Tag Archives: Global Citizenship

Not Going to Let the US Constitution Stop Us From Using Schools to Enshrine Global Social Justice and Human Rights

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Do you remember how the French thought the Maginot Line of bunkers and armaments would protect them from a future German invasion after World War I? So Hitler simply went around and came from another direction. The head of the same group whose ecstatic rejoicing over the passage of the WIOA in the US Senate tipped me off that something transformative was envisioned, announced in this video on “Rethinking Accountability” in education in June http://www.unfinishedbusiness.org/20140707-henderson-common-core-an-important-part-of-driving-equitable-change/ that ‘they’ were not going to let the US Constitution get in the way of achieving human rights for all as defined by the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That would be a human right to Just Economic Citizenship folks and an obligation for the rest of us to provide it.

Henderson does a shout-out to the 2 major US teachers unions, AFT and the NEA, and notes they are partners working on his Board as well as to his Vice-Chair, the General Counsel of maldef-the Mexican-American Legal Defense Education Fund. Legal amnesty and future citizenship for anyone who can make it to US soil is not a side issue. It is front and center of the Leadership Council’s (composed of 200 separate component groups) efforts to force the US towards Economic Justice and an Equitable Society and ‘building a More Ideal Union.’ Henderson points out that the “thousands of students who may not yet be citizens” need to be educated as if they were. You cannot watch that speech and especially the AFT President’s intro and not grasp that an invasion by migrants is viewed as a crucial means of fundamental transformation. It will radicalize education, the ballot box, and enable democratic local decision-making via participatory mandates of the relevant stakeholders in every community entitled to be consulted.

I want to pivot now to the suburbs because such a vision of Equality and Justice is simply impossible if suburban schools can still teach a solid curriculum of knowledge and students are allowed to retain the Axemaker Minds many brought from home. Now I could generalize about what I think will happen, but there is no need to do that. That same conference pointed https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/events/1201  to the new Consortium of Large Suburban School Districts as being essential to achieving its vision. Told you already that document was designed for trouble.  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/deliberate-cultural-evolution-via-developmental-psychology-to-force-social-change-or-gypsy-supers-lobby-dc/

OK, you say, that’s a hugely troubling vision, but we still do not know precisely what the desired template is. But wait (no, this is not one of the Ronco commercials pushing Christmas presents no one really needs) one of the participating Consortium districts, Fulton County in Metro Atlanta (not coincidentally also involved in EdLeader 21, Digital Promise’s League of Innovative Schools, and with that new affirmative Student Code of Conduct) announced the vision in an article in a local paper. ‘Problem-based learning’ would be the new view of curriculum instead of icky textbooks. High School will become a place “for all learners…[where] students and teachers come together.” It is a place where ‘different types of learning styles are addressed’ that provides ‘collaborative learning opportunities.’ Lots of collaboration and chances to sing kumbaya in unison on a daily basis to build community spirit.

A bit of sarcasm there towards the end. I know perfectly well what is involved in Fostering a Community of Learners. That’s why FCL has its own tag on the blog connecting explanatory posts. Now, we could also pretend ‘problem-based learning’ is not in fact a euphemism for what radical Paulo Freire called the cultivation of a ‘critical consciousness’ in each student in how they will now perceive their cultural and historical reality. http://www.thinkingtogether.org/rcream/archive/110/CulturalAction.pdf That would be true and creating Guilt in the Fortunate Students is as crucial for transformative change as creating Anger in Latinos and Blacks and Gay Students and anyone else who can be made to believe the world as it currently exists must now be redesigned for their benefit. Vengeance will be a plus too.

Anyone paying attention might have been able to make that accurate connection though. What’s the fun in that? No, being a research maniac entitles us to more vital info than that on what’s coming. The links we have found to the Study Circles made me want to look at what are called Folk Schools in Scandinavia. Could those also be related to this new suburban vision for high school? UNESCO defines the current vision of such a school as a place “whose point of departure is today’s living conditions and the problems we face” and “which do their best to open up young people’s eyes by confronting them with more genuine experiences and broader philosophies of life.” Now I happen to know that high school is using the term ‘authentic’ instead of ‘genuine,’ but yes, we do have complete alignment.

I am going to bring this vision forward to award-winning Finland and what is now called the Human Dignity Paradigm suitable for a “Diversity-Positive Milieu.” That vision is said to enshrine what is called for by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. First though let’s go back to the year, 1948, when the UN adopted the Declaration to see why UNESCO wanted to push “The Danish Folk High School as an Instrument of Attitude Change.” It’s rather hard to escape the basic fundamental entry point needed for wholesale social change with a lead-off heading called “How to Create the Right Attitude of Mind in the Young.” Now in the No **** Sherlock Hall of Fame for all time great understatements in a bureaucratic report would be:

“the quickest and easiest way to create unity is to invoke terror.”

Now those readers who are Climate Skeptics may have a good idea where such a terror gambit may be lurking in the 21st century, but in general the report  wants to create an ‘ethical standard’ that will force everyone to voluntarily cooperate by committing to “a higher consideration than themselves.” Of course some of us immediately see that for what it is-the Public Sector and Friends Full Employment Act until Time for a Taxpayer Funded Pension, but let’s pretend anyway so we can accurately recognize what is really intended. The word ‘folk’ concerns a whole people and the values they are all to share. Remember new humanistic values are the absolute inner core of all these global reform efforts by people who really do seem to believe Marx might have worked if the implementers had simply had enough supercomputers, data, and the psychological  insights of the behavioral sciences.

A folk high school is designed to give each student a “comprehensive view of the world.” It stresses that “true life can only be possessed in common with one’s fellow man, and that some of the richest values a people possesses can be accepted and shared by all, rich and poor, high and low.” It is a place to build an “enlightened view of human and civil conditions” and a “blithe feeling of natural fellowship.” The latter is what we today might call a Positive School Climate. The folk school would be training its students in co-operation. Its value as a vision in today’s suburbs anywhere in the world is the fact that the typical Upper Middle Class student with educated parents who have made themselves available during those early years pretty much arrive at First Grade at close to the level of essential academic skills that are viewed as a long-term ceiling. To get to Justice and Equality for All obviously.

The folk school model then, and a widespread failure to comprehend the radical shift that has taken place, is an essential part of what is going on globally in education under the mischievous labels of ‘reform’ and ‘remaining internationally competitive.’ Hiding under those banners is an actual determination by public officials to force “a broad outlook and understanding” among all students of a given generation “so that co-operation” in all areas can succeed. This of course requires a “will to solidarity” in each student, which is why that affirmative Student Code of Conduct, Positive School Climate mandates, and requiring Principals to create Communities of Learners to be judged as Effective and thus entitled to promotion, are so crucial.

None of this is coincidental. It all fits like a Bespoke Glove because it has been custom designed to fit together to force the desired effects at the level of the school, classroom, and each student’s mind and personality this time. When that 1948 report sneers at ‘examination schools’ and their failure to create the “mentality required to rebuild the world through all-embracing co-operation,” just substitute high-achieving suburban schools with a traditional content transmission focus. Then update to the 21st century and its tendency to stress social and emotional learning because facts can simply be looked up.

The 1948 version with the same intention of cultivating a mindset suitable for fundamental change was to ask “what is needed by modern society?” The answer then by UNESCO was it’s “not what a man knows, but what he both can and will do in co-operation with others.” Furthermore, that “is a capacity that needs training. Teaching and school work must be so directed that the pupil both sees the value and feels the pleasure of performing a task in common.”

That same requirement now goes by the name Collaboration and is specifically listed as one of the 4Cs required for 21st Century Learning. We’ve gone long again. Next time we are off to Finland to get lots more details on what is envisioned.

Everywhere that has ever had a successful economy.

Especially anywhere that ever valued the individual.

Global.

Social Cohesion Can Commence Once Reality is Born Largely from Beliefs and Boundaries Co-Created with Others

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“Around Us” was the last part of the quote the title comes from. The next line is “Although we need these boundaries and beliefs to function, we should not take them too seriously.” I suppose that flexibility may be the most succinct definition of the hoped-for Growth Mindset we have encountered yet, but this post is not actually about Carol Dweck. Remember Robert Theobald from our last post? In 1997, still awaiting the long sought revolution, he published yet another book reworking success: new communities at the millenium that laid out in its conclusion the “new belief structure” that would be necessary for a “radically more positive world” where each of us has a “core future commitment to the maintenance and development of social cohesion.”

Since my unusual, but terribly reliable method, of tracking the Common Core via its required actual implementation in schools and classrooms has turned up in just the last week repeated attempts to impose Theobald’s vision, the Baha’i values and compliance vision, and the cybernetic theory of doling out information in a controlled manner to create predictable future behavior we had best move on to the invisible how.  Since the last two have been covered in previous posts, let’s see what Theobald thought would be the New Belief Structure in place by 2011. I can assure you in education, radical intentions and methods do not go away. They don’t even always get new names. First though I want to use the guiding belief that we have now seen recurring consistently as the marching banner since the 60s taken this time from Theobald (quoting Pope John Paul II from 1994):

“If in his providence God had given the earth to humanity, that meant that he had given it to everyone. Therefore the riches of creation were to be considered as a common good of the whole of humanity. Those who possessed these goods as personal property were really only stewards,…since it was God’s will that created goods which serve everyone in a just way.”

