Epistemically Secure Society–Phraseology to Explain this Coming Decade of Plans for Us

Posted on December 28, 2020 by Robin

Since Epistemically Secure Society is rather a mouthful, let’s shorthand this useful phrase as ESS. It’s an important semantic tool to grasp though as it builds on the Shared Reality aspiration we covered in the last post, as well as the rather remarkable set of events set in motion around the US Presidential election. The type of demonstrably provable factual events media platforms will no longer allow to be mentioned or disseminated. The type of assertions, that despite sets of affidavits, may get a lawyer sanctioned now if they push the stories in Michigan. They may be true, but they deviate from the desired narrative of events and thus threaten the ESS. It fits too with how learning standards work and their component conceptual frameworks that now constitute Knowledge with a capital ‘K’. These approved concepts or theories that the standards both disseminate and mandate act as a common core of perception and motivation for future decision-making. The officially approved set of filters installed at a neural level is another way to put it.

The ESS phrase was laid out in a document called “Tackling Misinformation During Crisis” which stated this in October

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying ‘infodemic’ clearly illustrate that access to reliable information is crucial to coordinating a timely crisis response in democratic societies. Inaccurate information and the muzzling of important information sources have degraded trust in health authorities and slowed public response to the crisis. Misinformation about ineffective cures, the origins and malicious spread of COVID-19, unverified treatment discoveries, and the efficacy of face coverings have increased the difficulty of coordinating a unified public response during the crisis.

In a recent report researchers at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) in collaboration with The Alan Turing Institute and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) workshopped an array of hypothetical crisis scenarios to investigate social and technological factors that interfere with well-informed decision-making and timely collective action in democratic societies.

The UK’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence put that out October 21, and a newsletter in the US tied to global change aspirations linked to it in mid-November, after the election. I was struck when I read it how well the expressed aspiration fit with everything I was hearing in the name of Equity in the US and the Science of Learning and Development being led by Biden Education Advisor Linda Darling-Hammond. It fits with an interview I watched before Christmas with the same NCEE that created the New Standards Project where the name David Albury came up. I tracked that new name to a 2016 Australian document called “Innovating for Global Excellence,” which matter-of-factly informed readers that China too had embarked on an ideas-oriented transformation of its educational system. A little research confirmed that shift.

When a well-known dictatorship wanting to be the world’s dominant power thinks an ‘ideas’ curriculum reform is also compatible with its plans, the potential embodied in ESS certainly comes into perspective. It fits with how the media in the US seemed to coordinate to keep out any bad news about one candidate prior to the election, while refusing to cover even documented election fraud. As the Leverhulme paper put it: “If there is no shared belief among the actors in a community about the nature of a crisis or the efficacy of a proposed response, collective action is less likely to come.”

And it turns out collective action and its need for a common core of a widespread shared belief among the actors is what ESS is all about. Since we are all living in the midst of this, I thought the phrase would be a helpful arrow in our quiver of recognizing what we are dealing with and all these plans for transformation over this next decade. Many of us with 20-something graduates will recognize that the expressed “need for robust and reliable systems of information production and dissemination” is already being met by elite higher ed institutions and the media and tech platforms are merely following suit. The Leverhulme paper may have premised the need for an ESS “in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the upcoming 2020 elections,” but it also recognized it as the “solution to managing infodemics” which require a coordinated effort to control what information is produced, disseminated, and how it is UNDERSTOOD by individual minds:

the promotion of epistemically secure democracies will help us be more resilient to similar events in the future.

Methinks in an ESS, there will be no inconvenient assertions about fentanyl overdoses when a horrible video emerges that can become a totem for allegations of systemic racism meriting the wholesale transformation of society, its component minds, institutions, and prevailing normative values. Another paper I located in a footnote to that Science of Development and Learning openly called for a New Sociology of Education that would enable a TPS–a Totally Pedagogized Society. No wonder the Chinese are on board and digital learning experiences are now becoming ubiquitous. The TPS and the ESS go together nicely like interlocking gears turning something much bigger. No need to point out that the TPS analogy for what is needed now compared it to “the medieval period during which Religion played a totally pedagogising role and function.”

Awareness of TPS and ESS as openly expressed global aspirations help us understand what is going on around us and what is ahead of us in a way that clearly deviates from the hoped-for widespread shared belief system. Let’s stick though to the facts as long as we can. I joke about my bookshelf, but I did go looking there yesterday for insights after I decided these unequivocal concepts actually helped me grasp what otherwise seems to live more like bad science fiction than the reality that 2020 has been. I landed first on Richard Falk’s 1975 book A Study of Future Worlds from the World Order Models Project that the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations funded that I have covered previously here at ISC [see tag]. Its Prospectus for Transition seemed to be precisely what Donald Trump’s surprise Presidential election in the US in 2016 or the earlier Brexit referendum shock from that same year seem to have interrupted. See if this sounds familiar if a bit off schedule:

In terms of political action we anticipate t1, the 1970s, to be the decade in which value changes occur mainly on the level of political consciousness, i.e., orientations toward action. In t2, the 1980s, the main value changes will involve mobilization for action to achieve the new value priorities, while in t3, the 1990s, the focus will be on action to achieve transformation of institutions and organizations, both to alter value and goal priorities and to adapt organizational forms to the emerging value consensus.

Just because the timing is off, doesn’t mean the plans changed. Unlike the bolding in this post, those italics were in the original Proposal for Transition. I think Professor Falk and WOMP’s funders were a bit optimistic in how much it would take to change minds. That is probably why both sources of funds began to push educational reforms around conceptual frameworks beginning in 1980. Now we also get Competencies and Performance learning standards that fit right in with Mobilization for Action. Beyond Falk’s plans though, I also pulled Kenneth Minogue’s always excellent book The Servile Mind. His insight of what had changed in our conception of society really hits its mark in 2020, ten years after its publication.

…our very conception of society has changed. It is no longer an association of independent self-moving individuals, but rather an association of vulnerable people whose needs and sufferings must be remedied by the power of the state.

A few pages later in the book’s Introduction Minogue pointed out that

At the heart of Western life as we inherited it within living memory are self-conscious individuals guiding their destinies according to whatever moral sentiments they entertain…this moral idiom is being challenged by another, in which individuals find their identifying essence in supporting public policies that are both morally obligatory and politically imperative.

That’s the essence of learning standards properly understood all over the globe and the ESS and TPS they are to lead to in the 21st century. It is also the reason, I believe, that the False Narrative around education reforms, especially the Common Core, that commenced in earnest in 2011 in a most coordinated manner, keeps tying back to certain public policy think tanks. We will cover that more in 2021 so we can ‘be alert to the semantics’ as Minogue put it in this quote. Seems like an excellent way to finish this post and this troublesome year designed to resurrect the desired Transition and Transformation from unexpected electoral interferences.

I for one am not dismayed that attitudes have a life of their own, and that the demos in the twenty-first century is not entirely plastic material suitable to be sculpted by rulers. Rulers may get excited about ‘changing the culture,’ but modern peoples are usually brutish enough to resist being improved. Being alert to the semantics by which the moral has been transposed into the manipulable is one protection against a gullible acquiescence to the projects of government.

ESS and TPS, election fraud with no legal remedy, allegations of systemic racism with no regard to the facts, mask mandates regardless of whether they work, and lockdowns whatever the economic destruction and lack of efficacy–just a few of 2020’s Projects of Government.

See you in 2021 so we can stay alert to the semantics and try to avoid the mental and socio-emotional sculpting.

Focusing on the Conceptual System of the Mind for a 21st Century Imposed DiaMat

Posted on April 16, 2019 by Robin

What if I told you that global conferences none of us were invited to have Slideshares available laying out “By transforming individual conceptual systems, we can change society?” All of a sudden all that emphasis on New Kinds of Thinking and stipulating the desired categories of thought and, even in the US, making annual assessment of those ‘Higher Order Thinking Skills’ a federal mandate for virtually all students, begins to make sense. Transformation plans need malleable citizens either unaware of the plans for them or eagerly on board. There was a meeting in October 2017 in Chengdu, China of the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences where the IASCYS President usefully pointed out the desire to examine the “effect that a theory has on the system observed.” If you control the conceptual framework of a student or adult citizen’s mind, you control the theories they will use to perceive and interpret the world.

Very handy for anyone seeking to reject the status quo in terms of political, economic, and social structures. Suddenly, science needs to shift to include purposeful systems and education needs to shift to control the purpose of human systems. In a Newtonian, transmission of knowledge world via textbooks or lecture, “scientific theories do not alter” the physical structure of the world and how it operates or can be made to operate. “Theories do not change the way that nature works…But theories of social systems are constructed in the hope that theories will guide actions that will change the way social systems operate. There is a dialogue between theories and societies.” If theories are to be introduced via public policy think tanks and a new vision of the law to transform social and political institutions and practices and economic structures and activities, controlling the human conceptual system turns out to be the foundation for making the change without overt coercion.

IASCYS is a cybernetics honor society that features many names we have stumbled over in education plans such as Ervin Laszlo, Mary Catherine Bateson who was at the 1987 World Order Models Project meeting in Moscow (her dad Gregory Bateson coined the term ‘framing’ back in 1972 in his Ecology of the Mind), Ernest von Glasersfeld of constructivist math fame (covered in Chapter 3 of CtD), and George Soros, international mischief maker. If the President of that society on one of his last slides stated that “If Cybernetics is seen as a theory of experimentation and reform in social systems, it will connect the earlier work in cybernetics with political reform and the evolution of society,” then we have powerful people wanting to use the mind’s conceptions to change how the world works. They can do that if education targets people’s goals and purpose by altering how they make sense of the world.

