The full quote was Change Producing Levers and it bemoaned their current disassembled status. But that was decades ago before education doctorates became about implementing Marx’s Human Development Theory in the schools and classrooms. And before all that psychology research from the late Soviet Union got rolled into pedagogy as we have discussed several times. And before Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, grounded in Hegel and Uncle Karl’s hope that man could change himself and his values and external conditions through practical activity in the world, got renamed to pitch to parents as student centered or project based learning.
Honestly I was a history major and I have spent the first five decades of my life not giving the disgruntled German revolutionary dreamer much thought. Especially since I wrongfully assumed it was a tired old defunct ideology anyway. But it just kept coming up as I charted what the real Common Core implementation, the one compelled by degree programs and actual definitions and the accreditors and laws and regs no one else seems to be reading, looked like. So I dusted off my Phi Beta Kappa key for inspiration and rubbed it like a charm for good luck, shook the cobwebs out of my non-student brain, and dove into what turns out to be a still vibrant world of Marxist scholars looking for our answers. Especially why I kept seeing references to some unpublished 1844 manuscript that was still supposedly a vibrant vision for the future. The 21st century future.
I started with Gar Alperovitz’s new book that had struck me as fitting a vision of a small “c” communist future. That insight then pulled up economists Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick lecturing and writing away in an inspired way that showed no signs of being a defunct ideology. In fact they have said there are more Marxists today teaching in American colleges and universities than ever. I believe them but it also suggests that our collective guard is down about something that is still a real but unappreciated threat. If educators in higher ed and K-12, especially administrators, are committed to reorganizing our society and economy around Uncle Karl’s belief that:
“In a properly human society, we would find our freedom through our relations with other human beings. A proper human life is one which is lived, at least in part, for the sake of others.”
And no, Karl was not referring to spouse, kids, and friends. But that does read remarkably consistently with what is called Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development and the Universal Love Principle which we encountered in Hong Kong and all through teacher training in the US. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/using-education-to-shut-down-free-choices-and-then-redefining-as-personal-autonomy-orwell-lives/
So lucky me tackled several books by NYU prof Bertell Ollman that were quite enlightening on how important it was to Uncle Karl to provide the Concepts of Understanding that would then filter daily perceptions. Check. We had rather noticed the omnipresence of conceptual frameworks and how the planned assessments are tied to those supplied Enduring Understandings and Understandings of Consequence. And Harvard Project Zero’s CORE–Cognitive Reorganization. So the lineage goes back to how to spark an inner change at the level of the mind and personality. That will then ramp up the motivation to take action to change the world.
Another enlightening prof I tackled this week from London was Jonathan Wolff. His insights may also help explain why Bill Ayers goes running around declaring himself to be a small “c” communist apart from a propensity to be obnoxious. Wolff quoted from The German Ideology where Karl wrote that “communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established or an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”
A quote to keep in mind as education and other degree programs trumpet their purpose of creating Social Change Agents. And with education reforms globally admitting their purpose is wholesale social, political, and economic change. Away from the concept of the individual and the primacy of the rational mind. And before we really dive into our Uncle Karl Scholarship 101 Cliff Notes version dialogue, remember how I have told you several times that the accreditors all over the world answer to UNESCO? That accreditation is actually being used as a driver of cultural and noetic change in higher ed, graduate programs, and K-12 and that the standards tie to what we have identified as the vision of Humanist Marxism we discussed two posts ago?
Well it now turns out UNESCO actually has a division called MOST–Management of Social Transformations–that ties to virtually everything controversial that I have ever written about. Including the Belmont Challenge and International Human Dimensions Programme–IHDP– that Paul Ehrlich has bragged will fundamentally alter human behavior. I mention both of those programs again because they are operational right now with far-reaching visions of global change. Especially to citizens of the world’s only superpower. See the tags on right to find those posts if you have never read them.
Now we come to Princeton political science prof and Sovietologist, Robert Tucker. He wrote a 1961 book called Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. Now Professor Tucker had little use for Karl’s economic vision but he believed that:
“the aspect of Marx’s thought that is most live and relevant to the concerns of men in the contemporary West is the purely utopian aspect, the part relating to the post-revolutionary future…his vision of the future world was, if not scientific, at least rather prophetic of real possibilities. Marx’s concept of communism is more nearly applicable to present-day America, for example, than his concept of capitalism.”