Inspirational man, but somehow his sense of where wealth actually comes from was clearly warped. Anyway, this sentiment provides the perfect rationale for massive redistribution both within affluent countries and from rich to poor countries with no thought that anything vital might vanish in the process. Theobald turned this into a fundamental global governing “idea that great wealth and deep poverty were unacceptable in a just society.” He sold the idea that this New Belief Structure should become “one of the  great rallying points for a changed vision adopted by a growing segment of the population.” Yes and continued intentional mind arson and perspective shifting as the mission of K-12 and higher ed combined with weak job growth and explosive student debt only drives the allure of that same rallying cry now.

Central to this New Belief Structure and New Images of Citizenship in what Theobald called “common ground work” was:

a)controlling our ego needs and growth beyond them;

b) learning to screen reality through our own senses and the stories and myths we have learned;

c) emphasizing our collective intelligence and using our diversity to support the emergence of new systems;

d) acknowledging the importance of spirituality; and

e) “Recognizing the importance of using values–honesty, responsibility, humility, love, faith, cooperation, and a respect for mystery–as a compass that guides our choices.”

Values again. That common core we keep encountering globally. Guess where I found it just this week as an agenda item on a recent School Board Working Agenda in the Metro Atlanta School District with the duplicitous Conversion Charter we have looked at? In the new Student Code of Conduct. When parents sign off at the beginning of the year that they have seen the Student Handbook and agree to abide by it, they will now actually be signing off on listed “Character Traits” with language about desired values and morals and ethics without likely appreciating the wholesale transformation from the inside-out they have just sanctioned in their children.

At least Hong Kong citizens got somewhat of a head’s up when Kohlberg’s  Theory of Moral Development and Universal Love became a controversial component of the new definition of citizenship mandated via education, all we Americans get are vague references to Student Behavior or Positive School Climates. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/hiding-educations-theft-of-individual-freedom-behind-the-positive-school-c/

This post was always going to be about values since I have had UNESCO’s instructional modules to make that a central focus of ed globally for about a month now. I was just laying the groundwork with our Baha’i discussion since UNESCO itself said religion must change back in 2007 and that spirituality was a necessary component of Global Citizenship.  I wanted to make this post about why the Southern Poverty Law Center would recently issue 2 different reports within weeks of each other trying to taint opponents of the Common Core http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/publication/public_schools_in_the_crosshairs.pdf and Agenda 21/Regional Land/Equity Planning. http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/publication/agenda_21_final_web_0.pdf

SPLC is clearly engaged in a coordinated effort to prevent people from accurately perceiving admitted facts and declared intentions. We can think of Common Core as the Means to a Quiet Revolution and a Tool to Alter People’s Values, Attitudes, and Beliefs. Agenda 21 and Catastrophic Manmade Global Warming are the Excuses for Why the Transformations are Necessary and Tools to Control Physical Space and People’s Behavior. I can wish more of the critics SPLC cites were paying attention to the objections I am carefully laying out, but anyone’s accurate reporting of openly declared intentions or coursework is not theorizing about conspiracies. So what is SPLC really up to?

Remember how I call Common Core an explanation ‘bucket’ that obscures all the real intended changes like Positive School Climates, making social and emotional learning the primary focus, or making education about using a digital device instead of academic knowledge? Classic Bait and Switch has been my drumbeat in my book and now on this blog. I knew SPLC had created a racially oriented and economic justice focused curriculum. http://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/teaching-tolerance What I did not know until I started looking into their incentives to issue such misleading reports was that SPLC had partnered with the NEA to create TDSI–Teaching Diverse Students Initiative or that SPLC was partnering with the accreditors of teacher ed institutions to ensure its adoption in all teaching credential programs. Lots of incentive, in other words, for the SPLC to malign critics of effective tools for wholesale radical transformations.

Basically what SPLC is obscuring is the heart of the actual planned implementation in classrooms across the US under the mischievous banner of the Common Core and what now counts as Student Achievement and Growth. How about working with Glenn Singleton to create ‘dispositions’ in students pursuant to “Beginning Courageous Conversations about Race”? That can be one of the Character Traits district administrators now get to require from students under those new mischievous codes of conduct.

Recognizing the intended mischief from Fulton’s proposed new Code of Student Conduct and having asked detailed questions of administrators to make sure I understood precisely what was to be imposed, I came home to think about the potential for that Character Trait Code given what I knew of Fulton’s Charter, accreditation, and the intentions of TDSI.  file:///D:/Downloads/PRRAC%20-%20Race%20_%20Racism.htm Not to pat myself on the back, but it really is no exaggeration to say I speak ed fluently and usually understand the underlying theories now better than all the edudoctorates in the room. After all, most of them now are credentialed because of what they are willing to do to us and our children and this great nation, not for what they actually know.

The phrase–“Student’s Quantity of time on task engaged in desired behavior” may earn a doctorate these days when repeated constantly, but it probably should not be spoken out loud to parents. It does sound like social engineering. Nor should “Nothing as valuable as a good theory for social change” Kurt Lewin be quoted by name publicly as an example of the useful Freeze, Unfreeze, Refreeze behavioral manipulation strategy to deal with current teachers not on board with the technology shift.

If administrators think it’s OK to coercively brainwash adults, just imagine the plight of the children entrusted to their care in a world where changing the child is now the whole point of what is student achievement. Anyway, nobody can say I do not put my angst about where education is going and what the inevitable consequences will be to fruitful use. Yes indeed. Within an hour after leaving that meeting, I had the CARE Guide the NEA created with SPLC to “move beyond the restructuring of schools to the ‘re-culturing of education.” http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/CAREguide2011.pdf

That would be the real  focus of K-12 that SPLC needed to protect. It explains the importance of Core Values to the Vision. That would of course be the vision “Creating Change through Social Justice” and dramatically redefining the purpose of schools and negating academics as traditionally understood. Unless it is useful for new purposes like preparing students for everyday life, or perceiving ‘power relationships,’ or learning to exalt the ‘collectivist perspective’ and reject the ‘individualist perspective.’

We have a lot to talk about that is to be done under the cover of what counts as Excellence or a legally required closure of the Achievement Gap. It’s not what we are expecting and it certainly is something we need to fear as long as we remain unaware.

I have run too long again. Next time we will walk through that 174 page core document together.

Willingness to Make Personal Sacrifice for the Good of the Whole to Become an Integral Component of Student Identity

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After last year’s stealth release of the hugely troubling C3-College, Career and Civic Ready Framework over Thanksgiving week to avoid anyone noticing what was actually changing under the invisibility cloak of the Common Core, I was watching like a hawk this year. But I really was not expecting anything like what I saw. A new definition of US civic education and to be required and assessed values that literally would have transformed Mao’s cold dark totalitarian heart in the manner of the end of the cartoon The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Why such joy from a bloody tyrant? Because the only way to describe the Youth Civic Development & Education: A Conference Consensus Report released by the Stanford Center on Adolescence on November 27, 2013 (but oddly with a 2014 copyright) is suitable for schools in a country that aspires to authoritarianism over the individual. Any knowledge of history would clue that the actual result in practice is likely to be even worse.

Everything any dictator could ever want from his or her schools sounds hyperbolic and you may be wondering how many cups of espresso I have had this morning. Two cups of Lapsang Souchong tea so that’s not the reason I am writing in such dramatic terms. And I have done some additional reading in recent days to verify both the seriousness of what we are looking at and the price of what we are scheduled to lose. Invisibly and soundlessly. No notice means no protest in time and using technology as is planned means no offensive textbook coming home to alert parents or taxpayers to the wholesale transformation.

The paper’s primary author, William Damon, has already been quoted on this blog as seeking to use education “to direct the course of the future.” http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/what-if-higher-order-thinkingdeliberate-confusion/ . After reading this report one has to wonder if he or any of the other authors was tempted to jet to London and visit Highgate Cemetary to put a bound volume at Uncle Karl’s tomb to pay homage to his hoped for view of the future and human development. So much more meaningful than flowers at this point across the centuries of this bloody pursuit to finally gain full submission over even the idea of the legitimacy of the individual.

The first book I dove into to verify what I was reading a description for was a 1973 book by Ivan Illich called Tools for Conviviality. Illich made no pretense that he was calling for socialism globally and how to get there. The book came on my horizon because it is a part of a World Perspectives series that began in the 60s with Kenneth Boulding’s The Great Transition that we have already alarmingly discussed. Illich insisted that “society must be reconstructed to enlarge the contribution of autonomous individuals and primary groups to the total effectiveness of a new system of production designed to satisfy the human needs which it also determines.” Like Broadband for all?

