The original title for this post on the admissions about Psychological Governance (PG) and its declared ties to ‘standards-based’ education reforms and ‘competency frameworks’ was going to be “Shaping Citizen Identity and Social Practice so that Governance is Inside-Out, not a Building”. That gets at the function nicely and what must be, and is being, changed by law and governmental edicts as a matter of public policy. It’s also an aim that has been lied about repeatedly over the years in a most coordinated manner by people with ties to public policy think tanks and the philanthropies that fund them. I don’t think any of this is coincidental as I will explain. As I was outlining this post, however, the admissions about what neuroeducation and PG are were even more explicit than I remembered. Plus, the Hewlett Foundation, which has been heavily involved with education reforms via its Deeper Learning Initiative to prescribe the conceptual frameworks to be internalized within each students’ minds (the micro level of reforms), moved forward in December 2020 to the needed shifts at a more macro-level in what it is calling its Economy and Society Grantmaking Initiative that seek to explicitly move beyond ‘Neoliberalism’ to get to a ‘Fairer Tomorrow’ as the our old instigator-in-chief the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences is calling it.
We are going to deal with the micro-level today, although I have tracked down, downloaded, and read all the cited macro reforms that apparently can now be put in place via higher ed and the Academy because the K-12 learning standards aligned to neural pathways are fully in place. Let’s start off with the definitions of Neuroliberalism and PG contained in the 2017 Psychological Governance and Public Policy: Governing the mind, brain and behavior. They are essentially the Goal and the envisioned Tool of Choice.
Neoroliberalism is a vision to change the contents of people’s heads using education, cognitive restructuring and behavioural exercises…[to get to] a more inclusive and emancipatory politics. Psychological Governance are interventions targeted at the interface of conscious and non-conscious thought and action, connecting emotional response and rational deliberation…The exercise of psychological governance is a form of regulation of the social good through targeting the minds of individuals as a means of changing their behaviour…with a view to normalizing ‘an interrelated set of psycho-emotional’ attributes, dispositions, attitudes and behaviours associated with emotional regulation/intelligence/literacy, resilience, stoicism, optimism, character, hope, aspiration and community-mindedness…
I was revisiting my ISC posts from the spring of 2018 when I was working on the nexus of the think tanks and their seemingly organized deceit around education over the weekend. I came across the advocacy for instilled Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (the Reflective System!) within the mind of each student and the accompanying quote about how what air is to the lungs and blood is to the heart, experience is to the brain. I guess the author of the analogy wanted to remind readers that the brain is a physiological organ of the body with a purpose, but, in my mind, pumping blood and breathing air don’t change how the heart and lungs function. Experience, though, changes the brain at a physiological–predictable and observable–level and that universal reality of being a human being is precisely what standards-based reforms and competency frameworks have always been intended to quietly manipulate. That manipulation embodies a new vision for “an understanding, empathetic citizenship [grounded] in a ‘universal’ dimension of human experience and identity.”
That’s why john a. powell in Racing to Justice wants to hype racism in the US as a reason to target students at the level of their automatic decision-making systems. It’s why the 2020 Behavioral Insights book from MIT argues for a vision of education that recognizes “there are many environments that individuals struggle to change on their own, indicating a change in politics or policy is needed…to gain a healthy democracy and civic agency.” Sounds like just the thing Hewlett now wants to fund under its Moral Economy or Law and Political Economy Initiatives, doesn’t it? Getting back to our micro-level discussion though, that sought civic agency needs “the use of behavioral insights can actually help build that agency.” Here’s the next paragraph on how–
At the most basic level, behavioral insights can be used to nudge people to take part in civic activities in the first place. Although this nudge may be operating on the Automatic System, the goal is to make sure that someone takes part in in an activity that engages their Reflective System [where it gets to use the instilled Fuzzy Concept Map]. Then, behavioral insights can be used to design better deliberative mechanisms. Many of these activities take place in groups, but behavioral science shows that groups are vulnerable to issues like group polarization, availability cascades, and self-censorship. We can’t just assume that good reasoning prevails in deliberative settings–but evidence-based design makes it more likely.
Both of these books insist that this nudging and the behavioral insights work is done in “full public view,” that there is no “conspiracy to govern through expert knowledge on the mind, brain and behaviour,” and that “there is no sense it was a secret cabal unleashing a programme of control of citizens around Whitehall.” None of those assertions, however, dovetail with the ties to mandated learning standards globally that quietly impose a vision with “implicit moral assumptions about the kinds of young people we ought to cultivate” by targeting their Automatic Systems through the classroom and digital learning and manipulating their Reflective Systems. When the footnotes in these books take me to the 2012 Special Feature of the journal Ecology and Society called “Nudging Evolution” that laid out how to manipulate conceptual frameworks to gain new useful belief systems to allow a reenvisioned social construction of reality, it becomes clear just how targeted both the Automatic AND Reflective visions are in this vision of education reforms.
Learning Standards, and the curricula and assessments they quietly impose, then simply become a euphemism for what author Daniel W. Bromley called “Rules to Live by”. In this vision, instead of the purpose of education being to gain an understanding of reality itself, we are to get a replacement–
a workable view of the world out there, and its meaning to us, [which] comes to fruition (is realized) as a process of convergence…this alternative approach authorizes an epistemic community to engage in a process whose very purpose is the creation of convergence. When a consensus emerges among members of that epistemic community, then this consensus might as well come to be regarded as the accepted account of that observed and apprehended reality. In other words, what is really out there is the agreed upon account presented to us by those whose job it is to study and analyze what is out there, and then report back to the rest of us.
So in this vision of the social construction of reality it is the media, the academy, and public policy think tanks who are to provide us with the agreed upon account, which we are to simply accept. No wonder I angered so many when I wrote Credentialed to Destroy and then started this blog. Learning standards, in fact, prevent the ability for most students to develop “our own idiosyncratic meanings” and they force students to come to a “shared understanding” of global challenges and observed problems. Those are necessary for social systems, including individual people, to evolve toward “a desired outcome in the future, and the preferred means by which that outcome might be brought about.” Further,
In essence, each individual must work their way through this process by continually ‘updating’ their beliefs, as new evidence emerges, in order to reach some consensus on the exact problem, plausible solutions to that problem, and the range of feasible instruments by which the solution might be achieved…Reason giving is the essential component of democratic discourse in which a gradual evolution in mental models is the point of that discourse.
In PG, and its favorite tool–learning standards–we see a phenomenon going on around us that is insufficiently understood–“the role of the state in responding to and producing particular subjectivities.” It’s every bit as intrusive if it is the local mayor and Chamber of Commerce pushing for this invisible manipulation, as it is if Congress enacts it (which it has). In actuality, all these levels and institutions coordinate around the use of neuroeducation for 21st century transformations and “the broader rubric of psychological governance as a strategy for molding the adolescent brain, behaviour, character, and resilience.” Remember all the references we keep encountering to Virtues and Aristotle, apart from all the mindfulness mandates grounded in Buddhist practices? PG recommends either turning to “ancient Western or Eastern philosophies,” such as Aristotle, to “provide philosophies for living, tools for happy, virtuous and well-regulated emotional lives.”
How ironic, huh? Let’s finish with the quotes from the title that bring this all together.
Neuroeducation is still very much an effort to make pedagogy more effective in terms of teaching competencies that are dictated by standards committees…in neuroeducation, neural pathways are the real and imagined site of relevant moral and pedagogical interventions…what makes the brain such a fruitful site of intervention is that it is located at the threshold, intimately connected as it is to the senses, between the body and its social networks and environments, and that it is plastic, changeable, malleable. The brain is a site of encounter amenable to manipulation…the objective of teaching pupils to ‘respond not react’ to stressful, emotionally charged situations has put the brain and, in particular, the prefrontal cortex as the location of ‘executive function’–as that which must be crafted in order to achieve the most positive outcomes.
See how ALL students can learn or succeed and why Equity mandates are so crucial and ubiquitous now? They all force or flow from this recrafting of the brain quite literally to supposedly force a more normative vision of the future. Let me close with a quote which followed the above and note that by writing about these aims and methods here today they are ‘unnoticed’ no more.
What goes unnoticed, however, is the difference between the brain as a real organ in people’s heads and the brain as an ethical object that motivates new practices and behaviors.
Interesting isn’t it how all the offered solutions to the hype misrepresenting the nature of the Common Core and competency frameworks turn out to envision an education remolding the brain as an ethical object? That thus “Nudge Evolution’? That this is also ultimately the solution being pushed as the solution for ‘systemic racism’?