That quote calls for both a deep breath and a sit down and gulp reaction. 1961. Especially as Tucker goes on to make the point that is so critical to the education reforms that commenced all over the West in the 1960s. Prompting outrage from the get go but never accurately perceived. The sought revolution is not military confrontation and it needs no pitchforks. “The world revolution would be the universal act of human self-change.” If that’s not clear enough, Tucker goes on:
“The revolution involved is not a political one but rather a revolution of man’s attitude towards himself and the purposes of his existence, a revolution of values.”
And if that is not clear enough Tucker goes on to say the sought change is “psychological” and “a moral revolution within the self”. This Growth (as in each student in the federally mandated teacher evals) is the “outcome of a gradual process” (like over years of collected data now starting in preschool). If you wonder why the ASCD is pushing the Whole Child as an essential component of the Common Core and why every one with any power over the classroom is decreeing a social and emotional learning focus, we need go no further than Tucker’s insistence that the revolutionary change needed to target each person’s personality. As Tucker wrote graphically: “it is only there, and by the individual’s own moral effort, that the egoism can be undone and the revolutionary ‘change of self’ achieved.”
Now I am not trying to spook you but those passages accurately describe precisely what is being targeted. And now we know for sure why. And for most of us the terms Marxism and Communism are bounded by visions of the Kremlin and Mao and Stalin. We remain dangerously unaware of the real threat to the West from Uncle Karl’s philosophies. And how it can come in and create the desired, revolutionary changes in values, attitudes, and beliefs without notice. And at a psychological level within the student.
The year after Tucker’s book many of leaders in the Behavioral Sciences in the US visited the USSR on an officially sanctioned trip to look into the psychological research being done there. Ralph Tyler and BF Skinner were both on that trip and Skinner kept a diary. And Ralph Tyler came back and basically wrote the legislation that launched Title 1 and the massive federal involvement in US education. And Skinner pushed the operant conditioning potential of education, especially if tied to the computer. And in 1965 federally funded research began to change the nature of the colleges of education to make Behavioral Sciences the focus. Others have written about that BSTEP program and the revolution it controversially ignited.
But not in the context of Tucker’s book about where the real communist, little c, revolution needed to begin.
I will leave you to mull all this over. But I will add that all the economic and social transformations we have encountered in post after post that all seem to be different names for the same vision are all consistent with this little c vision of the economic future and social citizenship.
Oh, one more thing. Robert Tucker turned out to be the father-in-law of Robert English. You know who wrote the 2000 book that gave the award-winning, officially sanctioned story of how Gorbachev’s New Thinking was actually the Marxist-Humanist thinking?
Small world, huh?
An illustration of how this works, from the organizers of the Kaityn Hunt campaign;;
http://www.purpose.com/about-purpose/team/jeremy-heimans/
The Ford Foundation’s Visionaries Award.
The book Bertell Ollman wrote in 1971 that the title quote was taken from on Marx and the Concept of Human Alienation was funded by the Ford Foundation. All that money compounding tax free to finance little c social and economic transformation.
http://www.stopcp.com/
A UK example
Wow, small world indeed, we are dangerously unaware! Paul Burnett wrote “Moving From a Red To A Green Political Economy” in 1956. There is an entire chapter about sustainability. There is a sustainability department on every college campus in the US except maybe a few. The sustainability staff on all the community colleges of Illinois often attend the common core curriculum transition Delphi meetings. They spent a large portion of our district bashing parents. I got the feeling the gas chambers were operational.
Liz,
The evidence I have now makes it quite clear that what UNESCO envisions from its Education for Sustainable Development initiative that began in earnest in 1997 is precisely to get to the small c mindset suitable for transformative change. That will be the next post. I had suspected that but I do not write about what I cannot prove.
Now I can. That’s what I worked on Saturday coming out of an epiphany about what is really going on with those MOOCs. It’s actually to create an online learning community that is throwing off a tremendous amount of data about people and what they value and what it takes to create change.
I took time of from writing but have been reading voraciously the entire time.
Alperovitz focus now is environmental. That’s the excuse for the wholesale change economically and politically.
Paul Burkett and district meeting..sorry
“We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Sounds like dialectical anarchism. What the heck if it exists, let’s annihilate it. (How about starting with the U.N.?)
“The revolution involved is not a political one but rather a revolution of man’s attitude towards himself and the purposes of his existence, a revolution of values.” Wow! So now the role of the school is to instill in kids the purpose of their existence? This reminded me of those six Transdisciplinary themes of the I.B. Curriculum. When I first encountered these questions I wondered ‘what would they be viewing as a correct answer?’
http://www.ibo.org/pyp/curriculum/
America should give the U.N. two weeks to pack their bags, then build a circus on the real estate to memorialize its own stupidity over the last 100 years.
