their experiences and act on the basis of the identified concepts, Understandings by Design, Core Disciplinary Ideas, Cross Cutting Themes, and other abstractions that they did not create and build up from their own set of facts. This is actually where the constructivism in math and science and reading was always going. Control the symbol making capacity and you control what makes man unique of all the biological species. Bertalanffy figured that out and he hammers on that in the 1957 Creative Altruism conference featured in this post and in the 1966 book of his I have from his lectures at Clark U.

            It’s why I have said if someone has not read my first book, you really cannot see the rest of the story that we are examining on the blog now and that I have been researching in depth for more than a year now.

            From the book you know they do not want to teach math, reading, science, or history properly. They do, however, want to use academic classwork to create activities that change how the student views the world. Hence the topic of this post–alter the worldview and frame the orientation. That’s why the flow of data matters when it is behavioral data, not the store. O’Reilly deliberately brought in a speaker to create a rallying cry for a problem so that the offered solution was what was desired all along.

            The speaker by the way is a 1997 Middlebury grad with a double major of Russian and Studio Art. Perhaps he could help us translate all that cybernetic research UNESCO has and uses to create ed policy globally that is not available in English.

          • I had missed this announcement last week. http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/launch-strong-cities-network-strengthen-community-resilience-against-violent-extremism

            So given that the High Commissioner on Human Rights is a Saudi prince, where will we be looking for potential violent extremists? If the focus is on communitarian living together as the solution, is resistance to collectivism what is really to be ferreted out?

            Fits with this too–‘localization’ is the term the UN uses now for localities and subnational governments pushing policies to fulfill its goals. http://www.iclei.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ICLEI_WS/Documents/advocacy/SDG/LAMG_SDGsPositionPaper_March2015_20150318_final.pdf So when Lamar Alexander is hyping how the Every Child Achieves Act returns control to the states and local districts and schools and I notice it is simply where the federal or global (like Learning Metrics Task Force) goals are carried out, Congress is going exactly what the UN wants. Localization of the Agenda 2030 vision. Again I have now learned Atlanta is part of that stronger cities network. So is opposition to being forced into this vision by mayors and city councils as well as governors and legislators enough to make one an extremist?

            Wow–“as the government bodies with responsibility for meeting” most of the UN’s Post-2015 Goals. No wonder I always thought the local mayor sounded like an Agenda 21 puppet marionette. He is. http://www.iclei.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ICLEI_WS/Documents/advocacy/Post2015_Files/LAMG_SDGsPositionPaper_Post2Post_Final.pdf

          • Robin,
            When I read the first line of this teachers BS THAT is the exact phrase that went through my cranium! That phrase was quickly followed by quick boil outrage regarding the perfectly, criminal mind arson of foisting math abstractions upon brains that have not learnt or practiced the facts and algorithms with which to understand the concepts.

          • Remember how the 1968 UNESCO proclamation stated that the true new purpose of education would be personality development. This is from that Russian-American education forum and has been translated from Russian into English. All the cited sources on what was created to be “Learner-Centered Education” with copyrights in the 90s have this line as the start to the “Personality-Developing Model” of education. I actually found this before the UNESCO report. It has been a busy week. My bolding.

            “Personality development is possible only when a student’s level of knowledge and skills cannot meet the requirements of a given educational situation. When this occurs, a student may feel the need to overcome such a learning inadequacy, and a cognitive task emerges, requiring the student’s motivation and activity. In the student’s actions to discover and learn something new, his/her motivation is based on his/her interest in solving the task. Thus, cognitive tasks affect not only students’ actions but also their motives and needs. As observed by Ivanova and Osmolovskaya, ‘The uncertainty caused by cognitive tasks makes students exercise introspection and stimulates self-reflection. Students analyze their own activities and themselves, and such self-reflection is a primary contributor to personal development.”

            Personal development=Grit, perseverence, Rigor and Student Growth.

            Making more sense. The teacher is doing what she has been told to do. She is following a template, however, that has a different purpose than what she has been told.

            I will cover this in the next post, but so far I have been doing more driving around in the last several days than writing. I went back through this today and remembered your comment.

          • mc, what your kid probably needs is lots and lots of practice with the basic manipulations which they probably would have gotten in the skipped chapters 6 and 7, I guess. And while what the teacher says makes a certain sort of sense, it’s a bit too conceptual for that age group (even if it were an honors class) without lots of drill, so the kids can push those symbols around with some reliability.