These days nothing is a coincidence when it comes to education. It’s simply too useful a tool and the changes are mostly hard to observe, unless you know who to quote as they proclaim their intentions and methods of choice.
Sharing this little article revealing deeper meanings they don’t even realize they are revealing in case you haven’t seen.
” I was reprimanded for “acting like an independent agent of a set of principles or ideas or beliefs.” And I was told that by doing so, I failed to serve the “greater good and the higher truth.”
.” He further informed me that I had created “dissonance for vulnerable and unformed thinkers” and “neurological disturbance in students’ beings and systems.”
“A recent faculty email chain received enthusiastic support for recommending that we “‘officially’ flag students” who appear “resistant” to the “culture we are trying to establish.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2021/04/13/nyc-teacher-were-damaging-kids-with-critical-race-theory/amp/
With a staff education as they have at this facility I’m sure you would experience the gleam in the eye of a n administrator that knows exactly what’s going on. Backed up with brain research and MRI to prove transformation no doubt!
Thank you for that and good to hear from you again. I have been surprised at the relatively quiet reaction to this open admissions for all of us. The School Superintendents Association released its Learning Commission plans 2025 last week http://aasacentral.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/CommissionReportFINAL_040821.pdf and they openly admit in an Appendix on the Whole Learner Framework and Design the intended rewiring.Also, like Hewlett, they know their Urie Bronfenbrenner and his nested ecological spheres. I will quote both sections even though they are a page apart.
Just wow. Then yesterday the BELE Network’s newsletter was hyping CASEL’s Transformative SEL, which has come up repeatedly in webinars I have been on in recent months. They, however, linked to a 2019 article from Educatioaal Psychologist linking to pre-‘pandemic’ or racial riots planning to create ‘citizenship for critical democracy’. It can be found here. https://casel.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Transformative-Social-and-Emotional-Learning-SEL-Toward-SEL-in-Service-of-Educational-Equity-and-Excellence.pdf Apparently schools will know seek to deinstall the current ‘cultural orientation toward acquisitive individualism.’ They actually state too that neural change is the point and that now that they have listed the ‘initial graduate profile of transformative social and emotional competence’, it is time to develop the needed curricula, assessments, and experiences to create the “developmental trajectories and pathways for these competencies [that] is a necessary next step in our work.”
They also cite a Powell, making the last name a Proper Name unlike its holder, as the cited article was written in the same year Racing to Justice was written. Notice the repeated focus now on collectivism throughout the CASEL report.
Speaking of the focus on the collective, this https://education-reimagined.org/the-power-of-beloved-community-as-an-education-design-principle/ came out yesterday. I had intuited this was the MH vision from what was said at the (co)lab convening here is atlanta I attended in 2013 where the references to a then unknown phrase was ubiquitous. It also ties to what I know his advisor Bayard Rustin advocated as the ultimate solution. That King Center statement that is part of the article leaves no doubt. It also fits with the CASEL link on transformative SEL fpr participatory citizenship for a critical democracy.
I know eye tracking has been a big issue for you in the past. https://fpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/FPF-ARVR-Report-4.16.21-Digital.pdf on what these immersive technologies are picking up and what it can mean. That’s the Future of Privacy Forum.
Well, well, well. Did you listen to the speech yesterday? The Great Society is alive and well.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/28/politics/china-us-democracy-autocracy/index.html
Thanks for the eye scanning info. That still bothers me, but my how far we have come. We expected worse but my heavens its a steady decline.
No on listenng to the speech, but then I can’t recall listening to any President unless it is a 9/11 type event. Hard to do this work and think much of any politician, especially one with such a tendency for deceit during his career.
This is pretty unbelievable– https://www.gettingsmart.com/2021/04/its-time-to-reimagine-the-k-12-content-map/
Plus this calls for “Putting Academics into Perspective” as in not really the point. A tool not the goal. https://characterandcitizenship.org/primed
The Center used to just be about Character, but now we get the name adjustment as Citizenship is on every radar suddenly. It’s also what I have been working on so hard so I could get the open confessions that were consistent with what I had intuited, which is why I was listening in the first place. It has been a good week for that especially. My favorite though was the think tank employee who writes a great deal, especially for National Review, who referred to a Heritage Foundation fellow as “having the job of organizing the parents”. Just like they did with the Common Core.
Good to see you commenting. It would certainly be nice to step away from my Cassandra of Troy persona.
Speaking of confessions, this is from later in the article and obviously not news to me.
Also more proof that competency-based education is not what entities like USPIE are leading parents to believe based on a recent solicitation they sent out. That’s not CBE as workforce development just as I laid out correctly in CtD. I had been listening to Michael Horn at a think tank local luncheon while I was writing the book. He wrote for the recent AEI A conservative Reform Visison for Education. Perhaps it’s the George Will Statecraft as Soulcraft definition of Conservatism.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/nglc/resource-files/MyWays_09ContentKnowledge.pdf is certainly helpful in comparing what a ‘concept-based’ shift really means. It is also a reminder of why I found the Robby Soave California math curriculum article so sloppy, especially when he either purposefully or ignorantly referred to calculus as a ‘concept’. Leaves parents exercising the School Choice he was hyping as a solution only to arrive at another school that is concept-based and determined to prescribe the categories of thought in a cybernetic manner.
There was a session today that was part of the World Summit on the Information Society 2021 primer https://www.itu.int/net4/wsis/forum/2021/en on the question of what does and should count as a measure of Success for Children. Beyond ESSA’s mandates, I thought of the MyWays Framework and its focus on Competencies and broad measures of Student Success. Given all the familiar entities tied to WSIS, that cannot be coincidental.
Adding this, because the concept of flourishing and thriving was a big part of what Success should mean and here we are from the MyWays website– “What Learners Need to Thrive in a World of Change”. It was also funded initially by the Hewlett Foundation just like what was discussed in this post and what I have been quietly piecing together this month. https://myways.nextgenlearning.org/report-intro
I just noticed something. Our mailing address is:
Next Generation Learning Challenges
Tides Center
PO Box 29907
San Francisco, CA 94129-0907 is what comes up for NGLC. john a powell is the chairman of the board of the tides foundation and nglc is based at the tides center?
Robin, can you confirm which Esalen participants were affiliated with (CASBS)? THX
I am having trouble thinking of anyone for sure. Lots of famous books were written while the authors were CASBS fellows including Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology where he notes in the late 50s that ‘they’ now know more about Marx’s vision for human society than anything that was available to Lenin in 1917. The Human Development Society was thus a key topic there, which fits with CASBS being where Bertalanffy and Boulding created GEneral Systems Research Group. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that any of these people went to Esalen, but I don’t know. Thomas Kuhn was a fellow there when he came up with his paradigm change metaphor for his famous book. John Rawls was there when he wrote up his Theory of Justice and Karl Deutsch when he wrote The Levers of Government that in my mind laid out a blueprint for the role of what we now call think tanks in pushing public policy that is usually not accurately understood.
Today CASBS is where Angela Duckworth National Growth Mindset Network is based. There also seems to be an overlap between the Hoover Institution and CASBS in recent decades.
Journeying to our related interest in the overhype of covid and pushing remedies that are not actual solutions https://www.aier.org/article/pathogens-in-one-lesson-courtesy-of-sunetra-gupta/ is very good, particularly the idea of the dangers of a naive immune system. It fits with allergies increasing because of too much antibacterial soap use.
Daniel Kahneman was also a fellow there long before he became famous for his work with Amos Tversky that is now the foundation of the Behavioral Insights book. In fact, that is where he met his now wife–Anne Treisman, who was also a fellow there iirc. Remember the anonymous multimillion alumni gift to start the behavioral sciences center at princeton?
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2015/05/04/gift-establishes-kahneman-and-treisman-center-behavioral-science-and-public-policy
So much to sort out! Jeffrey Kripal, a biographer of Esalen, and a Board member, says that for better or worse, we can ‘blame’ Stanford for Esalen. Virtually all of the original influencers have ties to Stanford. I believe there are also ties to the VA Hospital in Menlo Park….Bateson’s studies related to schizophrenia. Ken Kesey, as well. Who was it who used the word “combine” to describe these networks?
Also, though it may not be relevant, Dick Price was a member of the same department at Harvard as our friend, the Uni-bomber, though some years later.
Price had two major psychological meltdowns, both of which entailed hospitalization. In both scenarios he was involved in some kind of personal development regime. He was Fritz Perls’ patient, and mentee when the second breakdown occurred. I really can’t see that any ‘diagnosis’ was ever made after the initial misdiagnosis of ‘schizophrenia’. That’s handy…he just experienced ‘states’.
