How many of us recognize the current widespread school and higher ed cancellations and switch to online and virtual learning as fitting with the education template various global institutions are pushing called the Libre process of digital pedagogies we covered in the last post? Never let a crisis go to waste, indeed. If you read as many global plans and conference materials for using education to force change as I do, it is hard not to notice that the word ‘pandemic,’ like man-made climate change, has long been considered a tool to force the desired sense of interdependence and communitarianism. Here’s a quote from a 2019 paper https://www.wise-qatar.org/2019-wise-research-learning-ecosystems-innovation-unit/ that makes the desired shift explicit:
The starting point must be around the holistic development of living in a better world–to be changemakers. I am convinced that ecosystemic approaches are necessary to move from mechanistic education systems to learner centric ones…It is clear that education needs to become an avenue through which global society will overcome the challenges, gaps and barriers we have created: the digital divide, the growing economic and social inequality, religious, ethnic, and cultural divides, and the extreme ecological pressures we are placing upon the Earth…An active search is underway for new ways of learning and new organizational forms for education that will be consistent with the emergent social and economic reality. In such a context, perhaps it is unsurprising that inspiration for change is sought from biological, as opposed to mechanical, analogues.
A biological lens is certainly easier to practice with during and after a global hype of deadly pandemics, isn’t it? Here’s another quote from that same paper that again fits where we are all suddenly being forced to go:
Across the globe there is a growing consensus that education demands a radical transformation if we want all citizens to become future-ready in the face of a more digitally enabled, uncertain and fast changing world…As learning frameworks outlining ambitious global agendas for inclusive education and lifelong learning begin to emerge, and as societies become more connected and intertwined, it is becoming clear that society has a collective role to play in equipping people to create meaningful futures, through lifelong learning.
Deriving from the field of evolutionary biology, an ‘ecosystem’ is a community of interdependent organisms acting in conjunction with the natural environment…This type of ecosystem comprises complex, evolving networks of organizations including think tanks, foundations, governmental and global agencies and others who are consciously connecting to facilitate the sharing of new knowledge about education and learning, innovation, funding opportunities and more. It is largely concerned with building the global shared knowledge base, scaling innovation and enabling the better use of resources and opportunities to tackle shared global learning challenges, not only within but between networks.
What is meant by a ‘global shared knowledge base’ we might ask and how does that tie to ‘shared meaning-making’ via common global learning standards? It reminded me of the requisite ‘systems thinking’ push over the decades that I first covered in my book Credentialed to Destroy and have since found in recent federal statutes and a new vision of Regulatory Governance pushed by a New Zealand professor, Jeroen van der Heijden, that has made its way here https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3531381 for broader dissemination. It helpfully (with italics) pointed out the need for a shift from:
thinking of systems as something ‘out there’ –an ontological approach –and systems thinking as a tool that helps us to think about reality–an epistemological approach.
The kind of conceptual learning frameworks I have covered repeatedly on this blog that require a common understanding to become widespread (that the Soviets also pushed as Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete) fits right in with what that paper above covers as “Regulation and Soft Systems Methodology (SSM)”.
SSM requires a careful understanding and defining of the system at hand–known as ‘root definition’. Defining the system and the problem it seeks to address is best done by a variety of individuals and organizations from within the system. In short, the definition includes the basic transformation a system seeks to achieve (T), the worldview that provides meaning to this transformation (W), system ownership (O), system operators (A), the customer or target of the system (C), and the environmental constraints of the system (E)…After establishing the root definition–again, done in a deliberative process with a variety of individuals and organisations from within the system–conceptual models are developed to actualize the stated aims (C). These conceptual models then must be compared with the real-time, real-world situation to define possible and feasible changes.
In late February in the US a paper came out called “Changing Expectations for the K-12 Teacher Workforce” that laid out such Conceptual Models as the new kind of knowledge all teachers are to develop–Deeper Learning. Reading the paper it is impossible not to recognize that without a deep and broad knowledge base that comes from being well read with an Axemaker Mind, the typical student, and the adult they will become, is not in a position to know whether the required Conceptual Models fit with reality or not. What a useful means of covert regulatory governance by governments at all levels and the institutions that serve as their cronies and proxies. It all fits perfectly with this SSM, 21st century global vision, of “regulation as a (cybernetic) system of control” where people and the organisations they are a part of can be:
configured in relation to each of the three components of a cybernetic system: that is, at the level of standard-setting (whether behavioural standards are ‘simple’ /fixed or ‘complex’ /adaptive) [Common Core/Competencies!], information gathering and monitoring (reactive or pre-emptive) [formative assessment and continuous improvement], and behaviour modification (automated or recommender systems) [aka Learning!]…
A call for applying systems thinking to a regulatory problem is a call to focus on the emergent behaviour of a collection of parts and their interactions as they ostensible relate to that regulatory problem…systems thinking sets boundaries to delineate what is relevant and what is not–such boundaries are often operational rather than spatial. Systems thinking introduces a set of concepts that help to map, explore, interrogate and give meaning to a complex problem at hand.
Finally, let’s quote from yet another paper being linked to globally on what learning standards and a transformed vision of education is really intended to do. It is by Ervin Laszlo’s son Alexander from 2014 and came out of ISSS’s 57th meeting on the meta-theme of Curating the Conditions for a Thrivable Planet. Called “Connecting the DOTS: The Design of Thrivable Systems Through the Power of Collective Intelligence,” it sought (with italics in original) systemic leverage points for emerging a global eco-civilization. Number one leverage point? The
centrality of meaning-making to human activity systems–at both individual and collective levels…This meaning-making drive brings us together…[it creates] a community of interest–around systems perspectives and approaches; a community of practice–around the application of systemic ways of thinking/ doing/ being; and a community of place–that sees and appreciates the interdependence of a globally interconnected world.
As we self-isolate in the coming days and weeks, let’s remember that creating a common vision and vocabulary for meaning-making is a prerequisite for the desired transformational change–first, at the level of each individual, but then also in broader political, social, and economic spheres. Notice how often the rhetoric is looking to foster, at both a visual and emotional level, those very communities of interest, practice, and place needed for transformational change for a different type of collective future. Notice how the release of a new virus from Wuhan China somehow gets used to reenforce the desired changes at an internalized, personal, level that global education conferences have been laying out graphically and with explicit transformational rationales for about a decade.
What a fortuitous kickstart as long as we remain in the vast majority of this planet that will probably not get seriously ill or even know someone who has.
Timely, isn’t it, with only a decade left to the declared finish line of 2030.
Yep, yep, and yep.
Was thinking, too, that the so-called AIDS epidemic was an earlier ‘go’ at this, though it did not involve the digital learning aspect. It was based on BAD SCIENCE, and the complicity of the media in eliciting wide-spread and irrational fear, and it did drive wide-spread behavioral change among members of the population who likely never knew an AIDS victim, or even someone who knew one.
And, note, the immediate response of certain more ‘sophisticated’ commentators on this crisis to ‘sense make it’ using data, while not asking necessary questions about that data.
On another but related note, I have been reviewing with an est/Landmark ‘survivor’ an exercise that is staple to a lot of these groups, though the flavors may change. It is a ‘choice’ exercise in which participants are asked to choose between two flavors of ice cream, chocolate or vanilla. Most people have a preference and express it. Next, the preferred flavor is removed and they are asked to ‘choose’, which flavor they prefer, and explain why. Of course, many participants respond that they ‘chose’ X, because there was no longer a choice possible, but this is NOT the right answer, and this is a RIGHT answer. The agonizing over this may go on for hours until the participant says in exasperation, “I chose it because I chose it.” EUREKA, the ‘aha’ moment, whereby it is understood that ‘no choice’ equals ‘choice’ if one is in the right ‘frame of mind’.
Now with the latest virus scare, choices ARE to question it and reap social opprobrium, to ignore it and risk same, to embrace ‘new’ behaviors and feel that one is contributing to a ‘solution’.
Somebody mentioned the media response to the Swine Flu epidemic that occurred during the Obama administration, and which was quite lethal. Here, there was a measured approach that seemed to actually have something to do with limiting the scope of a contagion but did not involve memes like ‘social distancing’. We need to build “heard immunity” to b.s.
A little humor to go with the mostly cruciferous vegetables I can find at the store. https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2020/03/18/best-coronavirus-memes/
Have you seen this? https://www.horizonadvisory.org/news/coronavirus-series-report-launch-viral-moment-chinas-post-covid-planning
Remember that ISSS conference I was quoting from in this post took place in Vietnam and systems science fits well with these plans. The Chinese have also been all over the related Living Cities push that I have covered here at ISC in the past. Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete and the HOTS emphasis on Enduring Understandings etc to guide perception and the interpretation of daily experience are essentially an update of DiaMat.
Just imagine what the laid out information system plans will do when overlaid with the IEEE Standards on Autonomous Systems that include people and tie to ISCED learning standards globally.
Adding this from unesco that is just out, since we know they are involved with Libre and ISCED is their baby too. Never let a crisis go to waste indeed. https://gemreportunesco.wordpress.com/2020/03/18/coronavirus-could-education-systems-have-been-better-prepared/
New ways of learning amidst virtual reality immersions was already the agenda.
Once again we must not let this crisis go to waste and we must think in terms of ‘systems’, not individuals. https://knowledgeworks.org/resources/resilience-empathy-equity-navigate-uncertain-future/ came out yesterday.
I am adding a bit more as it really is the excuse for the Human Development Society Uncle Karl dreamed of as the byproduct of a certain level of society. Human-centered systems to meet needs the article calls for as it notes the joining together of the education and healthcare systems. Then there is this
Pandemic’s Utility to destroy privilege. Yeah, right. Privilege here is only available to the politically connected in an Upravleniye vision of the future.
Pandemic’s Utility to destroy privilege.
