The final Chapter of that 1989 New World New Mind book we have talked about in the last two posts moved on to where all the radical education reform visions go eventually if you know where to look. That new vision of the future with a transformed society and economy. We need to always understand that if the future vision is anathema or likely to lead to unappreciated consequences that may well be tragic, we need to know that up front while the education pathway for these transformations is being put in place. The chapter was called “Changing the World Around Us” and pointed out that “people’s ideas are not as fixed as commonly thought–that in fact much is known about how to change them systematically.”
Which is precisely what the education reforms in the 90s known as Outcomes Based-Education and Whole Language set out to do. Another fascinating point from more than 20 years ago is the statement that “Television, of course, is one of the most important tools for developing new minds that society possesses.” Now that certainly explains an awful lot of series plotlines, doesn’t it?
Ehrlich and Ornstein point out that “the media, with minimal effort, could do a great deal to promote new-mindedness.” Boy did they ever step up to that plate. Greatly enjoying their inclusion among the “people who have leverage in our society” who would be on the list where “We must expose leaders of society to notions that are not now current.” I would say they all bit since virtually every troubling figure I have written about in recent months seems to be doing keynote speech after conference headliner after traipsing to DC or up to Boston to meet with Project Zero. Busy times as we reach the end game of what was laid out in 1989 as:
“Obviously, we need to make new kinds of thinking and new ways of handling our problems immediately available to society’s decision makers. And while changing the form and content of education would be a major step toward conscious evolution, much has to be done outside the schools as well.”
Which did happen. Society’s decision makers from their positions at foundations and think tanks and the UN and OECD and Big Business and ambitious politicians at every level have excitedly answered that call and are busily planning that future in books most of us have not read, in commissions we were not asked to join, in initiatives we have never heard of, and at conferences we have not been invited to. But it is no theory that there is a massive coordinated effort going on at our expense with a common consistent vision that involves our future and it has been in motion for about 25 years now. Let’s take a look at it since it involves no longer permitting the “pursuit of material self-gain” and an insistence a global self-appointed elite will create new systems of governance on our behalf with new “rules, arrangements and institutions that enable us to live well together: minimising destructive conflict and division in society.”
When I read the language in the 2010 National Education Technology Plan about 21st Century Competencies being the real goal, it was not news to me but it reminded me that I had better take a look again at what else the OECD was pushing. I knew they had issued Guidelines in March 2013 declaring that everyone’s subjective well-being was now their concern. How’s that for an all encompassing intrusive edict to justify a hoped-for lifetime of a tax-free salary and then pension? Was there a relationship between this Competencies/ Digital Learning push and the Subjective Well-being Initiative? Well of course. “Everything within the State, Nothing Outside the State, Nothing Beyond the State” as the saying with an unfortunate history goes. The language I quoted in the title and last paragraph came from this April 2013 OECD report. http://www.oecd.org/site/oecdgfd/Session%203.1%20-%20GFD%20Background%20Paper.pdf
This intrusive juggernaut coming out of both the UN and the OECD really tracks back to the Human Development Review reports that started in 1991 just as Ehrlich would have hoped. Over time what was sought just got bigger until now we get NGOs insisting they get to monitor and respond to whether “everyone’s relational and subjective needs are being and will be met” and “what governance in the 21st Century must consist of.” All that personal ed data and visualization will really come in handy when targeting personal “perceptions and aspirations” in order to gain a “cohesive society” is what is sought.
You can read that troubling 19 page report. Please note that the same US National Academy of Sciences now pimping 21st Century Skills and that Soviet pedagogy-inspired Education for Life and Work report has already quietly assembled a panel on Subjective Well-being as well. Another thing we are paying for but we are not invited to. Let me now add the Meeting of the Minds in Toronto in September to the list. 350 invites and they forgot us. http://cityminded.org/events/toronto/agenda But we all have minds as well. Are we insufficiently newminded to qualify for the event? This annual get together to plan all of our futures without our consent around the concept of sustainable cities and regions started in 2007. We would all love to hear the “Economic Development Case for Urban Social Equity” and how universities and hospitals can become “anchor institutions” controlling the economy of an entire area. Or listen to the EPA official announcing the US is “re-inventing commerce as we know it, pivoting from a consumption model to something more sustainable.” As both the taxpayers paying his salary and the consumers about to be shafted can’t we listen too?