Richard ‘NLP’ Bandler was a patient of Perls’ partner, Virginia Satir, who operated a Mental Research Institute at Stanford. He later went on to transcribe tapes of Perls’ therapy sessions as part of his graduate work, and these taped conversations provided, in part, the framework for NLP.
These are REALLY odd relationships, anyway you slice it.
https://michaelcornwall.com/tag/richard-price/
As far as I can tell, the first Price ‘breakdown’ occurred when he was interacting with members of the Asian Studies ‘combine’ in S.F. Price was IN THE ARMY NOW, but was commuting to S.F. in pursuit of ‘spiritual’ growth. Army docs, I guess, made some kind of diagnosis…based on what sounded like ‘manic’ behavior in an S.F. bar.
Price, via Esalen, becomes the live-in poster child of ‘states’….but, these ‘states’ seem always to have been exacerbated by his “psychonaut’ activities…meditation, gestalt ‘therapy’ and weekly (at least) use of hallucinogens.
I have, of late, been listening to a lot of Murphy interviews, and he, Murphy, kinda talks about his partner like a ‘piece of furniture’…a not quite all there, person.
All thoughts welcome.
I do remember reading about Murphy being a student at Stanford and that is where he got into ultralong meditations states with some prof as guru.
I had forgotten Gregory Bateson connection to Esalen, but his work with the International Cybernetic Society he helped found with Margaret Mead and Gordon Pask about 1969 included the Soviets and Eastern Europeans as charter members as well as if there was no Iron Curtain for anyone involved with theories of the mind, ties to the exchanges with the USSR and Esalen we covered at some point.
And of course GSRG was founded at CASBS as we discussed, but it was later absorbed by ISSS in the 80s I think. The daughter Mary Catherine Bateson has served as President of ISSS as has Ervin Laszlo’
s son Alexander. It was initially how I came across the founder of GEFF 2030.
Also Csik who created the Excellence template was a fellow at CASBS initially and greatly preferred that climate to Chicago where he was a prof and has lived in the area ever since. No question Csik, Alexander, and his wife all have an interest in the unconscious mind and the Eastern traditions of mindfulness. I would be surprised if Richard Davidson were not a fellow at some point and then we have his ties to the Dalai Lama and UNESCO’s mind brain education work. There is no question that altering consciousness as a means of creating the desired characteristics of ‘citizenship’ and likely decision-making from a neural level has been the global aim for decades. It’s clearly why I found what is in CtD and why the cybernetic template is ever enduring when ‘standards-based’ education is properly understood.
It’s also why there has been so much deceit about it in my opinion. It is rather inconsistent with Free Will, a hallmark of Western political thought for centuries, to be bypassing and then rewiring those areas of the brain involved in such decisions.
What is the Japanese reaction to Biden failing to meet with the PM on a state visit to US and using the Cackler instead?
I do remember reading about Murphy being a student at Stanford and that is where he got into ultralong meditations states with some prof as guru.
I had forgotten Gregory Bateson connection to Esalen, but his work with the International Cybernetic Society he helped found with Margaret Mead and Gordon Pask about 1969 included the Soviets and Eastern Europeans as charter members as well as if there was no Iron Curtain for anyone involved with theories of the mind, ties to the exchanges with the USSR and Esalen we covered at some point.
What is the Japanese reaction to Biden failing to meet with the PM on a state visit to US and using the Cackler instead?
Weird…my comments did not picked up in the above post.
One more time!!!
While at Stanford, Murphy fell under the influence of Dr. Frederic Spiegelberg, a professor of ‘Asian Studies’. Speigelberg was recruiting students like Murphy to join his American Asian Studies Institute. This later became the California Integral Studies Institute. Price was involved with this bunch, too.
Bateson was “a resident” at Esalen, and was likely directing the whole show, including the Mother Russia connections.
Not caught up on the latest Biden gaffe, but not too long ago…the Japanese Minister of Health tried to collaborate with his U.S. counterpart in the management of the Covid-19 virus. He got the cold shoulder and was told that U.S. health authorities would ONLY talk to the Japanese PM. Big scandal over this!!!
This is not about science or medicine, after all.
No it is not. https://harvardlawreview.org/2020/12/demands-for-a-democratic-political-economy/
Linked to by the Law and Political Economy visions Hewlett is funding now. All that Deeper Learning funding in K-12 and making sure Common Core assessments were aligned to it makes sense if the goal is “shaping visions for understanding and reforming society.”
Back to STANFORD!!!, here is the poet, Alan Ginzberg discussing his participation in a Stanford-sponsored research project (LSD), conducted an an Army Hospital in Palo Alto in 1958. He confirms this was a ‘CIA’ project.
Right on cue. I call attention to something so let’s change the name. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3819056 –“Re-Thinking Think Tanks: Differentiating Knowledge-Based Policy Influence Organizations”
KBPIO is another acronym we can add to CASBS or TOGA–the latter stands for Translocal Organizations of Government Actors. It’s when mayors, school supers, or secretaries of state for states, for example, coordinate their activities to get broader change implemented locally and mostly invisibly. Like how to cook an election with absentee ballots and Zuck’s-financed ballot boxes?
It’s about prophecy.
“It’s unlikely that the coronavirus will affect us for at least, I’d say, fifty years.”
Thanks for sharing, ;-).
Have you seen this? Japan is the example. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Resetting_Data_Governance_2021.pdf
It also fits with this old post http://invisibleserfscollar.com/desiring-a-radical-dialectic-change-in-social-reality-necessitates-enduring-misunderstandings/ and the webinars I have been on in last several weeks where
When I wrote that, much like what later happened with the discussion of Marxist Humanism as it was discussed in extant books from Eastern Europe or by Cornel West, the accurate description of how DiaMat worked and prospective education of the type that fits with Neuroeducation now and Critical Thinking as a means of altering consciousness, got censored. The ‘pandemic’, like systemic racism allegations is just another new theory to justify the long sought changes.
Saw this essay over the weekend https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2021/04/75255/ where once again the real purpose of Change in Consciousness gets overlooked to push the Action Civics red herring from our former anti-Common Core roadshow duo. Now quoting Brookings and Harvard that CC is supposedly dead. Nope, not by function, only by name, but where Emmett is now should interest my Catholic readers and it fits with the Vatican’s IMBES work and now the Humanity 2.0 Initiative we followed from the Jubilee Centre and its virtues curricula for K-12. Institute for Human Ecology and a vision of Flourishing. The ecology definition used fits with how competency frameworks, which Common Core was and is an example of, really work because as Milton Rokeach designed it, the aim is inner dimensions and outer behavior and the connection between the two. I guess that’s the reason for pretending that CBE is about workforce development, when it really fits with prospective education as that old post laid it out.
I guess both our posts speak to social engineering that is made to look like all kinds of things. For instance, Ginsberg seems completely oblivious to how absurd are his references to THE COUNTER-CULTURE, which seems to have originated in the halls of V.A. Hospitals, under the careful stewardship of the CIA and other agencies. Not a trace of irony in his speech! I guess all ‘revolutions’ are TOP/DOWN.
Or bottom up, but planned from the top down to appear grassroots per this Brookings webinar yesterday. https://www.brookings.edu/events/the-path-forward-for-education-and-climate-action/ where one of the speakers, Fedrick Ingram of the AFT actually spoke of the need to “get a belief system in folks” so that the belief system needed for the desired change could then align with the desired public policy to be implemented. He also spoke of how public policy (sounds top down to me wherever it is implemented in practice) and grassroots must neet in the middle.
There were so many graphic statements as to where this all is going and how it fits that I had to ice my hand when it was over because it ached.
I agree that most of what we’re seeing in terms of social change/perception change is heavily top-down with merely an appearance of coming from localities or actual grassroots movements. More on Stanford involvement….sorry if you’ve covered this elsewhere.
Here’s a link to Stanford’s “do-tank” SPARQ, which stands for Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions. https://sparq.stanford.edu/
“Our expertise is in social psychology, a field of behavioral science that appreciates that people are both shapers of and shaped by their social worlds. To change what people think or do, then, we focus on how to make change in the world around them – through the interactions they have, the policies they follow, and the institutions they participate in. Our work is also deeply collaborative – we work closely with our practitioner partners to understand problems on the ground and to codesign and test solutions in the field. Our goal is to bridge the research – practice gap and close that last mile.”
http://www.sparqtools.org/
“SPARQtools are digital toolkits that translate research into user-friendly formats that practitioners and educators can use to sparq psychological, behavioral, and societal change. ” In other words, to change what people think and do.