Yeh, right, what I am seeing is the privileged trying to make a buck peddling everything from Corona ‘masks’ (designer) to consulting related to remote work strategies/technogies. This whole thing is a little TOO well-organized.
On a personal front, my research partner in Madrid reports that he tested positive for the virus upon disembarking an international flight. He reports that the symptoms are similar to that of a mild cold. He is under house quarantine.
I wonder if, during any cold/flu season, you pulled people off trains, airplanes and tested them, how many would test positive for cold or flu strains. I think that number would be very high.
I hope you are right, but with a husband in the hospital for several days in January we have to be careful here. Good thing I like to cook from scratch and can easily shift to what is available. Had swiss chard with bacon and red wine vinegar Wednesday night which was a big hit with the baked haddock I made.
More use of crisis. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-03-18-teacher-interrupted-leaning-into-social-emotional-learning-amid-the-covid-19-crisis
Reason to go where we were always supposed to go anyway. Yale is simply using the RULER acronym to push what Bela Banathy recognized in the 80s as the needed focus to shift students and the people they would become towards thinking with systems and acting predictably as one as a result.
Here’s another example https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-03-17-school-leaders-say-plan-for-remote-teaching-but-take-care-of-students-first
Also think of all the constructivist math thinking that will get undone while stuch working from home parents actually teach multiplication tables and explain ratios and fractions. One of my kids commented on the number of conference calls now with the sound of children in the back ground.
I am adding this as I wrote a post on EcoMuve a few years ago and this successor VR experience is being pushed for stay at home resources during covid https://ecolearn.gse.harvard.edu/projects/ecoxpt
It all tracks back to David Perkins (AI from MIT like Kahn as in Kahn Academy) and the CORE–Conceptual Reorganization–NSF grants I also covered in the past. Now called Visible Thinking, but ties to Howard Gardner as well as IB globally.
https://pz.harvard.edu/projects/visible-thinking is the overall template.
Look at all the systems thinking videos being hyped to get the desired visuals in place. We have this http://www.clexchange.org/resources/videos.aspx
Plus the Infection Game is available for downloading.
And the headers for all these pushes actually hype it as not letting a crisis go to waste.
Plus we have this calling for New Age of Mutuality.
https://www.gettingsmart.com/2020/03/%ef%bb%bfthe-new-mutuality/
Finally here is the link to the referenced Future of Humanity report. https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Windfall-Clause-Report.pdf
“The five implications listed below are just the beginning for this new era of human existence. A sixth implication is that leadership matters. I hope this post provokes deep thought about the nature of public leadership required in this challenging time.”
Well, if leadership matters, how does one explain the leaders selected for Trump’s COVID-19 task force? Robin, I don’t know if you have watched Deborah Birx in action but she has made bold statements to the effect that solutions to the issues posed by COVID-19 will require the flexible, systems-thinking minds of younger generations. So, why is she a leader on this task force? Fauci, Birx and others have DEEP connections to HIV/AIDs combines and to the Gates and Clinton foundations, organizations, which have shown an incredible flare for graft in their third-world activities. Could NYC become Haiti?
Regarding your earlier post, Project Zero caught my eye. This is the foundation-funded Harvard think tank that also sponsored the Good Work Project. Yeh, Gardner is involved and Czick. Look out!
Robin, I have a question. I consider myself to be a good interdisciplinary thinker and feel this is a useful activity. I sense something very different is going on with systems-thinking, though — beyond the fact that they don’t really DO IT.
Any thoughts on this?
Your neural system that dictates how you perceive the world and interpret your experiences is something YOU developed. This envisioned neural net which acts as a dependable ‘system’ controlling thinking and future decision-making is prescribed to have that desired effect. Notice all the hype over disinformation that, upon examination, amounts to using unapproved mental analysis. We do that a lot here at ISC as you know. You can see it though in the graphic at visible thinking link. Good time to bring back this old post. http://invisibleserfscollar.com/all-that-is-solid-melts-into-air-but-does-it-really/
Also with links to Classical Ed and the Templeton Foundation we have this essay from this week https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2020/03/61609/
Snell sounds just like John Goodlad in the quotes I used in CtD, as well as other Social Reconstructionists I quoted. Citizens do not get to create their own neural nets. That’s what global learning standards are for.
I wish I was reading this in real time and not hindsight. But I could not help to remark here.
The person with the political disease is this Snell person, who has with the simple few paragraphs created in me a deep hatred for Him/her , While revealing exactly what has taken over the minds of our precious children when we send them to college – thus The statue of Christopher Columbus at the bottom of a body of water, and church is burned synagogues defaced.
“… Our society, and its schools and colleges, have devoted themselves to unmasking, unveiling, and deconstructing the really human things, in order to reveal them as artificial: as nothing but power, privilege, or a religious hangover: as things that need to be destroyed, so that the individual qua individual can define himself or herself as he or she wishes to be…”
A hammer to your head would give you a nice hangover Snell!. When they have you on the ground and they are stomping on your head with their Nike’s, who will you be crying out for? Will you be screaming “but I am on your side?” Or calling for G-d to save you from these wretched soulless creatures.
I just watched a presentation on The Vandee, the genocide that took place in France in 1790’s during the French Revolution that has been swept under the rug.
The juxtaposition of events that led up to that event with events in our country since 2012, as Obama Methodically unmoored Us from our Founding, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Church, and connected Us to his Dear Uncle Karl & fast tracked Progressivism, Sends chills up my spine.
The degradation of human beings right now has reached a point where it is not so hard to see Antifa and it’s stooges (America’s sons & daughters) become like those communists of the French Revolution who came to Vandee and slaughtered their countrymen for not Bending the Knee to their empty slogan “Liberty, Equality & Brotherhood (or death).” They performed unspeakable atrocities in their fellow countrymen.
We are close to the point of no return – this is not going to end well, but for whom?
Take a look at this. https://www.learningandthebrain.com/blog/good-morning-i-love-you-mindfulness-and-self-compassion-practice-to-rewire-your-brain-for-calm-clarity-and-joy-by-shauna-shapiro/
That’s what has become a focus of K-12 education. So we can appreciate we all belong to one another is precisely what the CCP, when not launching and lying about this virus, insisted be known as Universal Love and become part of the Hong Kong Citizenship Curriculum.
Plus we have this. https://www.christenseninstitute.org/blog/the-coronavirus-exposes-americas-misplaced-educational-values/
It was the author’s emphasis on competencies at a think tank breakfast he spoke at in 2012 that I attended that made me understand that was the real focus of the Common Core learning standards. Became reflected in CtD, which is why its insights remain so relevant.
Adding more in the same vein. https://www.edutopia.org/article/why-learning-home-should-more-self-directed-and-less-structured
No Higher Power, no Creator, we are the beginning and the end. Humanism. Science. Is That mindfulness stuff triggers me. Being kind and curious about our emotional pain? What does that even mean? Is there no place people will be Alone and able to be to figure things out on their own without a master mind showing us the way? Holy moly yes Robin CCP This is unsustainable. Human beings will at some point reject this. Tell me I am right , please? Say it is in the DNA of Americans and immigrants who came here to get away from this hive mind, central control, and once realized won’t stand for it.
I wonder how all this works in inner city schools where kids eat dinner on the floor so they don’t get hit by a stray bullet from a drive by.
This launched today
https://www.brookings.edu/events/webinar-how-we-rise-policy-solutions-to-upend-structural-racism-and-inequality/ The tenet isn’t just that race, gender, or class should not impact outcomes, which is ridiculous given just how much experiences impact who a child will become. They also do not want ability to affect outcomes. That assumes total control over what a person can become. It is an appalling vision where no aspect of the mind or personality is off limits for governmental meddling for “our own good.”
You probably remember I had long correlated school shooting sites with schools piloting the Tranzi OBE template. The more we recognize its neurological aims for change it becomes much easier to grasp why that correlation exists. It’s not less totalitarian when pushed at the local level using euphemisms and carrying out a more centralized template. Pretending it is about flourishing or Freedom, Justice and a rather unique vision of Liberty doesn’t change its true function either.
COVID-19 — a global perspective
This ‘event’ seems to be over in Japan, with workers sitting at their desks, and large- scale sporting events going forward. Kinda funny, huh, and given the amount of CN/JP traffic that must have occurred just prior to the outbreak in Wuhan.
Some of the locals believe we are not being told the truth…I kinda think the truth is not being told in other locations.
But get this, and it is so Japanese. The utility companies are maintaining service for those who cannot pay their bills. Landlords are forgiving back rent. I guess we have had a lot of practice with disasters and they have become the new ‘normal’.
Saw an interesting doc discussion the other day in which a cool-headed virologist observed that a virus really needed to have three characteristics to drive mass hysteria. It needed to:
1) be formidably lethal — (think MERs, or even Avien Flu)
2) kill children (think so-called Spanish Flu)
3) cause permanent disability or disfigurement (think polio)
This thing lacks all of these criteria.
I am going to quote at length from something the Frameworks Institute has put out that makes the Upravleniye function of this virus crystal clear.
Plus we have this from GSV and what used to be iNACOL:
It’s all an excuse to push the UN’s global governance via learning standards agenda. Change people at the level of their minds so they accept the organized society Ervin Laszlo laid out in the early 70s for the West.
One more from someone with ties to both the NEA and AFT that I have followed since the Bipartisan Summit on Capitol Hill that soros helped finance a few years ago (2014 0r 15)
https://medium.com/education-reimagined/covid-19-an-invitation-to-pause-reflect-and-embrace-the-power-of-community-9f522634df1
I’ve seen a number of talking heads in both MSM and alternative media touting this ‘transformation’ that has occurred via COVID-19. In that its actual impact has been fairly localized, to date, I cannot imagine how the mass of humanity has collectively awakened to this need to throw off the shackles of standardized knowledge.