We have encountered this human needs focus (instead of individual choices vision) before and it did start with Uncle Karl’s writings. Illich called it the convivial society and Gar Alperowitz calls it the Good Society or the pluralist commonwealth and Shoshona Zuboff called it a support economy and distributed capitalism. Apparently there’s a good reason why this same vision with a variety of names keeps lurking in the shadows of radical education reform. It is the Illich/Marxian vision of submission to “public controls over tools and institutions” and apparently people too.

Education is the invisible, no need to gain consent from the masses, means of finally shutting down what Daniel Hannan in his fine new book Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking People Made the Modern World calls the Anglosphere Miracle. The uniquely English idea “that the law existed not to control the individual but to free him.” The highly unusual in most parts of the world and throughout much of history “idea that the government ought to be subject to the law, not the other way around.” As Hannan notes “oppression and power are far more usual” which is why “politically, a medieval European monarchy would not have been so very different to a modern African kleptocracy. Once people are in a position to set the rules, they tend to rig those rules in their own favor.”

So changing the definition of required civic values in the US so that “all citizens must be prepared to make sacrifices for the common good” as what will be mandated and assessed in K-12 public schools is quite simply an insistence from government that citizens now submit to the suzerainty of majority political will. Administered by politicians and bureaucrats who intend to plan and confiscate. In case you think I am taking damning quotes out of context to rally outrage against the Common Core, how about insisting that “Democracy requires that citizens be willing to make personal sacrifices for the common good”? Doesn’t that phrase bring home why Ayn Rand’s personal experiences with the Bolsheviks in Russia in the 1920’s led her to fret so about “mandated social altruism” imposed by state edict?

It is hard not to visualize all those white crosses and stars in the Arlington National Cemetary or the monuments to the fallen in the D-Day invasions in Normandy France and be appalled that US education and law professors and writers are now seeking to revise. The very definition of what is to constitute politically acceptable 21st century US patriotism.

“Patriotism requires an ethic of sacrifice and duty, and the capacity to act on that ethic. It requires sacrifice in the form of civic activity that involves giving back for the benefit of the whole society.”

We have already encountered the mandate of a recognition of the “interdependence of all people across the world” also in that report. It is straight out of the Global Citizenship mandate the UK and Australia and Scotland all imposed under Michael Barber’s insistence before he left the Tony Blair Administration to push global ed reforms through McKinsey Consulting and now Pearson Education. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/mandating-global-citizenship-mindsets-by-assessing-whether-students-adopt-social-altruism/ The US is about to join the rest of the Anglosphere in closing down this ancient view of the individual and his rights before the government and no one was really supposed to notice. No statutes here. Just ambitious Principals and Supers and Consultants and accreditation agencies seeking to lead cultural change towards public control over all institutions.

How many of you have heard about all the founding primary source documents that are to be an essential component of the Common Core classroom implementation? Better read this consensus report then. Those documents are to be read through the lens of what constitutes “authentic liberty.” The report states that

“a nation cannot have authentic liberty, for example, if conditions of severe inequality render freedom an illusion for some members of the democratic community. Nor can we understand the areas in which equality is essential unless we link those elements of meaningful access and opportunity to the freedoms we ultimately must exercise in order to flourish throughout our lifetimes.” [That is unabashedly Marx’s theory of human development or what Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen are pushing now via the UN and OECD as capability as a human right.] To continue with the quote after making that crucial observation:

“Similarly, some citizens feel a loss of liberty when the government increases regulations of their personal and economic activities in pursuit of particular visions of equality. [Yes we are familiar with those particular visions. See above brackets]. The values of liberty and equality, in turn, are connected to a core notion of human dignity.”

We are NOT being asked to surrender the great Anglosphere invention that enabled unprecedented mass prosperity because production became more lucrative than predation as the way to get financially ahead. We aren’t even being informed. Apparently that joyful message reverts to a snoop like me. Aren’t you enthused that students are to even focus on the proper levers for taking by majority fiat as they learn about “treating political power as a central theme of civic education involves helping young people see how they gain greater control and influence over the many issues that affect them and the people they care about.”

No need to worry about where the lessons of history predict this will all end up because students are to be taught a version of power “firmly grounded in ethical principle.” Yes because any knowledge of reality might foretell the likely tsunami of political oppression that inevitably occurs anytime any group gets this kind of power over individuals who have no effective recourse.

That’s enough. Read the whole thing if you can bear it. I am obviously having a hard time with the no-holds-barred language being used. I think we need to all know our students are to be assessed on whether they are willing to “sacrifice for the the common good or greater good.”

And that this is being defined as “must reflect a commitment to interdependence and improving things for the many and not just the self. Furthermore, students ought to reflect on this principle in terms of a shared humanity beyond the boundaries of the nation, and from the perspective of future generations, considering the worldwide and intergenerational implications of the choices they will make.”

In the name of Common Core and civic education we are about to get all destructive propaganda, all the time. And the specialness of the Anglosphere won’t be all that disappears.

Every radical’s dream coming in as civic education.

Accomplishing One of the Biggest Transformations in Human History Largely Out of Sight

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The problem with having an experienced Due Diligence lawyer figuring out what is really going on in an industry is we do tend to blow through ordinary barriers. It is just reflex to figure out who really owns what and where the funding is coming from and who else is connected. Which may make me a pain sometimes in casual conversation but it was darn useful to clients. Now since I have chosen to use writing to explain the connections and why they matter in education and how it relates to planned social, political, and economic transformations globally, let’s get going again. Because with this story, the real question becomes who isn’t affected, not who is.

A book that is probably not on your radar screen that should be came out in 2009 in the UK and 2010 in the US. Called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger it lays out a vision to “inspire us to create a better society.” It argues that the developed rich countries have “material success and social failure” and that “the broken society and broken economy resulted from the growth of inequality.” Now I would argue that what has broken the rich countries is too much government intervention, like in the mortgage markets, that creates perverse incentives and loads of unintended consequences.

We have discussed before that many economists like Joseph Schumpeter realized that if you keep blaming the ill effects of interventionism on capitalism instead of the reality of cronyism coupled to government coercion, you will steadily get socialism quietly and invisibly. That is precisely what appears to be happening and The Spirit Level is intended to be a key component in creating the desired mindsets and political will for change. Blind, ignorant, but effective change.

Because of its thesis on what is broken and why, the book wants to “shift attention from material standards and economic growth to ways of improving the psychological and social wellbeing of whole societies.” Now that dovetails perfectly with both the UN and OECD’s current global emphasis even though the authors do not say so. As we will see though the dovetailing does have a lot to do with who gets published and why these days and who gets a fat nonfiction advance. And with the merger of Penguin and Random House as of July 1, 2013 that will become even more true. That one entity controls fully a quarter of the world book publishing business and the two previous competitors were frequently the sole bidders on major nonfiction.

Now Penguin is wholly-owned by the largest ed company in the world, Pearson PLC, which is a lot of influence in virtually every area of the information that gets out. If you remember, Pearson’s Chief Ed Advisor is Sir Michael  “Irreversible Change” Barber who thought Global Citizenship would make a nice substitute ideology to guide daily behavior since, he said basically, the Christian religion was no longer compelling and Marx had a bad rep in the 90s. He has his own tag detailing some of these pushes and his links via public meetings to Irina Bokova, head of UNESCO, who currently wants to use Media Education, including digital learning, to drive the planet to Marxist Humanism in the 21st century. Yes, she has said so. See those tags as well. Does she have any connections then to media? Yes, I would say so especially as German media conglomerate Bertelsmann controls 53% of the new publishing company to Penguin’s 47%.

If we quit thinking of socialism and the rest of Uncle Karl’s visions as being about the Kremlin or Mao and begin thinking of it as government led control by connected insiders of the economy and everyone else, what is really going on makes a whole lot more sense. Accurate perception also means we can strategize over both effective defense and offense in the coming years. At the end of the Spirit Level book, the authors remark that “creating the political will to make society more equal is more important than pinning our colours to a particular set of policies to reduce inequality. Political will is dependent on the development of a vision of a better society which is both achievable and inspiring.”

Now creating such political will and vision is Oh So Much easier if the largest ed company in the world owns Penguin which can simply publish such a book and many more.  Then that ed company can have its employees write reports and Forewords like this one just released  http://www.nesta.org.uk/library/documents/Alive_in_the_Swamp.pdf that push to have digital learning “irresistably engage” students. Software and gaming and assessments “personalized with the goal of unlocking the passion of the learner.” We have discussed before that digital learning can provide expert systems that teach but that is NOT the vision of digital learning actually being pushed. This is to be about behavioral change and the role of the teacher is to be a change agent “trained to focus on the personal experience of the individual student and to help uncover values and motivations.” Which again is darn useful since everyone involved about two levels up from the classroom, if not less, is intent on using education to obtain that political will and impose that social vision and create new values.