Seems like the assumption is that societal change is always controllable and always moves in a positive direction. History proves otherwise.
On a separate note, I don’t know if you are familiar with some of the new groups on the ground exposing indoctrination in schools. One is Parents Defending Education (DefendingEd.org). Whataretheylearning.org also has a map to expose nonsense in curriculum and lessons. They both use crowdsourcing to have users upload items to a state by state database. Defendinged even calls their map an IndoctriNation Map. Love to see people standing up and calling it out, even if anonymously at first.
People bravely stepping into the limelight, like Jodi Shaw at Smith College, Paul Rossi at Grace Church, and Asra Nomani at TJHSST, show that courage is still possible and necessary to push back against the indoctrination trends in education.
Not much ambiguity here on the real reason for SEL
It is one reason I am so concerned with these articles like one recently in PJ Media which treat CRT as synonymous with ‘culturally- relevant education”, which actually makes SEL crucial for just the reasons above. That quote was taken from the SEE Learning Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics at Emory University Newsletter. That’s the one partnered with the Dalai Lama and about 2 years old. They also have a link to this graphic https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxwLtkQsbBSGgFQnFLGSkcQKbNGW?projector=1 being used by an expensive private school here in Atlanta . It fits with this post and the previous one on exactly what is being targeted. Intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies in order to ultimately get to desired macro-system change.
I find CRT abhorrent too, but parents seeking their remedy in a private school should really look at all the privates working with SEE Learning to change the noetic systems of their students. Countering the 1619 Project with historical facts misses the actual target for change. I have been tying up loose ends before my next post to ensure that I have looked everywhere and am correct that all the coordinated CRT hype is still ultimately pushing DiaMat as the remedy that parents won’t recognize because they believe they have found their port in the storm and the true nature of what is to be changed in the student and why is being obscured.
Would you believe I used the Disinfo trail and common function to track two authors back to the same PhD program graduating from the same place in the same year? No wonder they were both stealthily pushing John Dewey, misrepresenting Marxism, and pushing the History of Ideas while being a bit selective about what was to be pushed. As you can imagine that kind of sleuthing to ensure I can prove what I have intuited is a bit time consuming. Luckily I can do some of the research now on my back patio while I secure my Vitamin D for the day.
No safety in private schools for sure. Especially if they are promoting new iPads for each kiddo and education for the Whole Child. Get more than you bargain for there except you pay out the wazoo for transformation.
No safety in those groups standing up either, not that I blame them for trying, but there are dishonest ones involved on purpose always are.
Interesting turn of events with gasoline. Maybe shoring up to skyrocket so easing in greenies seems like the answer.
We really are seeing interesting times and so much deceit. Meanwhile those dressed in black with riot gear in Portland face zero consequences.
Remember how I said years ago that you could sit downtown and spot it…. probably too dangerous to do that now.
Did you see that this came out today with some of our old friends?
https://greattransition.org/gti-forum/pedagogy-transition
Virginia Dept of ED SEL Standards are currently under review for citizen comment. The majority of comments oppose this top-down initiative and CASEL’s standards.
https://townhall.virginia.gov/L/Comments.cfm?stageid=9105
to get SEL added to graduation requirements
https://townhall.virginia.gov/L/Comments.cfm?GdocForumID=545
to get SEL standards input ( the input will be ignored as usual)
State level elections in VA will be interesting this year. There are currently school board member recall petitions circulating in Fairfax and Loudoun counties.
I got “lucky” with gas this morning on my fifth attempt. Had to buy premium and they’re now out. Not normal times.
In evaluating the true agenda of Parents Defending Education, you might want to look at all the think tanks whose education work I have found to be deceptive, its founder, Nicole Neily, has been involved in. To me the CRT articles are a repeat of the Common Core false narrative pushed by some of the same think tanks. I also read Erika Sanzi’s article in City Journal called “The Monster in the Classrooms” and looked her up. She seems to now be affiliated with Fordham which takes us back to the deceptive work Finn and Ravitch did when it was still housed at Vandy, before the Education Network relocated to Hudson and then being spun out as ‘independent’.
I also read the Mark Bauerlain essay this past weekend in CJ and if he honestly thinks the ‘Educating for Democracy” is about “the past” he needs to read its documents more closely. So much of this hype seems to be about making Wilfred McClay’s new textbook the answer. Apparently the Barney Charter Network is already using it and McClay is relocating to Hillsdale to teach starting this fall. Bauerlian shows up as on the Advisory Board of AAT Education, which is tied to Competency-Based Education through its CEO, Theodor Rebarber, also heading AccountabilityWorks. It is published by the Bradley Foundation’s Encounter Books. Bradley’s History Commission in the late 80s kicked off standards-based ed and it has always been about quietly creating the perceptual conditions needed for DiaMat and uniting Theory and Praxis. It’s what I have been working so hard on recently. I even tracked down Martin Jay’s 1973 book on the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory called The Dialectical Imagination to confirm that I am correct about how this all fits and what I recognized to be misdirections can be shown to be deliberately disseminated falsehoods.
No normal parent has the ability to track all this down or recognize how it all fits. Parents need the info in Credentialed to Destroy more now than when I wrote it. The Civic Mission of Schools insights in it are quite pertinent to following on EAD now.
I have about half a tank and don’t really have to drive much so I guess I will just wait for supplies to calm down. Because I spent summers in Fla at the beach for ten years, I developed the habit of not letting tank go below half so I could get to MId-Alabama if a storm brewed quickly in the Gulf. I walked by the Pipeline yesterday on a walk and thought about the mess we are descending into globally.
I am adding that EAD describes itself as NEH and Fed Ed funded which it is now, but Danielle Allen’s work shows up in a footnote as being something Hewlett is funding as part of its Law and Political Economy reenvisioning as described in this post. So essentially EAD is part of the LPE project, which is all about restructuring the future. It simply uses history as it platform for change through control of the prevailing Ideas. Hard to get more Marxian than that, which is precisely what I am proving at the moment using another one of Martin Jay’s books. Gee, I’m a nerd.
We at ISC and everyone who has read Credentialed to Destroy would have seen this coming. https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/when_a_newlyelected_school_board_member_stood_up_to_oppose_teaching_critical_race_theory.html
For any parents new to this or readers who were not here at the start http://invisibleserfscollar.com/who-is-really-in-charge-the-school-board-the-super-the-accreditors-or-unesco/ from early in the blog’s history puts the fact into its appropriate context. I had school board members from all over contact me quietly and thank me for recognizing this restriction and bringing it to public attention because school board members aren’t allowed by the accreditors to bring it to voters’ attention. Also, AdvancED still works the same but now goes by the name cognia. https://www.cognia.org/
Both Heritage ed fora and NAS, within the last month, were hyping the solution to CRT being to “run for the school board”. People also need to appreciate we can have a fully functioning Marxist theoretical takeover of the mind and personality without the words ‘white supremacy’ or ‘economic substructure’ ever coming up. It’s why the analysis has to be what we do here, which is tracking by function and its fundamental tenets that allow the planned mechanisms to fit together. Engrenage remains an important concept from the early days of the blog.
I just watched this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6UvGbS929I put on by the Library of Congress in part because I could just listen to all these seminars around CRT, Action Civics, Roadmap to American Democracy, Facing History and Ourselves and hear the Dialectic being set up. At about the 38 minute mark, all of a sudden Danielle Allen who could best be described as a fulcrum for anyone who has read her disingenuous book Our Declaration out of the blue brings up the 1619 Project and its narrative juxtaposed to the one being pushed by the NAS and its new report on Action Civics and how the plural narratives are set up on a Binary Line.
Precisely what I had heard. It’s a set-up, which makes sense since AAT Education creation of a civics/history curriculum around McClay’s Land of Hope textbook essentially financed by the Bradley Foundation also turns out to have had an NE commission as did the NAS in creating the very report Allen is referring to. Bingo!!
I had intuited that from how everything fit or in some cases actually did not, but I was afraid if I wrote about what I had been working on for more than the last month, then no one would confirm my intuition.
I feel like flashing a V for Victory sign. Woohoo.
Here we go. From a new book called Whole Child Development just published by Cambridge U Press which is available through May 19 through a link found at the Getting Smart website.
That’s Marx’s Human Development Society and it’s no accident that Element keeps using the term dynamic relations between people and contexts instead of the phrase Dialectical Materialism, but the function and purpose are there. Just focusing on CRT, ;et’s the real little ‘c’ focus come roaring into place without scrutiny because attention is on Xendi, Zinn, or the 1691 Project.
