Building the Sentiment, Forging the Real Feeling that Goes Deep: Rigor does Not Mean What You Think
Do you believe in coincidences? Of course they happen, but not about some things, especially when little known professors are suddenly brought back to be the quote of the day in a daily education newsletter. The day after the last post where I mentioned the 1948 push for a World Constitution at meetings held at the University of Chicago, the EdTech SmartBrief cited 'Italian Writer Giuseppe Antonio Borgese' for an inspiring vision about Change not only being possible, but necessary. How apropos when fundamental change is the daily meme. Borgese of course is more than an Italian writer. He was one of the prime participants in those meetings, a prof there, and the draftsman. He also wrote the 1953 book Foundations of the World Republic laying out the vision.
You don't really think I grasp how all this fits just from Abstracts or the Cliff Notes versions, do you? No, I had read that book and get the connection to ed. So does someone apparently at Smart Brief and they are fully aware of the pertinence of today's K-12 juggernaut of changes too. Few terms though come up more often these days or are used so consistently to mislead parents and taxpayers on the true nature of the intended changes as 'rigor.' There's a reason education consultant, Willard Daggett, with a ridiculously lucrative national professional development business (for someone who used to be in Vo-Tech. I have a few of those mediocre textbooks) says that "relevance makes rigor possible." Rigor is always grounded in emotion and personal experiences.
When a District Super tells concerned parents that Rigor is about higher standards and provides the metaphor that you cannot turn up the temperature suddenly on an oven from 350 to 550 without burning the turkey and leaving it frozen on the inside, I think that explanation deserves a Pinocchio award. That example of rigor may make parents feel better about upcoming higher than average failure rates on the new state Common Core math assessments, but it does not accurately reflect the nature of the problem. Rigor is about what a student feels, perceives, and does when there is no single correct answer or there are insufficient facts stated to reach a definitive conclusion or the asked about material has never been taught. It provides superb behavioral science data on likely future actions and it primes students to be willing to act in the face of uncertainty. Just what people with visions of transforming and then redesigning societies and societies around Big Data need from a compliant, malleable citizenry.
Facing History and Ourselves, which we met again in the last post, keeps being cited as the perfect example of a curriculum offering 'rigorous engagement' and 'deeper learning.' Deeper Learning is being trumpeted, formally assessed, and funded generously as the cornerstone of the Common Core and the OECD's global vision for education by the Hewlett Foundation. Building on the previous post's revelations and the return of Life Adjustment before that, why is FHAO so crucial for an international bureaucracy pushing for fundamental transformations in the economy, society, and political structures and institutions? Let's look.
http://trustnet.learningtrust.co.uk/partners/Community%20Cohesion/Case%20Study_Facing_History_and_Ourselves_at_Skinners.pdf advocates that teaching materials force students (their bolding) through the process of Text to Self (this reminds me of a time when… so that personal experiences become involved), Text to Text (building those links to previous school activities or discussions and the concepts involved so that a predictable mental web is being woven by schoolwork), and Text to World (students connect the ideas to things happening in the world today). Did you realize that's what 'personalizing learning' meant? Constantly reenforcing schoolwork to a student's life experiences and then creating life experiences in school and elsewhere to reenforce the desired concepts and attitudes? As the link says, FHAO allows students to have Mindsets that allow "better questioning of the world and what goes on it. But most importantly, students become more engaged in their own communities and apply the knowledge they learn to their own lives." (my bolding this time).
Knowledge grounded again more in emotions and instincts than facts, but all the more likely to compel future action for that very reason. Remember Harlan Cleveland from my book? Well, about 10 years before his 80s vision I explain there he did a report in 1976 for UN Leaders meeting in Philadelphia. It laid out his vision on what the significance of the US Bicentennial was for the future. He saw it as igniting the Next Great World Movement: the Global Fairness Revolution. Like the odd sudden citing this week of Borgese, these visions do not go away. They simply keep looking for new sales jobs to have education finally bring them to fruition. That's precisely what FHAO and PBS intended to do when they created Choosing to Participate to be used as part of what it would mean to be Literate under the Common Core. http://web.uri.edu/nonviolence/files/ChoosingToParticipate.pdf
When the "challenge for educators" now is announced to be creating "settings that can help young people develop as thoughtful, caring, compassionate, and responsible citizens," the vision of citizenry is to be Change Agents for Transformation. That is also blatantly a view of education that is primarily focused on Psychosocial Development, not knowledge as academic content. Students are to be deliberately primed, at a deep level, to be unwilling to accept the world as it now exists. They are also to be intentionally manipulated to misperceive the current nature of that world. Ignorance and grievance may be one of the most volatile combinations in the universe. Unlike nitroglycerin though, these Students with carefully cultivated and shaped Mindsets and emotional Push Buttons will not have warning labels. Not yet anyway. I am working on that one.
