Tag Archives: Jane McGonigal. Institute for the Future

Eradicating the Axemaker Mind via Schools to Supposedly Promote Global Flourishing

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Welcome to the 2020s! This is the Decade where Governments all over the world intend “to act as an instrument of the common good” and use the schools to rewire students’ brains so that they are more amenable to the plans political leaders have for us in the 21st century. I wish this was fiction or just a theory of mine, but it is not. I certainly was not going to write about this during the holidays, but there were quite a lot of white papers put out in December on this point, and being the careful researcher I am, I then followed up on the books and papers cited in the footnote and here we are. This is not a one shot post, but the beginning of what has become a well-documented armada of coordinated initiatives to use schools to cultivate “positive attitudes and activities” so that students can “develop the inner means to handle distress themselves when it arises. In other words, we should aim at a society in which people have the inner resources to flourish.”

About the same time those words were published in the inaugural 2018 World Happiness Policy Report presented at the World Government Summit in Dubai, a retired MIT professor, John Ehrenfeld, submitted his vision of “Flourishing: Designing a Brave New World” to she ji, a journal of design and innovation, asserting that “Flourishing is possible only when the right brain hemisphere is the master, but balanced with the left. The ultimate goal of every designer should be to foster flourishing…For humans, flourishing requires (1) restoring the supremacy of the right brain through direct practices, for example, mindfulness training, and (2) re-designing institutions and artifacts to enhance presencing: the perception of being connected to the contextually rich surrounding world.”

Well, that got my attention since the actual classroom practices now tied to learning standards all over the world fit with what Ehrenfeld wrote would be needed to make the right-brain dominant. I have school mandates under Positive School Climate prescribed materials that turn out to be renamed cognitive behavioral therapy practices. I poke familiar names and find books like Super Better: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver, and More Resilient that plan to use digital learning virtual reality and videogames to Hardwire the Brain via “repeated activation of specific neurological circuits that train the brain to be motivated by challenge, rewarded by feedback, and more resilient in the face of temporary failure.” Use the fact that “neurons that fire together, wire together” to create digital learning experiences to hardwire “cognitive habits that lead to lifelong success and psychological well-being.”

If “Schools are the primary place where the values of a culture get instilled in young people” and the materials quoted above and conferences like Learning and the Brain repeatedly declare that the ‘instilling’ is to be neural, we need to think about the implications of poems like the following created as part of the Search Inside Yourself e-book “Practice Kindness” created for students in honor of World Kindness Day.

Kind hearts are the gardens,

Kind thoughts are the roots,

Kind words are the blossoms,

Kind deeds are the fruits.

The new way for governments, political leaders, and their cronies to control behavior in the 21st century is not overt coercion, but by controlling the inner psychology and the practices and experiences known to instill desired neural and cognitive structures. Let’s get back to how Ehrenfeld laid out the how and why, but never believe his is a voice in the wilderness. Instead, it is entirely an accident that I came across his article while following up on something else and, using my experience from writing what is detailed in my book Credentialed to Destroy, recognized how his prescriptions for right-brain dominance were already enshrined in what has been misleadingly labelled as the Reading and Math Wars. Right Brain Dominance “can create a pull towards a different kind of future.” A future where the focus is no longer on the individual as those of us located in the West have always believed, but on the collective and its supposed needs. That shift needs to get at “the way we hold reality” itself and shift it to focus more on empathy or caring.

Think about all the changes in the nature of education and the new purposes of schools and higher education as you read this Ehrenfeld quote:

With new understanding of how the brain functions, the root causes can be traced to an imbalance between the two cerebral hemispheres. Modern culture is the product of the left-brain dominance, but flourishing can arise only from the opposite: the mastery of the right over the left. The challenge ahead is to reverse this through design and practice…Only the right connects to the [world as it is, with its rich context] , and can produce empathy and enable authentic caring…A key to increasing authenticity is the ability to delay or stop the left brain from taking over–that is, to remain in the present moment…Mindfulness offers a possible way to maintain the attentional stance of the right.

Now all the hype about bullying, where mindfulness practices are held out as the remedy and we happen to also notice that the trainer for the teachers does New Age Buddhist retreats on other days of the week, make far more sense. In fact, in Super Better, McGonnigal notes that “mindfulness meditation, for example, has been measured to have quite similar physiological benefits as casual game play…game play is a way to learn to control our attention–which is one of the primary aims of Buddhist practice!” Neuroscientists have shown that attention is a necessary component for neural rewiring and certain kinds of practices make the emotional side of the brain dominant. Here’s the sought practice beyond mindfulness training under “Reflective Practice”:

Reflective practice is a general label for the interruptive process by which experience can be embedded to the brain as part of learning. Reflective practice in design is driven by direct experience (right-brain) [virtual reality counts as direct!], rather than the mere application of abstract, general rules (left-brain). In terms of the divided brain model, reflection is the process that new experiences, under the control of the right brain, are passed over to the left hemisphere.

How often now are we hearing hype about students needing Whole Child instruction in controlling emotions to “develop five skills: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. All correspond to right brain activities.” Those of us who have ever had a child in an IB Program who were paying attention know we got almost as tired from hearing hype about “Inquiry Learning” as we did from the “Are you an IB Learner?” question. Now we discover that Inquiry is a right brain activity and Lecture is a Left:

Science is the paradigm of the left brain at work. Conversely, pragmatism is based on paying persistent, broad attention to the whole system and creating new understanding; it depends on holding the left at bay. Meaningfulness, or pragmatic truth, is not to be found in the abstract, left-brain, self-consistent, world of science. It is to be found in the real, right brain, phenomenal world…Pragmatic inquiry is a method that keeps the right brain engaged over extended periods in order to capture the dynamic, context-dependent character of complex systems…Presencing is a form of attention, which exploits the right brain’s attributes of breadth, persistence, and exploration/creativity. Presencing restores context to the external world that has been lost while the left-brain was dominant. Such context is necessary for flourishing.

Presencing looks at the world as a domain for acting and transforming. The focus becomes on what could be, instead of what is. Now that we have covered this desired rewiring, in the next post we will cover how this new right-brain vision of what it is to Understand in the 21st century is “not about cognizing a pre-given world, it is about becoming aware of and consciously choosing the aspects of the world we decide to cope with.” That quote was from a paper featured last week in a newsletter I receive and was written by a member of the American Society of Cybernetics. It fits with what the Father of Positive Psychology and Positive Neuroscience who presented at that World Government Summit says should be the new focus of Models of the Human Mind.

Are we going to be Driven by the Past and the dominance of the left brain or shall we make the focus of education “Navigating into the Future”? No, we are actually not the ones who get to design that future. It gets selected for us and then hardwired into our brains neurologically so we can “draw on experience to update” our choices and then act accordingly based on our “needs and goals” that have also been the aim of Right-Brain focused education.

It truly is a Brave New World once we read certain influential journals and look at the programs being put on at the certain well-attended conferences. No need to theorize about this coordinated effort at all. Just review the documentation. At least that is still possible for those of us for whom the left brain remains dominant.

Here’s to the Axemaker Minds who are not yet left to accepting an offered narrative of where education is really going and why it must be changed.

 

 

Destination Identity: Scaffolding the Collective Images of the Desired Futures to Habituate Needed Action

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Let’s go back in time to the 1960s for social plans before comparing them to plans from last month in the UK clearly following the same long desired blueprint. The back cover of The Art of Conjecture book from the last post mentioned a related book called Social Technology that helpfully explains to us that:

the gap between the social and the physical sciences will not persist…[as long as people come to recognize that] the comparison with the social with the physical sciences is a spurious one, based on an epistemological misconception regarding the nature and purpose of scientific activity…this is the crucial point–there is every reason to believe that, by effecting specific changes in attitudes and procedures, we can substantially narrow the gap between physical technology and sociopolitical progress…The time has come to emulate, not physical science, but physical technology.

Translating that into more graspable English, it is the role of the physical sciences to describe what is or, at least, what seems to exist. The role of physical technology is to be put into operation in the existing world to see what gets changed as a result. For this vision of Social Technology to work, it needs means for “devising appropriate educational innovations” that can “construct a common frame of reference in order to promote a unified collaborative effort.” We might call such an aspiration as the creation of an internalized common core of prevailing attitudes, beliefs, conceptual Ideas, values, and motivations to act. It was all laid out many years before what we today would call THE Common Core or Competency-Based Education. Think though of the potential of learning standards globally tied to UNESCO criteria if the sought sociopolitical transformations need a specified contextual map grounded at the physical, neural level, establishing:

a common vocabulary, an agreed-upon ideology, a set of reasonable goals, a common context for symbols, and ways of translating ideas into actions… [These would lead] above all, to acquiring an integrated overview of the problem area…forcing the analyst to make specific which elements of a situation he is taking into consideration and in imposing on him the discipline of clarifying the concepts he is using. The model thus serves the important purpose of establishing unambiguous intersubjective communication about the subject at hand. Whatever intrinsic uncertainties may becloud the area of investigation, they are thus less likely to be further compounded by uncertainties owing to disparate subjective interpretations.

Put the Reading Wars in a whole new light. doesn’t it? It also explains why phonetic reading and how to teach it had to be constrained until after learning standards could be mandated that would specify the desired conceptual frameworks that would provide the required new categories of thought. Let’s go back to The Art of Conjecture one more time since it accurately recognized that “Our perception of the facts depends on our ideas: it is through our ideas that we know reality.” Therefore through education that uses learning standards and required annual assessments of Higher-Order Thinking Skills to monitor and control which Ideas a Mind uses to guide perception and the interpretation of experiences, political authority and its think tank allies across the political spectrum have stealthily managed to control what every censor and authoritarian government in history craved control over: “our awareness of reality and our expression of this reality.”