Reality check, please! Does anyone recall Joe Biden having a “stutter” before he was elected POTUS? See, I don’t. I can recall watching this guy for years and not being aware of any speech impediment. I have seen Obama stutter, and other leaders, as well, but cannot recall Biden doing this. Also, stutters do not account for memory lapses and a general affect of disorientation. I have been looking for ‘any’ descriptions of this stuttering condition that predate 1/2021 and can’t find anything. This is driving me nuts!
I have always been told by anyone with neuro training that the site of his brain aneurism meant that his speech centers would likely necessarily be affected, apart from the aging process. Apparently the WH called a lid before 4 in the afternoon about 2 days ago despite the troubles in Israel leading towards war.
I just got done with a very troubling webinar where one of the admin’s joyfully talked about “creating school space safe for liberatory practices” and then ignored an explicit question to define it. I can see why since it turns out to be described as part of the Abolitionist Education push and comes out of Paulo Freire’s work as the antithesis to ‘ the banking theory of education.”
Got one more webinar this afternoon and then can talk more. My intuitions are certainly bearing fruit and look at what I found from the Windy City https://equity.cps.edu/tags/liberatory-thinking
Really is a mistake just to focus on CRT. Loved the references to what Constructivism is really about. Fits perfectly with Transaction Theory in reading just as I warned in CtD.
Hi Robin
It is worth seeing where such education is aimed at. It is aimed at children and suggestable adults accepting propaganda pieces as information from a national public broadcaster.
This podcast appeared in a week where they were building a very thinly veiled narrative. This link will blow your mind for its sheer audacity. I urge everyone to listen to what is being discussed by people in all our western countries with the knowledge and support of the establishment!
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/ethics,-philosophy-and-immigration/13361486
Thanks John. I am continuing to quietly mine the pincer action and the False Narratives being pushed by certain think tanks, virtually all of which have known financial ties to the Bradley Foundation that was behind not just the original history standards commission, but the late-90s Commission on Civil Society and the early-2000s Hardwired to Connect I covered. I recognized the Civil Society template of creating a ruckus in where these CRT road shows like this one are going. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/fighting-back-against-critical-race-theory.php
In this post I covered Neuroeducation and its ties to think tanks or KBPIOs and now there is a determination to insist the Equity template is the CRT? That contradicts this recent NCEE interview with Linda Darling-Hammond where she goes on repeatedly about Equity being grounded in the malleability of the brain. It is titled “Restarting with Equity”. https://ncee.org/2021/06/linda-darling-hammond/
She made the same point in yesterday’s SoLD Alliance monthly phone call, as did Pamela Cantor of Turnaround for Children. It also contradicts this from yesterday. https://www.nextgenlearning.org/articles/racial-equity-work-beyond-performative-change
I appreciate all of your helpful links into the real purposes behind these changes.
You really need to read this even though it is long. https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/ Hat Tip to https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2021/05/17/natural-virus-or-lab-experiment-gone-wrong/
This to me was the money quote.
If you think about it though, if the hallmark of 21st century citizenship around the globe is the “regulation of subjectivity” and our Psychological Architecture, as multiple webinars have nor explicitly admitted, then false narratives of how learning standards work, the origination of the pandemic, the election, what a school curriculum grounded in ideals (any type) is really aiming to alter, are all linked. It closes the gap between theory and practice and philosophy and real world effects. And there can be no dispute and effective opposition without recognition.
Did you see this from yesterday? https://theconversation.com/how-student-designed-video-games-made-me-rethink-how-i-teach-history-159310
My italics because history is NOT about becoming emotionally invested in characters and the decisions they make. Again, we have consciousness altering activities pretending to be about objective facts from the past. The real aim is changing the mindsets and student subjectivity that will be confronting the future. After all, decision-making is always about a vision of the future.
This whole business ties into points I was trying to make to the beleaguered dean of my International Studies program. He is trying to ‘sell’ a current generation of students on the economic benefits to them of an international education ‘experience’.
I tried to point out to him that people who work internationally, international lawyer, consultants and business people, well, the effective one’s are NOT emotionally invested in the cultures they engage with. They view these cultures through historical and other frameworks.
I think you will find that the nonsense described above is rooted in the FAKE field of cultural anthropology, e.g. let’s have American teenagers emotionally relate to Samoan teenagers and their ‘purported’ sexual habits through an act of imagination.
Let’s imagine we are a member of a samurai’s family…and let’s emote around some kind of hardship.
FYI, I got kicked out of my alumni F/B group because I described myself as being a “heritage Californian”. I was informed that ONLY the indigenous people were ‘heritage’ Californians. I asked if they meant the hunter/gatherer tribes that practiced cannibalism, and supplemented their diets by squeezing the partially digested vegetation out of animal guts and into their mouths? Apparently, not.
You know the rest of the world just laughs in wonder at this stuff.
I was listening to a webinar recently on the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy and thinking about how dialectical it is and the planned intention to push it into every school, making all the current CRT hype rather moot. It reminded me of Evald Ilyenkov’s work and so I checked to see if anyone else had recognized the current use of his insights in the West. https://monthlyreview.org/2020/01/01/evald-ilyenkov-and-soviet-philosophy/ Apparently based on the search I did, lots of his unpublished works has now come out or been translated and a Friends of Ilyenkov Society created that has begun to hold conferences. How’s this for a quote in how dictated conceptual frameworks that provide the categories for thought can be used?
Optics, lenses, frames, Disciplinary Core Ideas. Higher Order Thinking Skills– we are providing the categories that real-life experiences are to be analyzed by. Precisely the means needed to force a perception that transformational change is needed. All coming in without discussion, while parents turn out in droves to protect against the White Supremacy strawman of the Marxist dangers. Meanwhile. all this undisputed Marxist theory from both philosophy and psychology comes roaring in.
http://aasacentral.org/learning2025/
Quoting from website of The School Superintendents Association (ASAA)
It’s never the parents’/taxpayers’ vision; it’s always some other social engineering collective…
An American Imperative: A New Vision of Public Schools
A Report from the Learning 2025: National Commission on Student-Centered, Equity-Focused Education
The full commission report articulates in detail AASA’s vision, which is intended to function as guardrails for specific change while also empowering districts and schools to tailor plans to the needs of their learners, educators, and communities. What makes this report stand out is its call to action comprised of recommendations coupled with specific action steps.
The commission has identified core components and corresponding essential areas of systemic school redesign. As leaders, teachers, and students work to realize this vision, all must play an active role in redesigning systems, reengineering instruction, and co-authoring the learning journey.
I read that when it came out and it is very important. AASA is an example of a TOGA–a translocal organization of government actors. Their centralized coordination of the same vision, implemented locally where the actors live and work is a crucial element in this shift. ThinK of the Turchenko vision I covered in CtD. This prof, who has gone from Emory to Penn where Martin Seligman is, to now the U-Chicago where Science of Virtues is located, was featured in a Box in the Whole Child Development, Learning, and Thriving that Cambridge U Press just published that is grounded in Soviet psychology work. Unfamilar with her, I discovered she is known for something she calls PVEST–Phenomenologicall Variant Ecological Systems Theory. https://www.bcheights.com/2016/10/23/margaret-beale-spencer-looking-at-social-justice-issues-through-a-scientific-lens/ is from a presentation she gave.
https://grassrootsthinking.com/2018/03/20/liberatory-education-cultivating-human-development/ came out of an SEL webinar put on in April by Wested, where the video became vailable last week. It fits with the AASA above. https://selcenter.wested.org/resource/evidence-based-practices-for-equity-in-social-and-emotional-learning/ gets you to the video.
There is so much going on now, but it is all the same vision, just different rationales and pieces designed to click together a la engrenage.
I am still here, but feel it is important at the moment to listen and then follow up before laying out just how very much has been laid out. Sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming–to see so clearly in real time what was meant to be misunderstood or never even recognised. Thanks for linking. It remains an abolutely crucial conversation for us to be having.
Robin, apropos of everything, I have been in discussion with the now-dean of my undergraduate program in quote, unquote International Studies. He is trying to keep this program off the chopping block and had asked alumni for testimonials and support. I ended up writing what I hoped was a compelling endorsement of International Studies, but told the dean I could not support the program as it was designed in the past and currently. I tried to make the distinction between studies that expand perspectives and build necessary skill-sets, and those which confirm biases. In that my own program was housed inside a Department of the Humanities, I also argued that students had not matriculated with solid grounding in the Humanities, but, rather a distorted conception of what that field encompassed. The ideological villians were, of course, attached to the cultural anthropology cabal…people who advanced their discipline as though it were science when it was really propaganda, and still is. So, this stuff goes way, way back.
