Revolution of the Heart–Right Actions, Good Thoughts, and Correct Intentions

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I wish I could tell you I made up that title because it sounded alarming and I wanted attention. No such luck, unfortunately. I followed the trail of deceit surrounding the Common Core, competency-based education, and School Choice to a 1990 book by Neil Flinders called Teach the Children: An Agency Approach and started quoting. I remain a curious and pondering Individual even if that concept is now to be openly ridiculed and rejected. Notice that it will not be that much discredited Individual (which the Orwellian term ‘School Choice’ wishes to reengineer noetically) that gets to decide what is Right, Good, or Correct. No, we are in the era now of Brain-based learning and as the Institute for American Values’ Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities put it, we need a new kind of education and a new model of human development to fit with the italicized fact that “Social context can alter genetic expression and impact neurocircuitry itself.”

Nothing like neural rewiring to implement a desired new “bio-psycho-social-cultural model of child development” grounded on the fundamental premise that morality is about “love of neighbor.” The sought “authoritative community” trumps the historical set of values that built up the West’s prosperity and advanced levels of technology known as “individualism.” Community will now define “what’s virtuous” which is probably why I can track that IAV document to the NIH funded Science of Virtues guiding K-12 education and a new communitarian definition of Liberty that I covered last March in this post. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/locating-the-internalized-information-guiding-human-behavior-so-it-can-be-controlled-and-transformed/

Little did I know that just barely a year later, we would link that to a declaration that “an authoritative community stands for certain principles [ideas, concepts, Enduring Understandings!] and, in its treatment of children, seeks to shape and launch a certain kind of person. Put a bit more formally, an authoritative community clearly embodies a substantive conception of the good and includes effective communal support for ethical behavior.” We will get back to that confessional report and its IAV 1997 predecessor A Call to Civil Society in a minute after we cover the how. Through euphemisms like Growth, Student Achievement, Social and Emotional Learning, or federally required Higher Order Thinking Skills  that mask an Education that puts the heart in charge of how the brain thinks.

Agency education then (which based on what I know from writing Credentialed to Destroy acts like what that book laid out as Tranzi OBE and competency-based education) states that “what people think, how they feel, and the way they act in relationship to themselves and others is more central to education than what methods, techniques, or organizational strategies are supplied.” Under any of these names, I can recognize its tenets and it is tied to this call for radical “Authoritative Communities”. It is, according to that book’s dedication, the kind of education needed for “those individuals who will occupy the twenty-first century.”

Flinders stated that his book was for those seeking to use education “for establishing moral and intellectual rather than economic order.” Much like these other two reports though, Flinders did tie his education vision to the “unequal distribution of wealth” and that “current economic orders are driven by greed, power, and pride” with “some people…sensitive to the divine alternative to these faulty economic orders.” It’s not that I see Uncle Karl behind every tree or new vision of education. I simply recognize both his handiwork and the updated Marxist Humanism vision launched on the rich and technologically advanced West in the early 60s when I run across it. It is everywhere present in the language of these reports and books, even though there is no alarming use of the M word.

Just its themes so let’s get back to quoting so we can also see that this Third Way to be grounded in community, new values, neurocircuitry, and false narratives like the 2011 Closing the Door on Innovation is tied to what I usually simply shorthand as the MH vision, instead of always writing out Marxist Humanism. It does explain that new definition of Liberty noted above as well as why the Hoover Institution seemed to like A Call to Civil Society when it came out. http://www.hoover.org/research/civic-renewal-vs-moral-renewal In case anyone is hoping I am being overly alarmed when told that “we Americans understand freedom, our primary civic end, as an ethical condition–not simply as immunity from restraint,” I personally want a buzzer I can sound every time we track new visions of education or “civic obligations” to such redefinitions of historical terms.