Almost simultaneously with stumbling across that slideshare, the globalist Center for Curriculum Reform published Artificial Intelligence in Education: Promises and Implications for Teaching & Learning which also stressed targeting a Core Concept emphasis where the curriculum would develop the highly malleable ‘expert amateurism’ that “aims for ‘a robust and flexible understanding of the fundamentals.’ By internalizing the most important concepts of each discipline, and across disciplines, which we call core concepts, students are better equipped to deal with multifaceted problems and have a more diverse set of tools with which to interpret the world.” Then in Appendix 1 under desired Cross-Cutting Themes we are told that students need to have Design Thinking because “the twenty-first century challenges we now face are demanding a major rethinking and redesigning of many of our societal institutions from education, to agriculture and energy use, to product design and manufacturing, to economics and government.”

Well, that’s confessional, but it followed a push for the theme of Systems Thinking which “requires a shift from the mechanistic and reductionist model of twentieth century Western culture [where the theories did not impact nature. See Slideshare above], toward a more balanced approach.” You know who else wanted to get Theory into Practice? Uncle Karl and John Dewey. The Appendix then goes on to hype:

According to educational theorist and cognitive scientist Derek Cabrera, students should be encouraged to consider distinctions, systems, relationships, and perspectives (DSRP).

**Distinctions: develop increasingly sophisticated characterizations of ideas and objects

**Systems: Deconstruct ideas and re-constructing new integrated concepts with a variety of part/whole interactions

**Relationships: See connections between things

**Perspectives: See things from different points of view

By considering the common properties of complex systems, learners can apply this approach to view more traditional disciplines from a modern, systems perspective.

Now two things jumped out at me when I read that, DSRP functioned just like Dialectical Materialism did as a guiding philosophy of academics in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Plus I remembered reading that after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Soros’ Open Society funded the conversion of the DiaMat departments in Eastern European higher ed to a sociology (science of society) emphasis. Secondly, I had never heard of Derek Cabrera which is a tad unusual at this point. I was able to locate his “Simple Rules of Complex Conceptual Systems” paper and was told that “Context is a set of processing rules for content,” which seems highly useful for someone seeking transformative change in the status quo. Even more forthcoming was his statement in pushing DSRP that:

all human and group identity is derivative of the aggregation of conceptual systems for the individual or group. In other words, humankind is what it thinks either alone or in groups or sub-groups…In general, human beings are not irreparably divided by biology or geography, but instead by their conceptual systems…What causes humans to be incompatible are their conceptual systems in the form of beliefs, ideologies, ideas, and assumptions.

Another speaker at Chengdu also wrote a paper “Addressing the Critical Need for “New Ways of Thinking’ in Managing Complex Issues in a Socially Responsible Way” which ominously has a section called “Starting with the Young”. It made it clear that the foundation that must be changed to achieve sustainability is to alter Prevailing “Mental Models/mind Maps/ People’s Understanding”. That is the prerequisite transformation which is precisely why it gets pitched euphemistically as ‘student-centered personalized learning’ or ‘citizen-centric governance’. Having targeted the individual mind and imposed the desired theories, categories of thought, values, and attitudes practiced until they are Habits of Mind, “Systemic Structures–What does the System Look Like?” can be adjusted. That’s exactly what Cabrera’s DSRP trains students to do (and motivates them to want to do it.)

It’s not just CCR advocating this type of thinking, the website features school systems touting his Systems Thinking Made Easy “will transform your school district” and that “Developing every child into a systems thinker is an ethical imperative.” If that is not alarming enough, we have a closing quote around “developing shared consciousness across the district.” How very comradely. Cabrera did rather betray the transformational intention by admitting that “DSRP also provides a mechanism for the memetic behavior that must exist in order for evolutionary epistemology to be a viable proposal.” In other words, a transmission of knowledge curriculum does not force the needed change in worldview and daily behaviors desired for the Inclusive, Equitable, Transformative vision all these education reforms and new ways of thinking are tied to.

To add to the global push for these changes I found this https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/K-03-2017-0120 showing the Russian Science Foundation’s current interest in this kind of conceptual, 3rd order cybernetics. Finally, school districts may be imposing Cabrera’s DSRP, but Cornell Policy Review clearly shows it is a university level textbook intended for public policy coursework. Two purposes in social science achieved with one book. Changing the conceptual mind’s function via K-12, and also using it to credential in higher ed so that students can go to work for think tanks, philanthropy, governments at every level, or even run for office implementing these theories in the real world.

Today the OECD, working with the US NSF Science of Learning Centers Project released “Developing Minds in the Digital Age: Towards a Science of Learning for 21st Century Education” that laid out precisely how curriculum and technology will quietly implement this agenda. In a preschool, no less. I guess that fits with Cabrera’s quote that “When a mind is young, few conceptual bonds have been made and there is still much conceptual space in which to work.”

Practically a blank canvas is another way to put that aspiration. Just the vehicle for DJEM–Designed Joint Engagements with Media.

Serendipitous Admissions: Using Psychology to Impose Philosophy Makes Education the Requisite Tool

Posted on August 28, 2018 by Robin

Let’s go back and forth between the aims that nerdy writers and scholars say they want to do in the name of a new kind of authentic, holistic education and why, and the everyday how. The means and tools can be seen through learning standards and yesterday’s push under the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to shift to “phenomenon-based learning”. Let start with a means quote from Carter Phipps (who does executive coaching and leadership training in addition to his cultural evolution) in his book Evolutionaries: Unlocking the Spiritual and Cultural Potential of Science’s Greatest Idea:

“In his latest book, Evolution’s Purpose, Steve McIntosh describes developmental psychology as ‘the branch of social science that deals most directly with the evolution of consciousness. Indeed, this rich tradition…is critical for understanding the kinds of research, thinking, and perspectives that have given birth to our new appreciation of how the internal universe evolves’.”

Developmental psychologists create legally mandated learning standards whether imposed locally, by a state, nationally, or globally, so they get to specify how they want that so-called internal universe to evolve both for individual students and collectively for an entire generation of the population. Cool tool, huh? Likewise, they create curriculum such as what The Lawrence Hall of Science has created for Amplify Science that “motivates students by providing them with a sense of purpose and agency, and by engaging their curiosity.” In other words, it is a curriculum that is about targeting and changing the student’s internal universe and not conveying knowledge in the historic sense of education. Those same developmental psychologists get to decide what is to be “culturally relevant phenomenon,” which is awfully useful as we once again quote Phipps that “cultural evolution happens right here, in the collective interior life of humanity.”

How nice then to use learning standards like the Common Core or competency frameworks that no one but me seems to be explaining accurately to target that very “collective interior life.” As I was reading Evolutionaries I kept thinking that they were not planning for its audience to include someone who understood K-12 education reforms and its underlying legal mandates to enforce compliance so well. I think the Amplify Science paper also never expected someone to look at its supporting references and then track down the Symeonidis & Schwarz 2016 paper “Phenomenon-Based Teaching and Learning through the Pedagogical Lenses of Phenomenology: The Recent Curriculum Reform in Finland,” much less recognize the significance of grounding these reforms in the work of an M. Heidegger from 2006 with a cite in German.

Being a serious nerd who covered the nexus to Deconstructionism in my book Credentialed to Destroy, I recognized Martin the German (and Nazi) existentialist and his 1927 Time and Being with a little help from a translator search engine. Much like Phipps, phenomenology wants to “use complexity as a starting point” and for comparable reasons I suspect. A 2012 paper by a James Magrini on the promise of phenomenology and the philosophy of existentialism to create ‘authentic education’ though it:

“might be related with great success to social reconstruction and critical pedagogy for social justice in education. For the values we are ‘creating’ and endorsing are never restricted to the classroom, they have an impact on the greater society and, most importantly, the potential that exists for for its change…in addition ‘to assisting our students in their preparation to fit into existing social, political, and economic structures’, as so much of our educational system is currently geared toward doing, we, perhaps especially those of us who teach philosophy, need to encourage our students to think about how these structures might be significantly changed for the better.”

Brought to us by students trained to act from emotion using provided concepts and categories of thought deliberately introduced to drive a belief in the need for cultural change and new social, economic, and political structures. Trained using so-called ‘Power Standards’ that most parents will not even know exist. Let’s face it, phenomenon-based learning in 21st century science has little to do with science as a historically developed and useful body of undisputed knowledge and everything to do with changing each student’s interior universe. In fact, that 2016 paper stated that this phenomenological perspective will allow students to “become mindful of their own learning and acquire strategies of how to learn, a joyful, creative and reflective activity to ensure a good life. Competence, the buzzword of the 21st century, lies at the heart of this conceptualization of learning, which is essentially constructivist and psychological.”

Sounds like that internal, supposedly personal, universe to me, but serendipitously, I had seen a 1972 book cited in the Esalen book from the previous post by W. Warren Wagar, our old friend from the gravely concerning and therefore tagged on this blog–World Order Models Project–that commenced the next year. So I tracked down that book Good Tidings: The Belief in Progress from Darwin to Marcuse to see if I could walk through his cited philosophy to discern just how far back this desire to use education to drive cultural evolution at the level of consciousness actually went. I read that over the weekend and, serendipitously again, Wagar too was influenced by Heidegger and existentialism.