I am appreciating, though, that some citizens are resorting to five-senses methods, are out filming their local hospitals and COVID-19 testing centers in search of a pandemic. See: #filmyourhospital. Also, a steady stream of AXMAKER MINDED docs and researcher seem to be posting about the data issues related to COVID-19. Maybe, this was all another “ice cube challenge”?
Well, we have these suggestions. https://humaneeducation.org/humane-education-activities-you-can-do-at-home/ And the same site offers this quote that certainly sounds like what MGIEP or Humanity 2.0 already intended for us.
On the data, it will be hard for governments to give up the insights created from what they have been able to pull from cell phone records to allow contact tracing. It certainly will enhance the surveillance state’s aspirations once this excuse is over and this is all premised supposedly on governments providing for the well-being of every life. The panic CAGW had only engendered in the young gets created across the board and we all end up feeling ‘ruled’ by someone else’s goals for us. The essence of treating people as ‘systems’ who should desire what is being dictated to them.
We also have this:
From here https://knowledgeworks.org/resources/should-k-12-education-prepare-more-than-college-career/ which works closely with Institute for the Future, whose founding just happens to be mentioned in the founding documents from the 1968 Bellagio retreat the Rockefeller F hosted that first treated all of us as systems and laid out the vision for backwards mapping from desired transformational goals for society. It would become the Club of Rome and not go in the direction Nicholas Christakis’ dad wanted in using the social sciences. Well, they are using them now, in earnest and somehow it fits the plans in Blueprint too.
Well, I think humans feel so socially fragmented that ‘any’ common concern can feel like a ‘positive’ experience. That said, I think the sheer over-kill in response to this event and the obvious manipulation in play will backfire. People are becoming more media-savvy, and when they are told in lock-step to dramatically modify their way of living by people have ceased to be perceived as credible…well. I just watch for the installation of memes…the pat little NLP routines they all role out…and, the very evident hypocrisy. On that front, I think David Icke of all people, made a great point, today, that being that citizens of the U.K. are being asked, in essence, to dramatically alter their routines in order to protect the most vulnerable to the disease — the elderly. This would be the same country whose healthcare system attempts to persuade older patients to sign “do not resuscitate” forms under circumstances when their quality of life is still good. I guess that’s another systems thing. I think they have overplayed their hand with this one.
Also, I think that we will see the nation-state make a comeback in the light of things like the EU’s response to the crisis in Italy.
Oh god, and who could not shudder at Bill Gates pushing home testing kits, when the industrial ones have not even been perfected. I think they have overplayed their hand, and could we please have a respite from the mindfulness language!!!
This article https://www.city-journal.org/covid-19-and-technology goes directly to your point about technology and its use. Hard not to see the aims of Herman Kahn, who founded the author’s employer in this quote:
My state is going to a mandatory state-wide lockdown tomorrow and my county was already there. Luckily I live somewhere with lots of sidewalks that go on for miles literally. I logged 280 minutes of walking last week and am getting in plenty of balance core work. Since several of the biggest area hospitals are near me and that so-called Pill Hill is one of my walks maybe I should add a spin through its grounds to check out traffic. Yesterday was my venture out and I found the grocery store far more depleted than the previous wednesday. I feel sorry for anyone who does not know how to cook from scratch. The frozen case was strikingly empty.
Am adding this link. Government approved broadcasts. https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/California-PBS-At-Home-Learning-Model-Spreads-Across-US.html
Ah yes, the saved by technology angle, but what to do about the rotten, withered souls of those who are so obsessed with it, and progress and the march toward that wonderful tomorrow. Frankly, they are BORING.
Yes, look at the excuse for the already desired ‘Reset’:
https://www.gettingsmart.com/2020/03/hard-reset-what-will-be-new-post-pandemic/ Remember too VanderArk was at the GEFF 2030 conference in Russia with Pavel Luksha and wrote about the new kind of consciousness intended.
Time for my Vitamin D exposure while I walk.
Precisely to your point of concern and not going back in the genie’s bottle with this ’emergency’ is over.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2003/2003.12347.pdf
Also this quote, which again will outlast this pandemic
This came out yesterday https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-04-02-what-students-are-doing-is-remote-learning-not-online-learning-there-s-a-difference
They do want to break the historic paradigm.
Friends in beta-test California are reporting they are conducting K-12 classes via ZOOM and it is chaos.
Let’s look for a bright side. Could this situation backfire and result in more homeschooling?
Take a look at this. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability/our-insights/addressing-climate-change-in-a-post-pandemic-world
If the homeschooling is digital learning tied to ISCED learning standards as many are, hasn’t this ‘crisis’ merely accelerated the SDG agenda we also see in that McKinsey article. Think of all the ed architects like Angela Duckworth who once worked at McKinsey.
Also, during all this the UN dropped the 8th edition of its World Happiness Report https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2020/WHR20.pdf that we know is tied to Positive Psych in ed and Martin Seligman’s work. Same goals, more rationales for its urgency.
Also, speaking of learning standards, we suddenly get this push to adopt John Deweys’ vision for all adaptable systems. including systems. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340310268_Dewey's_Ethics_of_Moral_Principles_and_Deliberation_Extending_IEEE's_Ethics_Initiative_for_Adaptive_Instructional_Systems
How prescient Credentialed to Destroy has been on Dewey.
Notice the conclusion’s applicability too to homeschooling as well as the virtue ethics push we saw with the Pope’s Humanity 2.0
McKinsey was instrumental in promoting the early development of transformational models in the ‘coaching’ field (e.g. John Whitmore’s work), and, more recently contracted with a provider of “ontological coaching” programs to deliver to their consultants, globally.
Robert George of Witherspoon and APP who set off the False Narrative around the Common Core back in 2011 in what appears to be coordinated choreography is talking with Blueprint‘s Nicholas Christakis about what we do and do not know about the pandemic. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2020/04/62065/ is from April 7.
A quote:
Remember too Alexander Christakis, his father, was part of the original Bellagio retreat in 1968 that led to the Club of Rome. He also worked with Riane Eisler and her husband David Loye on the Darwin Project to push cultural evolution.
Doesn’t the pandemic hype and the powers governments at all levels have taken on enhance the so-called Good Society push Christakis laid out?
Am adding this https://www.jff.org/points-of-view/seize-moment-reimagine-k-12/ from this past week as well. Jobs for the Future works with federal government as well as Aspen Institute.
And then this from April 8 “Do we go back to normal or do we invent something else?” https://medium.com/education-reimagined/the-covid-choice-for-education-fc21ffa60fa8 And the something else just happens to be what John Dewey always sought for education to do.
Hi Robin,
Hope you are well during these strange times. Just finished reading your post and the comments. I thought of you as I am writing an analytical paper that has a bit to do with climate change. School, even graduate for me, has switched to all online. I recalled from your book the Styrofoam cup episode. My course is having me write about this particular lawsuit. https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/juliana-v-us
Why on earth this would need to be analyzed in a course completion series for forensic accounting I do not know…. eye roll…. Well, never mind, I do know. I wish I did not have to parrot what I know they want me to align my thinking to but alas I get the 4.0 and Deans list if they think I am following along. :p
Meanwhile I am sickened.
Here is the link for the case. Have you heard of it? Good little soldiers working together.
https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/juliana-v-us
Stay well.
LL
I am glad you are well, even if your degree work leaves you exasperated. Can you believe this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340310268_Dewey's_Ethics_of_Moral_Principles_and_Deliberation_Extending_IEEE's_Ethics_Initiative_for_Adaptive_Instructional_Systems just came out and links digital learning, the panacea for this overhyped pandemic, to the creation of Dewey’s Moral Deliberation Qualities needed for a Democracy?
Also ties to the False Common Core roadshow since a common participant now works for both IEEE and APP.
We also have this in rather broken English but we get the point. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3552398&dgcid=ejournal_htmlemail_educational:psychology:cognition:ejournal_abstractlink
Read ‘ourchildrenstrust’, ARGH!
On the Christakis interview, I am struck by the extraordinary level of elitism and moral superiority — almost on par with that of liberal Hollywood celebrities. Taking this moral high ground consigns everyone who might question the wisdom of this approach to the opposite position — we don’t care if our neighbors die. I would suggest that Dr. Christakis head out to the front-lines of his community, that he actually serve the people who don’t have lavish homes to ‘shelter’ in, and who will have no jobs to go back to. Oh, wait, this would mean a brush with reality.
The current situation and the comments Robin has been posting causes me to remember a personal and horrific experience of LEFTIST disconnects with reality.
In late 2010, I had been encouraged by two academics at a major U.S. university to form a doctoral cohort in Japan. They pledged that if I could accomplish this, they would teach a program on-site in this country, as opposed to my having to travel to the U.S. to fulfill residency requirements. I won’t name the individuals, the instituttion, or the program of study, but suffice it to say, Dr. Christakis could have been a guest lecturer.
I worked for several months securing a venue, designing informational events, evangelizing the program, and securing meetings with local leaders and academics.
The 3/11 earthquake/tsunami/Fukushima melt-down occurred just prior to the dates scheduled for the professors to visit Japan. I strongly advised them not to come. I was concerned about their safety and whether we could produce an audience for their presentations.
Undaunted, they arrived in this country utterly unprepared to deliver what they had committed to, and seemingly unaware of the dimensions of the disaster, its implications. Not one word of empathy was expressed to the ragged, stressed-out people who braved transportation challenges to attend learning events. Multiple complaints were lodged about minor inconveniences and cultural challenges,, e.g. that food labels were not written in English. Few to no questions were asked, no interest in the host culture was exhibited. I felt these people saw themselves as rock stars or celebrities and that we could all be eternally grateful for the body of knowledge they proposed sharing with our backward community.