We were also trying to comes to terms with a sexual abuse problem, faculty>>>student, on-going it seemed, which I argued was part and parcel of ideology advanced in the program. The solution proposed by my colleagues entailed reliance on yet another ‘movement’. The ‘struggle’ session continues, but I left the room.
I have been thinking of your interest in the Epstein Network and the extent of the corruption now that Bill Gates, the architect/financer of so much of the global ed transformation vision, has become implicated in it.
Take a look at this that came up in a civics webinar I was on yesterday https://personalizesc.ed.sc.gov/competencies-based-ed/documents-for-competencies/competency-based-education/competencies-for-the-profile-of-a-south-carolina-graduate/ because it also looks a great deal like what the competency frameworks for coaching seek to create. That internal consciousness that motivates and guides external action as well as daily perception.
Following up on the implications of other webinars I have been on recently as well as that new Whole Child Development, Learning, and Thriving: A Dynamic Systems Approach book I mentioned last weekend, I came across the global Association for Moral Education conference at Harvard GSE in 2016 called “Civic Engagement: A cultural revolution?” https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56980f6bab2810725e5a3c6c/t/58c6a04f2994cae7ec7d2144/1489412178246/ame-2016-program-for-web.pdf
The Chinese are so involved that they have their own Panel Theme. Global Work around “What is a Good Citizen and How Do We Create Them?”. Plus it turned out (and this is not what I was looking for) that the AME has an annual Kohlberg Memorial Lecture as in Lawrence Kohlberg and his Stages of Moral Development that came up years ago in what the CCP was foisting on Hong Kong in the name of citizenship. The speaker was Danielle Allen, whose Educating for American Democracy work has kept me quite busy since this last post as I examined what is being said, and which elements are true and where they lead and which are a False Narrative and what those implications of deliberate deceit are. Hewlett was funding her work at the time of this lecture where she was billed as a “poltical theorist at Harvard who is reknowned for her work on education for justice, equity and diversity in the digital age.”
Yes, my alma mater’s dedication to transformational change and its first female president’s idealogical agenda are finally catching alumni’s eyes and the college Alumni Director was quite obnoxious in my opinion against a group of 70-something alumni sharing legitimate concerns. Just the response of a Sycophantic Fellow Traveller, who inadvertently demonstrated the significance of the shift from Knowing to Believing in the face of unpleasant facts.
Well, I used my alumni F/B to test to level of programming. If I tried to add a bit of nuance to their completely absurd take on the world, the reaction was VIOLENT. I did discover that the ‘experimental’ program I participated in did have linkages to the American Academy of Asian Studies, now ‘Integral’ studies and I did locate students who had experienced that entity back in the day, AND the Esalen II facility at Pune. I learned a LOT. Also, I discovered the work of Seraphim Rose, a convert to Russian Orthodoxy who had studied under Alan Watts at the AAAS. He pretty much mapped out in the 1970’s what Esalen was up to in its creation of New Religions.
On Epstein/Gates, the media is doing back flips to contain this thing…predict Gates will be thrown under the bus as a sex pervert, which is less incendiary than what they were actually up to. My interest related to the research Epstein had financed at Harvard, the Martin Nowak stuff, which entailed computer modelling of the behavior of populations experiencing ‘pandemics’.
The stuff that is coming out about Gates just makes him sound like an ineffectual pervert, like he couldn’t even to THAT very well.
ARGH! Did you see the latest about Bill Gates having reached out to Epstein to intercede with members of the Nobel committee? Bill wanted the Peace Prize, and he asked Epstein to curry favor for him. WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE???
Well, since I have now tracked that Whole-Child Development, Learning, and Thriving: A Dynamic Systems Approach book just out to the MH, little ‘c’ communism vision being sold as the “idea of America” to be instilled neurobiologically, who knows? Literally hiding under what the concept of ‘Liberty’ is to actually mean. No wonder we have so much coordinated hype over CRT. It’s the antithesis to the 1619 Project/ Zinn Thesis, with the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy as the backwards mapped Synthesis.
All these terms like democracy, equality, liberty, social justice, all get quietly reinvented. All also tracking back to Urie Bronfenbrenner and thus his time in the USSR with Luria and Leontiev. I am quite tired of being correct on all this. Reading Richard M. Lerner’s 2004 book Liberty is like a bad dream in terms of all these ideas I traced first in CtD and then later on this blog. And they all get brought in using abstract terms that are now to mean something else.
Adding this just out, which basically confirms to me, what I had intuited–that the CRT sudden hype is midwifing both the Roadmap to American Democracy as the remedy, but also McClay’s unmentioned Land of Hope textbook, which is published by the same Bradley Foundation that financially supports this publication https://www.city-journal.org/civic-education-rightly-understood and its parent think tank–the Manhattan Institute. McClay is the kind of poetic writer Danielle Allen wished she could be to tell the story she wanted told.
We also have common financing now as National Endowment for the Humanities is behind the Roadmap, grants to Theodor Rebarber and AAT Education for curricula tied to Land of Hope, and the NAS to create angst over CRT in a white paper. At least in this essay McClay is direct about aiming for the heart and consciousness, instead of pretending that this dispute is about what set of facts to use. Notice too that McClay is listed as currently a visiting fellow at Heritage–yet another KBPIO–Knowledge-Based Policy Information Organization. Hard to separate though this kind of manipulated vision of citizenship as actually being synonymous with serfdom. “Believe what we tell you and show your willingness to act on it.”
By the way, this webinar, that has nothing to do with crt, is just loaded with references to White Supremacy and what the remedies must be. https://selcenter.wested.org/resource/evidence-based-practices-for-equity-in-social-and-emotional-learning/
It seems to me that Montana attorney general rulings, governor edicts, legislation etc are window dressing that doesn’t get at the real momentous, brain physiology altering practices being sought. The very things Lerner writes about and his co-author Karen Pittman trumpeted in a CASEL video and that SoLD Alliance video with May Helen Immordano_yang on rewiring the brain to get the desired Change Agent consciousness. Remember her specialty is Affective Neuroscience.
Pamela Cantor was on the Aspen Comission–NCSEAD.
On the topic of “citizenship”, here is a story I heard last night. So we are in another lockdown in Tokyo. To date, I cannot find a single person who knows a single person, etc., etc. who had perished from Covid-19.
The roll-out of vaccines has been slow…and, the supply available, here, is being accorded to the very elderly.
So a friend tells me that her Japanese husband went to his favorite neighborhood watering hole last night…very POSH place. While there, the owner’s told him that they were hearing stories of elderly people dying after being vax’ed. One couple had told them that they took the wife’s parents, both age 80 for the now available vax. Both were dead, two days later. FYI, 80 is not old in Japan…just the beginning of being old.
The couple reported that the doctor had told them that they needed to be “good citizens” and this meant NOT telling anyone about the circumstances under which their loved one’s died. I guess they broke THAT RULE, because you all are hearing about it now.
Wanted to make sure this was on your radar. https://countercurrents.org/2021/05/an-urgent-call-for-action-by-nobel-laureates/ Linked to by GRLI–with your ‘friend’ David Cooperrider and Charistopher Laszlo–that is behind changing the nature of business schools globally.
Just back from a funeral home visitation for a good friend of my mom’s–89. Weird to see people you knew you when you were young–one of the people in attendance taught me to swim when I was 5 in their family backyard swimming pool. I always wanted to jump off the diving board even though I wasn’t supposed to.
Robin, are you aware of a concise critique of the impact of Carl Rogers’s humanistic, student-centered frameworks on the achievement of learning goals?
Note, I have reviewed four different Esalen narratives and discovered that he/Erhard must have had a significant interface and via Rogers participation in gestalt training and gestalt networks in the Bay Area.
THX
I just pulled Walter Truett Anderson’s books and the One on Esalen called The Upstart Spring notes that the Esalen flat was on Union Street and “also on the 1700 block of Union Street was the Gestalt Institute of San Francisco. By this time gestalt had become the sixth most common affiliation of American psychotherapists” and that “Then an organization called est opened up offices in a building across the street from the Gestalt Therapy Institute. It was in more ways that one the new kid on the block, having commenced its training only in late 1971. However, there was nothing diffident about either est (Erhard Seminars Training) or its founder, Werner Erhard, and from the time they made their appearance, the human potential movement was never quite the same again.”
Anderson has Carl Rogers listed in the index to The Next Enlightenment only once, but numerous times in The Great Spring. I will check now and see if I can find something helpful to you.