That is because as a practical matter “our mind ‘sees’ by means of ideas” and education and the media have formally joined hands to control those ideas. The role of prescribed lenses, frames, narratives, or scenarios to imagine what might be different has the effect of prescribing the ideas we use in reading the facts. Now, the author of the Social Technology book, Olaf Helmer, was a co-founder of the Institute for the Future in 1968 to bring about the vision from both his book as well as The Art of Conjecture to create an institution to create a “constructive approach which will ensure to us some measure of control over the future of our society.”

IftF works closely today with Knowledge Works to create Forecasts involving to future of K-12 education and push Competency-Based Education. Its employees are also closely involved with pushing the potential of digital technology to reimagine what the world could become and why it is needed. http://invisibleserfscollar.com/when-gaming-intends-to-shape-and-distort-our-perceptions-of-everything-around-us-viva-la-revolution/ is from 2013. IftF also repeatedly shows up working with the GEFF 2030 visions surrounding the SDGs and all of the OECD’s work called Education 2030. Now let’s come back to last month’s https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/Our_futures_by_the_people_for_the_people_HrqsGPo.pdf on how mass involvement in shaping the future can solve complex problems. It is where the term ‘Destination Identity’ and the aspiration for “scaffolding public imagination” come from.

Crucially,  before the social planners writing that paper get to specifying the desired changes at the levels of the community and institutions, they first target a desire to control each individual’s ‘Mapping horizons,’ ‘Creating purpose’ for individuals, ‘Charting pathways’ for each individual, specifying the criteria to habituate ‘Acting together’, and, tied to the discussion from the beginning of this post, framing ‘Testing ideas’. The Framework for Evaluating Participatory Futures, in other words, just happens to coincide with what 21st century skills hypes, as well as Project-Based Frameworks to implement Competency-based Education. It gets at what learning standards specify and it says the real reason all this must be standardized through a reenvisioning of education globally is to

build collective intelligence about the future by helping people to diagnose change over the long-term, draw out knowledge and ideas about how the future could be, and develop collective mental images of the futures people want.

Well, at least the futures people will want when digital simulations, required learning experiences, formative assessments for HOTS, and High Quality Project-Based Learning get done with their ‘imaginations’. After all, that report disdains “only engaging people to think about the future in an analytical and rational way.” Mustn’t greet the future, in other words, with an Axemaker Mind full of actual factual information and your own developed categories of thought. Might lead to disparate subjective interpretations of what is important or even a wise idea to be transforming at all. Instead, we get the admission:

Art, embodied and experiential processes have a much greater influence on citizens, their sense of meaning, motivation and subsequent actions.

Can you repeat after me: “Inside Out and Just as Specified for Habitualizing Future Actions”? Nothing sounds more effective for creating a desired Social Technology than helping participants, whether they be K-12 or higher ed students or adults on a Learning Together retreat, “feel the future” so they will come to believe “how malleable these futures are.” Activities and learning experiences can be used to “scaffold public imagination; drawing out knowledge and ideas about how the future could be, and developing collective mental images of the futures people want.” Then those deliberately instilled common collective images of the future can be used to create “new collective actions and behavior in the present”.

Remember how Catalyzing Change from the last post hyped student agency and critiquing the present as the excuse for reimagining high school math? It turns out to be essential for a requisite “need to help people and communities deal with uncertainty, build resilience to change and act collectively.” Now, math, science, or history learning experiences become a means for “helping people to feel a sense of agency over their own futures is critical for maintaining social cohesion and preventing a fracturing along ethnic, racial, cultural, historical or other identity lines. Participatory futures can also facilitate collective action that is necessary to tackle systemic challenges like climate change.”

The Social Technology book set out a vision for dynamic social planning that works a great deal like what NESTA is now laying out and it also relies greatly on the control of ideas. So much more effective at evading any perception of censorship or control and less rigid than any Five Year Plan. Think of required Literacy Activities through the following aspiration from the NESTA report:

Collective images of the future help orient and organize in times of disruption. Throughout history, humans, organisations and societies have used mental images in the forms of myths, legends and religion to organise themselves. Images of the future play a particularly significant role in our lives, since our ability to make plans, decisions or set goals rests on them. Brain research shows that collective images offer orientation in times of uncertainty or when the necessity of reshaping our living environments becomes apparent. Participatory futures approaches use and create shared public images of the future that can provide a ‘destination identity’–acting as a motivating force to turn the ‘imagined’ into the real…positive images help pull us toward the future helping to catalyze social change and overcome cultural obstacles to it.

I think that is enough to take in right now as we contemplate the use of the ubiquitous Greta Thunberg or why common weather events now have to be the lead story on the national news. If you desired that social science, including its education and pedagogy components, have a role to play in shifting from what is to what could be, social planners know they need to create a “shared diagnosis of the key facts, trends, and problems,” even if that shared diagnosis is factually untrue in the world that currently exists.

The whole point is the effect of the shared mental images on actions that can remake what currently exists. I wonder if anyone else will grasp all these aspirations as Uncle Karl’s Man as a Maker of History, usefully brought into place at a neural level by achievement standards that hype student ‘performance’ and actions.

It turns out to be a plan for social reengineering with a long pedigree if we know where to look.

 

 

Power Belongs to Those Who Act With Reflection to Create Ontological Innovations

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To avoid a quick trip to the closest dictionary as I was forced to do the first time I encountered that mouthful word, think of it as shorthand for seeking actual changes in the real world. It reflects a desire, as we saw with the actual definition of “evidence-based policymaking,” where “the value of a theory lies in its ability to produce changes in the world.” Since this is a blog primarily about education, those real world changes can be at the level of a student’s physiology, changing them neurally. To quote a 2016 UNESCO paper called “A Conceptual Framework for Competencies Assessment,” those biological changes at an internalized, noetic level would be what anyone interested in transformational political, economic, and social change deems to be “essential to give each learner the cognitive, gestural and emotional capability, enabling him or her to act concretely in complex situations as a responsible citizen.”

No, each student does NOT get to come up with their own definition of what makes a responsible citizen. That’s the purpose of these learning standards and competency frameworks, properly understood, which is why there is so much deceit about the Common Core, competencies, and social and emotional learning generally. Student-centered, or personalized learning, should thus be viewed as grounded in “understanding the value of a theory through its consequences on naturalistic systems [that would be your child–a student, your school, or maybe your city] also borrows from Messick’s notion of evidence of consequential validity for testing. His argument is that the validity of a claim is based on the changes it produces in a given system. These changes or consequences can then be considered evidence in support of validity.”

Messick may not be a familiar name to you, but he was with Educators Testing Service at about the same time as the creation of Outcomes Based Education (OBE). Sure puts a more appropriate spin on what the actual outcomes were to be, doesn’t it? Remember how I keep warning that Portrait of a Graduate or Learner Profiles in state ESSA plans are merely a 21st century way to rebrand what was called Transformational OBE? That UNESCO paper is full of references to Learner “Exit Profiles” in case anyone has any doubt on how UN entities intend to accomplish their transformational SDG goals. Now lets stop the influence of the False Narratives and quote directly from a vision of Exit Profiles in a world where “the school is no longer regarded as the prime vector for the spreading of knowledge.” Yes, you might want to reread that and take a deep breath before we continue quoting:

“It then presupposes the acquisition of a system of values based on human rights in addition to the international rules of communication and behaviour in the educational world. These rules are essentially represented by life skills (notably encouraged by UNESCO, UNICEF and others), reflections of certain values inherent in the Western democratic countries and in their own way of thinking as societies: access to citizenship and practices linked to sustainable development in the domains of food, environmental friendliness, health, and so on.

The school is therefore induced to go beyond the disciplinary structure of education, which used to respond essentially to problem areas of content and knowledge. Today power no longer belongs to those who know, as it previously did, or even to those who seek, but to those who act–those who embark, who organize, who manage, and so on. Pure action no longer suffices today; a reflexive and critical analysis of actions and situations is also essential for meeting current challenges. The point is that the division into disciplines is no longer adapted to this logic of action.”

That would be why it is such a Red Herring for anyone to be writing or speaking about whether a state’s math standards prepare them to take Algebra as an 8th grader or ultimately Calculus. That was never the actual purpose of learning standards. It’s also why ESSA requires states to have performance standards, which require action, as the measure of student achievement or success. The quote involving Dr Messick above came from a paper from an Indiana University ed prof published in 2004 in The Journal of the Learning Sciences. Its co-author, Sasha Barab, was a keynoter at the https://www.imbes.org/2018-imbes-conference held in Los Angeles a few weeks ago.

I have written about the International Mind Brain Education Society before and there are references in the presentations made there to making sure the desired practices and theories become incorporated into UNESCO mandates and global standards. Barab has left the cold winters of Indiana now and joined the faculty of Arizona State, putting him at a place where transformationalist James Paul Gee (see tag) is also located as well as a Center of Sustainability with global tentacles. Barab’s IMBES presentation, in turn, emphasized his September 2009 article in Educational Leadership called “Why Educators Should Care About Games”. It gives us a first-rate insight into the new purpose of curriculum that fits closely with what is described in that UNESCO document, but it is not a shift parents are likely to recognize. Let’s take a look at the purpose of the sought transformational play that can be designed into virtual reality curricula.

“We focus on building game-based learning environments in which students play an important role using academic knowledge to make decisions that influence, for better or worse, the designed storyline. Thus, these virtual spaces transform learners in three ways: (1) they transform a person from a passive recipient to an empowered actor, (2) they transform content from information that the learner has to remember to a tool that the learner can use to accomplish desired ends, and (3) they transform context from an assurance that ‘this knowledge will be relevant in the future’ to a present reality that responds to the learner’s actions.”