Wish I could say this was an anomaly.
Just out of Lenten quarantine from my favorite blogs. Have only skimmed this post and comments. But I can’t resist saying that the rock star attitudes Leslie observed post Fukushima remind me of Fauci’s reference to economic shutdown and millions of unemployed, with its attendant suffering and death, as “inconvenient.” If this has already be alluded to, forgive the redundancy.
At least the standardized tests have been scrubbed, in Colorado at least.
Welcome back. This is very good. https://spectator.org/five-quick-things-the-tyranny-of-the-karens/
Hard for education not to be transformed when Equity is the focus and more kids than ever will start the next school year in k-12 or in higher ed, with or without needed knowledge and skills, largely based on what has been going on in their homes and the role taken on by their parents during this shutdown. Have been doing cleaning and came across the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia each of my children happily spent hours perusing when they were tweens and later. Which quarantined homes have those kind of books matters more than ever.
Hopefully will get something new up this week. Worked on it this weekend before the storms came. We were noisily and brightly blowing transformers around my house last night, just like a classic ice storm.
I’ve been on to Fauci for years, so his unmasking to at least the attentive sliver of the population gives me some grim satisfaction.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/01/how-government-is-standing-in-the-way-of-lifesaving-american-innovation/
https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/27/what-doctor-fauci-got-wrong/
Lots of money to be had for getting it wrong. I always believed that the majority of friends I lost to ‘AIDS’ were AZT victims. And, wasn’t/isn’t AZT a chemotherapy agent originally used on cancer victims but discontinued (toxicity)? I remember reading back in the day that the NIH, and related bodies had come to a dead-end in research related to DNA/cancer causes/cancer cures and were looking for a ‘new’ cash cow research focus. I recall Fauci and others promising that a vaccine would be found by the mid-’90s, and we are still waiting.
Hearing many docs now say that ventilating COVID-19 patients may not be an appropriate or optimal treatment choice. Wonder ‘who’ owns ventilator concessions. Why test cheap drugs that appear to be somewhat efficacious, when you can pull a useless and expensive drug out of a stockpile of useless and expensive drugs?
As the articles suggest, people need to look at Fauci’s connections to Gilead and other drug manufacturers.
Deborah, I have an Indian client based in Mumbai. He/I both know the “lockdown” is a death sentence for many, marginal, living on the edge Indians.
Am watching the COVID-19 comments on my undergrad alumni blog. Mine was an IR school, and full of children of Ford Foundation, and other foundation-types. They are enthusing about pollution levels in India decreasing. That is not all that is decreasing.
Although it is not comparable with the vulnerability of the population of Mumbai, I am seeing the relative devastation in my own city. A modest household, the parents having been laid off, with three growing young boys, can’t afford enough food to stave off hunger, and the gas tank is on empty. This is a case that I recently heard about from a friend when he was approached by the youngest of the three boys and asked for a piece of the KFC chicken he was eating. My friend followed up and discovered the circumstance I just described. Multiply this scenario by hundreds of thousands. Inconvenient, indeed.
Lent was ‘special’, wasn’t it.
“Not the Lent we choose, but the Lent we are given.”
On rockstar attitudes and CLUELESSNESS, I really want to write that experience up in depth. Oh heck, I will do it, here, but will only share best bits.
The ‘he’ of what was an academic couple was a Fulbright ‘Global’ Scholar who asked me questions like, “What is APAC?”, “How big is Tokyo?”
The ‘she’ was a Ukrainian who looked and talked like “Natashia” of Boris & Natashia cartoon fame.
When I expressed to them the perfectly rational fear that we might not be able to attract students to study in what had become a “radiation wonderland” — international universities in Japan had already lost 50% of their students — this is vat I vas told:
“Dahlink, radiation is actually quite good for people and animals, and plants. Chernobyl is now a paradise with plants and trees growing to twice their size…and the birds are singing there.”
He proposed that we move the program to Hokkaido, though I doubt he knew where that was.
Ultimately, they came clean with their mission. They were working for G. Soros, as they had been a few years earlier in the Ukraine. They wanted to know if quake-ravaged Japan was ready for a “color revolution”. FYI, these people were attached ot a catholic university.
All roads lead to Soros. Oh yeah, I know those catholic universities. And the bird song was probably especially notable coming from birds with two heads.
Yes, the double-headed, double-beaked ‘Sorosian’ is known for its unique song.
Look at this topic that went on this morning. https://asiasociety.org/policy-institute/events/webcast-economic-impact-coronavirus-china-asia-and-world
The funny thing is how very often the Acknowledgements page to these ideas has a shout out to the Open Society Foundation. I used material from the Asia Society in my book and ISC has covered its creation by the Rockefellers just like CASEL. Got this blurb from them yesterday
along with a link to this https://asiasociety.org/sites/default/files/2020-03/A_Rosetta_Stone_for_SEL_AS-ACT.pdf from November 2019, which of course, essentially aligns CASEL and the Asia Society’s aims to CASBS and its Growth Mindset network.
Your story of hunger was so poignant. I actually got a 12 pack of TP last week as well as more paper towels and wondered if they were there because they were a premium brand and were more costly because they had several rolls. With all the house cleaning we have turned our garage closet into a storage pantry when I see needed supplies. When I do go to shop I am there when store opens and I know precisely what I want and how to cook whatever I can find. My middle child laughs and said only I would see turkey nexk for $2.71 and immediately think of a delicious stock that is easy to make since someone is always home now.
On this:
I hope all of you and your families and friends are healthy and coping as best as possible in these very disrupted times. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the uncertainty it causes is stressful for all. In such times I find it critical to remind myself that this is not the new normal, that it will pass, and we will come back to a less anxious and more stable time.
“Going forward, your work to develop globally competent youth will be ever more important. The rapid spread of COVID-19 starkly demonstrates that it is no longer possible for any one country to isolate itself in today’s interconnected world. And alongside the spread of COVID-19, we have also seen the spread of racism and xenophobia. We need now more than ever to provide all of our students – our future leaders – with the skills of global competence to better prepare them to live, work, and lead among interdependent cultures and societies.”
May I say that the development of ‘global’ leadership skills is my wheelhouse. I have spent the lion’s share of my professional career focused on this topic and this activity. I have performed this function in international firms, in a global city, global cities. What I can observe is that HEALTHY, functional teams and organizations focus very little on equity issues, on staving off racism and xenophobia — too busy with business activities that require robust performance from ALL members.
I have come to really wonder about this OBSESSION among individuals who promote ‘Open Societies’ — and have concluded, based on WAY TOO MUCH contact with such people, that they are PROJECTING their own biases onto others, and their cultural myopia — and, of course, there are other agendas.
On the poignant food story — I must report that I am living by the grace of a local food bank. The business I was relying on to bootstrap my new coaching and business model was canceled or postponed in a heartbeat. Many independent business people, such as myself fall completely through the cracks when it comes to government subsidies. I am currently exploring “GoFundMe” and other crowdfunding vehicles as a means to generate survival cash. If anyone on this forum has any ideas, I would be MOST GRATEFUL. What it is!!!!
Leslie-
So sorry to hear that. Thank goodness for the local food bank. I literally go with what is available and so far have been able to stay out of what is frozen. I did notice today meat supplies seem to be shifting from previous weeks and the omnipresent turkey has vanished.
Thought you would find this angle interesting on our useful crisis theme. https://www.edutopia.org/article/innovative-ways-make-coronavirus-teachable-moment
And this article states that schools have been closed in 185 countries https://www.edutopia.org/article/what-past-education-emergencies-tell-us-about-our-future
Don’t Japanese cities rely heavily on mass transit, somewhat like NYC? Do you think the visuals from there may be impacting willingness to venture out in other urban areas globally? I find the difference between LA and NYC in terms of mortality and infections interesting. Here the National Guard will be cleaning my dad’s assisted living/memorycare facility tomorrow after 3 workers have been diagnosed. Since they only yest when someone has a fever we have to wonder how many unaware, asymptomatic employees or private workers are infecting away worldwide. Meanwhile the poor residents are locked in their rooms. Luckily we got the last available private room looking out over the garden and not a parking lot.
Yes, Japanese rely heavily on mass transit.
I have still yet to see studies, which evidence a correlation between social distance/distancing and reduced rates of infection. Also, I think that until actual rates of infection can be established in reasonably-sized sample groups, true mortality stats cannot be developed. If/when the dust settles and it is discovered that COVID-19 was, approximately, as lethal as common flu strains…I wonder how communities and states who have had their livelihoods and economies decimated will respond.
Extrapolating scenarios based on data generated from the NYC ‘situation’, may be as useful as doing same based on the Lombardia region of Italy. I have lived through an epidemic of a disease HIV/AIDS (S.F., early 90’s) that was understood at the time to be 100% lethal for its victims, and for which the means of transmission was yet to be ascertained. Recall that discussions of a quarantine of actual victims were VIGOROUSLY opposed by health officials and the liberal political guard of CA. This was a quarantine of people who had been diagnosed, not the entire population.
As I mentioned before, I have been polling people in my global network as to how many people they know who have been diagnosed…and I am coming up with a donut. I know ‘one’…and he was just seen at a public press conference introducing his new book. The American media has shown itself over many decades to be completely incapable of accurately reporting on any international crisis. I cite, as an example, Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta patrolling the streets of Tokyo, post-3/11 quake/tsunami/nuclear melt-down — wearing protective gear (anti-radiation suits), and declaring that the stupid residents of Tokyo were trying to protect themselves from radiation by wearing paper masks. It was the flu/allergy season. Truly the U.S. is an international joke, in this regard, and it might be time to start pointing the finger at its citizenry, rather than its talking heads. Actually, I think it is well past time.