Come to think of it, a founder of Esalen, had his Stanford life turned around by a colleague and friend of Heidegger’s, a refugee, Frederic Spiegelberg, who introduced him to the vision of the perennial philosophy contained in Eastern religion. You know, the one UNESCO does forums on with the Dalai Llama in conjunction with Harvard and the same one Pavel Luksha sees as creating a universal psycho-spiritual wisdom tradition globally using education that we covered in the last post? Now, if that seems like a lot of commonality, it’s the tip of the iceberg to the books and papers I have accumulated, but we need to move on. Plus, I hope, everyone gets the point now. Good Tidings says ‘Discard’ instead of ‘Withdrawn,’ but its aims remain explicitly current. That’s probably why it was pulled from circulation, huh? Let’s see why.

Wagar was quite graphic about what he called the “telic process of the mind, in which man took control of his own evolution and moved forward deliberately.” Telic is just a fancy word from the Greek telos that goes to people’s purpose, motivations, and aims, which is exactly what UNESCO, with previous Rockefeller Foundation funding, has recently announced they are targeting in the name of Futures Literacy and the Discipline of Anticipation. Somebodies (plural) are quite determinedly pushing cultural evolution by using education to control consciousness and have been, per Wagar, for a long time. Contrary to the above rhetoric, or Phipps pretending that Evolution is just an idea whose time has suddenly come in our 21st century, we get Wagar describing a Korzybski as calling for “the perfection of a ‘science’ and art of human engineering,” which is, of course, how learning standards are now to work.

Has anyone asked any of us if we are OK with “the welfare of the race would be managed efficiently”? To listen to much of the False Narrative surrounding the Common Core and data privacy, such psychological human engineering is A-OK as long as it’s imposed somehow at the school or state level, even if the blueprints are global and decades in preparation. If the financiers of the False Narrative also believe, or want to make use of a widespread, instilled belief, that “the key to future progress, therefore, was ‘integrative thinking and behavior,’ ‘democratic planning for freedom,’ the engineering from an improved social psychology of democratic human cooperation [Remember ‘Soulcraft’?]…also came to feel that social and behavioral scientists would have to work hand in hand with churchmen to help provide the ethico-spiritual integration indispensable to social harmony.”

More interdisciplinary forums most of us will not get invited to. We all need to understand though that Wagar laid out, as so many others have, a desire to “make the supreme task of the behavioral and social sciences to make mankind conscious of itself, and therefore put the future of the race under the control of reason.” Education IS a behavioral and social science and it is the one most of us will encounter most often. It is mind and personality that is aimed at and a belief that our collective culture, human intentions, and aims are all malleable because “the possibility of progress is open to man because he was educable, and because he had learned to control his environment through the sciences…Human beings today were born with the same emotions and powers as savages…Since the variable factor, the factor that may be altered indefinitely, is the social conditions which call out and direct the impulses and sentiments, the positive means of progress lie in the application of intelligence to the construction of proper social devices.”

That’s what learning standards are, as well as phenomenon-based learning curricula, or formative assessments. They are just three real-life examples of “proper social devices” for human engineering of the psychological internal universe of the student in order to implement normative philosophies of the future such as social reconstruction and social justice.

I could go on, but the rest of these quotes simply reenforce the recognition that the rest of us need to grasp as well. If political authority, at any level, and cultural institutions like schools, universities, and churches are all being led to believe that “In man, evolution has entered a new phase, no longer biological, but moral and spiritual” and that “‘psychosocial’ progress” can be made by compelling what those moral and spiritual practices are to be until they become instilled Habits of Mind, we need to recognize those aims.

Because those aims have NOT been discarded or withdrawn, unlike so many of the books that laid them out.

‘

Triggers of Action: Carving the Noetic Keels Needed for Politics to Steer Society and People

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Robin

Serendipity has always been one of my favorite words. I used to tell my children that a great vocabulary word has a sentence full of meaning in a single word. Several weeks ago I was out of town and catching up on emails when an investment newsletter just happened to use the following quote to make a point:

“A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.”–Kenneth Boulding, University of Michigan

Yes, that is a troubling quote, but I recognized the name as being the professor I had cited in my book Credentialed to Destroy. He was behind the push that began in the 1970s to force ‘systems thinking’ into the classrooms. The quote was credited to a 1957 bestseller I had never heard of called The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard. Getting that book zoomed to the top of my To Do list even before I knew that the quote introduced a section of the book called “Persuading Us as Citizens.” It covered how the motivational research the PR and marketing firms were using to sell products and services had been introduced into politics in order to “influence the state of our mind and to channel our behavior as citizens.”

What was then at least understood by its dispensers as ‘depth psychology,’ and controversial enough to drive a bestselling tell-all explaining it, is precisely what is now known as Whole Child Education and Deep Learning. It must be used by teachers and principals, who may never have encountered anyone explaining the true background of these practices and techniques. Why? To be deemed Effective. This is why I created the term Inadvertent Change Agent in my book. It is also tied to what the new K-12 federal legislation, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), mandates as the means of establishing ‘success’.

“Forced ideological homogenization” and “equitable economic development” have long been regarded as necessary components of an attempt by systems thinkers to reorganize society and individuals and redefine what constitutes ‘self-reliance.’ I am really getting tired of all these non-asterisked redefinitions, aren’t you? There was a February 1976 annual meeting of Boulding’s General Systems Research Group followed the next day by a meeting at Harvard of virtually every group we have ever covered on this blog or in the book including representatives from the Club of Rome and the World Order Models Project. I located the minutes of the meetings in a book which was kind enough to tell us this:

“in order to carry out the program proposed by the model, one really has to carry out very deep structural and attitudinal changes. This is why we say that the main problem is a sociopolitical, not a material, resource kind of problem, in the sense that there are paths and strategies which can take us to the satisfaction of basic needs. But the main problem remains of a sociopolitical nature.”

Good thing, huh, that systems thinkers specialize in a remaking of education and the creation of think tanks and a public policy network that will cause politicians to believe that they need to mandate and plan all these areas in the name of Equitable Economic Development? In fact, that is what the 2014 federal legislation–WIOA–now has all states and localities on record as planning. Since all the legislation to force the needed sociopolitical changes is now in place in the US, let’s go back to see what motivational research already knew in the 50s. After all the Congressionally created and White House visiting League of Innovative Schools was created to obtain desired research into what ‘motivates’ students.

Boulding, in a 1973 paper he wrote for the Social Science Education Consortium, laid out his interest in viewing the “whole human being as a system” whose “concepts and perceptions are often strongly influenced by our motives.” Is it any wonder then that motives have been officially targeted for research and that ‘concepts and perceptions’ are officially required for annual assessment via ESSA? Vance Packard shorthanded Motivational Research and its goals and techniques as MR in his book The Hidden Persuaders so we will too as we access some of its insights as to why education is now taking the same techniques and forcing them deceitfully on classrooms and students everywhere.

Packard quoted the magazine Advertising Age as stating the wide use of MR in politics–“This is all to the good.” What was not good, however, was the “growing public discussion of the importance of advertising in politics.” If public awareness that politicians were seeking to influence them emotionally and at subconscious and unconscious levels was problematic in the 50s, by all means let me continue to try to force a discussion of these same MR methods into K-12 education now. After all, if ‘role playing’ is a ‘psychological technique’ used to ‘modify the behavior and attitudes’ when it is used on ‘key personnel’ in large industrial organizations, it still has that same function when it becomes a required classroom practice for students.

If an insurance exec admitted role playing was used widely because “we needed a motivational device…[that] at the same time teaches at the emotional level,” that remains true when the methods are transferred from adults to the far more malleable minds of students. When Packard quoted the book The Engineering of Consent on how the MR methods are of “considerable value…to those who wish to modify society” and that “People must be controlled by manipulating their [instincts and emotions] rather than by changing their reasonings,” we get to remember that quote when the Davos crowd suddenly this month calls for https://www.weforum.org/reports/new-vision-for-education-fostering-social-and-emotional-learning-through-technology .

That’s even more true once we realize that MR users in the 50s knew already that “if you are engineering consent, then I think the social sciences would like to warn you that you should begin with a basic analysis of three levels upon which consent moves in a society like ours.” Try not to get ill when we recognize that education now is all about manipulating level two and public policy think tanks and many pundits from every spectrum and announced party affiliation are all about targeting level three. The man being quoted above and below is a social anthropologist Lyman Bryson describing 1953 seminars on the social sciences held at Teachers College, Columbia for PR firms. My bolding.

“The first level, he said, is human nature. He added that little really could be done here to ‘manipulate’ people. The second level was cultural change, which is where you must operate, he said, if you want to influence people’s ideas. The third level is the region of choice. Here is where an impulse is running in a particular direction, and some sort of choice will be made regardless, ‘as when a choice between similar products [think tank or media deceit functions here] is made.’ At this level, he said, ‘it is relatively easy to manipulate people.’ On the other hand, if you are trying to change their ideas, ‘you work on the second level,’ where different ‘psychological pressures, techniques, and devices from those successful on the third level’ must be used.”

Think of that quote and the ubiquity of the School Choice mantra that the think tanks push as their solution to education and the needs of public policy. Suddenly the imperviousness of the phrase to facts that show there is actually no choice becomes clearer. Likewise, Packard quoted a Dr Samuel Stouffer, director of Harvard’s Laboratory of Social Relations telling his listeners that “it was a good working rule that people’s attitudes are more easily reached through their emotions than through their intellects.” Back to role playing and a Whole Child emphasis and that Science of Virtues, then, huh?