If you print out this post or Barab’s article, you can do what I did and write the word “dialectical” in the margin by that 3rd way of “transforming the learner” at a noetic, physiological level. Later, the article reiterates that the new purpose of academic content, i.e., “knowledge connected to disciplines–such as investigative research and writing–serves as one of the most fundamental tools for making sense of the world and acting effectively in it.” If, like me, you know someone well who programs or creates computer software, it will be hard to get over the feeling that the new purpose of academic content and prescribed learning experiences, such as virtual reality games, is programming human minds and personalities, without that individual or their parents’ knowing consent.

It is the action that forces the desired neurological change in ways that can then become embedded Habits of Mind. After all, these educational games were created because:

“we want students to see the value of the content they learn for other situations. If a learner never realizes how this virtual experience relates to real-life experiences, then the game playing will have been engaging but not productive. Becoming a hero within a virtual world should enable students to see themselves as people capable of using what they learn to successfully transform their world and to continue growing as scientists, historians, or writers.”

In other words, science, history, and writing are no longer about disciplinary knowledge. They are the source of activities that can be used to change the student from the inside to alter their future behavior in the outside, real world. I am going to close with the ending of the paper, but readers may want to go back to Chapter 1 of my book Credentialed to Destroy to appreciate the transformational purposes of John Dewey’s Ideal of Learning. I was not going to bring in Uncle Karl, but this is unquestionably closely tied to his vision of the Human Development Society to be created once Man became a Maker of History. This quote follows the paragraph just above.

“By helping students connect virtual accomplishments to real-life scenarios, we lead learners closer to John Dewey’s ideal of learning. Dewey (1938/1963) argued that education should be about giving learners the motivation and expertise to act in problem-filled contexts where applying that expertise makes a difference. Dewey’s vision of schooling is quite different from the education experience most students have today, which involves amassing knowledge with the promise of someday bringing it to bear on the world. In contrast, when students solve problems in virtual scenarios, they get a taste of the real-world power of academic content.”

Just like UNESCO envisions.

With no sense of just how thoroughly they are now being manipulated by school, prescribed educational experiences, and the true nature of student assessments.

 

Still a Frightening Prospect and No Longer Far Away at All

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Why is it that what appears to most people to be innocent phrases of general intent like school choice, social emotional learning standards, the rule of law, or competence (just to cite a few examples I have dealt with) provoke such a strong, specific reaction from me? Because I read the books and articles where people lay out intentions that were never meant to be openly and accurately discussed. For example, back on October 27- November 2, 1968, just before the close and contentious US Presidential election, the Rockefeller Foundation turned over its lovely Bellagio, Italy retreat to the OECD Long-Range Forecasting and Planning Symposium. Once again our invites were lost, but this retreat focused on a “new kind of planning” and the redesign of social systems and the need to “dynamically change human values” to fit with this desire to plan “the creation of a future society.”

The ‘old’ concept of planning had been “essentially short-range in scope” with a concentration “on changing variables within a given system.” Out with the Old and In with the New was big in that epochal year of student riots around the world. The ‘new’ planning would be “essentially long-range in scope” with its concentration “on changing the system itself, i.e. its structure as well as its variables”. All those things I am so concerned about discussing on this blog or in my book Credentialed to Destroy go to invisibly implementing that second conception of planning. The word ‘system’ itself, unfortunately, includes people, hopefully captured during their neurobiologically most malleable years at school. Let me quote from just how extensive the desired planning was and where our title comes from as it is my belief that this is still where the Right and Left Pincer action of the think tanks, politicians, and governments at all levels in every country are taking us.

“The dominant concern over systems design, which expressed itself in the discussions, clearly arises from the recognition that planning ought to be integrative, i.e, cutting across a multitude of dimensions, in particular, social, economic, political, psychological, anthropological, and technological dimensions…the discussions of the Symposium dealt exclusively with two type of joint systems only–the society/technology and the man/society systems.

This restriction was also borne out by the statement that mankind, in its evolutionary process, is now moving from the era of environmental control (achieved through technology) into the era of social systems, whereas the era of individual systems is still far away–indeed a frightening prospect.”

A frightening prospect indeed and precisely where student-centered personalized learning is unquestionably taking us, but that’s not what we are talking about today. I want to explain what happens when the desire for such planning and redesign of what people are at an internalized level, and the human institutions and places they interact with daily, decides to use the law to obtain the necessary coercion. When someone begins to tout the Rule of Law from now on, I want everyone’s anti-manipulation radar to begin to spin at Full Alert Status. Let’s start with a book communitarian prof Amitai Etzioni, who is also the Active Society architect, touted as “If you are going to read only one book in preparation for the 90s–make it this one”–Mary Ann Glendon’s Rights Talk.

Now I had already encountered Professor Glendon insisting that the Rule of Law must be used to get the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into daily operation as a binding obligation. She had already moved well beyond any historic sense of the term–Rule of Law.  In her 1991 book she complained that the law has for too long ignored its potential for a “right ordering of our lives together” where there would no longer be “silence with respect to personal, civic, and collective responsibilities.” If someone sees “legal discourse…as the most important tributary to political discourse” where is it they want to start? Why that would be at the now familiar levels of education and media coverage that “help to shape the interior world of beliefs, attitudes, dreams and yearnings that are the hidden springs of individual and social action.”

A bit more recent Call to Arms for the Global Planning Set is “The Global Values Discourse” from 2012 from Garry Jacobs and Winston Nagan. It lets us know that commencing in 2010 the influential Club of Rome (also started at Bellagio about the same time as that planning conference) and the WAAS–World Academy of Arts & Sciences–laying out an affirmative, normative use of the law for “charting a better collective future for humanity based on universal values for sustaining a world order in the common interest.” If that sounds glorious, be careful as Brazil and Venezuela got touted as early implementers of this Human Development vision and both now have platitudes, dysfunction, and a shortage of toilet paper.

Nevertheless, the point of this post is to alert us all that the Rule of Law now is often obscuring a reality that seeks to “alter our fundamental conception of the source of rights throughout the world and weave a new narrative that embraces and assigns a rightful place to the individual, the community, the nation-state and humanity.” How many of us are aware that the same Institute for the Future which wants to redesign education and use gaming to recreate desired mindsets has also created “An Inventors Toolkit” called “Governance for the Future.” If that’s not concerning enough as a means “to reimagine society for an age of planetary challenges and human responsibility,” how about their involvement in the April 2013 Reconstitutional Convention, “convening a community of social inventors and innovators passionate in designing and creating new governance systems.”

Now if we visit that site http://reconcon.govfutures.org/ we will find Texas Law Professor Sanford Levinson as one of the listed speakers talking about “Is ‘Reflection and Choice’ Possible in the 21st Century?” If that name is familiar he was the first to call for a Constitutional Convention in his 2006 book Our Undemocratic Constitution. His work for a Recon Con should concern us in contemplating where such a Convention of the States would really end up. So should his prior work for the Soros-funded Constitution in 2020 that I have also written about. It does look like the Right and Left Pincers are all interested in disregarding our current Constitution as in the way of pursuing what Justice Breyer called Active Liberty in the August 15 Hic Sunt Dracones post.

Also be aware that in 2008 Columbia Human Rights Law Review published a special issue to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That issue insisted that this aggressive conception of Human Rights being asserted now in the legal training of lawyers “are rooted not in constitutions, treaties, or legislative acts, but in our very structures as human beings. According to [UDHR], these rights are universal because they are ‘indispensable for…[the] dignity and the free development of…[human] personality.'” Now I may recognize a direct quote from Uncle Karl when I read it, but the average law student does not when told this is the purpose now of the law.

Moreover there is no tip off in the law article on what the UDHR was in turn quoting from. Just one final opening sentence that “They are rights that every government, from the weakest to the most powerful, is legally and morally bound to respect, protect, and fulfill.” It should bother us that the US Human Rights Fund created a report called the Revolution of the Mind. Just like every other revolutionary, they recognize that to be successful in the long run it is the individual mind and personality that must be controlled and redesigned. Unfortunately, no one seems to regard this as a Frightening Prospect anymore. Just a necessary and exciting one that can now be successfully hidden in an online gaming assessment, unappreciated language in a charter, or in the terms outlining acceptable learning methods to be deemed a qualified provider able to accept money from an Education Savings Account.

Out of sight doesn’t mean the Rule of Law with its acute interest in planning at all levels and implementing the UDHR, like it or not, isn’t being bindingly put into place. Just because we do not consider ourselves to be governed doesn’t mean that others have not conceived plans to limit what we can be and control what we must do. Here’s a good example that’s probably completely off our radars. In October 2016 the Habitat III conference commences in Quito with all sorts of revolutionary binding plans for us. http://citiscope.org/sites/default/files/h3/Surabaya_Draft_New_Urban_Agenda-28_July_2016.pdf is the most recent draft of those plans. A few days before in Bogota (keeping it in same continent and he World Summit of Local and Regional Leaders laying out their plans for us. Here is the UCLG Definition of Local Governance:

“Governance is made up of the political and institutional processes through which decisions are taken and implemented. Governance is most effective when these processes are participatory, accountable, transparent, efficient, inclusive, and respect the rule of law. Good governance is particularly important at local level, where governments interact with citizens and communities on a daily basis.”

I could add that those governments are almost never forthcoming in those daily interactions about what they are really up to, but my point in this post is the dangers in failing to appreciate when planning and the rule of law are actually being used to impose the Human Development Society’s tenets with most of us being none the wiser. In other words, I want people to recognise what is being attempted before the toilet paper runs out and more minds are manipulated as if they were simply malleable play-doh that needs to be made amenable to these plans and new values. In late 2014, HUD commenced a National Preparatory process to implement the rights and obligations being laid out at Habitat III. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/HUD-Habitat-III-Overview.pdf shows that process in case we also missed that invite.