My middle child discovered yesterday that her sorority ‘grand little’ had it and was quite ill. Unfortunately, the definitive diagnosis took two weeks because some data had been manually entered wrong. The girl’s roommate had it as well.
A friend of my sil who was at my mom’s last year for Easter had it. Good point on the way the AIDS diagnosed patients were treated and the pressure NOT to close down the bathhouses. I read And the Band Played On years ago. Remember how many that male flight attendant who flew international routes infected?
It is hard not to see this all as a means to push the 2030 global agenda that seeks to make ‘subjective well being’ the primary domain of government responsibility and us all political and economic science lab rats I suppose.
I would like more information about what ‘it’ is. I have heard that in some countries they are simply testing for anything that can be classified as ‘a’ “coronavirus”. I have also heard that the ‘test’ is extremely fallible. This was the case with early testing for ‘HIV’. Since the media seems intent on hyping every single case of ‘it’, who is to say that the statistics are not being padded. Also read that hospitals receive US37,000 for every use of a ventilator, which would certainly incentivize ventilator use. The CDC has in the past conflated cases of flu and pneumonia and toward the end of hawking flu vaccines. HIV/AIDS is a permanent pharma cash cow, with the cost of treating each victim with anti-viral drugs running about 1,000/mo/ FOREVER.
On the Canadian flight attendant (patient one), I believe that story has been debunked.
To shift gears for a moment, Robin, have you seen the concept of “self-management” rearing its head in global education frameworks? If so, where and how?
Usually, the term used is ‘self-regulation’ or self-governance and it has popped up in Angela Duckworth’s work and in Charles Fadel’s CCR work and in pieces Larry Arnn of Hillsdale’s devotees have written for The Federalist on the purposes of education and those usually include a mention of Aristotle.
I would also say it goes to the essence of the OECD’s Key Competences work that is, of course, grounded in Robert Kegan’s work and his Transpersonal psych partner is Ken Wilber of Integral philosophy fame.
Got distracted yesterday as inlaws drove up to check on my 91 year old fil who is a widower living alone. He stayed in his house with glass door open and screen closed and we sat out on back deck far apart. I got my vitamin d for the week, while we chatted. Came home and made baked salmon cakes using cans of wild sockeye and a remoulade sauce I made yesterday morning. Today is lacinato kale soup. I go with what I can locate. Tuesday night was penne a la vodka with slightly less cream than needed because I was running low.
We have been eating a lot of cruciferous vegetables because they are the easiest thing to find.
Thanks for the references…this matter “self-management/regulation/governance” is rearing its had in my immediate circle. As usual, it is “what’s not to like?” until you check under the ideological hood.
Glad you are getting your Vitamin D and all, but I would ask you why you seem to think that ‘medu’, is less corrupt that ‘edu’?
While this may be a matter of “never letting a crisis go to waste,” it could also be a matter of crisis manufacture. If one sat down and examined the stream of messages pumped out about HIV/AIDS over decades, one would have to doubt the competence of everyone involved. I’m guessing if you had been a direct witness to the ‘in extremis’ habits, associated early on/ and still with ‘acquired’ immune deficiency, you would have to wonder HOW the medical community managed/manages to ‘delete’ these as causal factors in its disease model. Not to be graphic, but I will be, I used to live in a community in S.F., in which adult diapers were the hottest selling item in most drug stores, and this was pre-HIV. I will leave it to your imagination as to why 20 something males were snapping these up. Throw in the poppers, the cocaine, the alcohol, and the prophylactic over-prescription of antibiotics and you don’t really need a viral explanation for immune system compromise. The same result can be achieved via extreme poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation that prevails in the HIV/AIDS zones in Africa. Just saying that ‘virus’ theories/constructs serve a multitude of purposes.
I agree with you, Leslie, that the health profession is compromised. According to Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, the pharmaceutical industry wields enormous influence, through its financial heft, on the pharmacological emphasis of medical training. The anti-vaccination movement is the product largely of the explosive number of vaccinations administered to children before the age of 18; I think the last count was 53. There are many, many anecdotal reports of children becoming autistic after a battery of immunizations. One woman I spoke to saw her two sons become autistic after getting shots. When her third child came along, she said, No way. American newborns are administered a dose of hepB within 12 hours of birth; I have read that the U.S. has the highest rate of neonatal death in the industrial world. Neither of the instances just mentioned constitutes proof of anything, but they are suggestive. One thing that is a fact is that the rate of autism is exploding. Why? Could it have anything to do with overwhelming an immature immune system with powerful vaccinations? Nobody looks into it; there are very few studies on long term effects of vaccinations given to the young.
Everybody is talking about The Vaccine as the Great White Hope for coronavirus. (Btw, and as an aside, the success of flu vaccines among the elderly is very limited because of the drop in antibody production as age goes up. Not propitious for the success of a vaccine for precisely the most vulnerable demographic succumbing to the virus.) Anyway, Bill Gates is from the Gates Foundation and He Is Here To Help. Just as he helped in the field of education.
Finally, speaking of the behavioral component in diseases like HIV which it is politically incorrect to mention, Keith Richburg sheds interesting light on why Africa’s rate of infection among women was so high compared to the West, in his book, Out of America. I’ll spare you the details, which are clinically distasteful and culturally chilling.
I can imagine the details…have seen some of these up close and personal.
I just watched a Peter Deusberg presentation on HIV/AIDS, and I think his work is important because he suggests, proves I think, that HIV/AIDS has become the string theory of immunology, i.e. and wrong turn and dead-end, a Concorde Fallacy, too, resource-wise.
What stood out for me were the following points:
HIV does not satisfy any criteria associated with contagious diseases, e.g. no health worker or researcher has ever developed AIDS based on even very direct exposure to the virus. He mentions an animal study, ongoing, in which several hundred chimpanzees were directly injected with HIV and none has developed conditions associated with AIDS — the study is on-going and costs YOU 50,000 per ape, per year. There is another longitudinal study going with hemophiliacs who are HIV positive, and all they have learned is that these people are enjoying significantly longer lives than hemophiliacs of a generation ago.
If one posits sexual transmission, the oft-projected LEAP into the heterosexual should have occurred, universally, but has really only occurred under the conditions you reference above.
Virus replication rates — dormancy, latency
Because so many HIV positive people are asymptomatic for many years, e.g. of an estimated 17 million ‘infected’ persons in the U.S. less than 1,000,000 have ARC’s…researchers have had to postulate that HIV does not replicate in the manner of other viruses — which have very predictable replication cycles.
Lots of funny business with T-cell counts, and that 30% of AIDS RELATED CONDITIONS, e.g. Kaposi’s Sarcoma don’t entail any changes in T-cell counts.
Most AIDS sufferers in N. America and Europe are male, 60% are homosexuals who are VERY sexually active. Other’s are IV drug users who have tended to hit bottom.
Yet, safe sex and clean needle campaigns have not put a dent in what remains a very steady rate of ‘infection’, not exponential, but steady. 35 years, 7 billion spent every year, and no vaccine in sight.
From the UN from a few days ago. https://www.un.org/development/desa/dpad/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/publication/PB_61.pdf
Yes, health and education are the 2 prongs of ‘subjective well being’ which is the declared primary purpose of government. Saw that abe put the whole country into lockdown yesterday.
Adding this as you will recognize the desire to run away when they start the references to a ‘System of Systems’ approach. https://council.science/current/blog/setting-up-a-data-ecosystem-to-defeat-covid-19/
Also notice this 2nd paper is from the same group that issued the Belmont Challenge that caused me to start this blog.
Robin, I see how often you have referenced “subjective well-being” as an end goal. This would tie directly into Seligman’s work related to ‘resilience’, and also the HAPPY, HAPPY Positive Psychology track.
Just read that residents of a village in Siberia score higher on the Happiness Index than most other humans — they are very happy to be warm, with full stomachs.
I would like anyone’s thoughts on if/whether the focus on subjective well-being might tend to promote attitudes and behaviors that would ultimately undermine well-being, e.g. selfishness, narcissism, TOTAL FRIGGING AMORALITY.
This is the post from right before christmas 2013 after the release of the “Joint UK/US Statement on Subjective Well-Being”. http://invisibleserfscollar.com/gratitude-over-the-timely-official-admissions-that-now-leave-2014-intentions-beyond-dispute/
Then my famous Obuchenie Trilogy followed that. Some of my most read posts over the years.
Later in 2014 I created the IPCC Adaptation Trilogy laying out the desired ‘shared cognitive base” that would be under intentional attack. It started with this post. http://invisibleserfscollar.com/tackling-the-dilemmas-of-collective-action-requires-a-shared-cognitive-base-the-ipcc-adaptation-trilogy-begins/
Notice the last part of the Trilogy acknowledges the use of Mindfulness and “engaged Social Consciousness”. Nothing like a pandemic to have that effect, is there?
Note this from the Frameworks Institute on this exact point
I am adding this from part 3 because it is clear the pandemic is the excuse for the MH society globally just as when UNESCO was launched and then in the early 60s and now in everything the UN does:
That was my bolding. but the reason for the hype and the desire to create panic is so clear and aligns with what the ‘systems thinkers’ have sought all along as well, especially Ervin Laszlo and Kenneth Boulding, which is why they have tags here at ISC.
Here is a good commentary by E. Michael Jones, whom you have mentioned once or twice.
From the Aspen Institute that brought us NCSEAD and RETOC–the Racial Equity Theory of Change in ed
All of these many statements are describing a process of trauma-based mind control, coupled with or utilizing the Lewin model.
FYI, this ‘victim’ does not feel in the least bit transformed, just PISSED OFF.
Last night, I watched a YouTube vid produced by an American couple who had just lost to COVID-19, the wife’s father, “Dave”.
“Dave, age 63, had come home from his job at Home Depot (still operating) complaining of a scratchy throat. Two days later and after some EMS bungling, Dave was found dead in his bed.