It should bother us a great deal that Dr Stouffer considered that to be ‘learning theory’ research. Looking for ‘triggers of action’ in the form of words or visuals, learning theory even in the 50s knew that “behaviors can be changed by changing ‘the motivational forces working upon them.'” Think about that when you reread Chapter 7 of my book about how the Common Core and Competency-based education really target values, attitudes, and beliefs. If people are systems as Boulding and others hoped, then those are the areas that must be changed in order for personal behavioral goals to change as well. Once again the redefinitions kick in as the socially reengineered student, and then adult, gets described as ‘autonomous.’ It’s called Hidden Persuaders for a reason as the MR techniques “can create wants in people that they still didn’t realize existed.”

Trained through learning tasks and classroom experiences to act. Requiring ‘performance standards’ precisely to force daily practice with engineered mental models and manipulated emotions. Meanwhile no one planned to disclose the engineered existence of an internalized noetic keel consciously carved during years of preschool-high school ‘student-centered’ education. Carved precisely so that politicians and agency planners can steer society as they wish and reward cronies as they want. Packard ended his book with this worry:

“The most serious offense many of the depth manipulators commit, it seems to me, is that they try to invade the privacy of our minds. It is this right to privacy in our minds–privacy to be either rational or irrational–that I believe we must strive to protect.”

Federal law now requires, and states and schools, public and private, everywhere are happy to go along with, a now mandated invasion of the privacy of our minds. That’s the purpose of education research and the mandated databases. Longitudinal is another word for what used to be called more clearly ‘time series data’. The point is not what is personally identifiable, but the changes over time to allow this desired steering process. Packard was lucky. He was able to get the word out to enough people that MR became notorious. So it went underground and got new names and is now mandated for all of our children. To ultimately control enough of us for this steering to guide all institutions, but installed through deceitful false narratives and K-12 education.

Let me end with the remaining purpose that I believe has motivated who has been deemed acceptable for the Presidency and other political offices by either party since at least 1988. I think it is why ESSA and WIOA were “Bipartisan and Bicameral” as necessary components of the mostly invisible steering process. It’s 2016 and the oligarchs think it has taken far too long for what was planned in earnest from the 1950s on. Removing all obstacles, down to the level of the mental models of our minds, that might block the planned:

“most important social engineering role of them all–the gradual reorganization of human society, piece by piece and structure by structure.”

Person by person, starting with the children and euphemised as being about Learning, Student Growth, and Success for All.

Leapfrogging Via Deceit that Crucial Last Obstacle to the Long Sought Convergence to Collectivism

Posted on January 11, 2016 by Robin

Collectivism is one of those loaded words that sounds like I am trying to create a furor. Unfortunately, in this case, whatever the personal intentions of Texas Governor Abbott when he called Friday, January 8, for a Constitutional Convention, the actual release http://gov.texas.gov/files/press-office /Restoring_The_Rule_Of_Law_01082016.pdf may be one of the more deceitful documents I have ever read. It is deeply irritating to continue to be referred to as one of ‘the governed.’ Although since I live in Georgia, perhaps it is only Texans that are to be quietly subjugated at this point. Perhaps the author of the paper, a Texas Public Policy Foundation (another Atlas Network member) employee, Thomas Lindsay, who was previously with the National Endowment for the Humanities, is unaware that the phrase ‘We the People’ is now being used by radicals all over the world to promote the concept of a binding, collectivist, normative view of ‘democracy’.

Maybe the call of UT-Texas prof Sanford Levinson in his 2006 book Our Democratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It) for just such a Con Con that is tied to the Soros-financed American Constitution Society’s desire to have a new Constitutional vision by 2020 (began in 2005 as explained here) http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/progressive-polyphonic-federalism-invisibly-binds-people-and-places-to-the-just-society-vision/ was somehow news to TPPF and Dr Lindsay. It certainly looks like a Convergence, however, especially given all the insistence in the paper that the Rule of Law is the core value America was founded on. Excuse me?

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that ‘We the People’ just happens to be the name of an initiative Community-Organizer Extraordinaire Harry Boyte, who inspired President Obama and has worked on White House education initiatives, has created to be the so-called Third Way, neither Left or Right, to use education to get his ‘cooperative commonwealth’ vision in place. https://www.kettering.org/sites/default/files/product-downloads/We_The-People_Politics.pdf Maybe it’s a coincidence that Boyte created that paper originally for a Dewey lecture in 2007 and it just happens to fit John Dewey’s vision for how to create the right kind of consciousness via education to fit a normative democracy where the law would bind everyone to the common good vision. The one laid out in the 2008 Democracy in a Global World book that I tracked from looking at Amartya Sen’s work covered in the last post.

Let’s start pushing on all these ‘coincidences’ headed in a common direction. The quote that “Our nation was built on one principle above all others–the Rule of Law” is not simply false, it is false in a way that is useful in jettisoning the principles our Nation and its existing Constitution were founded on–the primacy of the individual. Lindsay is correct that at the federal level, politics is broken. That dysfunction, however, is no reason to reverence the Law so state and local governments can turn each individual into merely the Governed. It is facetious to argue, as that Con Con advocacy paper does, that “The whole point of the rule of law is that we comply with it even when we do not want to; otherwise, it is the will of man and not the rule of law that reigns supreme.” Huh? That’s the kind of sophistry a wannabe tyrant would assert.

As Daniel Hannan quoted Baron de Montesquieu as saying in his 2013 book Inventing Freedom: “I am in a country which scarcely resembles the rest of Europe. England is passionately fond of liberty, and every individual is independent.” When the phrase ‘We the People’ is used in various American 18th century documents it is referring to independent, sovereign individuals who believe in a “unique legal system that made the state subject to the people rather than the reverse.” That TPPF framing of the Rule of Law is the Continental View of the Law that Hannan contrasted with the very different “philosophy…from the common-law conception of a free society as an aggregation of free individuals.” It is a view of law grounded in collectivism, as Hannan noted, and “in particular, from Rousseau’s belief in the ‘general will’ of the people in place of the private rights of citizens.”

A conception of the Law grounded in the visionary who gave rise to both Fascism and Communism as the basis for a call to jettison the current Constitution is apparently what the admitted Left as well as quite a few Atlas members want as well. A reverence for individuality is an obstacle to the Convergence apparently. The US Constitution is in the way. I am going to use a particular essay “The Global Public and Its Problems” to illustrate what was meant by John Dewey by the term ‘Creating a Public’ through educational practices. In 1927 Dewey wrote a book The Public and Its Problems which called for a communitarian form of citizen loyalty as being necessary to create the public will and values to make democracy sustainable. This is not democracy as some kind of representative government with periodic elections, but democracy in the sense that Boyte calls the cooperative commonwealth, Marx called the Human Development Society, and the UN now calls Dignity for All by 2030.

In other words, there are reasons that the concepts from a 1927 book remain relevant in the 21st Century as the first chapter of my book Credentialed to Destroy made clear. Dewey defined the Public as a community where “its members recognize a common interest in confronting problems they all face and see resolving these problems by means of collective action as a common good.” Regular readers will recognize the current concept of Fostering Communities of Learners as the measure of what constitutes being an Effective Principal as using the school to now prepare students for a future where they get to be a mere member of Dewey’s concept of a Public. Needless to say, Dewey’s Public needs a strong, anti-individual view of the law to bind individuals to this broader vision.

Here is where the story laid out in the essay gets really interesting and directly relevant to our Convergence today. “Problem-solving is used as a self-building process” where “education figures prominently.” In fact Dewey called on it, like Boyte, for “bringing a certain integrity, cohesion, feeling of sympathy and unity among the elements of our population.” This, of course, can only happen in socioeconomically integrated schools with no tracking. The kind of deliberative democracy envisioned then and now can really only go on at the local level. In the late 1960s, that essay announced that (my bolding):

“the Eurocommunists (misleadingly so described because they included Communist party theorists and leaders from Japan and parts of South America as well as from Italy, France, Spain, and Great Britain) rejected this standpoint [the bourgeois/proletarian distinction] in favor of one that posited general democratic and political norms, potentially shared by them and by champions of capitalism within their respective nations.”

Couldn’t we describe that as the model for today’s Convergence we are seeing by the so-called Left and Right think tanks? Doesn’t that fit with the video in the comments of the previous post of Pastor Rick Warren this year moderating a forum with Professor Cornel West and Professor Robert George, the founder of Atlas member–American Principles Project? Have we once again returned to Dewey’s view of education, political life, and social policy that the Eurocommunists also used that “resisted both sides of this orientation by seeking common democracy building social projects.” I was at a forum last week where Policy Link founder Angela Glover Blackwell was the Keynote Speaker and the admitted radicals seem just as hesitant to admit they are now working with Big Business and Chambers of Commerce to advance their vision of a Just Future.

Yet we know that is already going on in the required local and state WIOA boards. It sounds just like the Eurocommunists who were “prepared to respect those with procapitalist attitudes, including capitalists themselves, insofar as they were sincerely prepared to engage in joint democracy-enhancing projects.” Isn’t that arresting to read as we continue to stumble across these clear collaborations and common visions among public policy think tanks and politicians that supposedly have nothing in common. Governments at all levels are in charge of us with the law as the enforcer of the vision in a world where suddenly “a Deweyan public comprising adherents of both egalitarian and neoliberal philosophies is possible, provided that neither camp is hypocritical in its professed commitment to solving common macro problems.”