If I am told that “our core imperative is democratic renewal through civic engagement” and that “effective civic engagement…depends on a larger set of shared ideas about human virtue and the common good,” do we as parents and taxpayers have a right to a head’s up to such a fundamental shift before this new vision is simply instilled as Habits of Mind in student-centered, personalized education? Where’s the actual Choice in School Choice if all the available educational choices are quietly committed, under a myriad of differing terms, to neurally instilling these selected virtues and ideas that will guide Right Actions, Good Thoughts, and Correct Intentions grounded in a New Golden Rule as Hardwired to Connect put it.

Flinders is not the only one tying this vision of education to concern over economic inequality. Also remember that the same Bradley Foundation that supports Harvard’s PEPG and its Education Next visions proudly funds the IAV behind both reports I am quoting from. In 2016, my research showed that the same Hewlett Foundation behind Deeper Learning and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund were too. Those philanthropries make strange bedfellows unless I am right that the Right and Left Pincers behind School Choice are headed in the same direction and that direction is the stealth enactment of the MH vision. Education and the law, two of my personal specialties, are primary tools. Here is A Call to Civil Society again:

“The economy exists to support human flourishing. It is not an end in itself…the weakening of civil society, including its moral foundations, is closely connected to the persistence and spread of economic inequality.” Does anyone doubt that IAV would be quoting Thomas Picketty if this report were reissued now? At least Picketty is honest about his agenda. What happens to us all when students are simply taught to feel and act on “our belief that we are one people, with obligations to one another”? If you are lucky enough to have escaped reading reading Uncle Karl and the MH template expressed without any mention of him, here is the IAV 1998 expression of it:

“…the basic subject of society is the human person, and the basic purpose of government–and all other institutions–is to help foster the conditions for human flourishing. In turn, the essential conditions for human flourishing are the elements of what we are calling democratic civil society, anchored in moral truth.” That moral truth is apparently that we have obligations to all others to meet their needs and that it is only in community “can we approach authentic self-realization.”

No wonder I kept stumbling over mandated communitarian concepts and practices as I tracked the actual requisite Common Core implementation in schools and classrooms. If think tanks and universities are going to push a vision of education that deliberately overrides the beliefs common to “most Americans today–[that] we humans, at least in the US, are autonomous units of desires, rights, and legitimate values of our own choosings. We are self-originating sources of valid claims, essentially unencumbered, self-owning, and auto-telological” they need to be open about it. Otherwise we have deceit to parents about what the Common Core is really about and how the various remedies they are being sold actually tie directly to this agenda I am describing in this post.

We are due more than a dismissal like “we view this understanding of the human person as fundamentally flawed” in a document most of us have never heard of. If this masked vision of education  reforms and its true purpose is tied to adopting “a new ‘civil society model’ for evaluating public policies and solving social problems,” aren’t we entitled to be told of the linkage? If we are told that the “new model is essentially ecological. It strives to view social environments the way ecologists view natural environments,” shouldn’t we know that so we can recognize the implications of adopting what Urie Bronfenbrenner called his Ecological Systems Theory? That his colleague, Soviet psychologist Leontiev said would be the Great Experiment on the West?

I guess we cannot react to what we are unaware of and thus spoil this great Third Way experiment http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/imitating-the-ussr-in-striving-to-discover-how-the-child-can-become-what-he-not-yet-is/ . I wish these ideas and practices had no ancestry, much less one I stumbled across years ago. The old model of civil society in the US was supposedly “a stool with two legs: government and economics. The new model adds the missing third leg: social institutions and values.” Schools being the most useful and common of those needed new social institutions, which will come in handy since the “new model seeks directly to protect and nourish social capital.” Our kids, their ‘social capital’ in other words, since in the “new model society consists of individual members who are encultured by institutions and obligated to the common good.”

Now that quote seems like a good stopping point before we discuss the implications of binding us all to a New Golden Rule we are largely unaware of.

If our children are taught, at an emotional level, to be a good 21st Century Comrade and act accordingly, do we parents and taxpayers have a right to know? Are we simply left to follow the tales grounded in deceit until we notice all the open and connected coordination as this post just begins to lay out?