Now, maybe, I am suffering from some sort of cognitive dissonance and have yet to grasp the scope and implications of COVID-19, but I was not remotely moved by this ‘chocked full of talking and teaching points’, grief-stricken family vid. The couple was just a bit TOO attractive, looked like people go get walk-on parts in daytime dramas, or who appear in tooth-whitener commercials.
My point is, that there is so much evidence that this story is being shaped and in a manner that suggests pre-meditation.
Heard it announced, yesterday, that the singer/songwriter, John Prine was a ‘victim’…NPR, Rolling Stone. Read the fine print and discovered Mr. Prince was ’73’, a ‘survivor’ of throat and lung cancer, and had just had a stent placed in his heart. These details did not appear in the HEADLINE.
Just sayin’
No doubt, but we have this aspiration https://www.nextgenlearning.org/articles/next-gen-change-and-the-coronavirus
And we have this with powerful players, including aft and nea via Education Reimagined, on April 28– https://www.newwayforwardsummit.com/
“For education, we can’t go back to “business as usual” once facilities re-open. Such action would signal to millions of children and their families that we don’t promise to serve their unique needs, honor their wonderful gifts, or acknowledge the shortfalls of the standardized, one-size-fits-all education system.”
I would think that, if anything, millions of children would find it reassuring to go back to “business as usual”.
Listened to a recent Charles Murray interview in which he observes that humankind has experienced numerous plagues, and these have not resulted in fundamental transformations of human behavior, values, activities.
Note the use here to ‘self-organization’ in answer to your previous question. I wrote about Donella Meadows and her models previously here at ISC. https://www.thinkbeyond.co.nz/blog/levers-of-change/
I remember her husband Dennis being at the Xian, China conference that was supposed to be another global gathering a la Davos.
I will say I disagree with Mr Murray in that the Black Death had a dramatic effect in eliminating feudalism as it made it almost impossible outside Russia to tie people to the land. It made wage labor possible and individuals took advantage and benefited without a “by your leave”. Was talking with someone today about what the Plague year did for Newton;s productivity and how the isolation showed he and Leibniz really did independently develop calculus without knowledge another was on a comparable track. Systems science is essentially the death of such idiosyncratic minds.
Well, based on what you observe in this last post, I am amused at the vociferous kick-back against anything coming out of the mouth of the alleged tech maverick, Bill Gates, and much of this coming from people who question, even, the expertise he claims in his stated field. In essence, though, I think as E. Michael Jones observed, we are being asked to trust the wisdom of various technocrats as opposed to that of democratic systems and elected officials. This, in a way, runs counter to the systems thinking solution that is endlessly touted in so many things you post.
Another thought I had is that this world of ours is probably no more messed up than it has ever been, and is maybe less so, but with media shaping perception of discrete and isolated disasters and human tragedies as belonging to all of us, we appear to be skittering toward a sort of END TIMES, if ‘we’ don’t act NOW.
We have talked before, or I have, about Lewin’s recommendation that groups can be made more group’y/gluey by the identification of external enemies or lofty transcendental goals. With COVID-19, we have an unseen enemy, which can be coupled with group-based solutions. Just watching Peter Hitchens discuss the enormous hubris that is now part of strategies to beat a ‘virus’, which few have taken the time to actually understand. As was the case with HIV/AIDS, the medical complex lept to conclusions and solutions, which were announced from on-high in a global press conference, after which dissenting voices were actively stifled. It wasn’t really about a virus, or saving human lives then, or now.
I prefer the name ccp flu myself since, however, it escaped the deceit about its existence, origin, and whether there was human to human transmission cost lives and crashed economies. Notice the number 1 way Donella Meadows seeks to intervene in ‘systems’.
http://donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Leverage_Points.pdf From page 4.
Adding this from later on as it goes to the function of learning standards as well as using the pandemic hype to change the rules and goals of social and economic systems, as well as people.
Nothing like a global pandemic hyped as if it’s another Black Death to be the immediate problem that must be solved via “we are all in this together’ hype.
Not how anyone is behaving in the produce aisles. It’s more “I have a mask on, let me knock you down because there is celery on my list.”
Just listening to John Ioannides at Stanford questioning the wisdom of school closures. He is saying that this might net a 2% reduction in total deaths, but even this is uncertain in so far as lockdowns, for some families, would entail young children sequestering in cramped housing with older relatives. He is calling the early projections, “science fiction”.
It is science fiction with a similar transformational purpose to the term “guiding Fiction’ we have encountered in education. It is what people believe that guides their future behavior and how they perceive and interpret their daily experiences.
A good example of what you are saying about “guiding fiction” is the Johns Hopkins’ digital global COVID-19 map — the source of information even and, especially, doctors are consulting. A researcher with common sense observed that if you wanted to convey real and useful information, you would do a ‘hot’ chart, meaning color code countries according to numbers of infections/deaths, e.g 4,000> gets a RED, <100 gets a GREEN, etc. He made such a chart using the WHO's real numbers, right or wrong, and derived a very different perspective. He also found oddities such a Vietnam and Cambodia with no deaths, despite their sharing a border with China, Shanghai with '5' deaths despite its being connected to Wuhan by a bullet train. Staggering death statistics in Nassau County, NY…WHY?
The point is that the Johns Hopkins' graphic rendering is not designed to inform but to terrorize.
In re Japan, a local doctor friend says his public hospital (Narita) is seeing many cases. At the same time, a citizen journalist surveyed with his I-phone camera, hospitals in Osaka — empty. I believe them both, but what do we make of it? Japanese citizens are up in arms because they believe their government and medical system did not properly prepare for this 'crisis'. Real stats indicate more hospital beds per capita than any other country in the world.
How could the Royal College in early projections be 'off' by a magnitude of, well, 500,000 deaths vs. 20,000 deaths? I guess this would be comparable to the WHO/CDC in the 90's projecting a global pandemic of HIV/AIDS — the virus which expresses itself in no less than 29 different diseases — which never happened. Nobody, and particularly the media seems to remember these gaffes.
On another and very strange note, I observed my church from earliest days of the 'epidemic' suspending services and well before the Abe lockdown, which is quite 'soft'. I just checked the website for another religious order that shall go nameless and found no mention of the virus on its website as of April 20th, no announcement of events or rituals suspended owing to the 'crisis'. Must be nice to live in an alternative universe, or MULTIVERSE.
I would not be too hasty with your ‘ccp’ designation. There were American researchers in that lab, and joint research agreements floating around.
Whole thing reminds me a lot of the Fukushima debacle. Those plants had been installed by GE, and were operated under a maintenance agreement with GE. There were American engineers doing just that, on the day the quake/tsunami hit. I saw one of these guys interviewed on Japanese TV. And, then they disappeared and the whole thing was TEPCO’s fault.
Don’t know if you read this blog from Australia, but the lockdown there with huge swaths free from the virus does make it look like an excuse for transformation. http://catallaxyfiles.com/2020/04/22/alarmism-and-political-ass-covering-is-about-the-only-thing-that-has-gone-viral-in-this-pandemic/
Today was weekly trip for groceries and the workers outnumbered the shoppers during ‘senior hours’ for the first time. I am guessing with this state starting to reopen later this week, to much criticism, people feel less need to stock up. I am under great pressure from family to limit my trips and I keep explaining I want to pick what we are eating on the basis of what looks good compared to last week. For some reason the dececco dried pasta was gone. Maybe problems with supplies from that part of Italy? I switched to tagliatelle instead of fettuccine since cannellini beans is one of my kids’ favorites and my hands are getting tired from all the cooking.
You could also look at it as the “Jeffrey Sacks’ing” of the American economy.
I have been meditating on the concept of “subjective well-being” in that it nicely explains a number of recent encounters I have had with family members and sundry other Americans from my past.
With regard to the former, I broke silence because I wanted to discuss the role “gestalt therapy”…we had a practitioner in our family — had played in a trajectory of family relationships…not positive, as you can imagine. My concern, beyond the carnage inflicted on our own family, related to what might have been a large network of individuals who treated with, were influenced by “X”. I guess you could ascribe this to a sort of “cognitive empathy” on my part, and as an act of familial “due diligence”. Note, I feel the same way about what might have been my father’s activities in certain WWII campaigns.
What I am encountering, though, is resistance to the consideration of ANYTHING, ANY ACTS, that may disturb “subjective well-being” in the here and now. I am wondering if this is somehow tied to …well, let me say that I think American culture has been a “therapeutic” one for a very long time — and, that what I think of as Third Wave therapeutic techniques, essentially diminished the importance of past trauma, past experience — in favor of a rewiring of neural pathways in the now.
Not to say that the onus of a family member’s behavior should fall on that person’s spawn, but, the creed of “subjective well-being” would preclude ANY examination of the sins of the father(s), etc.
Make any sense?
Yes and your personal experience with the effects of gestalt therapy also influences your interest in esalen. This piece is full of information https://www.zerohedge.com/health/global-covid-19-lockdown-what-youre-not-being-told-part-2 and I must admit not being familiar with ID2020. Seeing the big oil/banking foundation coupled to ms and global business consultants looks like something that would catch your eye as well.
The thing about ‘subjective wellbeing’ is that it is a subtle way to push the MH agenda while making it necessary for governments to take on an ‘all-invasive’ approach toward citizens. The interior version of the exterior lockdown power claimed via this novel covid. Flattening the curve goes from being about hospital admissions and deaths to no new cases now that this state’s governor wants to start reopening. Brought to us by the same media circulating a petition before the statewide lockdown insisting local lockdowns wer not good enough. Meanwhile, most of this state is unaffected. I live in the hot spot, but apart from having a full house (which does get in the way of writing I have discovered) it simply means I am careful when I go out and keep trips to a minimum. My youngest child did find me a mask, which replaced the soccer balaclava my middle child loaned me for errands.