No wonder Atlas member employees suddenly seem so fond of citing Justice Brandeis that “it is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” If the citizens consent. That must be why the University of Texas-Austin is working with Stanford on the national Growth Mindset study and doing such a loud and explicit declaration of experimenting on students to change their conscious and unconscious mental models. All consensual. Not.

Reverence for the Rule of Law and Education for Democracy are just the thing in a nation where a Republican Governor calls for a Constitutional Convention with a paper that tells us again that “It is wise, therefore, in every government, and especially in a republic, to provide means for altering, and improving the fabric of government, as time and experience, or the new phases of human affairs, may render proper, to promote the happiness and safety of the people.” That’s the view of Law from the Continent where as Aldous Huxley noted, rights are taken, but never given.

That’s the world of the Governed, the serf, and the subject, which is indisputedly where both WIOA and ESSA and a world where the White House has a Behavioral and Social Sciences Team working to change the nature of citizens at the levels of their minds and personalities. I just was not expecting the State of Texas to play such a prominent role in launching this new view of education and what it will now mean to be an American in the future.

Remember with Dewey’s methods comes the totality of his underlying vision. Suddenly the title’s reference to Collectivism is perfectly on point.

Can Bicameralism and Proper Presentment now bind individuals to everything 21st Century state and local governments choose to impose?

No wonder there is such a consistent push to teach through ideas, concepts, and themes now instead of a body of facts. Facts are a useful tool of the individual, but inappropriate without permission for the ‘Governed.’

Rejecting Reading to Avoid the Magic Elixir Bolstering of the Independent Human Mind

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Robin

We are making a pit stop in our discussion of the actual global vision of how to use K-12 education to create revolutionary transformations in our social, economic, and political systems without bothering to get consent. That’s some definition of democracy, huh? We are just going to talk today about reading and why political radicals do not want a widespread ability to read well anymore. If I was a sarcastic sort, I could have called this post “Literacy to Create Malleable Illiterates Via Stealth,” but since I do not have an ironic bone in my body I decided to refrain. Ooops, maybe not. I also want to dedicate the revelations I am about to volunteer to long-time UK Reading Instruction Advocate Mona McNee, who is now 91, ailing, and wondering why authorities there continue to reject her fine work that she has made freely available. This is for you, Mona.

I have explained repeatedly that it is individual perception of reality that K-12 education seeks to attack. Within the last week the World Bank in its 2015 Report was kind enough to admit to us that it is subjective mental models being targeted in case anyone wants to think that the aspirations I am about to lay out were limited to a particular time or place. http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/Publications/WDR/WDR%202015/WDR-2015-Full-Report.pdf Now that we have recent confirmation that this all still matters, let’s go back to the Soviet Union of 1929, the year after John Dewey’s troubling trip there that I described in my book Credentialed to Destroy . Deeply disturbed that what translates into English as Abstract Objectivism and rational views of causality and “a reverence for ‘fact’ understood not in a dialectical sense but as something fixed and stable” are all impeding the revolutions in all spheres envisioned by Marx and Engels, a VN Volosinov decided it was time for Marxism to directly alter the prevailing view of language.

Why? We all want to reasonably ask. Because the traditional dictionary view of print removes words “from the pressures of the social struggle,” which is of course not OK to an ideology that turns out to be more about historical progression through various economic stages than who actually, technically, owns what. Reading instruction, like what could go on in the classroom generally, then became a means in a political struggle with the goal being to alter “the conscious, subjective human psyche” just as the World Bank still admits is its target. Both want to get at human behavior and, then and now, Mental Models are the way in. I want to stop this historical discussion for just a second to link this to our CTE emphasis in the previous post.

http://maxteaching.com/files/Cornell-U-MAX-Teaching-Study.pdf is called “Authentic Literacy Applications in CTE: Helping All Students Learn” and is used by SREB’s High Schools that Work and was created by one of the listed consultants, James Stone. It’s all about paying attention to context and situations as a guide to how words are to be interpreted, just as Volosinov wanted. We could even describe this vision of authentic CTE Literacy as dialectical. Again, this all may seem from far away, but these aims remain current. In fact, the book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language was translated into English in 1973 with Harvard controlling the English copyright. Alert readers will recognize that’s precisely when the World Order Models Project began as well as the Rand Change Agent Study looking into why the 60s radical education reforms described in Chapter 6 of my book did not go as envisioned.

One more fascinating detail setting up the assault of what would be called psycholinguistics or Whole Language in the West initially. In August 1977 Harvard Educational Review published an article by Lauren Resnick (creator of the terms Rigor and Higher Order Thinking Skills 10 years later and also on the Common Core validation committee. See Tag) and Daniel Resnick called “The Nature of Literacy: An Historical Exploration.” The paper states that it was financed by the US National Institute of Education and written during the Resnicks’ stay at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where so much of the other elements of Radical Ed Reform and Economic Justice theory also took place. The article argues that a goal of mass literacy is unprecedented in US history and that such a goal creates the need for a new way to teach reading.

The article does not fit with my knowledge of reading history, but the mere existence of the article becomes the cite for a new way to teach reading to be imposed on all schools, especially in urban areas. That new way of teaching reading would put the emphasis not on sounds and letters since that would be a static, fixed “concern with the cadavers of written languages,” but on understanding the meaning of words “in a particular, concrete context.” The idea was that this method of teaching reading would allow language to be adaptable and changeable and fit to be a means for altering an individual’s subjective psyche to fit with the beliefs needed for the hoped-for transformations.

It is a view of language grounded in the oral traditions of preliterate or aboriginal people where words are understood to have varying meanings depending on their use to describe real things. That’s what Whole Language hoped to accomplish back in the 70s and it’s what the Common Core’s use of the required Close Reading and the term Literacy seem to mean now. It is what Volosinov said was “understanding in the proper sense of the word, i.e., orientation in the particular given context and in the particular, given situation–orientation in the dynamic process of becoming and not ‘orientation’ in some inert state.”

Dictionaries, textbooks, lectures, traditional algebra not tied to the actual world but as an abstract tool, and systematic phonetic instruction of reading are all treating language as an inert state. None of these are suitable for a world that is supposed to be in the process of guided transformations and historical change along a hoped-for pathway. In other words, none of these instructional changes is about a better way to teach or an argument over content. At its rotten core this is about traditional practices that innoculate the human mind against manipulation from outside. That’s not acceptable anytime political authority insists it has the right to transform the mental models of the masses. That was the aspiration of Power in Russia in 1929. Unfortunately it lays behind the real aspirations in the US and elsewhere in 2014.

Volosinov said that “one of Marxism’s fundamental and most urgent tasks is to construct a genuinely objective psychology, which means a psychology based on sociological [emphasis in original text], not physiological or biological, principles.” Marxism did just that and the Soviets researched precisely how to access and impact the individual, objective psyche and in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, as again I explained in the book and am supplementing here, the US imported and translated that research. It took that Marxian objective psychology and made implementing it in the classroom to alter individual students’ perceptions from the inside-out the emphasis of education degree programs, especially doctorates. It took away the offensive, but accurate, M label and simply declared the practices and policies to be Pedagogy.

Classrooms were to be experiential and those experiences were created to alter subjective perception in prescribed ways. If there was a popular outcry, parents and taxpayers were deceitfully told this was a dispute over how to teach reading and math and that the administrators were the degreed professionals that must be deferred to. Political radicals have long understood that words and vocabulary “constitute the foundation, the skeleton of inner life” and the are absolutely determined this time to irreversibly alter it. Since skeleton has a yucky factor, the same philosophy gets better names like schema, mental models, or Frameworks. The intention is the same.

What was italicized by Volosinov as superficial phonetic empiricism is a view of language that was and is in the way of the (also italicized) unity of the social milieu and the unity of the immediate social event of communication. Must be relevant to a person in a way that engages them and tied to real world problems and active and experiential like projects would be the current update of what Volosinov sought. Language must always be viewed in context just as Literacy-in-CTE lays out now.

Abstract Objectivism as a traditional, rational, content-focused subject matter view of the purpose of education and a dictionary-based phonetic view of language quite simply “exclude any possibility for the speaker’s consciousness to be actively in touch with the process of historical evolution.” Got that? Here, quickly, are the problems with language and academics unless they are playing a role in the “dynamic process” of changing what an individual values and believes.

1) The factor of stable self-identity in linguistic forms takes precedence over their mutability.

2) The abstract takes precedence over the concrete.

3) Abstract systematization takes precedence over historical actuality.

4) The forms of elements take precedence over the form of the whole.

5) Reification of the isolated linguistic element to the neglect of the dynamics of speech.

6) Singularization of word meaning and accent to the neglect of its living multiplicity of meaning and accent.

7) The notion of language as a ready-made artifact handed down from one generation to another.

8) Inability to conceptualize the inner generative process of a language.

That last one really is a confession of the extent to which the ideological focus requires drilling down into all the mental tools any individual is to have access to. This is fascinating, isn’t it, and explains so much that was previously inexplicable.

Good thing for us that the earlier “idea of language as a system of conventional, arbitrary signs of a fundamentally rational nature [as] propounded by representatives of the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century” has not yet been completely decimated by this M view of language and academic knowledge.