FHAO does not mince words when it states its intention to have Choosing to Participate:
"be a catalyst for conversation about how we treat each other, how we should live together, and what our choices mean. The key challenge is to think deeply [emotions again!] about what democracy really means, and what it asks of each of us. Democracy is a fragile enterprise and can only remain vital through the active, thoughtful, and responsible participation of its people. Education for citizenship means encouraging each of us to recognize that our participation matters."
Jumping to the punch line, FHAO intentionally uses the horrors of the Holocaust and Legal Segregation by race in the US to justify a belief that economic, redistributive, justice, if desired by a majority of current voters, is a perfectly legitimate demand binding everyone. Resistance then becomes akin to the racism that surrounded the Little Rock 9 trying to integrate Arkansas schools in the 50s. FHAO is the perfect accompaniment to the communitarian focus we have already located in the required Positive School Climate for all K-12 schools and lurking oddly in the definition of what it means to be Career Ready under the Common Core. FHAO early on specifically instructs students:
"communities are not built of friends, or groups of friends, or of people with similar styles and tastes, or even of people who like and understand each other. They are built of people who feel they are part of something that is bigger than themselves: a shared goal or enterprise [hence all the hype on collaboration now]…To build a community requires only the ability to see value in others; to look at them and see a potential partner in one's enterprise…community can also be defined in terms of a 'universe of obligation'–a group of individuals or groups 'toward whom obligations are owed, to whom rules apply, and whose injuries call for amends."
Amends are owed. I am going to end with that quote because clearly this intention is where we should put all these sudden mentions of allegations of White Privilege and conferences centered around preparing teachers to make that and race generally a focus of the K-12 curriculum. Everybody seems to like trilogies so this post is the Human Rights Trilogy's second part.
I want to come back with considering the implications of targeting values, attitudes, and beliefs about how societies and economies should be structured as just another antiquated area that can, and should be, legitimately targeted by K-12 for change. Comparable in the minds of many educators and certainly the FHAO curriculum to the shifts rightfully needed previously to move beyond legal segregation.
We are going to continue to confront history all right. Especially the implications of requiring that students "prove their humanity" in ways to be mandated by political authority.
Should students be taught that "Built into each individual's experience must be an occasion for giving, a task of humanity, an act of sharing and sacrifice"?
Is that really Student Achievement? Growth? Should taxpayer-funded education administrators and profs really be making these decisions in a free society?
Or is the disputed nature of freedom itself in the 21st Century the real question?
Posted in Belmont Challenge, Outcomes Based Education, Quality Learning, Social and Emotional Learning, Sustainability	| Tagged ASCD Whole Child Initiative, Career Ready Practices, Communitarianism, cooperative commonwealth, Facing History, Great Transition, Hewlett Deeper Learning, Kohlberg's Moral Development Theory, Life Adjustment, New 3 R's, Positive School Climate, Webb Depth of Knowledge, Willard Daggett	| 36 Replies
Masking the New Integral Human Rights Focus: Education Becomes a Tool of the Sought Cohesive, Caring Society
The Great War, as World War I was called in the 20s, had the effect of forcing many Europeans to begin imagining a world where there would never again be such a violent convulsion. HG Wells' The Open Conspiracy came out of just that kind of search to fundamentally change all the rules for the future. The essential part of Wells' vision was to use education to remove the "outworn ideas and attitudes" and substitute concepts and values conducive to world reconstruction. To Wells, there could be "no half measures. You have not yet completed your escape to the Open Conspiracy from the cities of the plain while it is still possible for you to take a single backward glance."
The NEA's Life Adjustment Model we encountered in the last post came out of America's reaction to the convulsions of World War II. Then, and in its current iterations stressing school as the source of a psycho-social catharsis of New Communitarian-oriented values, attitudes, feelings, skills, and beliefs, this change in the focus of the curriculum and the classroom should be seen through a recognition that "whatever we retain [of the ancient ideas and order] will come back to life and grow again."
What I have been calling Mind Arson is actually just the deliberate pruning of educators working as gardeners of the Mind and Personality in pursuit of Wholesale Change. Because,as Wells once again recognized: "the more thoroughly we seek to release our minds and the minds of those about us from them and cut off all thoughts of a return," the greater the possibility of the desired fundamental transformations in how people act and societies, economies, and countries organize their daily lives.
Wells even had a beguiling phrase for this intent–'mental sanitation,' which would certainly explain why it looks like mind arson and psychological manipulation to us. It is. An aspect we have been dealing with all along in the US and also the West generally is the idea of 'myth' hatched at the University of Chicago in 1948 (the year after the NEA began its revolutionary push in ed to make human relations its focus) where the 'myth' ceased to be a story that had never happened. Instead, a myth would become a vision of the world as it might be and ought to be. Education then quietly became a means of changing the student to make him or her ready to take action to fulfill that vision. Like the role of today's similar terms-'relevance' and 'real world problems'–the idea was that "constructive change of the world" would become the "guiding form of all human activities."