Anyone hear of the Affirmatively Furthering Inclusive Housing edict? That’s part of the Habitat III creation of new obligations and responsibilities. There were also HUD co-hosted Regional Convenings in Chicago on March 31 (Learning from the City), Philadelphia on May 17 (The City We Want & Need), Denver on May 20, Miami on June 13, and El Paso, Texas on June 22-23, 2016 in case we are neither employees of the Chamber of Commerce or community organizers and thus failed to get an invite.

With respect to the true nature of education reforms, the dramatic alteration in the purpose of the law and what the phrase Rule of Law actually now means, or what is really being imposed on us in the name of meeting human needs, none of us can dissent if we buy into all the false narratives floating around. These have been created by connected entities like think tanks or the Frameworks Institute or even formerly trusted institutions like the PTA , Girl Scouts, or even local churches precisely so laws can be used to bind and ultimately stifle dissent. Our job as still free parents, citizens, and taxpayers is to recognize all these coordinated plans for what they are and what they intend to do to us.

These are all frightening prospects and some are no longer far away at all.

Tethering the Logical Rational Mind Via K-12 Education to Emotionally Grounded Experience

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The language from the ESEA Rewrite on closing the achievement gaps between groups that objectively have had very different life experiences basically limits what can now go on in a K-12 classroom in any state or locality. Some local control, huh? Interestingly the only kind of education that will now suffice is precisely the same as what political and social transformationalists intent on social justice also want. It’s the same kind of K-12 education that members of the Chamber of Commerce also endorse since it makes genuine, shift the paradigm invention and technology far less likely.

To illustrate how once again all roads lead to the same place and how it does not benefit ordinary, non-politically connected, people at all, let me turn to an essay “Educating the Rainbow: Authentic Assessment and Authentic Practice for Diverse Classrooms” from a 1997 UK book Assessment for Equity and Inclusion: Embracing All Our Children. What that paper calls authentic assessment that is activity-based, group-oriented, real world problem-based, and designed to get at the motivating emotions, values, and attitudes that get hidden now in the phrase “high-quality” are called formative assessment or assessment for learning most often in 2015. Whatever the name, what’s the real purpose? That would be to create shared beliefs among all the participants in the classroom and eventually the school so that the students can also embrace shared meanings from interpreting their experiences and ultimately develop shared language to describe them.

Now won’t those things come in handy if the goal of K-12 education globally has shifted to “Introducing a new way to think, talk, and act”? http://www.thersa.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/1550609/The-Seven-Dimensions-of-Climate-Change.pdf came out last week on basically the same day that the President of the Rockefeller Foundation went to the RSA to speak about building Better, More Resilient Cities. Hmm, wouldn’t authentic or formative assessment then be helpful to the Rockefeller-funded Communication for Social Change they are pushing all charities to guide their funding by? Talk about tethering. That paper seeks to skip over the entire debate over whether 2014 was the hottest year on record and whether we are warming, cooling, or the physical climate is simply behaving like a ‘climate’. “Changing climate” must become what “social scientists call ‘a social fact’.”

The great thing about ‘social facts’ in sociology theory (which is after all a huge component of education theory and pedagogy in degree programs) is that they are designed to ultimately change us, from the inside-out. Hmm, just like authentic or formative assessments? Why yes and won’t those be so useful if people now need to have a “new sense of collective purpose that embraces the diverse elements of human experience–without new vocabulary and cultural currency that allows us to overcome climate fatigue, a social silence, and stealth denial.” Not to mention actual documentable facts about the reality of scientific principles that must now be excluded because such abstractions are not equally accessible to all people. Equity excludes what builds up the analytical and intellectually-oriented Left Hemisphere of the brain from acceptable classroom practices. Equity does, however, provide education with a means for developing shared beliefs, meanings, and language.

How convenient, huh? Especially with the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) that is part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University (where so many of the authors listed in the above book are profs at the Teacher’s College) creating reports on how to frame climate communication so that it can “Speak to the Two Parts of the Brain.”  http://guide.cred.columbia.edu/pdfs/CREDguide_full-res.pdf   That’s, first of all, the Analytic Processing System that concerns about Equity, social justice, and civil rights now insists must be starved of everything but pre-approved,  politically useful ‘concepts’, Enduring Understandings [see tag], or disciplinary core ideas and cross-cutting issues. The second side, what Marshall McLuhan called the visual-aural, holistic Right Hemisphere, is referred to as the “Experiential Processing System.” Fascinating, huh, since “learning experiences” are now to be the focus of K-12 classrooms since only they meet the Equity Gateway that allows Success for All.

That “Psychology of Climate Change Communication” paper helpfully tells us what a Mental Model is. Since that’s precisely what Rigor and authentic or formative assessment is designed to shape and alter and what concerns over Equity and Opting Out of ‘tests’ are forcing on all students, lets quote the report:

“A mental model represents a person’s thought process for how something works (i.e., a person’s understanding of the surrounding world). Mental models, which are based on often-incomplete facts [especially in a K-12 world where lectures and textbooks are treated as inequitable], past experiences [which will now include experiences of virtual reality created as gaming for the very purpose of manipulating mental models. See Jane McGonigal tag], and even intuitive perceptions, help shape actions and behavior, influence what people pay attention to in complicated situations, and define how people approach and solve problems. Perhaps most important to climate change communicators, mental models serve as the framework into which people fit new information.”

That very mental model is precisely what so much of the K-12 classroom implementation described in my book Credentialed to Destroy is designed to influence and control. It’s also the focus of so much of the required emphasis on digital learning. Everything being pushed in K-12 education now tethers that Analytic Processing System and forces and then manipulates the Experiential Processing part of the student’s physical brain. Gives new meaning to “brain-based curriculum”, doesn’t it? To be effective on any issue targeted for transformational change or political control, communication (one of the 4Cs of 21st Century Learning) needs to “make use of the following experiential tools”:

“Vivid imagery, in the form of film footage, metaphors, personal accounts, real-world analogies, and concrete comparisons;

Messages designed to create, recall, and highlight relevant personal experience and to elicit an emotional response.”

We see the latter tool in the omnipresent journaling that seems to be a part of every class now, including math. The former tool is not just brought in through computer gaming and the Common Core’s media literacy and relevancy requirements, but also group-based Problem-Based Learning and the Maker Movement. After all that CRED paper explains “How to Tap into Group Identity to Create a Sense of Affiliation and Increase Cooperation.” Very useful if a New Way to Think, Talk, and Act has become the entire point of education and much of the focus of media outlets of all kinds.

In the last post I mentioned Antonio Gramsci’s famous March Through the Institutions as a way to describe the actual effect of what Congress seems prepared to mandate, but RSA actually came right out and called for new societal institutions. All the more reason then to have the law mandate the Orwellian “high-quality education” we covered in the last post. After all, RSA (like the Club of Rome and ValuesQuest in the January 11 post) views “democracy” as a “mechanism for making collective decisions” and the “web of legislation” and the the “comprehensive system of law” as methods for “meaningfully constraining …the global economic engine.” Boy, that was not on the Bar Exam back when I took it.

These new societal institutions created then by a web of legislation like that ESEA Rewrite or your local city council’s edicts will “not be designed to make an economic case, communicate scientific facts or win an argument.” I guess that explains why the Analytical Processing part of the human brain that can do those things well is being tethered and starved of the kind of facts K-12 education traditionally provided. Instead, the experiential, social and emotional learning focus fits with the desire for new societal institutions that “allow people to express and discuss their concerns, fears, dreams, and hopes for the future. They would embed scientific inquiry into the nature of the problem and how it could be solved, in more complex debates about how we should live in a climate-changed world. And in that way, they would likely offer fertile place to explore the links between Science and the other six dimensions of climate change.”

That’s the vision of the future the authentic assessment, student engagement, digital learning shifts in K-12 education are all preparing students for, without anyone trying to tether students to the actually existing physical reality or what works or never has. Students who have a craving for unicorn rides in this socially just future will have nothing to prompt them this is not a realistic goal. Those seven dimensions, by the way, that plan to alter the present reality, like it or not, are:

1. Science: Forging a new social contract

2. Law: Constraining extraction

3. Economy: Investing in the Future

4. Technology: Scaling up deep decarbonisation

5. Democracy: Escaping the governance trap

6. Culture: Breaking stealth denial

7. Behaviour: Overcoming stealth denial

How binding in every way that matters would be one way to describe that list. Now, as a well-read adult in my 50s I can tell that paper is a fantasy. Nothing, however, in the planned K-12 implementation would create that kind of “Danger, Will Robinson!!” prompt. In fact, K-12 education is deliberately priming the mind and personality to prompt just such an urge to plan and act as the Seven Dimensions paper laid out. CRED even came up with an additional paper called “Connecting to Climate” in December that appears both tied to the planned transformations of mental models from K-12 education as well as a cronyistic politically planned economy being sold as ecoAmerica.

Once again this post is a heads up about what social, economic, and political visions are tied to the K-12 transformations everyone with any power is forcing on our children. This is not just about education, but education as a means for broader transformations. It is intended to affect all of us, whether we have children or not, and whatever our ages.

It needs to be on everyone’s radar screen where ever we live. Because no one in education administration is being honest in my experience and we are not likely to be among the cronies invited to an RSA program or an ecoAmerica annual invitation-only summit.

Thank goodness we can still read and our Analytic Processing Systems remain tethered to facts and likely actual consequences.

Bogus Excuses to Always Hype What Extinguishes or Controls the Analytical, Rational Mind

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In the ancient world, if all roads did in fact lead to Rome, it would not be much of a stretch to decide that Rome was the place where those who took the time and expense to travel likely needed to go to. Likewise, if every K-12 education reform that I know is part of the mandatory classroom vision has the same actual or intended effect on the human mind and a student’s personality, we can conclude that the global transformationalists we met in the first two posts of this trilogy need a certain mindset for their success. In fact, I considered naming this post “Becoming a Plant” after the video game Reach for the Sun where students will be “challenged to ‘become a plant’ and balance resources like starch and water. “Extend your roots, sprout leaves, and make your flowers bloom before winter hits.'”