I am also intrigued by the “Dumb Phones, Smart Kids: The Coming Revolution of Citizen Engagement” program since that does seem to put an unacknowledged real purpose on all the Bring a Mobile Device to School hype. Apparently “Present and future generations will have unprecedented leverage with youth ‘voice’ in such areas as mobilization of demand, improvement of services, participatory engagement and accountability in local government.” Will the youth be able to tweet when their relational and subjective needs are not being sufficiently met?
Two of the listed speakers at the conference though are involved with pluralist commonwealth visions for our futures that just happened to come my way last week. These planners all seem to love that commonwealth phrase every bit as much as Harry Boyte and now the White House Office of Public Engagement. Lots of commonality of what the future Good Society is supposed to be in places we would not be likely to look at so let me give this a boost. In July 2013 PolicyLink and the Center for American Progress released the book All-In Nation: An America that Works for All http://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/AllInNation-1.pdf with a government-centered/redistribution on steroids vision that will likely imperil almost everyone’s prosperity if it goes forward.
In addition we have a special journal issue called The Good Society laying out the commonwealth vision for the future. It did recognize that education is how we get there and that the US Constitution would need to be jettisoned or amended heavily and reenvisioned. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.5325/goodsociety.22.1.0074.pdf?acceptTC=true lays out how we get to a “Property-Owning Democracy” just as soon as a majority of voters will it apparently. The contribution from the Democracy Collaborative (which also got invited to speak in Toronto) http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.5325/goodsociety.22.1.0001.pdf is called “The Possibility of the Pluralist Commonwealth and a Community-Sustaining Economy.”
All the papers are in a similar vein. Public ownership and a state-directed economy and a reimagined workplace can be made to work in the 21st Century if we simply build the right Mindsets and personal perceptions and values through our schools. There is one more book that is being repeatedly cited as the vision for the future that goes along with these educaion reforms. Written by a sociology prof admirer of both Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren and all their environmental economics work. Publishing her (by Pearson’s Penguin Group of course) basically gets their past and current visions but it appears to be a new voice. Called Plenitude: the new economics of true wealth it sees us all swapping used clothes in the future and work sharing and rebuilding a face-to-face, localized, self-sufficiency economy.
Now none of us can debate what we do not know about and apparently only “society’s leaders” are supposed to be the decision makers in this future. No wonder there is so little knowledge in this Competencies/ digital learning vision. No wonder information on emotions and perceptions and motivations is so vital to the vision of future education. These visions of the transformed future that are sitting on unlikely assumptions about changing human nature are literally joined at the hip to the actual planned education reforms galloping into classrooms and schools that start classes tomorrow or in a few weeks at the latest.
Now one of the expressions that gets used all the time to sell this new vision for learning and education is to quit thinking in terms of silos. Well that goes both ways. We parents and taxpayers and believers in individualism and knowers of what actually creates mass prosperity and what dooms it need to start peering into the silos of future plans.
I for one just do not have the disposition to merely be among the ‘governed’ in the 21st or any century.
When they brought sustainable development to my town they first took private property in the center of town for a gazebo cliche town square and a propaganda kiosk!
Buildings and businesses began to close and be sold and left empty. Land banking. A hookah lounge showed up. One apt rental mogul now ownd tge entire center of town. We have 4 used clothibg stores. We have an art cooperative and a tatoo parlor.