So the development of modern technology according to the book “will help us rein in consumerism and ease the introduction of policies to tackle global warming.” It believes “profit-making institutions” will “appear increasingly anti-social” which is highly likely given such media control over education and what gets published as nonfiction in the future. Who needs censorship when so few control so much of what will make it to most human minds as available information? We will likely get more of  http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resources/park-avenue-how-much-inequality-too-much types of documentaries. Notice that just came out too and is classified as an educational material. Also  notice Equality Trust is preparing curriculum materials for 16-19 year olds and has a June 17, 2013 blog post explaining that we all have a flawed understanding of liberty.

The graduate student writer seems to have the life comprehension skills of someone who has always been supported by someone else as as he wants to define “liberty as the absence of relations of domination and dependence between persons” so “equality and liberty are not in conflict, but are in fact compatible and self-reinforcing concepts.” Honestly, if the government and connected insiders are in charge of making equality for all a fact as they are under all these visions, there will be a whole lot of domination and dependence and it will be hard to escape from. All in the Gutter Together with no ladder up or out. We will be back in the kind of status society referred to previously as feudalism. And we are not being assigned to the Castle with Moat class either. Someone has spent too much time in poli sci and cultural studies classes or reading the Howard Zinn view of history.

The authors are now turning The Spirit Level into a documentary for a planned release in Summer 2014 which will give emotionally compelling visuals for students going into US midterm elections. http://thespiritleveldocumentary.com/blog . The Foreword of the US version of the book was written by former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and the co-sponsor of that Nesta Digital Learning Innovations report is the hugely influential and connected California-based New Schools Venture Fund in case anyone thinks this is only a UK invisible coup. I explained the Marxist Humanist theory of changing attitudes and values here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/naming-educators-as-the-levers-shifting-the-human-personality-to-marxs-moral-revolution/ and that post fits with what is being explained in this post as well.

The Spirit Level ends with this rephrasing of Uncle Karl’s vision, still being sought so many years later:

“To sustain the necessary political will, we must remember that it falls to our generation to make one of the biggest transformations in human history. We have seen the rich countries have got to the end of the really important contributions which economic growth can make to the quality of life [they have gone through the requisite technology stage to supposedly make redistribution possible believed Uncle Karl] and also that our future lies in improving the quality of the social environment in our societies.[me again, that’s why there is so much emphasis in ed reform on the common good and community] The role of this book is to point out that greater equality is the material foundation on which better social relations are built.”

That certainly is the role of that book and isn’t it helpful Pearson is in a position to publish that book and use digital learning and its role as provider of so much of the curriculum and so many of the assessments to be used with the Common Core and for Texas’ STAAR? In a unique global position to prepare tasks and projects and questions that push that vision and create that political will? That it has a foundation pushing Global Learning in the US with the Asia Society mostly out of sight?

And is there any question whose vision we are about to use education to experiment as to whether better social relations can be built if nobody knows much and education becomes about engaging the passions through activity and visual stimulation?

Should we start a pool on how these transformations are really likely to turn out?

Schools that Break Down Obstacles to the Formation of Revolutionary Personalities

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No, David Christian, the Professor pushing the new Big History course has said and written some doozies as we will see but today’s title was not one of them. I borrowed it from aspirations for Italian schools in 1972 since David so clearly wants today’s students to learn to think as idealogues instead of factually. And with Bill Gates’ backing and his Foundation’s funding and McGraw Hill debuting the textbook Big History: Between Nothing and Everything in August, this may be nonsense to those of us who prefer facts and knowledge but it is about to be influential nonsense. And in more places that the “enlightened” high schools already on board. There’s a reason for connections too between Big History–BH for now– and those NSF-funded Understandings of Consequence that are also frequently false. You see, BH combines natural sciences and humanities within a single framework to emphasize the interconnections. Here’s the international newsletter http://ibhanet.org/Resources/Documents/newsletters/Newsletter_III_05.pdf  for April so you can mull over why this is now called Convergence Education in Korea.

Now in case you have always thought of ideology as an insult, let’s use the working definitions of some experts who knew it well and spent a lifetime pointing them out and refuting them. Here’s the great Kenneth Minogue again, this time from his 1963 classic The Liberal Mind: [my snark in brackets]

“An ideology may therefore be defined as a set of ideas whose primary coherence results not from their truth and consistency, as in science and philosophy, but from some external cause; most immediately, this external cause will be some mood, vision, or emotion. [Wouldn’t an emphasis on values, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings be oh so useful?] The psychological mark of ideological entrapment is the feeling of despair which accompanies the prospect of defeat in argument. [usually resulting in an irrelevant but nasty personal attack] Ideologies seek to avoid such painful experiences by framing their key utterances in a vague or tautological form, in order to make these propositions impregnable. The intellectual mark of ideology is the presence of dogma, beliefs which have been dug into the ground and surrounded by semantic barbed wire. [Think Climate Change models that ignore actual temps and omit key influences]. Ideologies incorporate some kind of general instructions about behavior–ideals or value-judgments, as they would commonly be called.”

Now since we learned in the last post for sure that we have a modern class of international nomenklatura who wish to govern us whether we like it or not, what better tool than schools that dispense Mindsets of Ideology instead of facts. No more making your own concepts, remember? Those will now be assigned as the acceptable Big Ideas to guide 21st Century student thinking. No parent need ever know. Who are they compared to a Social Studies Education major anyway. Now the typical ed major or doctorate that gets to be in charge of such a change in curricula may be blissfully unaware of the dangerous, even murderous, past of ideologies, but we are not. Especially after this post. Let’s borrow a few more key components from Jean-Francois Revel’s 1988 (1991 translation into English) book, The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information. Our title came from one of his stories.

Ideology is

–“concerned with a view to action. It transforms reality, indeed far more powerfully than exact knowledge does.”

–“refuse to heed displeasing arguments and facts–something that is the very negation of the scientific spirit.”

–“One can only begin to talk of an ideology with respect to collective beliefs.”

–“always active…a mixture of strong emotions and simple ideas, linked to a certain mode of behavior.”

Now I am going through this at some link because truthfully a push to have K-12 and higher ed be active dispensers of ideologies is exactly what we are dealing with in so many areas. And it is especially what the ed degree programs are all about. The District Central Office and the college deans and maybe your principal have all been trained to think ideologically without really knowing it. So we have to know ideology better than they do so we can always recognize both the poison and its advocates. Yes, this is about far more than BH.

Revel has one more vital insight we need to keep in mind. Many people prefer to think ideologically if they must think at all. As he notes:

“Human beings experience all sorts of needs for intellectual activity other than the need to know. The libido sciendi is not, contrary to what Pascal said, the principal motor of the human mind. It is only an accessory inspirer, and only among a small number of us. [See why TAG and Honors classes must go?] The average human being seeks the truth only after having exhausted all other possibilities.”

Well, not on this info-filled blog but Revel raises an important point for us to remember. Now I am going to start with a link to 1991 since David started pushing this project before the broken glass had been cleaned up at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/jwh/jwh022p223.pdf And David’s specialty was not just history but Sovietology. So I want you to remember this desire for “large-scale maps” that “reestablish {history’s} centrality as a discussion about what it means to be human” in light of a certain ideology that had come into disrepute at the time he was writing whenever it was upfront with its name. Beyond usurping the roles of philosophy and religion, BH wants to delve into “human impact on the environment” so ecology comes in too. In fact, BH is to play “as significant a role in modern industrial society as traditional creation myths have played in nonindustrial societies.” By that I guess he means “who are we and why are we here?” Boy, will BH get along well with contemplative education.

Christian is far more graphic on his intentions in the 91 article than he is now. He pointed out there “that growth, far from being the normal condition of humanity, is an aberration.” Trust me with these education policies and practices, that aberration is about to cease if it hasn’t already. Somehow if BH referred to how “the ‘bacillus’ man is taking over the world”, I am wondering if it might slow down textbook sales and funding. Probably not but someone who writes about the “sudden breakdown in an ancient equilibrium between a large mammal species and the environment it inhabits” will certainly be on board with the No More Axemaker Minds campaign Paul Ehrlich and the UN are mounting.

Honestly if BH “blurs the borderline between history and the natural sciences” then none of these subjects are in a form we would recognize. http://www.thegreatstory.org/universal-history.pdf is that troubling “History and Theory: The Next 50 Years.” Christian makes his intention that history “will have a powerful impact on public thinking about the past” quite clear. He thinks this “shared history” suitable for China or the US, Russia or South Africa will “help educators generate a sense of global citizenship.” Gag. That phrase again. Since Christian is fairly deceitful in marveling over where have all the Universal Histories gone, he is avoiding saying that was the role played by Uncle Karl’s theories. He clearly does NOT want to point that out. So I will and cite to Robert Heilbroner in his 1980 Marxism For and Against for pointing out that “No other study of history is so consciously oriented to mastering history, as is Marxism. For that reason alone it warrants our respect.” You didn’t think I would quote a Tea Party historian to refute Christian did you?