Now if I had described that “learning activity” before Christmas and linked it to the Arational Mind push we have been noticing going back to this post http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/blending-sustainability-and-education-to-gain-arational-nonlinear-minds-and-new-behaviors/ , I would have had the makings of a good freestanding post. Knowing the goals of the global CIFAL Network, the desire to use ICT to extinguish the Left Hemisphere’s historic dominance per that Global Village book, plus the explicit goals transformational goals laid out by ValuesQuest and the Institute for the Future, and the new vision of the role of the law globally, just make it so much easier to grasp why fact-filled, analytical minds would be regarded as barriers to all that planning and collective transitioning.

We have been having a discussion in the comments about the federally required MPOs–Metropolitan Planning Organizations–that push metro-wide transportation projects and how they are now being urged to explicitly get into economic and workforce development. I have noted that one of the things WIOA requires is that all students be trained in ‘systems thinking.’ At a DC conference this week the federal Transportation Secretary Foxx proclaimed transportation plans as the ultimate “system of systems” that merited a 30-year lay-out of plans. Into all this planning about us, our future, and using our money, I believe it’s no accident that videogames and digital learning are being pushed into classrooms. http://www.kqed.org/assets/pdf/news/MindShift-GuidetoDigitalGamesandLearning.pdf

Paul Ehrlich’s co-author of that 1989 New World New Mind book discussed in the linked post above, Robert Ornstein, wrote a 1974 book The Psychology of Consciousness pushing a desire to move away from the rational, analytical mind fostered by phonetic reading and traditional math, science, or grammar to a holistic right brain orientation that would perceive the world in interdependent, relational ways. Very helpfully he tied the ability and need for such a shift to the world now being in a position to meet everyone’s ‘biological needs.’ Time then for a more collaborative, communitarian focus to global problem-solving. Needless to say, K-12 education would need to shift and Ornstein saw great possibilities once “computer-assisted instruction” was able to “take the ‘state’ of the learner into account.”

What would such instruction, maybe called ‘personalized learning,’ look like? How about the Mindshift confession that “When it comes to assessment, many games have robust back ends that provide assessment data about the students who play them. That data can be extremely useful, providing information about your students that is applicable well beyond the game itself.” Information the students themselves may very well not be aware of. Data that adaptive learning ICT platforms need if they are to have the desired effects of changing the child’s perceptions, values, beliefs, and attitudes as the new focus of student-centered K-12 education.

Fits the Ornstein desire for educational activity with the student “embedded in the environment” perfectly, except most people would not be familiar with the Ornstein or Marshall McLuhan work we have looked at. They would simply accept the sales pitch that games-based learning would “replace a points-based extrinsic motivation system with a contextualized hands-on learning experience.” Not being in the habit of reading federal statutes like WIOA or federal agency plans, they probably would not appreciate the significance of the confession:

“Keep in mind: The common attribute of all effective learning games is that they simulate systems [or real-world social structures the trasfomationalists want students to believe are systems comparable to how the heart and lungs reliably interact]. They teach students how to understand academic concepts in relationship to the world around them. Certainly this increases engagement [what Ornstein called Being in the Moment that he tracked to ancient Asian religious practices] and retention, but what really matters is about using knowledge in interdisciplinary ways. [Don’t feel under control just because your personal use of knowledge is being prescribed in advance].

Digital or analog, game-based or not, good teaching and learning [Remember obuchenie?] is also about building social awareness, considering the individual’s impact on the wider world.”

Now won’t that latter effect work well with the Sustainability aspirations for the future laid out by the UN CIFAL Network, ValuesQuest, and that Institute for the Future Toolkit to prepare students for new forms of governance? We covered all the proposed role-playing in history classes as part of my AP US History Trilogy, but MindQuest proposes teaching American Government by having a student “role play a member of Congress.” A new form of Governance in utter disregard of the US Constitution is highly likely once curriculum is an “immersive experience” where “students sponsor bills, trade in influence, awareness, and approval. The game simulates meeting with lobbyists, donors, and volunteers. The object is to get reelected to office.”  Now that certainly suffices as allowing “teachers to present academic concepts in a contextualized, experiential way.”

Interestingly enough, precisely what Ornstein said a Right-Brain oriented curriculum should be doing if it intends to shift the focus from intellectual content to personal knowledge. Oh, our joy at effective school reforms that will raise student achievement in meaningful, authentic ways knows no bounds. Why did I start this post’s title with Bogus Excuses? Well, should we buy that games-based learning is OK for the classroom because “a generation of gamers has grown up without a civilization collapsing”? Someone was not listening when their English teacher covered the dangers of hyperbole. How about this rationale? “Positive mood states” or empathy “toward people from another country.” I am also afraid that being told “the way corporations, foundations, and research organizations are thinking about games and learning” is no justification when they are all on record seeking transformational social change using K-12 education.

That’s it, isn’t it? K-12 education globally must be shifted to producing a mind and personality suitable for a collectivist orientation. The simulation will prime the students to act in predictable ways without being in a position to recognize that real world consequences do not follow the prearranged instructions of the software developer. It’s no accident that Jane McGonnigal of Institute for the Future is quoted on this point of how students will come to see the real world, without noting her IFTF affiliation. Only that she wrote a book called Reality is Broken that I covered here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/when-gaming-intends-to-shape-and-distort-our-perceptions-of-everything-around-us-viva-la-revolution/

If you want a transformed economy, then push education based on “connected, networked ways of knowing that will dominate the digital future. Sharing and collaboration go hand-in-hand with integrating non-competitive and non-commodified ways of playing games.” Will that lead to a shareable economy? Maybe but it will be necessary since so few graduates in such a vision will have the mind or skills that have always been necessary for wealth to arise outside of war and just taking.

Is it true that “The way students play and learn today is the way they will work tomorrow”? Maybe, but they will be quite poor in such a world unless they can get elected or appointed to office or get a tax-free job in the UN System. Mostly the gaming is prepping for the student to be a participating member of a planned and controlled system, blindly accepting from a deep emotional level that increasing levels of material deprivation are inevitable and not a result of predation by the public sector.

Instead of declaring war on another country for wealth this is a system of predation on citizens. For those of us with a base of history knowledge not grounded in role play, it’s what the nobility did when they imposed serfdom. People exist for the use and benefit of those with power and are not free to make their own choices. No thanks. Another bogus excuse is that “the distinction between STEM and ELA is an arbitrary and superficial one” since they are each “simply forms of expression.” That really is someone determined to extinguish the analytical, rational mind for reasons laid out in Chapters 2 and 3 of my book. “All good games offer challenges in intuitive ways.” Want to guess which side of the brain acts intuitively and which does not?

Another bogus excuse? Gaming needs to be a part of early childhood education because it “teaches those students to associate screens with refined cognitive skills.” In other words, those children are to never know what rational, non-designed, grounded in facts, spinning out of various scenarios and likely consequences actually feels like. And won’t that be helpful to all our self-confessed transformationalists and futurists?

I am going to close this with an update to what has been one of the most controversial Values Clarification exercises for decades. It is called the Lifeboat but gaming lets a similar scenario, and obligation to reach a consensus, be visual so that the body’s physiology gets pulled into the plight. It will respond as if it is actually in a Life or Death situation as Willis Harman recognized in the 80s in his Global Mind Change book. Carried out as part of a Zombie Apocalypse in Norway classrooms, MindQuest ends on that example of a “sociocultural view of learning” where students and teachers “believe in sharing and constructing knowledge together.”

So they and others can build a new kind of economy and society together. Never appreciating in time that none of these things actually are ‘systems’ ready to fall into place like a game.

Bubonic Plague, Locust Swarms, Collective Values Transformation, or Futures Redesign?

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If we were playing Compare and Contrast with that title we would notice that the commonality is clearly horrendously destructive acts or events. Yet the last two are clearly planned and likely to be invisible to most of the people affected by the designed shifts being imposed on them. The first two just happen periodically, but their presence and catastrophic effects are immediately visible. Which is preferable?  Most of the trauma from the last two could be prevented if enough people globally were aware of the declared intentions, the foreseeable likely consequences, and the networks forcing the changes.

That’s why I wrote the book Credentialed to Destroy and why I keep up this blog monitoring the current related shifts in real time. Welcome to Part Two of what I am calling the Treacherously Trying to Trap Us Trilogy. In the last post I laid out the existence of the Global CIFAL Network set up by the UN System starting in 2003 to get local officials on board with its agenda in education, the economy, and society generally. Today we are going to poke around a bit more into things designed to impact all of us, but beyond our line of sight. Since all my research has the effect of providing close to x-ray vision as I read and listen now, let’s pull some more plans into the sunlight while there is still time.

Let’s start with yet another troubling plan created by the well-connected, Palo Alto-based Institute for the Future whose vision for Recombinant Education and Future Work Skills 2020 here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/advances-in-neuroscience-redefine-notions-of-performance-and-cognition-allowing-social-justice-in-learning/ left some readers irate and others feeling like they had endured a stress test. IFTF in 2013 also created http://www.iftf.org/our-work/global-landscape/governance/governance-for-the-future-an-inventors-toolkit/ to “rethink the relationship between citizens and governance. Now is the time to explore the widest range of future possibilities and to reimagine society for an age of planetary challenges and human responsibility.”