I really wish this post came with a big sheet of paper and magic markers so we could simply draw all those connections. Some things really are more easily explained visually than in print. Nevertheless, all these quotes are quite clear on the essence of the desired shifts.

More next time.

20 thoughts on “Revolution of the Heart–Right Actions, Good Thoughts, and Correct Intentions”

  1. As usual following up in Oregon based on what is revealed in your posts. Look at this. Gah!
    “Building champions requires a community commitment to excellence. The Champions Academy will create an authoritative community, which is a community committed to one another over time that models and passes on what it means to be a good person and live a good life.”
    https://portlandleadership.org/champions-academy

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    • You must do those searches saying “please don’t be right…” Since A Call to Civil Society is downloadable but Hardwired to Connect is not, let me give more quotes from the latter.

      “Authoritative communities” can help “solve the crisis of childhood”. This crisis stems from the need foster two forms of connectedness for children. “Much of the first half of this report is a presentation of scientific evidence–largely from the field of neuroscience, which concerns our basic biology and how our brains develop–showing that the human child is ‘hardwired to connect’. We are hardwired for other people and for moral meaning and openness to the transcendent. Meeting these basic needs for connection is essential to health and human flourishing.”

      This is why I put the emphasis on the ubiquity of that flourishing term in a previous post. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/09/15647/ It’s why it matters that the Witherspoon Institute is tied to that Closing the Door on Innovation report’s release and that George was on the Commission that released A Call to Civil Society. He and John Haldane (who was behind that seminar at Baylor that touted the authors of that deceitful APP/Pioneer report on the Catholic Curriculum Frameworks were involved with that 2015 book The Thriving Society: On the Social Conditions of Human Flourishing.

      There are Ten Main Planks to the “new scientific case for authoritative communities.” Remember how I called attention to the new definition of the law being taught now in law schools as the “enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules”? Remember what I bolded when I quote Plank 3: “The old ‘nature versus nurture’ debate–focusing on whether heredity or environment is the main determinant of human conduct–is no longer relevant to serious discussions of child well-being and youth programming”.

      Seems to be programming in the literal sense of the word, huh?

      Plank 7 played straight into the language from the Classical Learning Test and the article it used on “Happiness and the Moral Dimension of Education” that we covered in the last post. It uses the language straight out of Classical Education and it’s why I think that template is actually priming for the MH Ideal. It would also fit with Joy Pullmann’s involvement with a little discussed AEI Forum called “Values and Capitalism”. AEI recently gave Professor George some award and Flourishing certainly fits with Arthur Brooks vision of Conservatism as being about cultivating qualities of the heart. He spoke at a luncheon I attended in fall of 2015.

      “7. The ongoing development of morality in later childhood and adolescence involves the human capacity to idealize individuals and ideas.”

      By the way, Hardwired to Connect had James Comer on that Commission. Do you remember it is his work, financed early on by the Rockefeller Foundation, that led to the creation of CASEL?

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        • I cannot tell you how much this article, published today, reads like what I have been raising in the last several posts. http://thefederalist.com/2017/03/28/worst-thing-schools-teach-kids-ask-wrong-questions/

          As we saw with last week’s citing of Carol Dweck and promotion of the Growth Mindset, here we have the promotion of Howard Gardner and education as a ‘dialectical process’. We also get the continued creation of the Strawman of what it is that public schools are supposedly doing. “No longer serving the biblical God or the body politic, schools now serve “the God of Economic Utility,” which tells students they “are first and foremost economic creatures,” and that “[their] sense of worth and purpose is to be found in [their] capacity to secure material benefits…More importantly, though, serving this god prepares students for nothing more than a life of consumerism. As a result, the end of students’ “education” is a material life, not a meaningful life.”

          Meanwhile we get ALL the schools in reality insisting that students acquiesce into creating ‘shared meaning and common purpose’ with their classmates as if no one has any actual right to a mind and durable opinions of their own. That would be the evil Fixed Mindset I suppose.