Equality, Fraternity, Democracy, Social Cohesion, Real Utopias and the Electronic Republic

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Robin

If our 21st Century Lives were just a televised game of Jeopardy, the title would be the answer that would be linked to the championship. The correct question would be: What are the real goals envisioned when Education Reformers, politicians, and Political Radicals use the misleading term ‘standards’ in K-12 education? When that transformative Global Partnership we met in the last post says in bold face type on page 8 that “the pursuit of deep learning goals enabled by new pedagogies and accelerated by technology” is a Moral Imperative that will “guide all of our work,” what goals are really intended? The first part of the title comes from a paper published in the 1999 ASCD Yearbook called “The Role of Standards in Educational Reform for the 21st Century.” We actually do not have to assume that there is a link since one of the co-authors, Peter Hill, is also listed as a participant in the new Global Partnership on page 2 as one of its educational consultants.

http://www.carmelcrevola.com/publications/The_role_of_standards.pdf is the paper that once again makes it clear that the word standards is now being used as an Orwellian synonym. Translating the Common Core State Standards accurately then by its real purpose would be Common Behavioral and Dispositional Goals for All American Students, No Exceptions. Put together by DC-based trade groups hoping to cash in from the attached new vision of a politically-planned economy and society. Perhaps staffers who got to go on one of those trade junkets to China and thought that vision would work better for them. Hill made it clear on page one that the role of standards is to foster “values such as equality, fraternity, and democracy” indicating he may have always wanted to participate in the Storming of the Bastille. Best not to teach why such insistences can lead to a bloody Terror followed by a Napoleon.

Standards also allow for the “flexible, dynamic, and highly-skilled workforce” unlikely to ever create that Change the World innovation that destroys the existing business of a political crony. Ooops! That was my editorializing in a snarky manner on the real purpose, just like in my book. Page 2 mentions standards as a means for countries now to “ensure social cohesion” and page 3 sees standards as a transformative tool for a “society that values equity and a ‘fair go’ for all.”

The latest book tied to the World Order Models Project, the 2008 The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy by Daniele Archibugi, wants to make “prevailing world public opinion” the determinant of what governments ought to be doing on behalf of their people, the governed, in the 21st Century. That aim, of course, puts quite a premium on manipulating that opinion from the Cradle to the Grave, as the current political slogan goes. Or Womb to Tomb in another variation. Archibugi does want a radical transformation where by “virtue of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the subsequent pacts, individuals have been endowed with positive rights that they can claim from their own states,” preferably at the local level via those ever compliant mayors, City Councils, and appointed regional commissions who just love federal grants.

Now you know why that Declaration just keeps coming up now in classroom activities. Archibugi wants this radical transformation in world politics to come about by persuasion, not force, which is of course all the more reason to utilize K-12 education. All the mentions of citizenship and civic competence we keep encountering, make much more sense when we recognize the plan to “demand a role for the citizens of the world” to insist that their “human rights” be provided by their governments. Perhaps as a “moral imperative”? All the mentions of dialogue and creating shared meaning make much more sense when we read again of an intention to bypass elected representatives in favor of:

“creating better and transparent contexts for decision-making. This is why new channels of representation must open up through which the various opinions may be expressed in a dialogical rather than antagonistic fashion. To be effective these channels demand a greater willingness on the part of individuals to participate in the management of global public matters. The making of a global commonwealth of citizens requires that individuals are prepared to act on the ground of key shared values. What principles of political action must the citizen of the world subscribe to?”

That would be the real reason for new pedagogies and forms of assessment to see if the desired principles of political action, needed workforce skills to be an obedient, compliant drone, and desired personality traits are in place. Adding to the quotes from the previous post, this is why New Pedagogies insists the new “goals for education and learning” include “skills that prepare all learners to be life-long creative, connected and collaborative problem solvers and to be healthy, happy individuals who contribute to the common good.”

Now we could make a good case that I contribute to the common good by reading books on all these plans of transformation and then tying them to what is coming to a school and classroom or your business place soon, but I believe Michael Fullan, Pearson, the OECD, and the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations want it to be their idea of appropriate values and the common good. Given all the references to ‘consensus,’ ‘shared purpose,’ and ‘collective will,’ there really does seem to be an organized attempt to erase any concept of individual sovereignty capable of standing supreme against the state. I guess that is what happens when you import your instructional practices from the Soviet Union, nurture the economic vision in a place that worshipped Mao, and look to rich universities full of wanna-be political and social planners for the vision of what “We the People” is supposed to mean in the 21st Century.

The 1995 book The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age, written by a former NPR President and head of the NBC News Division, laid out the planned transition to a participatory democracy using ICT technology. Upfront it asked “What will it take to turn the United States into a nation of qualified citizens who are engaged not as isolated individuals pursuing their own ends but as public-spirited members who are dedicated to the common good?” Why, K-12 education reform centered on the Whole Child and guiding perceptions and a curriculum focused on learning by doing and real world problems of course. Lawrence K. Grossman left NBC News to be a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and work on the democracy project that became that book. It’s where Jal Mehta of the New Pedagogies Project graduated from before moving on to Harvard’s Ed School to use its graduates as tools for the desired public policy changes. http://www.slidefinder.net/t/the_20chastened_20dream_20notes/thechasteneddream–withnotes/13854681

It’s also where the co-authors of the books in the Real Utopias Project, Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, are professors. The Kennedy School is also heavily involved now, by the way, with creating ties between the US and China. CELAP from our last post, in fact, is referred to as China’s answer to the Kennedy School. Real Utopia came out of an actual conference at the University of Wisconsin in January 2000, a good time to commence 21st Century Re-Do Plans I suppose. Now think for a second how a deep knowledge of history and human nature full of facts might get in the way of this purpose:

“The Real Utopias Project embraces this tension between dreams and practice. It is founded on the belief that what is pragmatically possible is not fixed independently of our imaginations, but is itself shaped by our visions. Self-fulfilling prophecies are powerful forces in history, and while it may be Pollyanna-ish to say ‘where there is a will there is a way,’ it is certainly true that without ‘will’ many ‘ways’ become impossible. Nurturing clear-sighted understandings of what it would take to create social institutions free of oppression is part of creating a political will for radical social changes to reduce oppression. A vital belief in a utopian destination may be necessary to motivate people to leave on the journey from the status quo in the first place, even though the actual destination may fall far short of the utopian ideal.”

It may also create students like what we are seeing in Denver, Colorado and what we saw during the heyday of the Occupy demonstrations who have no acquaintance with any factual knowledge from the past. Where will they be when OPM-Other People’s Money-inevitably runs out? Can they become self-sufficient as an adult or will change by force, rather than persuasion, feel like the justified response?

Is there any place in history where deposing sovereignty from the individual and placing it in a collective under political control, actually ever diminished oppression? Guaranteed to ignite would be the reality. No wonder perception and student daily experiences are being so manipulated.

Next time we will come back to the new view of politics in a Real Utopia and the Electronic Republic where we each get to be governed.

Censorship Before the Fact: Prescribing What the Child Does and Believes Invisibly but Reliably Binds the Adult

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Robin

The problem with censorship, apart from the loss of personal liberty not to have governments intervene in what we think and how we must act, is two-fold if you are a wanna-be Steerer of Human Keels in the 21st Century. Some information always gets through and everyone knows that their flow of information is being regulated and manipulated. By using K-12 education globally in the 21st Century to “control learning experiences” or creating behavioral goals for what students are to “think and do” and then euphemistically labelling those aims as “standards” or “outcomes,” our Steersmen get to create what I am going to call Censorship Before the Fact. They intend to rule and they get to control what most of us will pay attention to, or ignore, in our daily lives. Plus we will not try to resist what we do not even recognize is there.

Win, Win if the 21st Century continues in the existing desired direction globally where those who are elected at any level of government are being told repeatedly they get to govern, in the literal sense of the word, those who elected them. We cannot resist what we are unaware of and my job on this blog now and in my book previously has been to point out the things that are intended to bind us without our active knowledge or genuine consent. Yesterday this story caught my eye http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/09/is-hong-kong-on-brink-of-its-own-version-of-tiananmen-square/. I knew at least the Hong Kong people could see how the same education reforms being adopted in K-12 globally have been designed to change what their young people value, believe, know, and perceive. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/using-education-to-shut-down-free-choices-and-then-redefining-as-personal-autonomy-orwell-lives/

I want to go back to the 2014 book The Fourth Revolution that I first mentioned in the September 21 post (2 back).

“China is doing more than promoting a web of connections: It is deliberately promoting a model. When foreign officials come to China [Heads Up!! This means our mayors and state Governors and Chambers of Commerce on ‘Trade Missions’], their tutors at places like CELAP [China Executive Leadership Academy at Pudong. It is elsewhere described as the ‘cadre training school’ that is “an organization bent on world domination”] now emphasize the virtues of the Chinese model–the way the state can focus on national champions or attract foreign investment into special economic zones or ensure the entrepreneurs join the Communist Party [substitute believe and act on the desired Big Ideas and it will fit the era here of new SATs and formative assessments] and thereby contribute to political stability as well as economic dynamism. They also compare China’s sleek government [no visits then to their troubling Ghost Cities] with America’s gridlock and India’s chaos. The government has seeded Confucius Institutes in universities across the world and is trying to use the Boao Forum for Asia as an ideological counterweight to Davos.”

We can just imagine how joyful the veterans of these trade junkets to China are to have had the US Congress enact that Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act in July now requiring all states and localities to create state and local economic development plans tied to education.http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/priority-economic-citizenship-for-some-officially-sanctioned-status-as-prey-for-most-of-us/ I just want to point out that the Confucius Institutes mentioned are the same ones the College Board announced a formal alliance with this summer. Common Core Chief Architect David Coleman even made a very odd servile comment about “They are the Sun and we are the Moon.” The Boao Forum mentioned left Asia for the first time for a meeting and decided Seattle, Washington with Microsoft support and Bill Gates keynoting was a good place to meet. Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who presided over the taxpayer bailout of political favorites during the financial meltdown in 2008, also is deeply involved with Boao.

