Armed guards at a public hearing supposedly to look into, via committee, the federal role in education in Georgia. Ready to escort out and maybe arrest anyone who tried to interject accurate facts into a scripted effort to decree what the accepted beliefs could be. Interested citizens who recognized the misstatements, irrelevancies, material omissions, and conceded facts with behavioral programming implications, in what they were hearing and thus felt compelled to stand up and yell “Liars, Liars, Pants on Fire” would be met with all the power of the coercive state. Ready to dictate what its citizens must now accept as their knowledge and beliefs. Now, I was too busy taking voluminous notes to feel the need to comment. I was there after all because I wanted to know what particular falsehoods citizens were going to be urged to believe.

I have written up some of my insights and the implications for my book and this blog in two long comments to the previous post. Readers should take a look at those to fully grasp  what was inadvertently conceded as the speakers desperately tried to obscure the feds bullying behavior with states back in 2009. I want to deal with the need for police power and this determined need to create false beliefs in adult citizens if they are paying attention and in virtually all students now as they move through what is now called the P-20 process. Education from preschool to graduate school is all now to be about being “more of a ‘value producing agency’ than an information-dispensing institution.”

What I grasped on Wednesday was that the state and local school administrators, with the help of certain of their elected political buddies, intended to implement Competency as Milton Rokeach first theorized about, and the WIOA and the GELP-Global Education Leaders Program (last post)’s Next Generation Learning, are now quietly pursuing. Searches since then have made it clear that while the excitement in the US is over the Common Core, Next Generation Learning is pursuing the actual behavioral programming intentions globally on parallel tracks mostly hidden from US taxpayers.

Now my kids will confirm that my tombstone should probably read “Never Lie to Her. She Always Immediately Knew and Went Looking for the Why.” The good news is that GELP and the US-centered CCSSO Innovative Learning Network (last post) have all confirmed literally that the actual description from documents I described in my book is still the intended trajectory. Unfortunately, they also confirm it is for the wholesale political, social, and economic transformations I also disturbingly lay out. With a touch of humor and irony as possible.  Hooray for timely prescience!

What I want to do today is talk about the whys of the need for behavioral programming of students and coercing adults in their own beliefs. Why is competency-based learning so alarming to me? Before I get to what Milton Rokeach laid out in his federally-sponsored research in the 60s and 70s as the use of the term-Competency-to obscure what was to be values clarification, I want to remind everyone that the theorists for this Equity for All, Just Freedom, Human Rights as Economic Justice view of the future all concede that their vision will entail a coercive state. The armed enforcers the other day are simply a sign that public officials have decided to impose on us without consent or discussion what is known as the Flyvbjerg (no, I cannot pronounce it either but I have his book) Social Science Debate in Scandinavian countries.

The debate concerns the role of the social sciences in Western societies in the future. Since we Americans or Canadians or English or Australians might object to the planned shifts in society and the use of education to consummate the shift just as the Fabians imagined, we get lied to. If we recognize something is amiss and want to point it out in the prescribed public forum, we may be subject to arrest. We are not supposed to recognize the behavioral programming. Honestly, read this recent vision of the transformational purposes coming to a classroom and tell me its not about changing the child. http://www.edutopia.org/pdfs/blogs/edutopia-finley-9ways-plan-transformational-lessons.pdf

Flyvbjerg, who I will just call Flyv from now on (his advocacy though has now gained him an Oxford professorship), pointed out that “rationality may endanger sensitivity to context, experience, and intuition.” Keep that in mind when even the advocating district supers admit consistently the new classroom focus is to be on student ‘engagement’ and group activities. Neither of those builds up the rational mind in the sense the West, its prosperity, and the historic concept of the individual are all built around. Flyv wanted to make education in the West about discussing values, interests, and who has power. Remembering again that Charter District Fulton has announced remaking its high schools around ‘problem-based learning,’ Flyv viewed this power, interests, values emphasis as necessary if education is to produce adults ready “to think about what can be done to the problems and risks of our time.”

Since you probably do not have a copy of Making Social Science Matter, I will enlighten you that Flyv and the Competency advocates really are talking about education that now enshrines that “personal experience via trial-and-error is more important than context-independent, explicit, verbally formulated facts and rules.” That’s the real reason textbooks and lectures are going away and terms like assessment, ‘productive struggle’ and ‘rigor’ get substituted deceitfully to obscure this shift. Now Flyv conceded that this “experience-based behavior” substitution that gets hidden also now under terms like Excellence and Quality Learning instead of the historic “rule-based, rational mode of conceiving human activity” has so much destructive potential that the following exchange was proudly cited:

“Jurgen Habermas (a noted radical prof and modern Dewey advocate), after hearing Hubert Dreyfus present the model to him at Frankfurt University [exclaimed]: ‘you are talking about skills like hammering and chess, but what you really want to do is undermine Western society.’ To which Dreyfus replied, ‘you are right, that’s exactly what it comes to.”

Undermining Western society is a good reason to rely on a police presence to control what can be said, deceit by administrators well-paid for being willing to push this vision no matter what, and Orwellian definitions of terms. Now I first wrote about Rokeach here  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/targeting-student-values-attitudes-and-beliefs-to-control-future-behavior/ . Competency IS a dangerous concept, as Rokeach used it, and our modern day global transformationalists are now using it. I went back to my copy of his 1979 Understanding Human Values: Individual and Social where he readily acknowledged that creating a “state of self-dissatisfaction”  via “value confrontation” is the “basic psychological mechanism that generates such a sequence of enduring change.” The purpose of Competency in education now, whatever it means to the layman, has to do with “man’s power to alter experimentally another person’s basic values and control the direction of the change.”

Highly useful if the intentions of the 21st Century are to once again put political power thoroughly in charge of people and economies, which is precisely what open declarations of influential people admit is going on. I am going to end this post with another Rokeach quote that I believe tells us why the Finns developed what I am calling the Finnish Ladder Towards Consensus Collectivism and why US administrators are bringing it in as required systems thinking, Fostering Communities of Learners, Competency-based education, Discourse Classroom, or an affirmative Student Code of Conduct.

“I believe that a value education program will turn out to be illusory or self-deceptive if the sole focus is on the students’ own values…A more genuine self-awareness will, I believe, be achieved as a result of stimulating a comparison process, in which what we find out about ourselves is compared with what we find out about significant others. Experimental evidence…suggests that, in the process of making such comparisons between self and others, we will often become dissatisfied with what we have found out about ourselves, because it violates our conceptions of ourselves as competent and moral human beings. Such states of self-dissatisfaction are empirically found to lead to long-term change and, as a consequence, to long-term changes in related values, attitudes, and behavior.”

Just the view of education needed then for personal transformation as an unconscious reflex to foster broader fundamental social transformations. I am going to continue in the next post talking about the consistency in what is being sought.

We can now see why politicians, public employees, and private sector cronies all personally prospering from this unappreciated Statist vision would want a police presence to prevent someone like me from explaining with facts and documents what is really going on.

So I write. Aren’t you glad books and blogs remain an available avenue for a factual discussion?