Now before anyone says that stated purpose alone is no link to the UN System, let me remind us that the Center for Curriculum Redesign’s Charles Fadel touts IFTF’s work. But I can do better than that. On the last page, IFTF thanks “Dr. James Dator for providing the inspiration and methodological foundation for this toolkit.” Dator, a futurist professor in Hawaii, was Secretary General and then President for a decade of the World Futures Studies Federation, which IS part of the UN System and closely tied to UNESCO and its work in education and multimedia. So when the Kit urges people to “Re-Think: Examine your foundational assumptions about how the world works, how people behave, and what values you would like to see instilled in your society,” this is precisely the kind of Change Agent/social engineering work we also saw the CIFAL Network owning up to.

So out-of-sight but closely tied to what is planned for US K-12 education we have this Toolkit proclaiming that “Government has seen little structural change in 200 years. For example, the US Constitution was created in the 18th century, and while novel and in many cases admirable, it couldn’t have anticipated 21st century social, technological, and political realities. Societies must re-examine the principles upon which governments are based, and think carefully about the values, beliefs, and metrics  upon which to build governance for the future.” Can you say impose without notice or consent? How about jettisoning what is still valuable?

Can you imagine students with precious little knowledge of history being told as part of a high school long-term project that “Values provide a moral compass for the governing systems you will create. Do you want a society that manifests freedom, happiness, justice, harmony, equality, security, well being?” Plus donuts for all that will never compromise your waistline and free internet that will always be serviced promptly, where ever you live. Sarcasm off. Let’s get back to the Toolkit: “Some absolute values may conflict with others. For example, freedom often affects safety or equality. But to thrive, a society must understand and express a vision of its common goals. Your Task: Clearly state the values that will guide the way governing processes and institutions are created. Don’t try to solve the tensions between values at this point.”

Now that last passage vividly illustrates the problem running through all these intentions and declarations. Many are factually untrue. Many societies have thrived without such a vision of common goals. Having such a vision will NOT make a society ‘thrive.’ In fact, believing such nonsense and having little factual knowledge primes people to act based on illusions. That’s good for statists wanting transformational change, but not so good for those of us footing the bill and being told what we must or cannot do in the future. IFTF though is not the only connected entity now pushing transformations of values in order to give “rise to new conceptions of global responsibility and human rights.” It’s not just the Rockefeller-affiliated Club of Rome involved. http://www.clubofrome.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/VALUESQUEST-The-search-for-values-that-will-make-a-world-of-difference.pdf

It’s not just the UN asking the Club of Rome and the ValuesQuest Initiative to “contribute to the creation of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals Programme.” Those are all bad enough for us. The real danger to all of us would be a failure to appreciate the intention to reconceptualize the nature of the purpose of “the law” globally to make these transformations binding. Because details matter when the stated transformational plans are so dangerous, when the Club of Rome or IFTF or anyone else cites a troubling document, I try to find it.   http://eruditio.worldacademy.org/files/Issue_1/reprints/Reprint-The-Global-Values-Discourse-W.Nagan-G.Jacobs.pdf When I notice that Nagan is a law professor at the University of Florida and believes the law can be a tool for “charting a better collective future for humanity based on universal values for sustaining a world order in the common interest,” I sit up and start taking meticulous notes.

When the law is viewed as a means to force “social evolution,” I remember what Julian Huxley and Theodore Brameld wanted UNESCO to do (described in detail in my book) and know precisely what is envisioned for the 21st Century. The law can be used as means if someone wishes to “require fundamental changes in the normative foundations of global society in the 21st century,” but ‘can’ does not mean the results will not be comparable to the plague or a swarm of locusts in what is being destroyed. When that article describes an approach that “targets the institutions that control and regulate the production and distribution of these values,” K-12 education, the higher ed colleges of education, and the powers given to accreditation all fit the bill as such ‘institutions’. That’s why concentrating all those areas in a single person as described in the last post fits the desired template that “No One Can Stop Us This Time” so well.

The fact that his business partner is tied to CIFAL and planned economic development at the state and local levels also fits perfectly in the vision “for providing the normative guidance for the future of political economy of the world community.” Now, I cannot tell you how unexcited I am to see K-12 education, state economic plans created under WIOA by governors, the law as a tool of forcing collective group decision-making and a redefinition of individuality for the 21st century, and all these other declared plans for “economic democracy” and new institutions that replace “faith in impersonal mechanism” with “institutions dedicated to the rights, dignity, welfare and well-being of all humanity.” France has been entranced by this vision for more than two centuries and look what happened there last week.

The law as a “driving force for social activism” and a “powerful instrument for social development” as “New Paradigm for Global Rule of Law” phrased it, coupled to the Mind Arson and Psychological Manipulation I have been chronicling in K-12 education truly is intended to Treacherously Trap Us All, from the inside-out and all around, to the UN vision first laid out by Uncle Karl so long ago. Can we imagine the law and education of malleable minds dedicated to locking in the “Confucian idea of rooting morals and ethics in human interaction and reciprocal relationships” and the “African principle of Ubuntu. In effect, people realize their moral value in relation to other people”? No wonder we keep running into a communitarianism mandate everywhere from what Career-Ready Practices really means to the Positive School Climate mandates.

I continuously warn how invisible these planned shifts are until we know what to look for, but how is this for a confession from the ValuesQuest document? “Values need to be so deeply embedded within a culture that no one recognizes that they are values.” Perhaps, we should add and “chosen by someone else for the purpose of subjugation to someone else’s choices about the future.” See why “values, attitudes, and beliefs,” and whether and at what rate they are changing, is precisely what is being “assessed” by the new measurements? That’s the real reason the radicals do not want to give up a requirement in any rewrite of No Child Left Behind of some kind of annual “testing.”

Given that Milton Rokeach created the word Competency to obscure the presence of values manipulation in the new focus of K-12 education, having that word be the new global goal while the UN system and the Club of Rome write “values are actually what we use to guide our way through the possibilities and problems of life” is a dangerous way to hide in plain sight. It’s no accident values are also the focus of that IFTF Toolkit or the OECD’s Key Competences that PISA measures students in.

ValuesQuest says that “it is our choice whether to have an unequal or equal society.” Factually that is not true, but we may all be sharing poverty as the consequences of these designs are imposed on all of us via education, the law, and the public sector generally.

None of the Change Agents imposing all of this intend to become equal with those they are coercing. They simply recognize there is money to be made and power to be gained from hyping that it is “our value choice which determines whether we live in a world of opportunities for all.”

This is simply a currently connected oligarchy wanting to empower themselves with no way out for most of us.

Knowledge though remains the way out. That’s why there is such a deliberate, coordinated, global  attempt to circumscribe it in the 21st Century.

 

Structuring Minds and Hearts to Quietly Gain Power to Act Directly on the Individual Citizen

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You may have noticed that first I figure out what is really planned for K-12 classrooms and then I figure out why. It helps when I discover that certain foundations, like Rockefeller or Carnegie, have been financing specific education visions for decades. Hard not to intuit “So you believe this fits in with your other work and gets to the same ends as initiatives that now go by different names?” It’s almost like a Treasure Hunt except what drives me is a recognition that if this continues there will cease to be much treasure outside of political connections or a tax-free endowment. Being a dedicated researcher though I was recently reading Michael Cole’s  1989 The Construction Zone: Working for Cognitive Change in School laying out how to use classroom activity, especially via computer interactions, to create the desired ‘intrapsychological’ changes that would guide perception and likely behavior going forward. That precise word kept being used.

Now before you exclaim that I am not going to be in the running for How to Have Fun on a Weekend, let me say in my defense I knew I was going to be stuck somewhere for several hours and wanted a few options on what to focus on. So I was also reading Martin Erdman’s Building the Kingdom of God on Earth as suggested by a blog reader. Maybe that simultaneous pondering first of how, made the proclaimed why jump out at me. Back when the Protestant churches were far more influential than they are today, there was a pre-World War II global vision that they could be the institutions that to create the “state of mind which must precede any genuine progress toward world order.” That quote was by future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1944 to the graduating class of the Princeton Theological Seminary.

It is precisely the same view of changing hearts and minds we now see in the schools, especially K-12 education. Education became the social vehicle for transformations in prevailing beliefs in a collectivist direction. Beyond this constant theme over the last 100 years that the way to change the nature of the real world, politically and socially going forward, “consists no longer in physical obstacles but only in the minds of men. The difficulty of so changing the minds of men, even in commonwealths so advanced, is hard to exaggerate…The work of effecting that change is essentially work for the churches; but they cannot begin it till political thinkers have clearly said what the change should be.”

Now substitute the word ‘schools’ there for ‘churches’ as the far more effective long term influence now. Also recognize from the last post that Uncle Karl is absolutely one of those political thinkers and that the principals and administrators dictating required classroom practices, and psychologists creating the measuring assessments, are all now actually looking to force and then monitor precisely just those sought changes in students’ minds and hearts. Now one more quote is crucial to what I really think is now intended under euphemistically phrased practices and policies like Competency-Based Education, digital learning, formative assessment or assessment for learning (notice next time you see that phrase that for is italicized just like that for emphasis).

In England before World War I, a politically influential group called the Round Table laid out its 20th Century international vision. It had ties to both the famous Rhodes Trust and to what is now the well-known Council on Foreign Relations. Deep pockets, influential, in a position to maneuver any agreed upon plans into place over time is a succinct way to describe any of these types of groups. What I care about, because I believe it was the goal that led these people to want to use both the churches then and the schools now, was a desired “power to act directly on the individual citizen.” That’s not the view of the role of governments in common law countries like the UK, the US, Canada, or Australia. Being upfront about these intentions and goals is a great way to prevent their ever happening.