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          • No, but I had read he was going to do that. As long as ESSA exists in its existing language, the states are bound for all intents and purposes to the Competency vision of the student as a system. That AISP document I linked to on the previous thread makes it crystal clear that all states and all schools are bound to the education vision laid out in the Common Education Data Standards. It dovetails with what I laid out in Credentialed to Destroy when I warned that the Common Core was tied to Competencies. Sure enough it is all laid out here, complete with the Learning Progressions I warned about, but with visuals. https://ceds.ed.gov/pdf/nds-model-presentation-v4.pdf

            It was amended in July 2016, roughly 6 months after ESSA was adopted. See my point about centripetal? Where ever any student starts from, this is the vision for their internalized mind, personality, and motivations and then the desired external behaviors. When you read that and how Learning Standards work (as I have tried to warn) and then compare with this kind of [supply expletive of choice] https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/03/common-core-damages-students-college-readiness/ the con being run on parents is quite clear.

            I had missed the renaming of the Pope Center for Davidson’s most famous former Chemistry prof. Don’t miss this doozy of a quote: “American education was not designed mainly for the private benefit of personal economic advancement, but for the public benefit of cooperating with families to bring up citizens capable of self-government.” Really?

            Self-government, like self-regulation (OECD) and self-discipline (Angela Duckworth of IPEN and Grit and the Growth Mindset Scholars Network) are all synonyms for the student as an engineered system. Notice that quote above fits in perfectly with the sales pitches for the Classical Learning Test, which stated “it is about the community, not the individual.”

          • Teachers College at Columbia U has created K-12 lesson plans to help teach students “about public policy”. http://www.econedlink.org/topics/28

            Get em used to what the authoritative community can do to them so they try to control the steering. Basically the MH dream gets imposed invisibly as a “matter of public policy”.

          • CEDS existed before CCSS and will continue to control outcomes, especially considering most don’t know they exist.

          • Take a look at this https://www.aisp.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Data-Standards.pdf just released despite the above date. It honestly states “Governments at all levels go to great lengths (and expense) to administer programs that are designed to affect outcomes at a population level…We view Integrated Data Systems (IDS) as any well-organized collection of disparate data that coheres around a common purpose.”

            In the case of students, in K-12 or higher ed and really in preschool too, that common purpose is to specify the internalized Concepts and Ideas (Knowledge) that guide perception and interpretation of daily experiences as well as the values and emotions that motivate likely future behavior (hence the Revolution of the Heart metaphor). What is internalized and turned into Habits then guides likely future behavior. The student is a system and the coercion is largely out of sight and neurobiological.

            Here are two more quotes from that with my bolding as usual. Administering this locally does not affect the global template or its clear ties to Uncle Karl’s long ago druthers in the least.

            “Understanding these narratives [between people and the organizations that ‘serve’ them to meet their ‘needs’] requires an explicit IDS structure that connects units of analysis to theoretical models of human behavior in the context of complex social and administrative systems.” That’s why IAV’s use of Bronfenbrenner’s metaphorical Ecological Systems Theory matters so much and with his template comes his purpose, just as with Dewey.

            “To develop meaning, or reveal narratives, a data system must be built around structural models of what transpires between individuals and the systems that serve them.” That’s what makes my accuracy in describing what is really going on in Credentialed to Destroy both so useful (to us) and threatening (to the Right Pincer and its funding sources). I know exactly what the theoretical models are and have extensively documented them. The false tales of federalism or pretending that SEL Standards are about a database of PII (remember that letter to Congress?) or that Tranzi OBE and competency-based ed are about workforce training is that they all go to preventing parents from recognizing the reality of this desire to coerce invisibly and at a neural level.

            This intellectual whoring going on or just people who embody the Peter principle and simply do not ask the right questions as they push these templates of what the Common Core was and is really about enable the entire Upravleniyetemplate that begins at the neural core of the student’s mind and personality. Meanwhile, governments at all levels and their steering allies in business like the Chamber of Commerce know quite well that “Over the long term, the goal is to build IDS that span geographic, programmatic, and agency-level boundaries“.