Adding this after looking further, it seems to me that what you are describing on Rogers would have been something created for the WBSI–the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California. I remember seeing somewhere in a footnote that it has now closed, but within the last decade. Here’s what Anderson wrote:
Thanks for this! See my comments and questions:
I just pulled Walter Truett Anderson’s books and the One on Esalen called The Upstart Spring notes that the Esalen flat was on Union Street and “also on the 1700 block of Union Street was the Gestalt Institute of San Francisco. By this time gestalt had become the sixth most common affiliation of American psychotherapists” and that “Then an organization called est opened up offices in a building across the street from the Gestalt Therapy Institute. It was in more ways that one the new kid on the block, having commenced its training only in late 1971. However, there was nothing diffident about either est (Erhard Seminars Training) or its founder, Werner Erhard, and from the time they made their appearance, the human potential movement was never quite the same again.”
Anderson has Carl Rogers listed in the index to The Next Enlightenment only once, but numerous times in The Great Spring. I will check now and see if I can find something helpful to you.
<Also, and going back to Upstart Spring…Murphy, and the gestalt crowd at Esalen ran a series of train the trainer workshops between 1965-1971. Maslow was involved in these, as was, I believe, Rogers. They seemed to be tinkering with a number of technologies and processes in what was a covert experiment on human beings. Erhard is known to have participated in at least some of these workshops…though he discounts their influence on the formation of 'est'.
Adding this after looking further, it seems to me that what you are describing on Rogers would have been something created for the WBSI–the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California. I remember seeing somewhere in a footnote that it has now closed, but within the last decade. Here’s what Anderson wrote:
WBSI was a unique institution, part think tank and part growth center, that was deeply involved in researching, teaching, and using group process. He [Richard Farson] and Murphy had been friends for a decade, and the two organizations, Esalen and WBSI, had enjoyed a parallel association. Murphy characterized it as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, in that order; one the renegade, the other a more cautious explorer.
Not all my comments/questions were recorded.
I am trying to find out if the S.F. offices of Esalen that Murphy established in 1967, were located on the same block of Union Street as were the S.F. Gestalt Institute and ‘est’.
Also, I came across comments in William Bartley’s book on Erhard that suggest that the Large Group Awareness Training programs from which Erhard engineered ‘est’ — were inspired by Carl Rogers work to develop group dynamics technologies that were affordable for the masses. This kinda cuts against the idea that the psychologists opposed mass ‘therapies’.
That would seem to be what Anderson is saying on a common physical proximity at the same time. He also says that the
Seeing that reference to Lewin, reminded me that he was tied to the Frankfurt School of Thought while still in Germany, which is relevant to the CRT suddenly ubiquitous in coverage from the same groups who did a great deal of misleading about the Common Core. While confirming that I found this link that may interest you. https://www.siop.org/Research-Publications/Items-of-Interest/ArtMID/19366/ArticleID/1552/Marx-Was-Right-Lessons-From-Lewin
Another insight from the book with respect to Fritz Perls was “The object of gestalt work, Fritz sometimes said, was not to achieve a breakthrough; rather, it was to achieve a break-in, a sudden invasion of one’s own privacy, a re-established contact with lost and deadened feelings.” That sounds like what you and others have described about how violating and intrusive these sessions could be. It also fits with CRT in classrooms come to think of it or Courageous Conversations which has been going on for years.
Not really sure why it is mostly my post, but the following fits with your interests plus what I am hearing almost daily on Whole Child Learning and what is really targeted.
Now confluent education would be called holistic and based in strengths, not deficits, and mandated as a civil rights issue under Excellence and Equity mandates. Now we also see state learning standards and school mission statements that force what Brown called ‘confluent education’ that “develop approaches to education that would integrate the schooling of the mind, the body. and the senses all the way along. We saw that in john a powell’s calls on what would constitute the solution to the need for Racing to Justice.
Thank you for the last post! I am having to rely on what are cosmetically-altered accounts of Erhard and his involvement with Murphy/Esalen. As we have discussed, Erhard was a disseminator, not a creator. Whatever objections to his practices made by Murphy and even Carl Rogers were complete theater, I believe.
The connection to the Santa Barbara professor, Brown, makes a lot of sense in terms of edu projects but also with regard to the creation of NLP by Bander/Grinder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yrrm5qccig
Monumental rant at 2:40
How much like Large Group Encounter Awareness does this sound like to you? https://www.nextgenlearning.org/articles/racial-equity-work-beyond-performative-change
I keep thinking about what a red herring much of the so-called CRT bans are to getting at what is really intended. Plus this is quite stupid from Heritage. https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/06/10/texas-1836-project-law-aims-to-promote-informed-patriotism/ —“We are all the children of slaves and slaveholders.”
What a ridiculous, factually inaccurate statement, especially in a family like mine where descendants came over in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from very troubled areas of Europe. Only someone determined to spin a yarn, probably with the Bradley published Land of Hope as the panacea at the end would write something like that. Absurd, counterfactual statements like that come from backwards mapping from a desired end to spinning a palatable narrative to get there. Makes sense too since McClay starts at Hillsdale this fall and Larry Arnn is on the Board of Heritage and won the Bradley Prize in 2015. Maybe for the Barney Charter Initiative? Barney has announced they are using McClay’s Land of Hope and McClay has written about preferring themes to a chronology. The NEH not only funded the Roadmap for Educating for American Democracy after Hewlett’s initial funding of Allen’s work, but also funded the curriculum for K-12 AAT Education is creating using Land of Hope.
More training in Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete for American schoolchildren. Also look at this pincer action in late June. https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/events/seeking-truce-civics-history-wars-educating-american-democracy-answer It’s all coming together unfortunately and, as with the Common Core, boy are parents being played with their children’s very “hearts, minds, and bodies” the very real target of what’s being misexplained to them.
They are just using the CRT bans to build better mousetraps. Same thing went on in the Human Potential Movement. When social critics tagged the movement as ‘narcissistic’, in the mid-70’s est, and other scams shifted to social awareness projects.
BLM is kinda in that tradition…all cosmetic. So, they will go to Plan C.
Yeh, the “children of slave owners” thing is REALLY annoying.
Probably, a good idea to again remind the world who were the actual slave traffickers.
This situation is quite similar to the SHAME now being inculcated with regard to the ‘locking up’ of Japanese Americans in internment camps. ‘We’ are supposed to feel collective guilt for that. New book out says that Hoover opposed it, but was overruled by factions who ultimately bought for pennies on the dollar, the 1.4 billion (1940’s money) in assets confiscated from the Japanese. It is the same scenario. ARGH!!!
On LGAT…there has been an attempt to displace credit for the development of these programs to a couple of real nobodies. Further, 60 years in, there is still no standard definition for LGAT, very little research performed, and NO REGULATION. Bit of a red flag, and a red herring.
Nothing like a unesco-affiliate doing a cartoon competition for school choice to boost my consistent warning that it is NOT, in fact, a way out. https://gemreportunesco.wordpress.com/2021/06/15/join-our-cartoon-competition-on-school-choice-launched-in-partnership-with-the-cartoon-movement/
All of a piece,
How prescient of me to have warned about Lysenko in Credentialed to Destroy. Just read that ETS wants to increase the disciplines of civics and history as a counter to the events of the “January 6 insurrection”. Yes, the solution to a fictional insurrection is to turn all school children into Marxist makers of history to fulfill the civic mission of schools (also covered in CtD) and then have formative assessments that can look for the presence of the desired attributes and then call that “student success”.
Are you familiar with this Trash Hack initiatives UNESCO commenced last year with the government of Japan? https://gemreportunesco.wordpress.com/2021/06/16/trash-hack-young-people-rethink-waste-in-their-schools-homes-and-communities-with-unesco/#more-14328
Now becoming an international template.
Have another webinar shortly. This education for history and civics juggernaut has me very busy, but again it is all consistent with what my book and this blog have warned about. My book turns out to be more pertinent than ever, which is why it still sells every month.
That’s a hoot. The Japanese already have one of the smallest per capita carbon footprints on the planet.
We are trying to understand the building boom going on in Tokyo, a city that was supposed to decentralize after the 3/11 quake. Millions of acres of empty office space.
Notice how this https://www.transcendeducation.org/playlist-blog/using-design-to-disrupt-the-cycle-of-racism fundamental transformation in the nature of education, along the lines of what John Dewey called for a century ago and for the reasons covered by CtD, will not be impacted in the least by CRT statutes.
or this aim that Uncle Karl would recognize
https://www.transcendeducation.org/leaps-for-equitable-21st-century-learning Yet we have deceitful think tanks and their employees telling parents that an Equity mandate is synonymous with CRT. It actually means something much different.