Transdisciplinary in K-12 comes from the DeLors Report from the mid 90s “The Treasure Within” and the Learning to Be, Learning to Live etc and yes it does get put into the IB Learner Profile.
I worked on Transdisciplinary Saturday and will write about that next. UNESCO is based in Paris but their purpose is to take down education in the West.
Don’t forget they are also a partner in ATC21S, the global 21st century skills movement. I have long known what they were pushing but the whys are now loud and clear.
And to Liz’s point this works hand in hand with UNEP.
I just went back and reread the new economics foundation The Great Transition post that talked about a society where there would be an “equal partnership between the public and the public sector” that just reeked of an elite administered society. That was the report that talked about not fully prescribing individual behavior and nudging but not shoving.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/values-and-vocational-creating-citizen-drones-via-education-worldwide/ is the post. It was also based on the 1989 UNESCO vision for post Berlin Wall education globally. That’s where the values and vocational in the title come from.
Now that I have read Tucker’s book and Shoshana Zuboff’s distributed capitalism/support economy vision and others, it’s quite clear to me that Fulton’s County’s conversion charter fits with getting to that Altered Economy and Society and Political Structure with No Use for the Independent Individual that I wrote about in that post.
That also makes sense as the accreditor holding company AdvancED is based in Alpharetta, Georgia in Fulton County. So homebase with all those expensive homes and a belief that people and businesses deliberately moved there to get away from the Inner City pilots this small c vision that UNESCO is pushing.
It also fits with the charter’s use of the term Life Skills and Soft Skills as the point of education along with use of technology. I wrote that post before I had tracked the definition of Life Skills to that WHO report on using Mental Health to change student’s values and personalities.
It would also explain why the Spencer Foundation targeted Fulton’s for one of its Behavioral Sciences grants. And the Harvard Strategic Data Project’s interest in monitoring changes made to Fulton students.
No wonder Ed Week did a feature story when the charter went effective last summer. It is to be the model for other unsuspecting school districts where parents and taxpayers do not think to read the charter. Or recognize it as a binding contract that can just as easily agree to gut academics and interfere with children’s emotions, values, and beliefs. Which is what that charter actually does. Very much in line with UNESCO’s Models of Social Transformation.
Piloting MOST in the suburbs. No wonder the Super feels empowered to be openly malevolent in his dealings with parents and taxpayers. What an expensive power trip.
Interesting stuff. So the Transdisiciplinary tracks back to the DeLors report? I was reading some of that last night. I can’t wait to hear what more you have learned about it. It’s a scary word to me because the people I hear throwing it around generally don’t know what it means, and I like knowing what things mean. “Trans” like a transfiguration that only the anointed are capable of understanding.
When it comes to these longitudinal studies, you think they’re measuring these soft/life skills? I was also wondering, say Westat comes into a school to do the longitudinal study—does the principal, teachers, ever look at the questions that are being asked? Could a parent sit down with the child as they answered the questions? I’m assuming that they wouldn’t advertise that, say, the longitudinal study is being administered in April and if parents have any objections that they should let the school know. I, for one, would love to know exactly what questions are being asked.
For one, I’d like to know if it’s the same test for everyone or if there are different rabbit holes the test takes you down depending on your answers to each question?
Desuetude,
I think it is the latter. There is some language about being able to identify barriers to changing values, attitudes, and beliefs and the coming up with a plan to surmount.
is a youtube of the kind of behavioral info these videogames are creating. Listen and the speaker says 60,000 data points being tracked. Daphne Koller in her TED talk on youTube on what is really being thrown out by these MOOCs says something similar.
These are a tremendous creator of Behavioral Data about change and reactions to feedback. She is an AI prof. I think what constitutes computer “thinking” is actually responding to the Big Data in preprogrammed ways. I am not a computer person but I know a few people who really understand computers and they tell me computers can only respond to instructions and rules created for them. We are providing that info.
The DeLors report does not say it is transdisciplinary. The UNESCO reports I have explaining Transdisciplinary and its link to the IHDP 2011 report on using education to reorient society globally now refer to the Delors report as consistent with the Transdisciplinary transformation plans.