            Ultimately all that stuff is pushing symbols around, and you can do pretty much anything you want (except divide by zero) as long as you do the same to both sides of an equation. So it’s vital to be good at doing those manipulations accurately, then one can play with the problem to get to the solution. As long as there’s lot of practice, it may not matter exactly what the context looks like.

            If the new curriculum is designed to stop them from getting to that point of playing with a problem to find the solution, then it’s misteaching.

          • Teachers are being told to misteach, believe in these bad methods, or find another career. I am getting phone calls from people going through the training and hysterics is the norm at what they are asked to do. Frequently the presenter insists this is effective and an informed teacher will note the effectiveness is all in sel indicators and the highly-paid consultant will only note that after attention is called to it. Oh, yeah. That is where the growth is.

            This new report has just come out. http://www.jff.org/publications/equal-opportunity-deeper-learning Bootstrapping the cybernetic model as if the student is a system to be programmed neurologically and then trying to mandate as a right under civil rights laws and equity obligations.

            College kid packing up as I write. Hooray!

          • I happen to know mc is referring to a private school where what the headmaster requires will determine who gets their contract renewed.

            Likewise, this paper shows that what the district office defines as teaching practices to foster deeper learning cannot be ignored if continued employment is the aim. http://www.jff.org/sites/default/files/publications/materials/How-District-Central-Offices-can-Support-DL-at-Scale-092515.pdf

            The practice mc described is also known as Deeper Learning as pushed by the Hewlett Foundation and is ultimately what College and Career Ready actually means. I will come to that with support in the next post now that I got college daughter off. Slight detour as I had to call her back as she had left her dry cleaned tops.

            Remember principals and district administrators not pushing Deeper Learning will not get promoted into the really lucrative administrative positions. Noncompliant Teachers not only have to worry about losing their license and contracts, but many tell me that only administrative positions pay enough to support a family. That is powerful incentive to be compliant.

      • So, get pregnant again and even if you’ve used up your lifetime TANF eligibility, you get more.

        Oh I forgot, people don’t respond to incentives, but to great and high ideals. They’d never actually do what I said above.

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    • I think the color picture of him standing on the US flag smugly featured in the NYT just before 9/11 will nip that one in the bud.

      Apparently the student data privacy groups are excitedly distributing this 20 minute video from last week https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/haunted-by-data and it got forwarded to me. I listened and thought that data is not in fact analogous to nuclear waste which is physical and toxic. I also knew that O’Reilly had come up when I looked into Open Data and the e-Government push. He is a cheerleader for what the Un is up to and yet he featured this point of view at his global conference that was in NYC last week. Contrary to what the speaker said, if there is no market or purpose for data, its existence is irrelevant. We continue to have so many who do not get that flowing data, rather than stockpiled, can still be quite toxic if it involves guiding behavior towards stipulated outcomes. Once a stipulated destination has been reached we do not need to keep that info. After all in the Re-imagined Education vision the Powers-that-Be know what Competencies they stipulated. Flow info of where someone is in the progression still allows all the behavioral manipulation to occur.

      O’Reilly knows that. Turns out he is also pushing something called algorithmic regulation and this Guardian feature article is lengthy but revealing on what we are up against. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/20/rise-of-data-death-of-politics-evgeny-morozov-algorithmic-regulation

      Apparently O’Reilly became interested in the work of this man while still a teenager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski and I certainly recognize people who tout the ability of Images and language to create memes. Csik, Howard Gardner, and William Damon wrote a book about cultural memes and their ability to change prevailing norms and drive deliberate evolution. I wrote a post about it several years ago when Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi first came on my radar. Before I knew about GERG or his work with Ervin Laszlo and Bela Banathy around systems and cultural evolution or what Excellence actually means in education.

      People do not understand that with behavioral data once the stipulated ends have been reached, no one needs to keep that previous data. While the progression is occurring the data of primary interest is where is the person in their journey and what experiences seem to be causing what type of changes. How long is such change taking.

      By featuring this speaker and misrepresenting the nature of the problem and the real use of data, people advocate for a solution that makes the behavioral manipulation worse. This is not a purge of the problem and I do not think the speaker’s use of the term Flow, that is a title of Csik’s 1992 book, is a coincidence even though his name is not used.

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      • Never was a fan of O’Reily thanks for cementing that.