All of that is relevant to what is coming to the US, Canada, UK, and Australia, but those are connections no one is supposed to be making. Since I have the planned template and blueprints, I know where to look and what counts as connected that would be off most people’s radar screens. We know though from Michael Barber’s Oceans of Innovation report for Pearson covered here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/descending-to-a-connected-kleptocracy-via-the-digital-learning-and-climate-change-ruses/ that he, the US Department of Education, and Pearson all see China and a collectivist future as where K-12 education reforms are going globally. I am sure it is totally coincidental that the book was published by a Pearson entity and the authors write for a different Pearson entity–The Economist.

Pearson, Microsoft, Intel, and a new entity headquartered in Washington State which has gathered actors from all over the world–Collaborative Impact–have developed a partnership designed to promote a new consistent vision for K-12 education globally. This lays out their vision http://www.newpedagogies.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/New_Pedagogies_for_Deep%20Learning_Whitepaper.pdf You may have noticed that today’s post is less about the how of K-12 ‘reforms’ and more about turning a spotlight on the mostly invisible end game. Before We are Bound and while the Necessary Keels are still being laid in the young people who are the voters of tomorrow.

Point Number 1 is that the report acknowledges these are all experimental practices based on behavioral theories. Students are guinea pigs because it is the desired change that is important, not the people being changed by fiat. Secondly, the list of organizations involved includes the federally-created Digital Promise and thus the White House sponsored League of Innovative Schools. Please do not tell me there’s no connection to the Common Core. Yes, because it has already passed Go, collected $200, and gone straight to the Competency-Based Next Generation learning all these entities are pushing globally. Third and most crucially, the wholesale changes are explicitly about “What kind of learning work prepares [students] to be healthy, happy, productive members of our new societies?”

Participants in a Collective in other words. Ruled and Governed. Although Michael Barber is a key component of this partnership, the Lead Global Change Agent is Canadian Michael Fullan. In his 2001 book The New Meaning of Educational Change, Fullan cited personal communication to him from Barber, who was then heading up the equivalent large-scale reform in the UK for Tony Blair. Usefully for us, is the statement that for governments to be successful in the long term requires “creating frameworks for the accountability of public services including education.” Remember in our new “joined-up capitalism” we have private vendors but public regulation of what they do and how they do it. The mirage of free enterprise. Corporatist Enterprise as I have seen it called. Anyone surprised to learn that last week the Center for Reinventing Public Education and Fordham released those very accountability standards to go along with the Common Core?

Secondly, Barber acknowledged K-12 reforms are only a means to a transformative end. Getting there requires “placing education at the heart of a wider approach to social and economic renewal.” Elsewhere Fullan wrote that schools and adults needed to leave “Nostalgia behind” them and focus on the “knowledge and skills your children will need as they become citizens and workers in the future.” Notice that order and the assumption education is about fitting future life roles, not equipping anyone for independent. rational personal decision-making. One more time, Fullan made it clear that this new type of learning that is about changing, prescribing, and then monitoring students’ thoughts and behaviors and ‘reculturing’ the schools to require just that was to “enable the present generation to adapt to this radically new and demanding world.”

Adapt means change. Adapt means transform. Legally imposing this via K-12 education is the kind of Censorship Before the Fact that would be resisted if done visibly or to adults with Axemaker Minds.

I want to stop here so next time we can tie everything we know is coming to our schools and classrooms to the latest vision (2008) to come out of WOMP apart from that Richard Falk essay cited in the previous post. It’s called cosmopolitan democracy and it ties to everything in this post and the previous ones on e-Governance and Deliberative Democracy grounded in Dialogue. It also fits with the Sharing Economy so many of our mayors and cities are signing on to.

Since no one else is willing to admit that all these global K-12 education reforms are about “moving from the polis, founded on borders, to that of the cosmopolis, founded on sharing,” I will keep at it until Epiphanies Abound.

I guess we have also found yet another reason why traditional American History is becoming forbidden. Did I mention the former Head of the Gates Foundation, Tom VanderArk, started pushing the Gates-funded/Russian-created Big History last week as well?

Or as I like to call it, History Suitable for a Collectivist Future anywhere in the World.

Treasure of Social Comity Requires Sacrifices of Individual Sovereignty

Posted on September 25, 2014 by Robin

Many of us have seen news reports in recent days on student walkouts in the Denver suburbs. The School Board wants to ensure that certain traditional areas are still emphasized in American history, while the students see the intervention as propaganda. The adults involved seem a bit shocked that what they see as facts is seen by high school students as an attempt to manipulate their belief systems. Why can’t the students properly understand who the People in the White Hats are in this controversy they seem to want to ask?

I think it would help if everyone understood high school is too late to introduce facts and knowledge into a curriculum that has long been about shaping values, attitudes, and beliefs in desired directions. The federal ed lab in Aurora, Colorado, McREL, after all, originated the transformational concept in K-12 education of Second Order Change http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/second-order-change-why-reform-is-a-misnomer-for-the-real-common-core/ many years ago to force irreversible change in students’ worldviews.

We can only repair the damage done if we appreciate what has happened in our schools and why. It relates to the e-Governance we started looking at in the last post as well as the creating the shared visions and collective purposes needed to effectively bind the individual to the decisions made by others. In his 1999 book The Double Helix: Technology and Democracy in the American Future, Edward Wenk laid out the new vision of politics our students are actually being prepared for. Government is to be “considered as a steering system and not simply a power broker.” This fits, attentive readers will remember, with the admitted use of conceptual understandings and the manipulated social construction of reality to create an invisible steerable keel in the students who are tomorrow’s citizens. Student-centered learning then instead of the subject-centered emphasis of old is necessary to build that keel. The ultimate consequences also fit with what Hayek warned us of in the previous post.

When the School Board tries to interject facts into the classroom, without appreciating that the keel is already there, it becomes easy for the adults closer to the classroom, who know what they have constructed over years, to steer the outrage. Facts=Propaganda if the Keel is already in place without parents, students, and most taxpayers knowing it’s there. Why is it there again? Ultimately, this generation of adolescents is being and has been primed to regard politics as a term used to “describe how elements of a diverse society use their power to bargain collectively, then strategies and tactics for their achievement, all within an agreed upon set of values and rules of engagement. This is American society in action.” That’s the vision of American society and politics the students are acting on, while the school board is still locked into a vision of traditional representative government.

“Consensus must be generated” so that governments can steer with a “high degree of harmony” towards a vision of Equity and social and economic justice for all. Many K-12 and college students have been thoroughly embedded in this vision for years. The Common Core is merely a means to make sure it is in place everywhere. Public or private. Suburbs, cities, or rural areas. To align the US with what is going on in other countries towards the same ends.

We adults are the ones who simply assumed that the education template had continued on much as it had previously been. Once social comity becomes the established goal of the future at all levels of governments, then “social functioning needs a consensus on goals and a mechanism for its generation and fulfillment.” We get that mechanism by K-12 and higher ed signing on, as well as the media, plus “whoever controls technology.” No wonder their related foundations are so involved.

ICT generates the visual images that serve as a “kaleidoscope” of what the future might be and are not bound by whatever has successfully existed before. Wenk wanted everyone to recognize that “Government is not mainly or the only machinery of governance. In American democracy, everyone should consider themselves part of government rather than holding it at arm’s length and figuratively holding the nose. Only by engagement through enlightened civic literacy, civic discourse and commitment can the diverse needs and desires of all be negotiated.” Hence the C3 Social Studies Framework and CCSSO prescribing desired Citizen Dispositions. As someone deeply steeped in history, this is a prescription for disaster, which is why accurate knowledge of the past is no longer being encouraged or much tolerated.

All the push surrounding Digital Learning and Laptops For All it should give us pause since Wenk recognized, and aimed for, what substituting those manufactured visuals and virtual reality would do to “critically alter the consciousness of the receptor.” That would be the student, your beloved child that you dropped off this morning and entrusted to a system intent on transformation. Well aware of the question that Wenk saw and intended to use: “What does information technology do TO us as well as FOR us.” In Wenk’s world government, industry, and people will all interact and then be bound by what the decision-makers decide. People are supposed to become satisfied with the ability to offer their opinions to “those who govern them.” If this seems like a scifi book or limited to one idealogue, it’s essentially the vision laid out by Marina Gorbis of the Institute for the Future in her 2013 book and speeches globally. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/weak-humanscomputersexpert-modelling-of-captured-data-is-this-your-approved-vision-of-the-21st/

It’s essentially the vision of the future and our new obligation to function as a collective that Richard Falk (of the Carnegie and Rockefeller-funded World Order Models Project) laid out recently here http://greattransition.org/publication/changing-the-political-climate-a-transitional-imperative . The new APUSH Framework and the La Pietra Conference we looked at in that trilogy of posts make much more sense when we are aware of a well-funded and determined effort across decades “about moving from the here of egoistic state-centrism to the there of humane geo-centrism.” Since Falk’s angry quotes at the time of the Boston Marathon bombing show he in no way wants a reality of hate to get in the way of his vision of the future, we can be sure that today’s tragic videos of sliced off heads will not change the vision either. It is up to us to recognize it.