If you really want to feel sickened by this agenda locate the UNESCO Faure report from 1972. For years that has been kept under lock and key, now it is available to download. Probably because it remains relevant to current transformation plans and needed to be easily obtained from officials anywhere in the world. Six months ago it was not available.
The PBIS materials I have make it clear that the continuous improvement is affective-values, attitudes, and beliefs and feelings. That is coming in under a broad reading of what is the mandate under federal disabilities laws. I get those announcements and saw the change in Response to Intervention last April. Horror that such a change could be made without genuine notice was one of the reasons I started the blog. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/how-social-and-emotional-learning-as-the-primary-focus-is-coming-in-all-the-windows/ is the old post explaining that.
The Riot Games behaviorist team video was interesting. Statistically, the one point that jumped out at me is that there are 1 Billion hours of play time per month logged on the site.
I would have never thought they would have simply come up with the idea of having a behavioral team to promote good behavior during gaming, but they did. It makes me think that someone’s twisting their arm as well.
I could picture a classroom of kids with iPods rating each other’s behavior at various points in the day and a whole menu of rewards and punishments being part of a rating system. Pressure to conform, bricks in the wall, that’s the name of the game.
Have you ever read any of my Facing History posts? Which I found to be a highly duplicitous program that basically teaching an erroneous understanding of what led to the Holocaust among other failings. The host of that video Justin Reich was previously in a leadership position for Facing History.
And the Berkman Center that put that on also has the anthropologist Mica Pollock on staff. The one who also is involved with Michael Cole’s CHAT work in San Diego. She was the prof who recommended that the teachers be taught that the civil rights laws do not allow anything that causes unequal outcomes until the civil rights laws could actually be rewritten.
Seems like everyone wants Radical Social Change. They basically are giving away the game in order to get all the behavioral data from what changes people’s skills and reactions and what feedback works. Something is highly profitable and it has to be the generated data. After all they mentioned million dollar prizes being put up.
Interesting idea—and with 1 billion game hours logged each month, from around the world, that’s a load of data.
I’ll have to look into those Facing History posts.
Learning to Be—I found it. The fact that it comes with a Preamble is scary enough. I’ll check out some sections. “The education of modern man” I think he means the ‘contol’ of modern man is a challenge.
The UN has entirely too much time on their hands, too many reports. When Frank Rizzo was going to run again for mayor later in his life (I guess sometime in the late 80’s or 90’s) he told people that he’d give the Parking Authority brooms so that they could clean the streets, i.e. actually do something useful instead of harassing citizens with tickets. Something similar should be done with the UN.
I am not sure that its the same but my daughter in 8th took a NAEP test in april and i was not allowed to see it, but assurex it was nothibg and that the data was ” very safe”. They did take different tests, some got calculators some did not.
The UN must go. What a buncha creepers. Watch Sue pimental video see the unesco logo in the title sequence and at the end. She is cheif writer of spooky commie core with creepy clown coleman.
We will let them perform only in the third ring of rhe circus as they lack talent of any kind,
But maybe they can ride donkeys in a sustainable circle or something like that with linda darling and ayers to pay off their debt to america for their treason.
Right on, Madmommy, right on.
This isn’t exactly just for just this post, but it’s a video about how a US teacher could be fired for telling kids they have fifth amendment rights not to answer questions to assess their progress on Social and Emotional Learning.
I don’t know if those rights legally apply to kids or not, but it seems like a good preparation for adulthood to get them used to asserting them as needed. But apparently that idea is not a part of Common Core.
As you see I read only the finest websites: http://gawker.com/teacher-in-trouble-for-telling-kids-they-can-skip-drug-510084832?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_twitter&utm_source=gawker_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
Interesting case. The fact that another teacher ratted him out is terrible. That “proprietary business information” argument is probably used to conceal a lot of mischief. Let’s wait and see how this plays out. Batavia, Illinois.
I just found this symposium here at Mary Grabar’s site and watched it yesterday. Its quite eye-opening for those who may be new to the ed wars world and eye-opening still even if one has been studying this issue for many years. A great panel with quite a few insightful perspectives.
http://www.dissidentprof.com/
Thanks for posting that Loran.
It is heartbreaking to know what is actually happening on so many campuses now. I call it the cultivating a worldview instead of transmitting knowledge template. It is strong at some of the most famous schools but it can be hard to get anyone to think beyond the US News ranking. One of my kids watched the antics at Swarthmore recently and was upset she and her friend had looked at it.
My insights I am going to write about next on Transdisciplinary and how it really means Future Studies grew out of an announcement last week from another well known college. Tomorrow.