Here’s Heilbroner again: “Marxism is intended to provide more than an understanding of history. It is intended to serve as a guide for making history.” Why, how active. See above under Ideology.  So a “history that looks to the future” as Christian claims for BH is a history that functions just like what Uncle Karl envisioned. Something to think about as it becomes mainstreamed.

http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/6.3/christian.html makes it clear that David is quite aware that it is the power of symbolic language and the storehouse of cultural info across generations that has driven the human ability to adapt. To change our environment. He and others involved with global education reform know it is unique to our species and they are not too happy about its potential. You can take a look yourself to see if you think BH, like Whole Language, is an attempt to diminish that human ability to adapt and innovate.  http://usm.maine.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Collaborative%20of%20Global%20and%20Big%20History/christian%20historically%20speaking%20big%20history.pdf is one more link for you to see if you share my belief that this type of “underlying unity of modern knowledge” is because it fits Minogue and Revel’s definitions of ideology.

Because if it does, this is just another tool in that giving more power to Governments and the Public Sector vision. Which is precisely where ideology is the most entrenched.

Who knew it was going to be such a ferocious struggle to maintain the legitimacy of the individual in the 21st century?

Igniting an Entire Generation of Dedicated Social Change Agents via Education Compelled to Act Now

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The great Political Theorist Kenneth Minogue’s tragic death yesterday gave me a good reason to go back and reread the highlights of his fine 2010 book The Servile Mind. Turns out to be just the kind of insights we need to grasp precisely what is being attempted globally in education. And why. I had been fuming since Friday that we have basically three tracks going on right now in education. Track 1, the vast majority, really have no idea that there are to be dramatic changes in the nature of K-12 and higher education. Track 2 is aware of the Common Core and is concerned that it is a usurpation by the feds of local control over the curriculum.

I observe and write about Track 3–the real implementation  intended to fundamentally change attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors in order to gain a desired political, social, and moral transformation. Track 3 is so anti-content that it calls for substituting emotional engagement instead (this past week’s Partnership for Global Learning annual conference in NYC). Or as this influential group advocates  http://p21.org/tools-and-resources/p21blog/1151-how-can-technology-empower-deeper-learning-in-a-21st-century-school “deriving the curriculum from the lived experience of the student” rather than “a collection of fixed texts.”

Minogue recognized in The Servile Mind that something fundamental was shifting all over the world “as governments take over the tasks individuals used to do for themselves.” That our very conception of society is changing and much of the attitudes driving those changes are being first nurtured, and then required, by education “reforms.” He rightfully worried about what happens in countries where a majority of voters come to see themselves as “an association of vulnerable people whose needs and sufferings must be remedied by the power of the state.”

Minogue recognized that the power and unprecedented prosperity achieved by countries in the West grew from a foundational vision of “self-conscious individuals guiding their destinies according to whatever moral sentiments they entertain.” Now, all over the world, a competing vision seeks stealth enactment and education is the preferred means of avoiding detection as the rulers sculpt the citizens to be malleable. And behaviorally predictable if only the right buttons are pushed. Yes, that would be another job for the compliant media if Minogue had only had a copy of all those UNESCO reports. Minogue does nail the new vision though. A future society “in which individuals find their identifying essence in supporting public policies that are both morally obligatory and politically imperative.”

That future vision now can quietly come in the front door of the school to coerce compliance from an early age. Via lots of psychological student data and a very poorly understood definition of Student Growth. Which will make it much more difficult for us to protect the next generation from being manipulated into a “gullible acquiescence to the projects of government.” Minogue wrote about the Romans and how they “had learned the moral practices needed for a sycophantic submission” during the long reign of Augustus. And when the atrocious Tiberius came along they had been mentally and emotionally disarmed from coping with overt tyranny. The usefulness of deliberately targeting “hearts and minds” has been clear from time immemorial and we should honor Professor Minogue’s admonition that “we should never forget that moral change takes place below, and often deeply below, the surface of a culture.”

Back to track 3 to discuss what is off most radars. It has explicit intentions to create those very moral changes we were just warned about. In an entire generation of learners. Hoping to, in the words of one speaker, create “habits of head, heart, and hand that together will hopefully cause students to take meaningful action. And engage in volunteerism and service. Standing up against injustices and improving conditions and making changes in the world around them.” I have warned about media education and the primacy of the 21st Century Skills push and also the Global Competence portion of the Common Core that guides the classroom vision even though it is usually unmentioned in the PR push. On June 4, 2013, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (which had deceitfully claimed to be shutting down a few years ago) put on a Congressionally Sponsored Global Awareness Event at the Capitol Hill Visitors Center. To push Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy. We had the Pearson Foundation as a sponsor and a Disney executive (as in Mickey Mouse and lots of Media pull) as the moderator.

If you have 40 minutes to spare, here’s the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Us7qvshjhw&feature=c4-overview&list=UUK7RYYXF4XqP_mIDu28ZtuQ . I am going to assume you are busy though and give you the highlights. Or what I consider the troubling implications of a vision of education that regards the whole point now as getting students to “become passionate about global issues.” Issues selected and fostered because they will be useful to growing the tendency of the government to intervene, or at least guide, in all matters in the future. I was quoting Scott Hirschfield of the US Fund for UNICEF earlier so let’s continue with what knowledge and values and skills he wants to see K-12 schools cultivate. He said UNICEF defines global citizen as someone who “understands interconnectedness and appreciates global diversity. Someone who challenges inequities and takes meaningful action in their communities at the global level.”

Hirschfield went on the say that “head–heart–hand is how we shorthand this.” I am going to interrupt my quoting to point out that genuinely free market economies provide people with what they want to buy but they are drivers of economic inequality. It’s just that the least successful still are better off financially than has ever been the case in a state-directed economy. With Statism what gets equalized has generally been misery unless you are politically connected. Everyone else gets misery without much recourse apart from physical escape. On rafts. Over Berlin Walls. Tunneling. A human drive to be free.

So when content is pooh-poohed and emotions are pushed and equity becomes the driver we need to beware of knowledge as officially described as “economic and political literacy and an understanding of human rights.” Hand is the “skills we want” like “conflict resolution and a willingness to negotiate and compromise.” Then we get heart as “the values and dispositions we want young people to internalize” like “compassion and toleration of others.”

I will interrupt this troubling confession of the new purpose of education to once again borrow Professor Minogue’s insight that “the ideological frenzies of the twentieth century” like Nazism and Communism “have largely disappeared, except in universities, but the basic impulse in our civilization toward collective salvation has not.” And the way an elite go about obtaining that collective salvation and servitude is through a “change in the hearts and minds of human beings.” So we recognize the impulse but what happens to a society where the next generation knows little but feels the need to jettison what exists and try to design anew?

I will shift and end with Kathleen Welling’s vision since she too sees the new purpose of education as “changing lives.” She hyped the first Global Student Leaders Summit in March in Costa Rica with Al Gore as the keynoter. Next April the Summit is going to China and the emphasis is on “how do we change this world?”

I think the term “playing with fire” is too mild to describe the dangers of this new, to be mandated, view of education. Welling also mentioned that she believed that the Asia Society was doing fine work in promoting this new view of Global Education which is why I led off this post with a mention of its PGL13 conference last week. http://sites.asiasociety.org/pgl2013/about/ She also mentioned the work of Fernando Reimers at Harvard as guiding this new vision of global education for all in the future.

He’s probably not on your radar yet but he’s been on mine for a while. At the beginning of this week that celebrates genuine freedom, what type of meaning would freedom have in a country where K-12 education becomes devoted to “all children” must “develop their own understanding about how we all share responsibility for the well being of humanity?”

Not just that understanding mind you, but also “develop that compassion” so that students will learn to act as desired. And on the political issues desired.

 

Time for the Collective Will of Many Visible Hands to Challenge the Allegedly Destructive Invisible Hand?

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Right now the favored attack being used to discredit people who point out  the inconsistencies in the stories being put out about the Common Core US education reforms, or the poor history of global climate models in predicting reality, to use two current examples, is to retort that someone is “part of the black helicopter crowd.” Now, given the incredible schemes I have uncovered and described with detail on this blog, telling you I am the last person who believes in black helicopters might strike you as untrue. But I really did not go looking for these stories. They rather found me. I just recognized what I had to be looking at and then wanted to know and document how and why.

So please understand if I write about the equivalent of a black helicopter event that strikes you as too incredible to believe, remember all of the following

–I have personally seen the black helicopters;

–I have obtained proof before I even mentioned it; and

–I have doublechecked the color of the helicopters to make sure they can be accurately described as black and not navy.

At that point I will write about an incredible story but only because I want all of us to have time to take the appropriate action. The equivalent of running or ducking if we really had helicopters coming. I have friends who ask how I can stay so calm while describing such machinations in the public sector. But honestly, as a history major, this is all rather fascinating to me. Plus it is quite clear this was all never meant to be uncovered or linked together in time. So pulling this all together before it all takes effect does give me some solace.