Gone is the ferrier, toy store, 3 antique zhops modern furniture store and decorator stores in comes a fortune teller. Hair salons which switch owners every 9
months as do restaurants. Shifty call centers in storefronts and all above store business space turned to apartments. 2008 the town made a resolution to follow a regional mpo and follow SD and smadt growth. There are visibly more changes and the entire town either fell for revitalization s am or went and played golf. Our Catholic school was closed andNow they want our little adorable public school to be a charter. We are told if school does not take fed and state money they are fibed and taxes must be raised. The zoning was changed with a bait and switch and the developer/ apt rental mogul conveniently owns most of the buildibgs in fown
where all the undesirable amature retail is plunked ( with victim group pervayors) collecting grants and paying no taxes.
The new atitudes desired by common core are despair and anger and the new worldviews are community service and how to lie and scam people for the community with their money.
Common core is just a dialectic step for taking power from localities. Just like smart growth and the umbrella sustaina le development. It is any thibg that furthers a plank or progress towRd UN utopian totalitarianism.
Google the kgb documentary and watch Castro tell us what they
seek. And who propped him up.
Sorry in advance for typos on iphone
mad mommy- look at the speakers at the Meeting of the Minds conference. Cisco and Big Blue are all over this vision.
In fact before I wrote the piece this morning I went back to doublecheck that I was right that Stanley Litow was involved in the awful Pathways to Prosperity report. So the idea of Career Pathways is centered around this regional public sector dominant economy. Here’s a link to it all being part of this new view of Economic Development.http://citizenibm.com/2012/12/new-york%E2%80%99s-pathway-to-prosperity.html
You cannot imagine how many doors opened to me when I realized the Career Pathways/merging of all students into a combined academic and vocational track was what P to P was pushing. In fact that’s where I originally encountered the OECD’s Competencies work and the use of Qualifications Frameworks globally to also use Competency to try to control workplaces. They are not popular outside of govt agencies and the BBC but it is a mean of turning political insiders into the meddling decision makers for everyone they seem determined to be. All at our expense.
I just wonder what IBM’s going to do with all these people they are giving AAS degrees to, who they say are “first in line” for entry level positions with IBM.
Are they going to quietly drop this program just before that first class is about to fill out job applications? It has the appearance of putting their money where their mouth is, but they’re probably getting all sorts of grants and political favors for this, and the first class is now rising 10th graders it seems, so there are several years left before they have to worry.
David-
That question has already come up and the answer was that the P Tech students should not have really assumed that this credential would get them a job at IBM. It is really just a part of the vocational for all push that Big Blue has also released a report pushing. http://www.civicenterprises.net/MediaLibrary/Docs/Enterprising%20Pathways%20CTE%20Final%202012.pdf
Do you remember the post last summer where I talked about the National Academy of Sciences report called Computing for Sustainability? It had a vision of know-nothing citizens who would be primed by the media on useful issues that the decision makers wanted the “citizens” to be alarmed about. Big Blue was involved with that report too. Remember too that Gerstner, their CEO at the time, was all over the 90s version of what I call Radical Ed Reform because that’s what the insiders then called it.
Also a different paper from the same journal wants to declare that every city over a certain population threshold has a right to continued existence.
So the Curley effect and machine politics and absurd pensions run the productive sector away but this Regional Equity movement insists we must all maintain Detroit and Cleveland no matter what.
We are going to have to deal with these plans for using urban areas globally to control everything democratically through a voting majority. The disdain for the votes the US system gives to small states is vicious. About as bad as the 2nd Amendment as an obstacle that must be maneuvered around.
http://www.cincinnatichamber.com/events/eventdetail.aspx?EventCode=C1306PRTM3#.Ugfh43-kO8o is a similar program Litow is doing in Cincinnati. Nice business model.
Dispositions & Juggernautism
Disposition – predominant tendency of one’s spirits and mental outlook to act in a specified way
Juggernaut – merciless destructive and unstoppable force
I have noticed the “juggernaut” behaviors in how Early Childhood Education is being promoted. It’s very troubling when a lot of experts in the field of ECE are ignored and excluded from policies and debates.