One thing I have noticed is my kids seem more worried than me. I think in part because their news feeds slant them in certain directions whether they realize it or not.
Thanks for all of this. I read up on the history of the term “subjective well-being”…and, delved into its Positive Psychology roots. To me, it looks like a “designer mood state”…and, maybe, the inverse of a state or states based on objective moral order. Yes, I would agree that it represents an internal lockdown of a whole range of emotions, which would include ’empathy’. I think the same people who would gravitate to “enlightenment in a weekend” would eat this stuff up.
Right now, I see the “subjective well-being” imperative guiding a global nervous system to ooze with empathy for a very small bandwidth of those being impacted by the ‘virus’ — a demographic that had never inspired much caring in the past, i.e. we can virtue signal around protecting old people, while ignoring a 10,000 car line-up at a food bank in Texas.
The recent Pelosi-hosted tour of her ice cream collection smacks of this…as, does California culture in general.
Look at the graphic Harvard’s Center for the Developing Child just put out. https://46y5eh11fhgw3ve3ytpwxt9r-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/COVID19Infographic_FINAL.pdf
Wellbeing has become the ubiquitous explanation, hasn’t it?
From this link: https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/what-is-covid-19-and-how-does-it-relate-to-child-development/
Fits well too with the Mahatma Gandhi Center work we looked at in recent months hyping the same agenda as a means of instilling ‘kindness’ globally.
Am adding this agenda in full swing, as hubby was on a conference call earlier so I couldn’t easily get to my computer. It was a good time to mop hardwoods as I finally located more Murphy’s oil soap at a reasonable price yesterday. It’s good to have a house smell clean when you are stuck inside. https://aurora-institute.org/cw_post/virtual-youth-summit-supports-student-agency-and-community-building-during-covid-19-school-closures/
Oh. My.
Yes, socialism is really looking for ‘creative minds’. That’s why Mind Arson is always such a critical component. http://inthesetimes.com/features/covid-19-coronavirus-vaccine-capitalism-socialism-innovation.html?mc_cid=e414992453&mc_eid=e86bfa566e
Look at what part of the False Ed Narrative crowd wants to get from this manufactured crisis:
This caught my eye, above.
“…drugs that reverse overdoses and fend off HIV..”
Don’t know if you have seen Whitney Webb’s latest work, but she has been digging into who owns patents for various vaccines. I believe the same firm that holds anti-HIV drug patents, produces a NARCAN-type inhaler that paramedics and police use to reverse opioid overdoses. This drug costs US127 a pop and many firms have attempted to produce a generic facsimile at a much lower cost. This has been blocked by the patent holder. I recall her reading a press-release of some sort, which stated that the pharmaceutical firm saw junior high and high schools as potentially great markets for their offering.
My kids have always thought that the attention span drugs like ritalin were the gateways for drug use because the mood alteration becomes natural. I would not be surprised by the blocking you describe.
Look what KW put out yesterday. Remember how they do the ed forecasts with Institute for the Future?
https://knowledgeworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/restoring-hope-in-crisis-Covid19.pdf
Never let a crisis go to waste, even if you have to create the ‘crisis’ to provide the desired nudge. This is in next paragraph
I have finished that paper and note that at the end they link to a paper on their personalized learning vision that they issued in May 2019. Pandemic is the kerosene I suppose.
The poiint is, ‘who’ owns the patents to various drugs and vaccines and these would include anthrax, smallpox, HIV, and opioid overdose treatment. I think COVID-19 (relevant tests, and proto-vaccines) would fall in this category, as well. If you are going to stage an event, it is simpler to do so if control of the cause, and remedy is consolidated in a small number of hands.
I guess we can see the same in consolidation of ownership and control of various educational ‘remedies’, right?
Please, too, take a look at this group. https://www.edge.org/people
Thanks. Will do. Take a look at this quote and remember Strive Together is tied to Knowledge Works that created that Restoring Hope in Crisis vision I linked to yesterday.
https://www.strivetogether.org/library/making-our-world-a-better-place-strivetogether-deepens-commitment-to-racial-and-ethnic-equity/
By the way, the link ends with this:”We invite you to join us as we use our collective power for the well-being and success of every child, cradle to career.” I bolded your favorite word.
I think we need T-shirts: “Strive Together!”, “Well-being, Being-well!!”, “Flourishing Together!”. I KNOW this is a stupid question, but what color are the Indians who are currently dying of lockdown-induced starvation? What color(s) are the 50% unemployed in L.A. county? I guess HIV/AIDS had to be made a more equitable disease by its African jump into the heterosexual population. We must be equal in everything, even death. These people are completely insane.
Yes, indeed. Somebody mentioned to me that the explanation of the Michigan governor for banning the purchase of seeds in the Walmarts that were remaining open was that it would give Walmart an unfair advantage over the mom and pop gardening shops that were ordered to close. The obvious alternative never occurs to these social justice nazis.
Deborah, please get with the equity program, resistance is futile!!!
Mom and Pop stores are kulaks that must be eliminated.
Was thinking that I saw early signs of a collective future in China…where they are removing the human element from every transaction. See, the government took a survey (yeh, right!), which determined that Chinese people really do not want any human contact, whatsoever, during their consumer experience — so, now, all their convenience stores are self-serve!
Kulaks. What a spot-on analogy. Everyone whose livelihood has been suppressed is a kulak. The seed vendors provide the essential element that links directly to the kulaks. Meanwhile, the commissars are making out like bandits (as it were).
https://www.dailywire.com/news/huge-companies-suck-up-hundreds-of-millions-in-stimulus-cash-meant-for-mom-and-pop-shops
And divide and conquer to complete the picture.
Did you see this case? https://www.educationdive.com/news/education-is-a-fundamental-right-us-district-court-rules/576688/
Yes, kulaks does seem to be the apt term.
Deborah, I would like to talk to you directly regarding matters related to the ‘c’ church. Could you share your contact information through out moderator? I have had some experiences, of late, that I really need to get some perspective on…THX
Sure thing. Robin can send you my email address.
They only have one playbook, and repeat the same behaviors in any/every environment. Sociopaths are really insensate to just about everything around them; and especially the human furniture.
On the subject of well- being….My sister teaches kindergarten. She alerted me to a technology called Pear Deck, which is used as a presentation add-on for classroom “conversations.” Her colleague sent her one for first graders.
The child is faced with an emotional check-in splash page: “Adventurers always check in before exploring:” then big letters: “How are you feeling today?” The child may click Happy Face, No Emotion Face, or a Sad Face emoji picture, OR the written phrase “Or skip.” Gee, I sure hope Mom or Dad are sitting nearby to stop the SEL data collection! Imagine the data sets they’ll compile for every child!
Google Classroom is going to have fun parsing all the data they’re collecting too!
Good Morning Robin,
Someone sent this to me. Probably fake but entertaining reading none the less. It was interesting the ability alleged with online and biometric information as we have discussed in the past and what they can get from online activities and classroom gaming.
https://www.docdroid.net/GXnohZC/govuscourtscasd66035330-pdf#page=16
Good to see you commenting. Hoping to get back to a more normal schedule with less people in the house soon. Knew you would appreciate this too. https://www.edutopia.org/article/neuroscience-behind-productive-struggle
https://www.edutopia.org/article/neuroscience-behind-productive-struggle
Not my understanding of myelinization, which is, of course, what gets attacked tragically in MS. It seems to be attributing to myelin what is normally attributed to synapses and dendritic connections from repeated experiences, but those are not necessarily lead to mind arson. This, of course, makes constructivist reading, math, and science practices a good thing. How many readers of Edutopia have been thinking about the myelinazation process for more than 30 years. Ah, notice, that mindfulness too is supposedly good for myelin production.
Maybe it can cure the virus as well?
This topic was covered in a “Principles of Adult Learning” course that I recently had to suffer through with a uber left leaning super young prof, who mentioned he was still highly in debt for his masters in some dead end degree like cultural studies. He’s now trying so very hard to warp other minds as his was. Anyway, I am sure I rolled my eyes so hard it was annoying to him as many times as he mentioned “fixed” mindsets and new growth pathways in the brain.
Anyhow, in all your readings did you ever read the book “The Great Society” by Graham Wallas in 1914? Supposedly this is where LBJ got his title from. It came up in a history class and made me wonder if you ever looked at it. Mr. Wallace likely received the benefit of an education that did him well before the mind arson began. Thoughts?
I am growing tired of the “all in this together” brainwashing on the radio and TV. Emails from school and Oregon Health about practicing mindfulness as we are locked in the house. Did you hear that? That was the sound of my eyes rolling in the back of my head again… ding!
The messaging in nothing less than predictable.
I will have to check my ctd notes but my remembrance is that the great society was dewey. That book date fits with someone taught by him at chicago or later columbia. Will look into and get back.
Yes, I could do a map of my neighborhood and available loops through adjacent neighborhoods. As we have talked about in ctd and now here at isc, the plans are laid out, the word pandemic was laways in the list of interdependent global problems that would be potential triggers, but this is still surreal.
Speaking of messaging, brought to us by mit press and thus tied to ccr and fadel as well as the Earth Science Partnership–
https://you-are-here.pubpub.org/
Take care of yourself. This stuff is important to grasp as we know, but not fun. Good to know to protect our children, but also let it go and just enjoy our lives with that background understanding.
Don’t know why this is on my mind, but a million years ago and when I was a child growing up in a multicultural neighborhood on the Left Coast, I had a friend. I will call her, “Julie”. From the earliest days, “Julie” was ‘mindful’ of the behavior of everyone around her, nothing and no one escaped her attention. “Julie” was also endlessly prescriptive — she had a vision of how we each of us should see the world, and each other, AND she shared this. Last I heard, she had become a psychologist and was attached to a department of education.