But despite everything I read, I was still startled to hear this morning that President Obama would be announcing his climate plan this Tuesday afternoon at Georgetown University. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcL3_zzgWeU&feature=youtu.be is the White House announcement video released yesterday. For a likely nonexistent problem just like all my documents and reports and numerous blog posts always indicated would be sought. The reason that social, economic, and political transformation would supposedly be necessary.

And I should be the last to be numbed. After all I really have read all those Club of Rome books and reports and the Belmont Challenge document itself.  Maybe that is part of what caused the feeling of being stunned. Let me give you an example from Jared Duval’s 2010 book Next Generation Democracy: What the Open-Source Revolution Means for Power, Politics, and Change. Duval is a member of that UN-affiliated World Future Council and the book laid out his vision for an economy centered around “real, participatory democracy.” As far as he is concerned, the Millennial Generation and others “will reconceive fundamental aspects of how our state and local governments are set up” and then impose that new vision on everyone. Consenting, appalled, or unaware.

But Duval also gave examples like the devastation of Hurricane Katrina being due to “the failure of conservative, limited-government ideology.” Which is not true. If anything, Katrina and the cited levee boards were a reminder that government powers and tax money frequently get turned to fulfilling private, selfish personal interests. Likewise, it was not “unchecked private whims that gave us the subprime loan crisis and the recession that officially began in December of 2007.” Both of those were ignited by government interventionism and cronyistic taxpayer subsidy of the risk without any chance for the profit if things turned out well. And for such ignorance of the real reasons for these debacles we are going to impose more cronyism a la a directed Industrial Policy/Green Economy with more public/private partnerships? Find a reader who is more naive for that sales job.

I actually now have a copy of the World Future Council’s plans for all of us. Called A Renewable World: Energy. Ecology. Equality, Duval wrote the last chapter envisioning all those planned changes to values, institutions, and ways of living. It is where today’s title comes from.  FWC pushes the “concept of open or living democracy–democracy not as simply a structure of government but as a way of life, manifesting shared values of inclusion, fairness and mutual accountability.” So convenient then to also have a formal global Media Education movement coming out of UNESCO right now and supported quietly by ed reforms all over the world under various names like the already described CCSSO-supported Global Competence in the US or Global Education in Australia.  http://www.globaleducation.edu.au/verve/_resources/GPS_web.pdf

Whatever it is called locally the UNESCO push to use education to impose a New Humanism as we discussed in the previous post is based on the utopian idea of “equal access and the egalitarian distribution of competences and capacities.” Which makes social interaction and feelings and new values among the few acceptable areas that can provide such equity. It is certainly NOT quadratic equations. Instead we get “communication” aided by computer as equitable.  Or “real equality in the possibilities for participating and sharing of opinions.” Shared ignorance is what this would have been called in the past. But this is the era of media literacy movements to build:

“bridges in order to construct a universal dialogue among [cultures] that fosters the spirit of understanding and the gradual, painstaking construction of shared values. In this way, the media literacy movement is against stereotypes and prejudices and in favour of the potential of the media and ICTs to build a universal culture of peace.”

Now I snarked Kumbayah in the last post but let me point out that some stereotypes are accurate and some prejudices are grounded in fact and leave it at that. The universal culture of peace aspiration is nice but not if you are disarmed– mentally, physically, and emotionally–to defend yourself when someone else is the aggressor. Unlike Jared, history does does not strike me as showing people are basically cooperative by nature. Given his poor sense of causation that I described above, I am not anxious to try out his and WFC’s theory of human nature. Or the kind of shared values acceptable to him, WFC, or UNESCO.

Like Anthony Giddens, WFC declared that “even if climate change were not happening, we would still need to change our energy systems, restore the health of ecosystems, create more livable cities, vibrant communities and resilient localities, use less resources, spread wealth, increase international peace…” No wonder no one seems to care about actual temperature records in all this climate modelling. Both Giddens and WFC are basically saying we want to impose Uncle Karl’s little c Positive Humanist vision in the 21st century and we won’t take no for an answer. And Tuesday we are likely going to find out someone else who will not take no or voter disapproval for an answer.

I first wrote about the World Order Model Project and its insistence on creating shared humanistic values here  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/reorienting-world-order-values-via-the-intervention-of-activist-education-and-progressive-politics/ . I think all these books I have mentioned indicate WOMP and the Club of Rome and various UN entities have done a bang-up job in their expressed goal to “take hold of public and elite imagination” of the “need for world order.” And now it is time for the rest of us to get with the program because we truly do have an international elite who want to rule. What Falk called the “power-wielders.” And they want the rest of us to adopt the needed values, attitudes, beliefs, emotions, and dispositions to go along and finance all these transformative plans.

And they are impatient. After all, Richard Falk first wrote these WOMP plans in a book published in 1975:

“The prospects for smooth transition, by which we mean a process that is largely nonviolent and cumulative, will depend on the extent to which a positive learning experience is widely shared throughout the world in relation to early efforts to pursue the new agenda of world order values.”

Now such an aim means it has long made perfect sense for there to be a stealth coordinated global effort being led through the UN around global ed reform. After all, Falk even included a footnote to the above quote that “‘widely shared’ does not imply identical, the important ingredient of ‘learning’ in this sense is commitment to a continuous process of global reform more or less in accordance with the WOMP priority schedule, but allowing for important variations in emphasis.”

That certainly would account for all this coordination over decades and countries. And the consistency of aims under a variety of names.

And quite frankly why the overall description does sound like a black helicopter event. After all, the reality of climate change turns out to be quite optional to the planned transformations.

 

 

Inventing the Education of the Future By Insuring Planet-Wide Activity to Produce Unified Outlooks

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Last week EdX announced that 15 more colleges and universities had joined its vision to offer online degrees. What caught my eye about the announcement was that one of the colleges, Davidson, a perennial Top Ten US News institution, had announced last fall that the Duke Endowment was paying it $45 million to “boldly” remake the nature of liberal arts education. So when Davidson’s part of the EdX announcement focused on the “transdisciplinary” nature of its new focus I decided I was looking at what we lawyers call a “defined term that is dangerously missing its actual definition.”

What I found is relevant to everybody everywhere. Whatever your interests. Because the search for that Transdisciplinary definition led me to the manifesto for implementing Agenda 21 and economic, political, and social visions first laid out at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. In 1994 the first world congress on transdisciplinarity was held in Portugal. Its purpose was to lay out how to get the desired mentalities to evolve via education. This is all part of what UNESCO calls its Culture of Peace Project.

In 1996 UNESCO issued its vision for elementary and secondary education globally–the DeLors Report “The Treasure Within.” It laid out the four pillars of a new kind of education: learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, and learning to be. It is based on UNESCO’s idea that education in the future should rely on what it viewed as in “the case of human beings, the decisive ‘ingredient’ is their mental and personal disposition to trust, share, negotiate and collaborate.” And that education in the future should cultivate that quality to “produce unified outlooks.”

Yes that is the origination of all that Group Project push but K-12 is not today’s focus. Remember I am using international documents that were created before the K-12 implementation in the US stalled and became partial in light of the outcry over outcomes based education and School to Work and nonacademic standards from the various disciplines like history and English and math. So we have the DeLors vision that I believe moved into the IB curriculum when those rocky shoals developed and Al Gore lost the election in 2000. The K-12 Transdisciplinary vision hid there waiting for another US President to come along and reignite what was called radical education reform in the 90s when all these documents were created. But the DeLors vision of K-12 rolled forward in other parts of the world.

But UNESCO in the 90s did not have a crystal ball and it knew what kind of complete cultural shift it sought. Basically the same one the World Orders Model Project also sought starting in the early 70s that I explained here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/reorienting-world-order-values-via-the-intervention-of-activist-education-and-progressive-politics/ . I am not throwing out the term Marxist Humanism to be provocative and I have made the case in every post between that one and this one. Other entities have pushed and are pushing similar visions.

But the history of the latter part of the 20th century and education especially only makes sense when you realize that the bounteous wealth created by prosperity in the West was and is coveted for redistribution. ICT-Internet Communications Technology–has been assumed by plenty of MH theorists all over the world to be the long sought technology that could make widespread leisure a possibility if only people could be made to share. And the best way to force people to share is to use education to create new values and mindsets and beliefs. A widespread belief in an impending crisis would also help.

So in 1997 there was a conference in what must have been, as usual, a lovely setting, in Lucarno, Switzerland on the next step after the DeLors Report. The Transdisciplinary Evolution of the University was the topic. But the report issued was far more encompassing than just the higher ed component. It’s basically the blueprint for all the UN pushes that have become so controversial in so many areas. It is THE manifesto for what has come and is coming through related (if you track from the UN backward) initiatives like the US Common Core or Living Cities or Green Growth or the Regional Equity Movement. You name it and it is probably there. As usual I am giving the precise name to allow for searching but not a link since that would take it down before many of you can read this post. At the moment it is on multiple servers in multiple languages.