This juggernatism Robin mentions is not only troubling — it is very revealing. This coercive means of transforming society and in fact subverting the natural evolutionary process of social change certainly signals some deep agendas at stake.
I’m only briefly making a comment because I’m due elsewhere for the next hours, but I just could not help myself to express how gladdened I am to see Robin say:
*** “I for one just do not have the disposition to merely be among the ‘governed’ in the 21st or any century.”
I see that “disposition” is the word that fits my concern at the moment. It relates to the NETP report concluding that: “Many of the failings of our education system stem from our failure to engage the hearts and minds of students.”
So, they’re after hearts and minds?
John Holt who helped propel the home education movement in the 70s, 80s, said”:
*** “Today, freedom has different enemies. It must be fought for in different ways. It will take very different qualities of mind and heart to save it.”
I will explain later what fears of totalitarianism Holt was struggling with. But for now, this statement by Robin about “dispositions” does, I think, speak to the “different qualities of mind and heart” needed to save freedom.
What Tunya says… I second. Thanks Robin! socialism = gangsterism = slavery
Consider contacting Ron, Robin. He’s a longtime legal researcher and author who knows full well… the score. Moreover, he’s determined to do something about it… by going directly… to the Supreme Courts… in ALL 50 states [simultaneously]. And from what I can tell… his legal foundation – contained within the 16th Amendment itself – has some real teeth to it… which cannot be… so easily dismissed/ignored.
http://216.240.133.177/archives32/Stadtmiller/2013/08/
Listen to him describe this weekend’s conference that was discussed on August 5th, hours 1 and 2.
Perhaps you… or someone you know… would like to learn more… even assist in this effort.
http://newpeopleorder.com
The New People Order
P.S. – Also, I found this today: http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_708.pdf
http://www.oecd.org/site/oecdgfd/Session%203.1%20-%20GFD%20Background%20Paper.pdf
Its interesting how, in so many cases, you don’t have to read very far before you encounter the unalloyed theoretical Marxism or another era, on the rocks, shaken, not stirred:
“In his seminal work on the transformation of economies and societies Karl Polanyi explains how the development of the market economy divides the economic and social systems into two different spheres, where the economic sphere and its motives dominate the social sphere (Polanyi, 1944). He explains the process of the commodification of labour and the vulnerabilities that this creates for workers. In doing so Polanyi provided a framework for understanding of the emergence of the modern welfare state that is still relevant today for understanding rapidly developing societies.”
What is the fundamental purpose of the state?
“From this perspective the welfare state constitutes more than the provision of social policy, it goes to the heart of the historical construction of the identity of the state and is a fundamental element of the social contract between individuals and the state.”
As I read this, what its saying is that the purpose of the welfare state goes well beyond the provision of material necessities to those in need to the very center of the underlying concept of government, or, that is to say, the fundamental meaning and purpose of the state is the provision of human well-being – the state as active caregiver less protector and guarantor of individual unalienable rights through which we may take care of ourselves and each other independent of most state action and activity — and its associated attached strings.
Sorry, that last post was mine, but no name.
http://cityminded.org/events/toronto/sponsors
A list of the usual suspects is always instructive. What’s interesting here is not just the usual non-profits and foundations, but the big-name rent-seekers subsidizing this watermelon festival. Toyota’s claim of operating under a “global earth charter” is particular striking, due to the similarity in terminology to Gorbachev’s initiative of the same name, the “Earth Charter,” which was connected to his Green Cross International movement, begun as the rubble of the Berlin Wall was being cleared away and the sickle and hammer gave way to tree frogs and whales.
One has to follow the money, but one must never forget to also follow the ideas.
So glad you put that up. Tremendous amount of cronyism to this vision. The book explains it is not accidental and where the vision was coming from. I was working on footnotes today. Making me reread some of the later chapters. Somehow the Green Arm of Toyota is just not going to get the hundreds of thousands of miles their V-8s can get with regular oil changes.