        Above you mentioned the Ga. School-Justice conference. We do not have a conference like that here but we do have a vocal groups about the school to prison pipeline. The same groups align themselves with Ravitch, Save Our Schools, Stand, and All Hands Raised, Bats, Opt Out, Rethinking Schools, Teaching for Social Justice. Notice a theme? Here is a link to a presentation on the School Discipline Consensus Project with Council of State Governments Justice Center. Click the School Justice Consensus project link for the ppt. Notice Texas trial, and pbis vision and the use of data monitoring for at risk students.
        http://www.nasponline.org/advocacy/ppi/2013/final.aspx

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        • Did you notice the Innovation Lab Network annual convening next week? There’s the links to competency-based education and the connecting credential website says this is called Qualifications Frameworks in other parts of the world. In the US, calling it that links it all to Chapter 4 of my book where it belongs. Remember Lumina based its DQP in higher ed on Robert Kegan’s work on cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal skills. That same work is the basis for the OECD’s Key Competences work in K-12 and thus PISA.

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        • I finally made it through this broadcast and there truly are some extraordinary statements. http://connectingcredentials.org/summit-recording/ Anthony Carnevale’s body language was also something to watch. Love how Lehrer called him a Labor economist to add weight to his statements. His Marxist background came out from the get go with his initial statement that “those with the least are hurt the most”.

          Auguste clearly called attention to the extent the accreditors are the enforcers of who will be entitled and which programs to get public money. Somehow institutions are conflicted but the accreditors are not just showed me that insiders like former Michigan governor Engler want accreditors to stay empowered and misunderstood. His body language reminded me of Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed.

          Lumina wants to be more than a cash register with a social conscience and lead the social change.

          Did you notice all the references to changing the ‘system’? Change the students and change the economic, social, and political ‘systems’

          Do you agree that governments fail at being in charge “because they are too far from marketplace.” The desired convergence between Left and Right is alive and well and we are the clay to be molded and to foot the bill.

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          • Speaking of changing the system–here is the just released report for “rewriting the Rules of the American Economy” just like yesterday’s speakers called on ‘someone’ to do.

            http://www.rewritetherules.org/

            Remember Joseph Stiglitz is also involved with this global UN/OECD vision that we know the UN has launched with its 2030 Agenda.

          • It really is worth watching while you can. The Governor was keen on pushing competencies. Did you notice how many times they repeated that industry was setting the standards for education and training, er. wait. Those are the same thing now. Even stating that companies are working with education to create curriculum. So much reminded me of the Lifelong Learning book I am still reading.

          • I had to break it up, but it is truly delusional. Between that and the Stiglitz paper, I think I will need to immerse myself in something more real. Maybe fantasy sports leagues?

            Stiglitz kept referring to the economy as a system too. Don’t you just love the insistence that the institution now matters less than the nature of the program. Baloney. So Lumina wants some sort of conductor to decide what is equivalent and then what? An employer may not disagree. From the same program that kept asking how you could compare a coding degree from 2 different schools. Oh, perhaps a job interview with substantive questions. Are those now to be deemed inequitable and off limits?

            Did you notice how many times the Lumina guy kept hyping this as a means to “strengthen our democracy”? Same guy who thinks “generalizable skills and some content knowledge is all anyone needs to be successful in work and life. He forgot the magic elixir of soft skills. I did love that we are at a “point of criticality”. Really? Is this to be as nonsensical as the movie The China Syndrome where the critical core was going to melt all the way to China?

            Did you catch Byron Auguste’s comment that “we need entities that do this collectively [figure out what has changed and how to fix] but are closest to the marketplace.

            Nothing about his statements left me comfortable any of the speakers believed in individual freedom or free enterprise in the traditional sense. They just use regulation to create a market and then want us to believe there is still genuine freedom left, not just disguised control with a different contrived mechanism.

            I thought the woman sounded like a parrot of every power point she had ever listened to, but her emphasis on “applying the concepts they are studying in the real world” is the same as what is being pushed under the Common Core. “We want you to internalize these concepts and learn to act as we wish on them and then we will proclaim the student to be Competent and autonomous.”

            Did you believe anyone hyping that either ACE or accreditation made sure that “academic rigor” was present and that “the quality of the program meets the highest standards.” And no employer in a job interview better dispute that, especially if their workplace does not yet meet the Majority Minority vision of the future.

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