            That earlier link I put up from AISP before this one even includes a flub that mentions our old friend IMS Global.

          • Take a look at this and then think about that data and what is being standardized. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cqf9BEdUIAA0bc9.jpg

            Same School of Ed tied to the Center for Curriculum Redesign and Mind Brain and Behavior specialty and individual-in-context. Fits well with the School Choice and PEPG work at the Kennedy School of Government we know the Bradley Foundation and Gates are also funding.

            The co-PI on this Cultures of Thinking is David Perkins, who was the PI on the Cognitive Reorganization NSF grant as well as Understandings of Consequence I covered years ago on ISC. It’s why Understandings of Consequence has a tag.

            I showed this paper https://www.sg.ethz.ch/media/medialibrary/2017/02/Positionspapier.pdf that is being pushed by our GovLab profs to some software geniuses and they wanted to know why the paper regarded people as ‘closed systems’ instead of open ones. I explained that is the function of Radical Ed Reform in its Tranzi OBE/competency-based ed forms being imposed on both K-12 and higher ed.

  2. Controlling the debate takes on a sinister new meaning beyond
    Oz Racial Discrimination Act, Clause 18C limits on free speech
    that may offend some. With the above make-over, the cits won’t
    even be able to think heretical thoughts let alone express them.

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    • This report from google on unconscious bias was distributed today by the Mindset Scholars Network hq’d at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. http://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/unconscious-bias-in-the-classroom-report.pdf

      Notice that the solution is to intentionally target unconscious processes of individual decision-making and to perfect the ability to turn these theoretical models for interventions into classroom and school practices. This is not really about getting more women into STEM, whatever Ivanka Trump and Betsy DeVos are being told.

      Notice that the same google that issued a UK paper about 2 years ago calling for the reorg of the world’s economic, political, and social systems in the manner we recognize as the MH vision, now states its “core mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Tranzi OBE, standards, and competency-based education all make that ‘core mission’ so much easier because they consciously seek to circumscribe what it means ‘to know’ in the 21st century.

      The Right and Left Pincers are in perfect agreement on what is being sought. The problem is the insufficient number of people who are either paying attention or are still believers in these carefully constructed false narratives surrounding educational reforms globally.

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  3. So the new Office of American Innovation is being called a “non-ideological ideas factory” (funny). And the A team made up “Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff and Tesla founder and chief executive Elon Musk” can surely “help” us. Anyone who believes the new administration will free us from government overreach, especially in education, isn’t paying attention. With these corporate players and universities like MIT and Harvard pushing the same dangerous narrative, how will people ever see through it?
    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/politics/trump-taps-kushner-to-lead-a-swat-team-to-fix-government-with-business-ideas/2017/03/26/9714a8b6-1254-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html

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    • Look! It’s the same MacArthur Foundation that is behind Connected Learning and that used the unabashedly Marxist language to launch that initiative that is behind the funding of AISP https://www.aisp.upenn.edu/

      Everyone you are describing is quite aware of how Upravleniye works, except maybe Kushner. He went to harvard though so even that assumption is iffy. As I warned about in October when I stumbled across all those blueprints from Stefaan Verhulst and Beth Nozick we were going to get the same domestic plans whoever was elected. One would have been knowing and the other from electing a neophyte to the Presidency. At least Trump seems to have good intentions although his Ed Department is shaping up to be precisely who Jeb Bush would have put in place to further these plans for us.

      Wish he didn’t listen to Heritage, which seems to be All Aboard for the MH vision as long as its major contributors can be the designated providers or creating these databases or software.

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    • Speaking of ‘thrive’ as a now ubiquitous euphemism for what you saw in those CA CORE Districts. https://education-reimagined.org/resources/5-thrive/

      Notice the unique character profile assembled on each student and then how standards are centripetal. The student may start off unique but they will not remain that way. It’s what the requisite ESSA non-academic measures of success are all about.

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