Remember that 2004 Cooperation Agreement between UNESCO and Microsoft that global ed reform advocate and financier Bill Gates signed personally (November 6 post)? It explicitly mentioned Etienne Wenger and his concept of Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Needless to say, I got a copy of that 1998 book so we know that to Gates, Microsoft, and the UN entities:

“knowing is not just a matter of information. In practice, understanding is always straddling the known and the unknown in a subtle dance of the self. It is a delicate balance. Whoever we are, understanding in practice is the art of choosing what to know and what to ignore in order to proceed with our lives.”

Except all this insider talk of intrapsychological structuring, mental maps, and cognitive change is actually about someone else designating in advance what is likely to be noticed and ignored. All those references to ‘lenses’ with no optometrist in sight. How’s THAT for the ultimate power to act directly? On the importance of guiding available vocabulary, limiting the genuine ability to read fluently, and moving away from a personal store of factual knowledge, here’s Wenger again:

“An adequate vocabulary is important because the concepts we use to make sense of the world direct both our perception and our actions. We pay attention to what we expect to see, we hear what we can place in our understanding, and we act according to our worldviews.”

That’s why we have a quiet but coordinated global effort per Wenger to mandate a shift in K-12 education so that the “focus [is] not on knowledge as an accumulated commodity–as the ability to repeat the past–but on learning as a social system productive of new meanings.”

Now we can infer that John Foster and friends and the Round Table would be pleased if they were still around, but we can in fact know what UNESCO, the Gates Foundation, and Microsoft have in store for us via this 2012 Video (23 minutes and well worth it) on the New Classroom Experience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG6PVCMb3tE Now this Learning Without Frontiers vision is linked by UNESCO http://www.unesco.org/education/lwf/ to the same troubling transdisciplinary vision of changing the student we examined in detail here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/opting-out-as-the-remedy-may-mean-accidentally-accelerating-nonconsensual-transformations/

Maybe Queenstown was picked to be the global Transdisciplinary pilot because it’s just so much fun to travel to the Barrier Reef in Australia at someone else’s expense. Let’s not let that non-updated website fool us since Learning Without Frontiers global conferences ran annually from 2005 to that one in 2012. Now those same aims are lurking in Charles Fadel’s Curriculum Redesign Project, GELP, ATC21S (17:42 mark in that video), and especially in KnowledgeWorks’ High Tech High and the work now of the League of Innovative Schools.

Since we have already examined all those entities previously on this blog, let’s briefly look at what confessions Anthony Salcito made in that video. Consistent with Wenger’s vision, Salcito is annoyed that “what we’re learning hasn’t changed.” He, and his employer we may presume, want to “fundamentally change what we are teaching and assessing” and “get ready for the workplace.” There’s that controversial School to Work vision again coming in by stealth this time. He is excited that it will be a different kind of workplace. I suppose that’s because Microsoft says so.  In what may be my favorite confession of the social engineering intent behind all these sought ‘immersive experiences’ that combine ‘visual representations and emotional connections,’ Salcito explains the “technology advances the emotional response.”

Not your desired emotional response, silly. The emotional response at an intrapsychological level that Planners have decided students need to have to prime that perception and those future actions. Beyond that confession, listen at 18:02 to hear that History is no longer about content, but rather a means to “learn leadership.” Algebra is now a means to learn holistic abstract thinking. Apparently the Planners would like to specify all those internal structures of mental interconnections, instead of having whiz kids develop their own. Neither controlled or equitable I guess. We might be troubled by what Institute for the Future’s Jane MacGonnigal declared as the intentions for Game Based Learning, but Salcito embraces it (19:26).  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/when-gaming-intends-to-shape-and-distort-our-perceptions-of-everything-around-us-viva-la-revolution/

Notice Salcito admits a desire to use Game-based Theory to “reenforce positive behavior.” Their definition of it, not ours. Likewise, he recommends Service Based Learning as a way to get students “fully away from content” in order to apply this theory of learning. This experimental theory of transformative political change created at the intrapsychological level in the minds and hearts of unsuspecting students.

There’s a much shorter Learning Without Frontiers video, also from 2012,  http://vimeo.com/50438579 that says that “if we get it wrong, we will jeopardize an entire generation” of students.

I am asserting that if this vision of learning goes as intended and planned, we will lose more than a generation of students. Education for transformation at an intrapsychological level is a superb way to generate economic famine for virtually everyone.

Real economic wealth lies in the human mind. And too many are currently determined to extinguish that believing falsely that this mind arson creates willing subjects and more for others.

You can see why I have so little patience for Opt Out as the final parental remedy and solution for what is being changed in the K-12 classroom.

With all these trackable declarations, it may turn out to be a “Look Squirrel!” misdirection while the intrapsychological structural changes are rolling along.

 

Advances in Neuroscience Redefine Notions of Performance and Cognition, Allowing Social Justice in Learning

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If the last two posts have made anyone feel like they are on a roller coaster with a sickening feeling in the pit of their stomach, I am genuinely petrified about all the references to using K-12 education to try to physiologically redesign the brain. The OECD really did state in a report issued just this week on Metacognition that ‘we’ need to “control cognition”. We cannot ask anyone if their meddling knows no bounds if we are not aware of what is being targeted or why. I was detailed on this in my book. What has shifted since I wrote it is how often images of the physical brain are showing up in Learning Presentations to administrators. http://www.lbusd.k12.ca.us/Main_Offices/High_Schools/Linked_Learning/videos.cfm gives a High School PLC Institute example on the new 3 Rs–Rigor/Relevance Framework.

Someone who runs a hugely followed Internet site on the Common Core said to me in person at a hearing and then via email that the psychological emphasis of my work scared her so she would make no effort to let her readers know what was in the offing. A lapel pin with an Apple Core with a Red Line through it shows valid concern, but it will do nothing to protect the children from this actual psychological focus. http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/IS%20Project_Conference%20Brochure_FINAL.pdf states that the OECD (remember DeSeCo from the book and the transformations outlined in the conclusion?) has a new project to “further develop and refine a framework and prototype formative assessment tool for 21st century skills.” Do you live in a district where the children will be used as guinea pigs to develop those “Behavioral and social skills (character)” and “Skills in thinking and creativity” that are conducive to the OECD’s idea of innovation?

That would be entirely new institutions, a transformed ‘grassroots’ society centered on subjective wellbeing, and a sharing economy centered on cities and laid out here. http://newclimateeconomy.report/ That’s the actual vision attached now to being “internationally competitive” when we follow the facts. Today I want to take us (maybe want is not the right word). Let me rephrase. Today we are going to look at what the KnowledgeWorks Foundation calls “Recombinant Education” and its partner, the Institute for the Future, that brags about having developed the manipulative Delphi Technique, calls Future Work Skills 2020. The latter report by the way   http://www.iftf.org/uploads/media/SR-1382A_UPRI_future_work_skills_sm.pdf was created with the University of Phoenix in case anyone wants to believe these shocking statements will not influence degrees and online programs.

Why did I put Neuroscience in the title beyond the fact that I am using a literal quote? Because we are dealing with a futurist mentality that insists on changing K-12 and higher ed around the assumption that “Massive increases in sensors and processing make the world a programmable system” all the way down to a micro-level. The micro-level is a euphemism for ‘people’–you and me folks, and especially our still malleable children. We are in big trouble if the children believe what these reports state–that we can “use data to design for desired outcomes.” Someone else’s desires, not ours, especially given the number of references to “collective intelligence.”

Somebody really needs to go read Harvard history prof Richard Pipes’ book called Property and Freedom and remember that all these education schemes ignore the Western tradition, particularly in the US:

“we ‘own ourselves,’ that is, are our own ‘property’…that is tantamount to saying that we are free to dispose of ourselves, which is the meaning of freedom.”

Pipes, an expert on Russia, communism, and the Soviet Union, recognizes a utopian scheme that accepts no boundaries on the control of the State when he sees it. He was reminded of the philosophy of the English social historian RH Tawney who wrote the following in 1920:

“The individual has no absolute rights…all rights…are conditional and derivative…they are derived from the end or purpose of the society in which they exist…this means in practice that if a society is to be healthy, men must regard themselves not as the owners of rights, but as trustees for the discharge of functions and the instruments of a social purpose.”

When someone of Richard Pipes’ eminence follows up that quote with an observation that “Hitler held the same view of rights, including property rights”, please do not retort anything about Godwin’s Law. It’s a warning pertinent to where this is all going as we encounter those 15 Constructs from the last past and formative assessments to make sure individuals are ‘guided’ by the desired concepts in how they interpret their daily experiences. That  WorkSkills report even mentioned the Key Skill of Transdisciplinarity as needed for the Future Workforce. Precisely what those 15 Constructs from the last post said they were creating from the inside-out.

The Future Workforce report assumed that “immersive and visually stimulating presentations of information [will] become the norm.” That will replace print for most people, which will mean the loss of the one thing known to create the rational, logical, independent mind. It is certainly ironic that John Holdren’s Digital Promise federal initiative is being used to bring about the precise Arational Newmindedness Paul Ehrlich longed for back in the late 80s. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/blending-sustainability-and-education-to-gain-arational-nonlinear-minds-and-new-behaviors/ Give the long time colleague a Gold Star for effort!

IFTF insists that we can “plan our environments so that they are conducive to the outcomes that we are most interested in.” That is known as a sociological wish, not a fact, that has a notorious past. Nevertheless, we get to hear about neurogenesis research (the creation of new neurons), where it is hoped that “change the environment, change the brain, change the behavior.” All without any need to give notice or get consent from the individuals being targeted for a new “Design Mindset.” IFTF wants government policymakers to make “education a national priority” and “consider the full range of skills citizens will require.” No need to consult the individual citizens or respect their or their parents’ desire not to have a New Kind of Mind grounded in emotion and Arational.