It’s that time of year. Dance recitals to go to for me!
No I am not the one dancing. Last time I did tap “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth” was the song. Many years ago.
I’ve got that song on my hard disk. My grandkids love it. I try as much as I can to keep them historically engaged in and aware of things that are not part of their generation and personal experience. So many kids/youth I see today are trapped in the present, and can see and enjoy nothing beyond the day they were born, and have no historical consciousness or perspective.
Have you read “10 Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child” by Anthony Esolen yet?
Outstanding.
That was a great panel. Radical Math? Hoochie-Mamma! That’ll fit right in with Tranny lesson design. Amazing information. However, the Q&A section was among the worse I’d ever seen. Monologue after monologue. They should have simply given each panelist 10 extra minutes.
Here is a nice overview of the Common Core battle going on http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/blogs/beginning-common-cores-trouble_731923.html?page=1
I would add there are more reasons than this but then I am focused on what the actual implementation looks like and what the real expressed intentions are.
I would also add that the international assessments like PISA and TIMSS are tied to social justice and equity positions and do not test knowledge. They were expressly created to drive countries towards UNESCO’s vision of education as changing people’s value systems and attitudes and limiting factual knowledge.
My kids think today is a Mom day and I have found the mother lode of what is going on globally. Like most of my key finds, inadvertantly while following up on an inconsistencies. So I amy not write today but we have stunners lined up for weeks to come. Just pouring out like mice from flooding catacombs.
That ‘cultivating a worldview instead of transmitting knowledge template’ was right on the money. I’m looking forward to what you have in store. I check out the article.
Bruce Thornton’s points about the rapid expansion of Universities in the postwar period leading to the problems in higher education, viz. declining standards—both in the students and faculties—and his NBA analogy, were very interesting. The expanding under-prepared, under-qualified faculty produced a vacuum that was filled with politics. Unable to teach a subject to any substantial depth, they fill it the course time with politics. I don’t watch network or cable news anymore but I can remember this ‘expert’, Dr. Marc L. Hill on Fox (from Temple)—a bonafide bs artist masquerading as a profound thinker. I guess that’s par for the course.
Are u in Phila? I am
Things are down the rabbit hole here on all fronts
I’m from Philadelphia and I still spend a considerable amount of time there. I agree with your assessment. I fortunately didn’t go to the public schools there. In the early 1960’s, I’ve been told, it was still a good system—complete with outstanding orchestras and the like. Then came ‘school-based management’ and things deteriorated. Standards dropped. A teacher friend of mine told me, in the 90’s, that when kids went of field trips it was the teacher’s responsibility to check to see that the bus driver had a drivers license. Apparently the drivers would give the keys to their buddies to cover a trip here and there. And the Parking Authority—good grief! Now they have ‘Kiosks.’ The first time I encountered a kiosk I thought I had been transported to someplace like Serbia. I am very grateful for the development of the internet marketplace. There’s lot of great history in Philadelphia and I respect that, but in recent decades, a lot of foolish management.
My kids go to private, but I know that some of the suburban schools WERE at least excellant. Dear Lord you should see Springside, so enraptured by globalism it is hardley recognizable!, my daughter wanted to switch because her friend goes there and I have to say, super nice people but really through the looking glass, my alum friends are too stuck on tradition to notice. they are greening themselves on their way to the cricket club, hilarious, well not really… so Public may even be a bit behind the privates here in Phila, PennCharter, ALL the Friends schools, Even the Private Catholics have not been spared. of course, with nary a nod to a parent about it.
waddawedo?
This video about first-grade ELA in Utah is just perverted. Well the curriculum is perverted, not the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rGph7QHzmo8
I’m not sure that it’s possible to do enough at-home remediation to correct for this. Fortunately someone got hold of this material and made it available to Utah parents.
Thanks David. I think I posted that on an earlier thread.
Emotion words. Reminds me that I have just been told by one of the leading game theorists that is a frequent keynote speaker at events like SXSWed and ISTE that we can get to a sustainable engagement economy in the future through gaming and positive emotions.
She is also calling Robert Torres’ Quest to Learn charter school an example of Alternative Reality Gaming. Taking the rules that make for good gaming and applying to real life. This idea of it being realistic to make the real world like virtual worlds and that this is a stealth means to accomplish the UN’s goals in its Millenium Project makes me feel like we are truly down the rabbit hole with a capricious Red Queen in charge.
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