This morning when I was following up on a troubling document on using values reeducation to really get that MH vision of the future we encountered in the Robert Tucker and then the Richard Falk World Order Models Project, I cam across this GC 2002 statement from Gorby and Maurice Strong. http://www.gcint.org/sites/default/files/files/Earth_Dialogue_2002_Lyon_SynthesisReport.pdf
Perhaps we should start referring to the official story we got in the West as the Myths of ’89 and’91. This is not news to me as I have implied but the weight of evidence is huge now.
Forgive me for being very dubious regarding claims that a shady coven of “international bankers” are behind the serious economic and political problems we now face.
Not that all international bankers are angels, but of much more concern to me is the entrenched, permanent incumbent political class, the countless nameless, faceless bureaucrats swarming throughout the administrative agencies of U.S., U.K., and EU, and the leftist intellectual elites comprising much of academia, the foundations, the UN, its agencies, and the many NGOs associated with it, and the mainstream news media.
This comprises what Andrew Codevilla has called “the ruling class,” (not a “financial class” per se but one that definitely seeks to control and determine the nature of human economic life) and represents with or without “international bankers,” the nucleus of our coming THX1138 world.
There is no tiny cabal of conspirators running the show, like the Wizard of Oz, behind a curtain. Indeed, much of it, as Robin has shown so well, is out in the open if one is willing to do a lot of reading and research. It really isn’t that hidden. Our problem is the Left and the “vision of the anointed,” Not old Mr. Potter (though he may have sold out to sustainable development as well).
I am not sure where the international bankers reference came from although I do find it interesting JP Morgan Chase funds the Global Cities Initiative and Citigroup Citistates. http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Urban-Land-Institute-Citistates-Group-112189.S.138786938
I want to go to a conference at the Bellagio retreat of the Rock Foundation. Doesn’t that seem more fun than Toronto?
But yeah this planning all of our futures around urban areas and their needs to be subsidized and planned for is quite the big business these days.
The reference was from the post by Lark In Texas above. I’m more than a bit suspicious of conspiracy-like theories in which international bankers, or any single cabal, are singled out as the center of everything.
Not saying that all people such as this are not a part of aspects of various parts of these overall trends.
The only time I theorize is in the privacy of my own mind when I am trying to figure out the connection among known facts.
We are dealing here with power and money and the ability to use the coercive powers of government to live at someone else’s expense or have a regulator protect you from potential competition. I have too much open declarations and confessions to speculate. Just not my nature. There are elements of this story I ignored through at least 5 provable passes because it was not where I wanted to go or it was too much of a challenge to what I wanted to continue to believe about the world.
It’s one reason I put the book manuscript aside and started the blog. The story had become so huge that getting people used to the idea seemed wise. I had no idea that the SEL and other elements would be so graphic.
http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/uploads/files/72e71aca-93a6-40f6-8233-66a784f62d8e-participants.pdf
is the list of who did get to go to Bellagio. Some interesting names including the head of IPCC. The real reason for the bogus models is this desired planning/ Ok but it’s a fair speculation especially with the head of Brookings Regional Equity, Bruce Katz, also there. Now going by Metrpolitansim.
And former ATL mayor Shirley Franklin makes it further clear that ATL is considered to be a prime mover in this area just behind Portland, Oregon and the Twin Cities.
Also Policy Link’s head is there. The co-sponsors of the All-In Nation who are also speaking at Meeting of the Minds.
I read part of the All-in Nation booklet last night. Its classic Open Society Institute stuff that reads, for the most part, like one extended Obama campaign speech.
Long on lofty-sounding pabulum and short on details. What does come through quite well is that the vision here is for a thoroughly state-directed socialist welfare state that encompasses and directs pretty much all aspects of human life and sees the country (“all-in nation”) as an organic collective in which everyone’s business is everyone else’s business and all aspects of life are the state’s concern.