We actually do not need to speculate about the broader transformations KnowledgeWorks and IFTF are assuming. Beyond all the Strive Together links to a needs based communitarian economy based in urban areas and the Recombinant Education document I mentioned, there was an earlier joint 2020 Forecast that laid out their Map of the Future Affecting Education that called for Altered Bodies: experimenting at the intersection of environment and performance.” Again, not what we expect when we put our kid on a school bus. Are we sending them to schools to “develop new capacities” consistent with a collectivist vision someone else created and did not mean for us to find out about? Should schools “become focal points for interventions focused not only on educating resilient students, but also on promoting resilience in their communities.”

Resilience is one of the listed IFTF categories and it is designed to prevent individual or community responses that focus on “resisting disruption or maintaining the status quo.” In other words, whatever happens in the future K-12 education is trying to take the likely response out of the hands of individual citizens. They get instead “A New Civic Discourse–Rearticulating Identity and Community in a Global Society” that does not care one bit what the US Constitution established so long ago. Another category–“Pattern of Recognition–An Extremely Visible World demands New Sensemaking” discusses the impact of data a great deal and calls for fostering “collective sensemaking.” No wonder the need for classrooms to develop a shared understanding of everyone after Discourse keeps coming up when we look close. Remember the Rockefeller Funded Communication for Social Change?

Here’s the link to the subsequent Recombinant Education vision http://www.knowledgeworks.org/sites/default/files/Forecast3_0_0.pdf. You may want to read that on an empty stomach or with a Hot Toddy. It is enough to chill the bones. Here’s a sample from the High-Fidelity Living category:

“Deeper insights into brain processes and into cognition and motivation under varying conditions [likely discovered from real children without parental consent] will inform both the design of cognitive assistants and our [whose precisely?] understanding of how to structure learning and work environments to maximize focus, intrinsic motivation, and creativity.”

If that seems troubling, there’s a break-out later that admits that data will monitor a student’s “social and emotional conditions, to predict performance and suggest personalized strategies for success.” Still excited about Personalized Learning and what the League of Innovative Schools is pushing with its federal mandate? How about the admitted ability for “Reading Your Mind”? There’s no indication the student will actually be informed of the results of the ‘reading.’ How is a futurist or policymaker in education different from the typical Palm Reader or Clairvoyent could be the new question given these admitted aims with students.

I am running out of time so I want to alert everyone to one more thing that such a Learning Ecosystem will be designed to do to supposedly Create the Future. How often are we hearing about the need for Equity in education? The last bullet point in the vision states: *”Track and address any new inequities that emerge within the learning ecosystem.”

How will the inequities be addressed? Building up the learners who have not yet shown “what learners will need to know”?

Or using Complex, Unknown, and Nonroutine Problem-solving to try to scramble the rational brains of the more able students? To try to force them to respond from emotion instead of logic and facts.

And if you wonder why I keep remembering Uncle Karl’s vision for all this, let’s get a dime for every time we encounter a reference to meeting ‘needs’ in this vision of the future.

Notice the reference under Shareable Cities to “open governance” and remember my warning over the e-Republic and e-Democracy.

Time to pull more open nefarious declarations into the sunlight of public scrutiny. There is still time, but not if we continue to make this simply a Debate about the Common Core.

It is So. Much. More.

 

Surreptitious Vision: Ed Reforms as Designing an Internal Keel to Control People and Manage Society

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No I am not a sailor although I did once have a very fun weekend on a sailboat in the Chesapeake as a hapless, but supportive, passenger. I am afraid this metaphor of a keel that allows steering regardless of the direction of the wind has been invoked as the official analogy of those who wish to use education in the 21st century globally to change human behavior and ” design a new, organic, socio-cybernetic system for the management of society.” Please do take a deep breath before we continue. At least now we know why the virtual reality science simulations planned under Common Core Next Generation Standards have been focusing on illustrating force and motion in addition to all the ‘supposed’ threats to the environment. These days any content allowed through virtually always has a purpose in creating a transformational mindset.

Today’s discussion is largely from a 2011 paper by Scotland’s John Raven called “Competence, Education, Professional Development, Psychology, and Socio-Cybernetics.” It has global aspirations and fits perfectly with UNESCO’s use of the term “Cybernetics of Global Change” as part of its MOST-Management of Social Transformations-official program. Apparently, we, the hoped-for victims and funders of these transformation plans, are the only ones NOT familiar with just how often the planners have begun to think in terms of how to invisibly gain control of human behavior to manage society.

That control lever can occur, according to Raven, through a socio-cybernetic, competence, focus in education plus new political rules. Since stating this out loud would create a popular outcry that might interfere with plans for subjugation, the same developmental push gets sold globally now under the blissful, but misleading, term–focus on Excellence. The other necessary component involves changing the political governance arrangements, which is of course exactly what the UN’s Agenda 21 seeks to do. Majority rule, judicial overreach or neglect, regulations, and power to appointed boards instead of elected ones all work quite nicely too.

Today’s focus though is on education since both UNESCO and Raven declare this is the Yellow Brick Road to Social Control. Just as adding a keel to a sailing boat is cited by Raven as “key to getting the boat to sail into the wind” so an education that rejects the primacy of individual “technico-rational competence” and content knowledge in favor of “helping people to develop and get recognition for, the diverse, often idiosyncratic, talents they possess” is key to the radical vision of social transformation. If that seems a bit odd, how about the admission that the key to “changing the way we run society,” (don’t you just want to ask “who is we, Kemosabe?” as if this were a Tonto-Lone Ranger skit), is rejecting the traditional focus of school since it “reinforces a social order which offers major benefits to ‘able’ people.”

Poor dear, all of civilization that these writers and planners take for granted is thankfully due to the herd-defying curiosity and mischief of just a few ‘able’ people. We will rue the day when their minds came to be molded into whatever was necessary to tolerate transformations.  Instead, we are to get education designed to change “people’s beliefs about society, how it works, and their place in it” even if none of those beliefs are grounded in reality. In fact in acknowledging and laying out the intent that project-based learning will no longer be a way to discover content, Raven begins to disclose the radically different goals of what is also euphemistically called ‘student-centered learning.’ As he states explicitly (and he is the one who loves italics), the purpose of the letters or pictures or slogans or poems “was not to depict what was seen accurately, but to represent it in such a way as to evoke emotions that would lead to action.”

Remember in the last post when I kept reminding that curriculum grounded in virtual reality likely would be whatever simulation created politically useful beliefs and values and that Holos Consciousness? That statement was based on having hung out with more than one software developer in my life and career. Turns out though the 1995 book Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community warned several times about the very same thing. The whole purpose of stressing computer simulations in the classroom is the computer’s “capacity to represent action in which humans could participate.” Perfect way to prime the pump for revolution we might say. In fact science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, then a Byte columnist, was quoted as fearing that “technology masks the constructedness of any simulation.” Here are his exact words and they remain hugely relevant to the mental keel being created within the student by digital learning and assessments of 21st century competencies:

“The simulation is pretty convincing–and that’s the problem because…it’s a simulation of the designer’s theories, not of reality…The fact is, though, the computer doesn’t say anything at all. It merely tells you what the programmers want it to tell you.”

And the programmers, such as ISTE keynoter Jane McGonnigal, have been quite graphic that these games are being designed to create a mindset that believes in the need for social transformation. Sim City creator, Will Wright, was quoted as saying his games are adapted from Jay Forester’s World Dynamics work, which once again takes us back to the Club of Rome, the 1970s, and the desire to push systems thinking in education, economic planning, and the now-proverbial means of managing society. Cybersociety recognized that “representing flux and change is exactly what a simulation can do”, making it a far more effective tool for altering the nature of human experience and illustrating the possible causes of social change.

A very powerful, highly visual, weapon we are mandating for classrooms and ‘assessments’ without giving a second thought to its use as a driver of how the student’s mind will perceive the need for social change. Computer games have become so ubiquitous that remembering that they were once recognized as “where we go to play with the future” gets overlooked. So does the fact that the future is not the least bit bound to follow the variables set up in a software virtual simulation. Just ask Putin. Fostering a belief in things that are not true, and collectivist values that leave you unprotected against either foreign invaders or domestic predator politicians, is no way to become an adult.

Making computer gaming the focus of the classroom because it is engaging and increases graduation rates still omits a crucial fact all the programming world still remembers. The gamer unconsciously and intuitively “internalizes the logic of the program.” Just the thing in other words for those who want social transformation and people who can be steered like the keel of a boat. Precisely the metaphor Raven chose to both use and illustrate with drawings of a boat. Marry those manipulative visuals to an express declaration for a “dramatic reorganisation of most peoples’ thoughtways” via schools and universities and we indeed have a problem. All being implemented into a classroom near you without a By Your Leave under banners like the Common Core or Positive School Climate or a 1:1 Laptop Initiative.

Left out will be the acknowledgment that now ‘intelligence’ is to be understood as an emergent property of a group rather than an individual characteristic. Furthermore, this intelligence depends on releasing and harnessing a huge variety of individual talents that are scarcely related to intelligence as conventionally understood. Thus conventional ways of thinking are unethical–destructive of both individuals and society.”

The attempts to manage society and achieve new forms of governance will not be successful. Only the extent of wealth lost and prosperity trashed is in dispute. The intended damage to be delivered via education to the psyche, false beliefs, and pernicious or naive values is unstoppable unless enough people realize there is no dispute at what is being sought or why.

Intentionally created financial conflicts of interest seem to be the norm to coerce adults into either complying with, or actively advocating for, this vision of education. In the US I see it being pushed under federal civil rights laws as necessary to have Equity and Excellence. The very title of the global ed summit that commenced today in New Zealand-“Excellence, Equity, and Inclusiveness: High Quality Teaching For All” tells me this developmental, obuchenie, new view of ‘intelligence’ grounded in group interactions is a deliberate global phenomena.

If only someone could create a computer simulation for politicians and school administrators showing the true social effects of such widespread mind arson.