This out today fits with your point. Look at that Futures Triangle and this quote
https://knowledgeworks.org/resources/futures-thinking-now-drivers-change-futures-triangle/ builds upon this from yesterday
And then this from the day before https://knowledgeworks.org/resources/futures-thinking-now-examining-assumptions-future/ that fits with what we know Luksha has been up to and GEFF 2030 and UNESCO says is the new role of education. What a useful ‘pandemic’ to jumpstart again the existing agenda that might have gotten stuck.
Take a look at what this shutdown has done to the zone of plausibility described here https://knowledgeworks.org/resources/futures-thinking-now-facing-uncertainty/ in how students will come to think of roles of governments at any level, whether they have obligations to one another, and how an economy should be structured and who should be the drivers.
which reminds me greatly of how the ed lab McREL in Aurora (near Columbine) has been pushing Second Order Thinking as the purpose of ed reforms for decades.
Your favorite topic.
https://www.learningandthebrain.com/blog/an-exciting-event-in-mindfulness-research-repost/
Plus a nice confession on real purpose of this now, often required, practice:”It’s particularly persuasive research because it studies both mental behavior (psychology) and neural behavior (neuroscience) at the same time.”
I mean they outright claim it. “Mindfulness changes mental processes”.
More than anyone realizes…..
Was just assured by a friend in the mental health field that there would be plenty of work in future months…helping to pick up the wreckage of people and organizations. There seems to be no ‘mindfulness’ related to cause and effect. Shit just happens…
It’s a good reason to ‘become a solutionary’!!
https://humaneeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/How-to-be-a-Solutionary-A-Guide-for-People-Who-Want-to-Make-a-Positive-Difference.pdf
Plus more proof this reaction was to get us to the MH society reflected in the UN’s SDGs. Remember Sweden was already there. https://www.fastcompany.com/90497442/amsterdam-is-now-using-the-doughnut-model-of-economics-what-does-that-mean
Am adding this from this morning’s reading. https://www.wzb.eu/en/events/how-to-make-the-perfect-citizen-redefining-civic-virtue-in-chinas-social-credit-system was being pushed in the EU, with MIT sponsorship, back in January before the pandemic became widespread. This past week the paper was uploaded to the ssrn network with GovLab, which has been working closely with other entities, linking to the paper.
‘Cybernetic citizenship’ sounds precisely like where learning standards take us globally when accurately understood. Plus look at what Robert George was doing this past week per a helpful reader. https://jmp.princeton.edu/heyingweinstein
Nice and dialectical. Good reason to not want the Common Core to be accurately understood back in 2011.
http://global-citizenship.eui.eu/event/how-to-make-the-perfect-citizen-redefining-civic-virtue-in-chinas-social-credit-system/ is more detailed on the January meeting and its ties to the Global Governance Programme.
Sorry, to go off topic, but you cannot make this stuff UP!
“The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics [PED] was established in 2003 by Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers following an imaginative proposal by Jeffrey Epstein and Benedict Gross. The center operates under the auspices of William Kirby, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Martin Nowak, Professor of Mathematics and Biology, is the Faculty Director.” [brackets mine]
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6880926/HarvardEpsteinReport.pdf
Interesting tie to the Templeton Foundation and its funding of Evolutionary Dynamics. Fits with their push for cultural evolution via the noosphere manipulation via education.
Also noted that Nowak came from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, which comes up in research almost as much as CASBS over the years.
Adding this as it fits with never let a crisis go to waste. https://www.educationdive.com/news/coronavirus-the-definition-of-global-and-climate-curriculum/576322/
From a high school English teacher in Maryland. No need for expertise to have an opinion. Still using this downtime to organize my files and I just culled some research from 2013 that I rightly saw as problemmatic, but now I can see better how it fits with this cybernetic citizen project I have been ferreting out these last several years. It is also clearly a driver in the False Narrative. I think it drives a great deal of the “let’s establish a narrative and everyone will simply accept our characterization.”
Look at where the desired remedy leads.
With regard to a lack of expertise constituting no bar to the expression of an opinion — I am recalling that our local mental health clinic fact totem on all things COVID-19, was back in 2011 a repository of advice on all things Fukushima/radiation threat. I think this harkens back to the concept of “ideology worker”.
Update on my local food bank experience.
What had previously been a sort of dignified, gentle experience, has been rendered something close to a TSA cavity search. Now there are chock lines drawn around whole blocks to organize STANDING, and one has to submit to a temperature check before being allowed in the facility — also, major ID required and beyond the ID card, which had required major ID to obtain. There have been less than 300 COVID-19 ‘deaths’ in this ENORMOUS city, and I would bet that most entail co-morbidity or ADVANCED old age.
On a happier note, I observed that MANY small businesses are simply ignoring government edicts — and, short of rolling the Self Defence Forces in, what are they going to do?
As for the ‘global’ impact of all of this…it seems to me that this perception is only so because some members of the human heard consider their lives SO incredibly valuable that a 1/1,000 chance of death by virus — actually, its much smaller, constitutes an unacceptable risk.
Yes, I noticed the Templeton Fund connection to the PED project. It looks like Epstein used this fund to direct money to PED after his presence on the Harvard campus was causing too many people to hold their noses. Per that report, he seems to have been a regular at the PED research facility, and he was accompanied by young female ‘assistants’ during his visits. This mirrors what was going on at MIT, when a female whistleblower at that institution said, enough of the waif-thin ‘assistants’ who could not speak English. Apparently, members of that faculty sat these women down and tried to determine if they were there of their own volition.
I have been listening the Maria Farmer testimony — she was the first Epstein victim to report him to the ‘authorities’ — and this was back in the mid-’90s. Beyond being intrinsically cringe-worthy, a lot of what Ms. Farmer reports resonates with the kind of language, attitudes, and ‘manners’ I have observed in my own field. Also, anyone who has an interest in the NYC art scene should give her a listen.
This mirrors our earlier discussion on ‘self-regulation’ and its synonyms and once again covid gets used as the excuse to make desired changes.
From here https://www.gettingsmart.com/2020/04/how-the-research-on-learning-can-drive-change/ in the last week.
So sorry to hear that the food bank process has been made so onerous. The only upside to all this here is that the blue angels/thunderbird flyover is here this afternoon and goes over my house twice per the plan. Never seen them together and it’s been years since we used to take the kids to the airshows at dobbins where the blue angels performed before that was disallowed by the density in that area of Atlanta.
It is a warm, cloudless day here so it should be quite a show. of course, one of my kids keeps referring to it as ‘propaganda’.
Notice how this leads to a UBI, just as we discussed, although this author describes it without using that term
https://americanmind.org/essays/the-pandemic-road-to-serfdom/
Also notice the reference to the need for the masses to have a belief system that can be exploited. Precisely what Learning Standards and competency framework mandates create.
Well, they cannot even pull off ‘oligarchical socialism’ in my location. Payments were announced weeks ago, but no one eligible has received the form by which to apply for said payments. So, where did all the ‘work’ go? It was there one week and had disappeared the next. I have an economist friend in Madrid, who is coincidentally a COVID-19 survivor. He stated with regard to the Spanish economy that never in the nation’s history had so much wealth simply evaporated. Where did it go? The people, the resources, the means of production did not go anywhere.
Student-centered learning is such a misnomer. This concept reminds me of a battle I had during my ill-fated law school career. I had a passionate interest in Property Law, and I think this was the case because it was impossible to teach this suject w/o teaching a good bit of history in the process; the subject made no sense absent historical context. I believe this historical dimension had been deemed racist, sexist or otherwise unacceptable, ergo the professor had to introduce constructs around property rights as though they had been discovered under a cabbage leaf, or had revealed themselves in a burning bush — they just were, and were there to be memorized. I kept noting this phenomenon and insisted on asking, who, what, how, why…until I was not called on anymore.
Amazing story about the adult illiterate who becomes a champion of literacy, which is to say remedial literacy.
My head hurts.
My head hurts!
I did connect with the 2 hour Webinar — A New Way Forward: Building a Learner-Centered Future — April 28, link posted on ISC April 18. Thanks for the link as I would not have heard about this otherwise.
Technically, it was a well-organized event. The keynote speakers were good and the topics for the 18 breakout sessions appeared wide-ranging to suit particular interests. I chose the System Leaders for a New Way Forward with Tom Vander Ark as moderator.
There was nothing disappointing in the conversations — provided you were a progressive educator or a supporter of progressive schooling: standardized assessments are demoralizing, kids need to thrive, inequities must be addressed, social learning is important, there are many models of progressive education . . .
For me it was disturbing because I believe that inequities actually result from “progressive” school practices. These schools do not place an emphasis on the fundamental skills of reading, writing or arithmetic. I’m reading a book by John Corcoran right now, a teacher who wrote the book “The Teacher Who Couldn’t Read”. Because he himself was never taught to read and suffered serious self-esteem problems, when he became a teacher he considered himself a “learner-centered” teacher. Yet, he states, “Still today one of the real shortcomings of progressive education is the de-emphasizing of basic skills.” He learned to read at age 48 and went on to found literacy organizations.
In this COVID period when so many education organizations are organizing to stay not only relevant but to actually, as opportunistically as possible, advance their particular agendas, we need to be alert to pitfalls if we embrace some of their passionate plans. It’s hard to know what to suggest that would enable parents and public to be more critical and discerning about the way forward.
I’ve just seen an opinion piece in a Michigan paper that clearly announces that since “More than half of Michigan’s third-grade students were not reading at grade level”— even before COVID — that this deficiency needs priority attention. But will this comment make a difference? Does each community need to have outraged advocates get their opinions posted in their media? And, would that make a difference? Would polls be taken that clearly ask if people want “progressive” or “traditional” or other styles of education and would this make a difference in choices for people?