Whether most of us are aware or not, Falk, the OECD, the UN entities, and public officials at all levels are pushing education and land use regulations designed to create the “citizen pilgrim” who “combines the identity of a participant in a community and the acknowledgment that the desired community does not presently exist, that its essential nature is to bond with a community that is in the midst of a birth process.” No wonder those Denver high school students believe accurate facts from America’s past constitute propaganda in the present. They are participating in a birthing process and many may hope to become midwives of it. No wonder we just keep encountering a required communitarian mindset lurking behind actual definitions of being Career Ready or having a Positive School Climate.

If everyone with political power globally is pushing a comparable vision of the collective future and that vision requires what Falk called “drastic shifts in political consciousness,” then preschool, K-12, and higher education will become dedicated to creating those very shifts. Those students are merely showing they are heeding the “call for an engaged citizenry responsive to the need and desire for a reconstituted future as well as a repaired present.” Why, it’s that Neanderthal School Board majority showing it has not yet yielded to the Transition clarion call that requires “infusing both political leadership and the electorate with the values and perceptions of the new realism.”

That again is the new realism that is actually not very realistic to those of us deeply grounded in knowledge of the past and conversant with what has ever created mass economic prosperity. No, we are apparently to be stuck with education designed to create over years “the engaged pilgrim devoted to the here and now of political action (as well as the pursuit of a visionary future), whether by way of exhibiting empathy and solidarity with the sufferings of those most vulnerable or by working toward innovative steps serving human and global interests.”

The good news in all this is that these students have been consciously subjected to behavioral engineering so that they will have Growth Mindsets that are malleable to change. They are only irreversible if parents, taxpayers, future employers, and the students themselves remain unaware of the deliberately constructed Worldview.

That they were subjected to fuzzy math and Whole Language precisely so that their perceptions could be manipulated.

The key to deconstructing the keel is to know it is there.

The key to defeating these open declarations of a planned transition to collectivism is knowing they exist.

Consider this post as joining my book Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon to be clarion calls towards defeating these collectivist aspirations. While there is still time.

Sounding the alarm truly is the beginning of the way back from the precipice.

Imaging the Past to Experience and Reshape the Present More Fully: APUSH as Social Science

Posted on September 3, 2014 by Robin

I tend to come at the same issues from a different approach in part because I usually pick up on all the terms that have quietly acquired a non-dictionary meaning. The real definitions completely change what people are actually admitting they intend to do. When it comes to history now, at whatever age, approach all courses or activities, even for elementary students, with a recognition that “Personal Transformation on our Minds” is the motto crooned to the tune of “Georgia on My Mind”. You will never be far off from what the real goals are. Facts are really only important in this view of history if they can be used to shift how we see ourselves or others in the present.

Did you know that historian Thomas Bender (he actually seems to prefer the term Humanities professor) from the previous APUSH post and another NYU historian (now Harvard) Walter Johnson, also at La Pietra, have each been fellows at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences since the Conference and before the formal relationship with the College Board began? History as a tool for altering human behavior in the present certainly puts the purposes of that otherwise mystifying Conceptual Framework in a new light, doesn’t it?

Did you know that back in 1934 the American Historical Association issued a Carnegie-financed report (remember they are now sponsoring Competency-Based Learning and so much more) called the “Report of the Commission of the Social Studies.” My thanks to the reader who read the previous post and directed my attention to this report on the american deception website. All the way back then, the AHA announced that “the American people are part of Western Civilization now merging into a world order.” Schools therefore needed to modify any coursework that would encourage “the traditional faith in economic individualism.” The US would be “embarking on vast experiments in social planning and control which call for large-scale cooperation on the part of the people.”

Compliant is probably a more apt description for the new desired attitudes, but the soothing PR sales pitch in the report is that “education so conceived is concerned with the development of rich and many-sided personalities capable of co-operating.” Education that continued to focus on subject-matter content would simply “intensify the conflicts, contradictions, maladjustments, and perils of the transition.” Just thinking of us then is why we have been lied to about what has been really going on. The view that school could become primarily a matter of social adjustment and experiences while the real purposes hid behind continuing use of Academic Course Names has been on the record for a very long time.

When I said in the last post that the La Pietra Conference immediately made me think of the World Order Models Project, the original book that I reached for was the 1990 Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community. That book was essentially the post-Soviet Blueprint of how to proceed to ‘reform’ the West as if it actually did not ‘win’ anything at all. It grew out of a 1988 Moscow Workshop that launched the Global Civilization Project. I know. Another lost invite. The essential premises going forward were that the era of the nation-state was over and that the historic state form was insufficient as a “political community.” Instead, the locality should be the focus of the political community and politics should now be reconceived as “purposive social action directed at the conditions of social existence.”

If you redefine “democratic theory” going forward as “a theory of social movements rather than states” and you do not want to tell the masses in case they do not want to go along with such an oligarchy power play, you hide the shifts in education. You create a Common Core and use Close Reading to foster the desired perceptions of “which human identities are crucial, what forms of social action are necessary, what political communities have to be created.” You use the school to create classroom practices that involve “politics as an everyday experience” and never disclose why. You create an APUSH Framework that is missing most of the crucial facts, but is full of activities and concepts offering students a means for “working out new understandings of themselves and bringing those understandings into the world.”

That’s because it’s the Flyv Social Science definition of understanding as grounded in subjective experience and how the student learns to perceive it using the provided concepts and disciplinary Big Ideas. I will pull one more nerdy word out of Robin’s Magical Glossary of Pertinent Education Terms: phronesis. Every time you see the word ‘understand’ from now on having to do with what students are to ‘know’ it means grounded in experience and perception and not logic or facts. A phronetic, Arational understanding is what the social scientists and educators intent on fundamental transformations call it and we should appreciate it is not a fact-grounded, analytical sense of the word ‘understanding.’ Is APUSH making more sense now?

How about if I add that Bender’s 1978 book Community and Social Change in America explained the now close relationships between sociologists and historians to create a means to “illuminate the dynamics of a complex society.” To use historical data and sociological ideas to examine “the ways in which the roles, statuses, and identities held by individual Americans changed over time.” Now that’s a view of the purpose of history that would fit right in with a Global Civilization Project interested in bypassing the factual history that might preserve the legitimacy of the nation-state. Instead we quietly build up senses of entitlement and grievance in social movements.

Bender acknowledged that “ideology can create a national community held together by emotional bonds similar to those associated with the social experience of community” that we are discussing here. What Bender seems to want to focus on as history is the “network of social relations in which the individual is embedded” and what the “structure of social experience is.” He wants to look for and hopefully use history coursework to start a course back towards relationships and interactions grounded in the “qualities of mutuality and sentiment associated with community.”

If that sounds like Bender is interested in fostering the kind of communitarianism we just keep stumbling across in the actual Common Core implementation, I think that is exactly right. It would also explain all the foundation sponsorship of the La Pietra Conference. It is history as a social practice of students and teachers acting as a community to explore the past to better appreciate what is wrong with the present.

I have one more place I want to look to put APUSH into perspective while once again encountering the communitarian emphasis that never seems to be far away from what will be imposed on students in a K-12 school or classroom. The goal always seems to be to accustom each student to a more communitarian, interdependent approach in society and the economy. This book from 1992, Responsive Schools, Renewed Communities, is by Clifford W Cobb, a co-author of the very troubling for the common good, with a Foreword by famous communitarian prof Amitai Etzioni. It actually advocated for vouchers and charter schools and school choice generally as a more reliable vehicle for achieving the communitarian focus. That surprise would suggest I am not the only one who understands that accreditation is the monkey wrench that undermines genuine choice for parents.

So beware what remedies we advocate for without reading the footnotes and small print. My purpose for using that book is how well it fits with the template from both the 1934 Report and the methods for transformation of political community laid out in Contending Sovereignties. That 1992 book wanted schools that depend on “fostering concrete experiences of commitment to an immediate community. Those experiences can then be generalized into a devotion to the common good.” School becomes a means to “generate allegiance to core values,” which would of course put it in line with the global education template UNESCO and Pearson are quietly pushing.

Relevant to our igniter of social movements goal as the new actual purpose of history coursework (or Civics or English or STEM…) is the desire that Multiculturalism and Diversity be seen as goals that will allow the “continuing distinctiveness and autonomy of subcultures, particularly those based on ethnicity.” Well, let’s face it, not all ethnicities qualify. A few sentences further is the real point of cultural pluralism. Those “ethnic nuclei” that are to be respected are those that can constitute “enduring centers of social action.” Oh, that will go well with the new, post nation-state emphasis. The next page, revealing that our prying eyes were never meant to read that book and really grasp all the Diversity hype, “stresses the tactical value of limited separatism.”

Especially in our new world with its focus on the locality and everyday experience. Whatever the intentions of individual advocates today, please be aware that back in 1992 School Choice was being pushed by some as yet another means to get back to:

“the context of a community of personal affiliations that imposed moral expectations and sanctions on its members. That tradition can be revived by shifting from devotion to an abstract national community to reliance on particular, local communities. In other words, rather than expecting the state to resolve our disagreements with each other on moral issues, we should learn to rely on participatory communities to guide the behavior of individuals.”

I think that is what all education at every level globally is now geared to if, like me, you know where to look. We have been looking at an astonishing consistency of aims now from a huge variety of starting points and assumed affiliations.

Next I will walk us through how history is actually to be used before APUSH to get to the Global Civilization Project goals.

Ready for the assessment to be a class quilt?

Invisible Serfs Collar

"a group which desires to be strong has no use for the man who claims to think for himself."

Tag Archives: World Order Models Project

Leapfrogging Via Deceit that Crucial Last Obstacle to the Long Sought Convergence to Collectivism