Called “Educating for a Sustainable Future: A Transdisciplinary Vision for Concerted Action,” it was created as part of UNESCO’s call to action from the Rio Summit to implement Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 to gain the desired global social, economic, and political changes in structures and institutions and especially people’s mindsets, personalities, and values. As usual it was a call to action for the levers of the sought revolution and biosocial evolution–“the multiple partners and broad community of stakeholders in the educational enterprise.” No, they apparently don’t mean parents or taxpayers.

The really nice thing is the report tells us the truth about Sustainability and acknowledges that “sustainable development is an amorphous concept, intended to be:

“an emerging vision…In truth, it is as much an ethical precept as a scientific concept, as  concerned with notions of equity as with theories of global warming. Sustainable development is widely understood to involve the natural sciences and economics, but it is even more fundamentally concerned with culture: with the values people hold and how they perceive their relations with others. It responds to an imperative need to imagine a new basis for relationships among peoples and with the habitat that sustains human life.”

And education, K-12 and higher ed, is how you get those new values. Especially holistic education that targets the Whole Child, emotions as well as knowledge. Particularly if you get to make education about real world problems to be engaging and relevant. And you get to supply the Big Ideas and Conceptual Lenses that students will then use to guide their daily perceptions. It’s an essential part of How to Change and Guide Beliefs 101. And grounded in feelings instead of much actual facts makes those beliefs integrated. Hard to change later. Whatever the reality.

So not only is education globally the recognized vehicle for social and economic change, the idea expressed is that “not only can it inform people, it can change them.” Yes, that does make all that behavioral data being scooped up via computers in the Digital and Blended Learning K-12 emphasis all the more important. That is part of what EdX and the MOOCs are also doing in higher ed as we will discuss in the next post.

In the mean time all these visions are attached to a recognition that education is essential to “a vision of society organized in a new way.” Which all my recent posts have laid out in detail as the vision attached to education reform. UNESCO and politicians globally know that “societies need to be convinced of the need for sustainable development, in order to show their capacity to devise solutions to the problems confronting them.” A recognition that of course always comes down to a belief that direction from governments at the federal, state, and local levels and international agencies are an essential component of every future economy. Despite the reality that government-centric economies in the past have gutted mass prosperity. Cronyism inevitably abounds. See IRS Scandal.

So here is education’s UNESCO-assigned mission in the 21st century globally:

–“bring about the changes in values, behavior and lifestyle that are needed to achieve sustainable development, and ultimately democracy, human security and peace;

–disseminate knowledge, know-how and skills that are needed to bring about sustainable production and consumption patterns and to improve the management of natural resources, agriculture, energy and industrial production;

–ensure an informed populace that is prepared to support changes toward sustainability emerging from other sectors.”

That would translate roughly into students who no longer have Axemaker Minds or unapproved knowledge. Who have what UNESCO calls a Common Ethic or a “new global ethic that transcends all other systems of allegiance and belief, which is rooted in a consciousness of the interrelatedness and sanctity of life.”

It is also the cultivation of attitudes of servitude and what I would call sheepdom.  Willing to move with the herd and not stand apart.

I find this to be an appalling vision for the future. Especially one being delivered largely out of sight by college professors and administrators in higher ed and education professors and School District administrators and Principals in K-12.

With an attitude of “there are promotions and lucrative contracts and grants available if you push this.”

The Education for a Sustainable Future vision actually seems civilization crashing to me. Which UNESCO turns out to agree with. They believe the next resulting civilization will be the peaceable one.

If they are tragically wrong, who will give the tuition or tax refund?

 

Mystical Marxism, Shapers of Our Current World System, or Building New Mental Software

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Please. Oh, please, can I opt for a Door Number 4 as I continue to track down the actual planned social, political, and economic transformative vision for the future? Global and using so-called education reforms as the vehicle. Without our consent and apparently without our knowledge. Modelled on of all things, Soviet psychology and philosophy, but now renamed and spun in terms of Confucius or transpersonal, Integral, philosophy and the ever present systems thinking. Because of course the mindsets that the Chinese leaders find appropriate for their “under our thumb” (to the music of the Rolling Stones please) citizens is precisely appropriate for a US or Australian or Korean classroom. Anywhere I suppose where anyone with political power dreams of looking at the masses of taxpayers and voters and assigning a role of permanent subordination.

Mystical Marxism. That’s what Ken Wilber called his Integral Worldview that explores, honors, and acknowledges “all the dimensions of men and women’s experiences–sensory, emotional, mental, social, spiritual.” Now Ken has actually been on my radar for a while because Harvard ed prof Robert Kegan seems to like partnering with the Integral Life philosophy when he is not pushing “Lessons of Systemic Change for Success in Implementing the New Common Core Standards” with Peter Senge and Hewlett Foundation funding. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/viewing-education-as-the-prime-lever-for-international-social-change-community-organizing-everywhere/ . But I do not talk about people on the periphery no matter how troubling the implications of their views. No I was following up on the definition of Global Competence and the Smithsonian’s involvement with both Understandings of Consequence and Big History.

Which caused me to take a look at the SHOUT education conferences Smithsonian has been sponsoring with Microsoft and another entity I was not familiar with. TakingITGlobal–Inspire, Inform, Involve. It turns out to be a student social media site promoting Global Citizenship. Disturbingly to me, their Theory of Change http://www.tigweb.org/about/why/change.html is “inspired by the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber, which posits that there are 4 areas (quadrants) where progressive development can occur: Interior Individual, Exterior Individual, Interior Collective, and Exterior Collective. Through our programs and project, young people move along a linear path through each quadrant …(A) Youth Development; (B) Youth Action & Participation; (C) Social Movements; and (D) Societal Values.” There’s more specifics on that site to help inculcate that individual and collective common core that prompts transformative action. Parents happily thinking their children have become involved in service learning may want to search out Wilber’s aspirations for Achieving Binding Democratic Global Governance.

Part 2 of our title comes from more detectiving around this issue of Global Competence and its integral (couldn’t resist because it’s true) part in CCSSO’s vision of the Common Core’s actual implementation. Turns out in 2009 the Gates Foundation funded a  CCSSO project called EdSteps to essentially obscure the key implementation components that might be controversial. Mustn’t allow any disruption of the political narrative being used to con the public on what was coming. It’s the EdSteps frameworks then that announce that the Common Core is about “a nation transforming its business and education systems in response to the evolving global economy.” That would be the Capitalism 3.0 or  what Shoshana Zuboff called distributed capitalism and the Aspen Institute the fourth sector/for benefit economy.

http://edsteps.org/CCSSO/SampleWorks/EdSteps%20Framework-08_29_12.pdf is the framework. Virginians and Texans may want to note their involvement with EdSteps as more proof you can get the common core implementation without the actual math or ELA standards. The Five EdSteps skill areas are the key implementation components that no one had been previously and systematically assessing: Creativity, Problem Solving for Learning, Analyzing Information, Global Competence, and Writing. Now honestly as EdSteps describes all these areas they will go a long way towards training students to Ascend from the Abstract to the Concrete or what Paul Ehrlich called organizing around Big Ideas and Concepts that will instill a compulsion to act. But you now have those Frameworks and my earlier posts. I need to move on to the even more troubling ideas behind the EdSteps screen.

EdSteps is a partner in yet another entity, world savvy, framing transformative curricula and practices for the 21st century student. And without the above link you would never see the ties to CCSSO. http://worldsavvy.org/assets/documents/uploads/WorldSavvy_ComponentsofGlobalCompetency.pdf lays out the Knowledge, Skills, Values & Attitudes, and Behaviors to be instilled in students. It’s all troubling but it’s the Knowledge component we need to focus on now. Especially as it primes for Big History or something comparably false and influential.

In particular the phrase “Historical forces that have shaped the current world system.” We don’t have a current singular world system. If we did it would by definition be totalitarian. The aspiration for one was a huge part of what drove one side in the Cold War. As long time readers know, I have been describing what appears to be an effort by UNESCO and other UN agencies to use initiatives like the Belmont Challenge and the Future Earth Alliance (still have not seen anyone involved in tights with lettering on their chest) to get to a singular world system.

That phraseology in the Components of Global Competency tells us a lot about the assumptions inherent in meetings none of us have been invited to. It also indicates all these transformational reforms are being driven either by some woefully ignorant people or idealogues enthralled by Utopia. Not to mention the Champagne Tastes and Caviar Dreams of being a connected Business in this vision no longer worried about consumers or competitors.

But a key component of this social vision starts at the city or regional level. Where it is much easier to get all the relevant politicians on board and bought off with grants and revenue sharing to finance a transformation. At least in the short term. It’s called the Learning City or Region and shifting the US towards it to dovetail with its Asian push is the purpose of both the Metropolitanism initiatives we have covered several times and the planned shift in federal revenue sharing we covered here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/well-no-wonder-no-one-listens-to-common-core-complaints-if-it-is-tied-to-federal-revenue-sharing/ .

But inexplicably the mayors and city councils always leave out the key component of the vision about “building mental software conditions for human wellbeing.” Or that learning cities and regions are the vital first step in “building the structural concept of a ‘learning society’…based upon an emphasis that ‘a society should be rewired and re-constructed in a way that human learning is put at the very front and maximized to fulfill the idea of a whole person.”