Yeah, I know you always appreciate the nonsense going on globally around the push to use activity and abstractions guiding perception emotionally along with useful images to control consciousness. That’s the real goal of the Frankfurt School and there is no need for the hyped terms from CRT to get at consciousness. I was on a webinar on Monday that included the head of Georgetown University speaking on the kind of change desired. John DiGioia was his name and he actually said that we “need to get at people’s interiority and the ways they make meaning”. You can imagine how quickly I wrote down that quote. The “January 6 Insurrection” hype is also front and center on the need to use a new kind of history and civics to gain a new consciousness in the name of the kind of citizens desired for the future.
I am sure you heard about this but sharing just in case. Brilliant idea, just brilliant.
https://www.union-bulletin.com/news/northwest/oregon-students-would-no-longer-have-to-prove-they-can-do-basic-reading-writing-math/article_73698a9a-bfdd-11eb-920f-c7f235e75a99.html
Thanks. Hope you are well. This video released yesterday confirms to me that all this crt hype, as well as the way action civics is OK as long as it is tied To Ideals, and the misrepresentations of the Frankfurt School after the denial in the past of the MH template, by the same people involved with the Common Core deceitful narratives, is quite the orchestrated pincer action. https://www.city-journal.org/theoretical-roots-and-practical-consequences-of-critical-race-theory The Manhattan Institute, which publishes City Journal has long been a major beneficiary of the Bradley Foundation that is also behind McClay’s new textbook. I even went back after watching the video to confirm that “full and free development of the human personality” from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that is based on the MH/ Human Development Society vision did sound just like Rufo hyping Excellence so that Everyone can meet their Full Potential. Plus every one of those Ideals he lists has been redefined by Amartya Sen, Danielle Allen, one of the authors of Whole-Child Development, Learning, and Thriving: A Dynamic Systems Approach among others. None of this is coincidental and it all just keep intersecting.
Yet how can students really thrive, as you note, except as wards of an administered society, if they cannot read, write, and think arithmetically at least? At least they are unlikely to dispute an offered narrative or contradict some news anchor or professor claiming something factually provable is Misinformation when it is, in fact, simply inconvenient information to some transformational, collective aim.
Did you see Fed Ed is hosting a 2 hour Equity Summit on Tuesday, June 22? Open to the Public via video as long as they sign up in advance.
LL, I woke up this AM with this very idea on my mind. Prior to Covid-19, I was in the habit of hosting international student interns, U.S., U.K. Germany, Italy, N.Z.
My learning was that the American kids (with one exception) were not literate or numerate. All came out of relatively high ranked universities.
My German and Italian interns spoke better English than did the Americans. Accents aside, their syntax was more complex.
I mentioned next week’s FED Ed Equity Summit, but it has the subheading of “Building Equitable Learning Environments in Our Schools”. That brings into play the vision of Equity from here. https://belenetwork.org/
It’s worth the time to read the quotes chosen. People need to understand the wholesale changes at the level of the child coming in in the name of Equity, which have nothing to do with CRT. Making the terms synonymous keeps parents from thinking School Choice as the remedy and ending up at a charter or private school committed to the same transformational, neurological change, template laid out by BELE.
Look what came out on a Friday night on a new Federal Holiday. https://curriculumredesign.org/wp-content/uploads/Embedding-Competencies-within-Disciplines-aka-Top4-CCR-June-2021.pdf
Also remember that the Common Core was and is a Competency Framework. We covered this in CtD, but the False Narrative kept insisting competency=votech. Look at the listed competencies. It goes to scrambling the brains and personalities of the students to become a good little comrade. Wanted to make sure too that you saw how Mindfulness comes in under Character.
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/dallas-fort-worth/news/2021/05/05/dallas-isd-launching-first-of-its-kind–hybrid-school–with-video-game-esque-learning-platform
H/t Amazing Polly https://www.bitchute.com/video/dc902i3d2FYk/
Polly puts this this video gaming virtual reality platform within the context of the Great Reset plan to utterly divorce us from reality by habituating us to a Truman Show existence that we can conjure up on demand. She doesn’t, however, talk about how this is not education.
I think I have come a long way in solving what has been bothering both of us about the Barney Charter Initiative Schools and the False Narrative. Are you familiar at all with the Center for Public Justice? I was on a webinar AEI sponsored on Friday and was struck, as I noted to Leslie, with the language targeting beliefs and practices and the very clear alliance between the Public Justice vision and the MH one, in terms of results, if not motivations. So I went looking for a connection between James Skillen, who was one of the founders of CPJ as it is called now and served as its President and Larry Arnn. Up came a 2002 book available on the search engine that scoops up books called God and the Constitution: Christianity and American Politics by Paul Marshall.
He thanks the Claremont Institute for funding the book and its then President Larry Arnn. He also thanks CPJ for its Civitas Program for doing a one day seminar on the book, hosted by the Brookings Institution and AEI on the book. Skillen is thanked by name. The book talks about moving beyond “changing individuals one at a time” targeting the “vital inner matters of the heart.” Sounds like Tranzi OBE to me or holistic student-centered learning as it is called today and which the motto of Equity and Excellence mandates. Fits with the Pillars we see in Barney Charter School graphics as targeting change in each student.
Relevant to Classical Ed hyping Good, True, and Beautiful or these anti-CRT or Action Civics statutes codifying Ideals or Founding Principles into the staute, therby turning History and Civics into philosophy or political science theories being mandated into practice we have this money quote from the book’s Preface (my bolding):
Pulls a great deal together, doesn’t it? Especially on top of the various blogs and think tanks that have been doing presentations to incite parents about CRT, then insisting the public outcry is ‘grassroots’ or ‘organic’ . The remedies enshrine Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete or the New Dialectics as Soviet philosopher Ilyenkov called it. Same tool as the Frankfurt School used to get a to consciousness, now codified into statutes but doing precisely what Paul Marshall laid out in the quote above. It’s also the remedy Thomas Lindsay calls for in this paper https://www.texaspolicy.com/action-civicsnew-civics-civic-engagement-and-project-based-civics-advances-in-civic-education/ Notice the co-author is a Hillsdale grad and Lindsay was at NEH for years where he pushed the ‘We the People’ overhaul, which is another phrase that gets redefined to turn history into a philosophical or poli sci project without saying that upfront.
It’s all coming together, even if putting it together has been time consuming.
Thanks. I am adding the title of the video so people understand what it is about. “Mother from USSR destroying Equity, Marxism at the Board Meeting BCSD. Calling School Bolshevik. CRT”
Busy here with Father’s Day cooking as last night was for my husband with the kids and this afternoon I am making requested crab cakes for my 92 year old father-in-law. I mull when I cook and I was remembering yesterday about the Student Privacy model legislation from Jeb Bush’s ed think tank that actually authorized personality manipulation via SEL and data gathering, The irony with some of the CRT legislation I have seen is that in the name of avoiding the Marxism of CRT, these statutes are enshrining the every bit as Marxian and Frankfurt School inspired Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete alteration of Consciousness via the vague language about Ideals and Founding Principles. As I have been quietly documenting (which I why I stopped writing to just listen and take notes from hours of confirming webinars each week), all these terms have been redefined to support the Marxist Humanist Development Society. Now that is being authorized by statute, which is quite the Trojan Horse, isn’t it?
I was on a webinar Friday and realized that I had just heard the professor speaking admit the targeting of beliefs and behavioral practices. How very Tranzi OBE I thought. That CCR document I put up this weekend on Embedding Competencies in the Disciplines so that all school work becomes about changing the student’s personal characteristics that will guide their future behavior. That really becomes apparent in the descriptions in the Appendices.
I also called another CRT opponent to that BELE Network site I have linked to here and what it says Equity really means and how it is hugely misleading to do what Chris Rufo did in his video from last week where he treated Equity and CRT as synonymous. BELE’s website features a series of illuminating quotes and one of them is from Kendi.
Those are radical shifts in the goal of education coming in in the name of Equity. Kendi was featured as a speaker in another webinar I was on last week and he did not come across as either particularly well-informed nor analytical. His anti-racism slogans are really just a facade to insist on the Marxist Humanist society as a matter of right. Of course, that’s also the goal of the Law and Political Economy Framework created in 2020 with Hewlett Funding that ties to this very post and the Fairer Tomorrow work CASBS at Stanford is pushing.
Hoping to get something up tomorrow before the webinars begin again in earnest.
James Lindsay has done brilliant work w/ regard to Marcuse’s shit on tolerance of intolerance. This is the nut of the thing. Let’s stop being aggrieved and cut to the chase.