The well-being ideology is really scary. This makes our thought patterns, attitudes, and whether we’re all happy and fulfilled (pull out your Maslowian needs pyramid) the business of the state and its school system.
http://www.capitalinstitute.org/forum/moneyandwealth/capital-forum-reducing-wealth-gap#.Uguhtn-kO8q is the link of all this to George. It is through Juliet Schor but you have former execs for OSI now pushing this and this vision. As I am about to explain in the next post, this common good orientation requires constant administration that creates the class of administrators and those connected to them who make out like bandits.
It’s actually a similar vision to feudalism but no knights or moats and much better plumbing. The rule of a self-appointed elite over everyone else is there. And both Juliet Schor and Herman Daly who I have written about as well see a return to a self-sufficiency economy. In the name of power, let’s blow up everything is what it looks like with everyone pushing it trying to get grants or taxpayer funded payroll gigs or consulting contracts or the ability to live off of untaxed, compounding foundation assets determined to drive social change. And then pay well enough to try to insulate the prime movers from the ill effects.
Maybe I’m too sanguine, but I read the first bit of All-in Nation and it just struck me as a gimme request from people of color. Benefits to people of color seemed to be the constant topic, and the authors state they are people of color. Presumably it’s written for their fellow people of color. They were pretty shameless about the racial aspect of their agenda.
So I said “so what else is new?” and moved on to other reading. There have always been big-government and redistribution advocacy groups for people of color or specific colors. The formulation of this as “all living together” is not new either. SCOTUS Justice Thurgood Marshall bitterly said in his dissent to Milliken v. Bradley
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0418_0717_ZD2.html
“Our Nation, I fear, will be ill-served by the Court’s refusal to remedy separate and unequal education, for unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.”
This by the way was a very important case. In the 1970’s, about 20 years after Brown v. Board of Education that the libs always talk about and even teach in our social studies classes, the SCOTUS reversed a bit and said that districts are not responsible for remedying conditions outside their boundaries. So you can have a white district and a black district, and Brown does NOT allow government to step in and bus students from one district to another.
Isn’t it pretty dishonest for schools to teach Brown v. Board but not the more recent and controlling Milliken v. Bradley? (I learned about Milliken from one of the other links, where the lefties say it’s a big problem!)
I remember I was in school in the late 60’s / early 70’s and for a while there, there was talk that students might be bused from my good high school down into the inner city. Then that nonsense stopped, I guess because of Millken.
David-The legal link to this post on restructuring constitutionally mentions it in part to get that Milliken dream. It is definitely still an obsession. As are metro-wide school districts.
I wouldn’t dispute your characterization of that report but an insistence of an equal outcome for all groups are key drivers of all these plans. That’s why I mentioned the co-pusher was at both the Citistates Bellagio conference and speaking at the Meeting of the Minds. It is consistent with why Van Jones said he was green and what Project 21 is all about. A big part of the justification for Statism in the 21st century beyond necessary for AGW is necessary to achieve equality of opportunity for all groups. That means equity of outcomes.
Remember the higher ed AACU paper that were are moving to requiring equity in credentials? The only way to do that is to gut academics which Gee says is the whole idea.
Gee and his fellow sociocultural radicals who are pulling all the levers now say “the focus of education, we argue, should be on social practices and their connections across various social and cultural sites and institutions.”
Later he lays out what I can tell you fits with the required CC classroom.
“The practices of a Discourse–like practices of law school–contain in their forms of public interaction the ‘mentalities’ that learners are meant to internalize. Immersion in such practices–learning inside the procedures, rather than overly about them–ensures that a learner takes on perspectives, adopts a worldview, accepts a set of core values, and masters an identity without a great deal of critical and reflective awareness about these matters, or indeed about the Discourse itself.”
The activity, psychologized classroom changes who the student is basically at an unconscious level. The conscious part would be attacking current troubling beliefs or values or attitudes in the way of the desired worldview.”
Remember Growth is the measure of an effective teacher and it’s not genuine knowledge. Gee spilled the beans graphically on that too.