Well that sounds outlandish and remember learning means changes in values, attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors. I seriously doubt UNESCO’s or the Chinese vision of a whole person would be ours. And again aiming at those personal traits is essential to anyone with an aspiration of an integral human system. Local, national, or global. Bad track record people. And the above links have the Common Core in the US linked to at least two strategies for such a totalizing vision of personal and collective transcendence. The one Hewlett paid for in that previous post and Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory of Change.

It will be no fun to be an individual in a “complex adaptive system” being reorganized and centrally directed. Which is probably why the 2010 UNESCO document I am pulling this global Learning City vision from is quoting from Korea, Shanghai, and Changzhou, China versions. Where “education is an instrument to rebuild the community” around the planned vision. A community where “all” is so “co-related and connected to make a whole complex ecosystem of human learning. It is like a human body which cannot be detached from other parts. If so detached, the human simply dies.”

There’s no place for the genuinely autonomous person in that UNESCO-inspired vision of the Lifelong Learning Community (LLC). And if you think nothing like this can happen in the US or other countries like Australia I suggest you read this Leading Learning Communities report to be an effective elementary school principal. http://www.naesp.org/sites/default/files/LLC2-ES-1.pdf . That LLC vision is supposedly necessary “as we face squarely the challenges inherent in the transformation of our global society.” A learning society. One where, to once again quote UNESCO and a Korean prof of Lifelong Education in Seoul:

‘learning functions as a key attribute and defines what a society should be [functioning like what the Chinese Communists used to call ‘thought reform’ and others had a darker term for]…a key apparatus of social production and reproduction [which sounds better than the reality of social engineering]…In sum, a learning society is a self-organising emergence [in a centrally planned and dictated sort of way] where new patterns of social fabric and learning systems are merged and deployed. Here my point is this: a learning city is not just an old-timer’s economic project, but a whole new idea where a whole new learning system emerges, revolves, and grows to lead economic, social, and political development as a whole.”

How totalising. No room for the unitary self there. No wonder john a powell said that the Regional Equity Movement in the US and its accompanying education vision was not just looking for distributive justice. Not when you can join a vision where “learning is considered an authentic and generic DNA for cultivating the post-industrial society as a complex adaptive system. In this vein, systems thinking is the key mode of planning and implementing the whole situation in action.”

Which would explain why systems thinking just keeps popping up. All the function and little of the notoriety of the M word.

Explicitly treating all of us as if “cultivating a forest of learning systems, which needs patience, systems thinking and collective minds.”

No I am not done yet. But that is quite enough to chew on for today.

 

 

Isn’t It Political Sabotage to Use Education to Eliminate the Assumption that Students are Individuals?

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Yes I am in a feisty mood today. I am angry at the level of deception and duplicity surrounding the actual Common Core implementation and where this is all going. Or was until some of these revelations. Those of you past a certain age may remember the 80s TV show “The A-Team” when George Peppard would put a cigar in his mouth, lean back, and with a grin say “I love it when a plan comes together.” Well today we really are taking a huge step towards unravelling a well-laid but nefarious scheme that involves Common Core but more importantly it involves education globally. And UNESCO. And the IB, International Baccalaureate Program, and its IB Learner Profile and concept of Global Citizenship as where Common Core is actually going.

I had intuited this from personal experience over the past several years but never thought I could prove it. Then Ed Week did a story right before Christmas on how Common Core was now emulating IB except that the Common Core was missing the IB’s focus on the affective or social and emotional learning. Well I was intrigued and annoyed. Fascinated that Ed Week would admit the link given the IB focus is on changing the individual to listed Personality Characteristics rather than knowledge. For the student to develop a desired Worldview that frames their perceptions of reality for a lifetime. But the typical person does not know that. And annoyed because I knew Common Core was just drowning in social and emotional learning. And Ed Week likely knows that too. I think they are angling for SEL to get an invitation to come in through the front door instead of the windows or through Executive Orders.

I tucked that annoyance away until I was reading David Conley’s 2007 report to the Gates Foundation on College Readiness and recognized just how much the listed characteristics mirrored the IB Learner Profile. And also the 21st Century Skills Movement. Doublechecking to see if I was right pulled up a September 2010 IB document called “Meeting the needs of 21st century learners: New Developments in IB Programmes.” Which sure did look like it fit the actual Common Core implementation I have been charting. Moreover, Harvard’s Project Zero is advising IB. That meant Howard Gardner and Csik’s Flow. And we have been chronicling what they say they are up to. Altering the future. Lots of that aspiration. In fact the new IB motto is “Imagine Education for a Better World.”

IB’s updated Learner Profile language too is quite reminiscent of what Paul Ehrlich and IHDP and Peter Senge all claim to be seeking via education. See what I mean?

“The aim of all IB programmes is to develop internationally minded people who, recognizing their common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet, help to create a better and more peaceful world.”

IB just loves to push that “I am because we are” theme, claiming it is an old South African expression. And its elementary program, PYP, has an educator in 2012 proudly proclaiming that “our students no longer see themselves as the centre but as part of the whole. The change is inspiring!” Yes and Peter Senge, who IHDP views as one of their favorite futurists and a useful Statist aider and abettor calls that Systems Citizenship. I wrote a post about it in horror. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/develop-learners-who-think-and-behave-and-view-themselves-as-systems-citizens/

When I went online to check to see if IB was touting a connection to the US Common Core up came the Hunt Institute in NC which is putting out so many of the Common Core training videos for teachers. They had put up the Ed Week story on IB as proof that the Common Core reflected “World-Class Standards.” So IB=World Class Standards. Time to track IB some more. Which is what I did. Arne Duncan in his Equity/Civil Rights drive would be pleased to know that IB is changing its programmes to make them more accessible to all students. Called “Valuing All Learners” it is intended to allow for the inclusion of special needs students in everyday classrooms for all kids. Just change what counts as learning!

Then it turned out that Professor Martha Nussbaum is an advisor to IB talking about Critical Thinking and the problems of our current economic model. More links to Chicago! She wanted IB attendees to know she did not hate business. She merely believed “a human face needs to be attached to our economic system by the teaching of critical thinking and global citizenship.” I think Riane Eisler called that a Caring Economics in our new 3 R’s post. Nussbaum wants education and society to produce more “people who are prepared to live with others on terms of mutual respect and reciprocity” and fewer of the people “who seek the comfort of domination.” Well, honestly, the solution for that is not to make sure nobody knows much and is driven by feelings and intuition instead of facts. But, hey, I am not tenured. What do I know about how the world has always worked. That doesn’t really matter I suppose now that we have IB to recreate our Worldview for the future. More than one slide laid that out.

Now I could talk about IB over several posts but all the papers and slideshows I was downloading over the past several years certainly looked like the planned Common Core implementation if you take good notes. Then things got ever so much more interesting. IB put up its partners in research. They included the University of Chicago and Columbia University Teachers College. Plus the American Institutes for Research. Which might well explain why so many of the slides were from the US. Guess who else? EPIC–Education Policy Improvement Center, David Conley’s group. No wonder the definition of College Readiness reminded me of the IB Learner Profile.

And representatives from the UK and Canada and Australia and Hong Kong. Which would explain why there is so much commonality worldwide. It’s not just UNESCO although UNESCO helped create and fund IB initially. And IB in the last few years has again openly embraced the UNESCO vision of using education to obtain cultural evolution. Downloaded that pdf before writing this post. And IB and Martha are quite graphic in seeing IB education as a vehicle to “promote a humane, people-sensitive democracy dedicated to promoting opportunities for ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for all. Which sounds strikingly like the Second Bill of Rights push her old friend Cass Sunstein is touting for Obama’s Second Term.

I am going to close with two statements David Conley made in his 1993 book Roadmap to Restructuring that graphically laid out every aspect of what will be sought via education for transformation. His involvement in both IB and College Ready and laundering non-cognitive in 2012 is no surprise. Various Means to Still Sought Transformations that go far beyond education. What he said in 1993 as a statement that underlay all his visions and intentions for education that explicitly included OBE and systems thinking and communities of learners was that this was all an education for “a democratic society that rejects the social class system.” And the alternative would be a leveled society except for political insiders? That’s a caste system like the Middle Ages with no movement or mass prosperity.

The other complained of continuing “learning experiences predicated on assumptions of students as individuals.” There is nothing accidental about the communitarian emphasis to the definition of Career Ready or in the interdependence to be fostered by mandated systems thinking  or john a powell’s determination to destroy the concept of the unitary self.

I have said before that globally there is a recognition that the sought common core is changed values. A Global Consciousness. Values with a Common Good/Universal Love orientation. Now that it appears that the IB Learner Profile=Common Core in US and global classrooms we have to decide whether educators and politicians have the power to jettison the concepts of Individualism without our permission.

It turns out there was a very good reason for all that Mind Arson. Power. Getting it and keeping it. The real 21st century vision.