Today we call those Learning Tasks as my book lays out. Consider this post further filling in around the edges of these long term pursuits at social reconstruction on a global basis, like it or not. Aware or not. I don't know about you but I think we can attribute Ralph Tyler's creation of the term 'behavioral sciences' in 1948 to the other activities going on at that Chicago campus on how to move the US and the West towards a World Republic grounded in distributive justice as a human award, not a reward for merit or a pick-up after bad luck. Likewise, Tyler's 1949 book shifting the curriculum focus of school to Learning Objectives and away from knowledge. Those Learning Objectives remain the basis for the very outcomes-based education we dealt with in the 90s version of these reforms and what goes by the name Competency today. It always comes back because …
Following up on what I heard in year end meetings in a local school district that combines suburban affluence and urban poverty with a racially and ethnically diverse student body, with that 2011 NEA CARE Guide we have talked about, turned up once again the behavior modification and character manipulation curriculum hiding under the deceitful phrase Facing History and Ourselves. I have written about it before (see tag), which is why I was so alarmed to see it going international as the UK used it as part of its Journey to Justice, which also seeks distributive economic justice for all as a matter of human rights. Since I was already dismayed about this related upcoming conference in Boston http://commonbound.org/page/about-commonbound, it is hard not to feel that revolutionary change is coming from every direction to go along with these ed reforms in preschool, K-12, and higher ed.
FHAO turned out to be everywhere now with its proclaimed goal of pushing "policies and practices that prevent violence and promote peace." Working with PBS, for example, to create a Choosing to Participate curriculum to "think deeply about what democracy really means, and what it asks of us." Pretty sure that will not be the democracy as the tyranny of the mob that so concerned the US Founding Fathers since knowledge of that history might result in the forbidden backward glance. No, it will be democracy as a vision of what might be. Another reason to be concerned when FHAO representatives are listed on the program of this recent Immigration Day program that also talked about A New American Majority: Political and Personal Perspectives. http://www.kbcc.cuny.edu/nac/Documents/ImmigDay_2014.pdf
The US-based Human Rights Education Associates, as part of its Citizenship Education, Globalization, and Democratization push used FHAO to create a curriculum for South Africa called Facing the Past. http://www.hrea.org/pubs/tibbitts-prospects-sep06.pdf Instead of a focus on facts the point is to "infuse the question of values in the learning of content." Teachers were told they must "'unlearn' any 'official narrative' of apartheid." Instead the students and teachers would use "interactive, participatory methods of learning" to explore each other's perspectives. They would role play and examine "human behavior and universal themes such as identity, group membership, obedience, and taking action." Through "working with personal experiences and choice in these histories, links were intended to be made to issues and moral dilemmas facing young people today."
First, have the students explore if "hate is innately a part of human behavior and experience? If so, how can we change that within ourselves?" Note to radicals, this amounts to the child who would never think about bullying others on the playground being asked to wear a T-shirt that says "Violence never works" and then wondering why he gets picked on. This type of emotional curriculum consciously milks stories to produce a sense of grievance, or guilt, depending on where in life one was born. There's no knowledge being instilled of what actions might make the situation worse for everyone. This is a curriculum that actually cites that "[DM] was particularly moved by the video. He was crying afterwards. He wanted to know what the youth today can do to make up for the wrongs of the past–that their 'white' parents had committed and/or benefitted from."
I am going to go into the US versions of FHAO more in the next post, but this New York Times ad from a week ago on the need for Equitable Implementation of the Common Core Standards in commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the Brown segregation decision should give us pause on the real intended purpose of the standards. http://civilrightsdocs.info/pdf/NYT-CCSS.pdf The listed Leadership Conference changed its name formally in 2010 to add "human rights" to its title and purpose of pushing "for progressive change in the United States." Using the same concepts of distributive economic justice those World Republic dreamers in 1948 or Wells' Open Conspirators in the 30s wanted to pursue.
Also pertinent to where all these reforms are really going is this recent Communique, a term always intended to announce revolutionary intent, from National Civil Rights and Education Groups http://nul.iamempowered.com/content/communique%CC%81-joint-statement-support-common-core-state-standards-and-equitable-implementation . Trust me on this as someone with a mother lode of implementation materials from my book and this blog, no one is planning on teaching that inner-city kid how to read properly. The equity comes from changing values in a manner that emboldens the belief in the need for fundamental transformations in how we live and what we all believe.
I am going to close by showing what such equitable education aimed at personal and social change actually looks like to a participant in programs like FHAO. "For the first time during my education, I was feeling and experiencing what I was learning. I was doing an inherently human thing, and my education was coming alive. [her bolding].
"Learning is felt."
"that feeling that I can't quite name, the one that gets my head all hot and my insides queasy and my muscles just aching to get up and go out and do something. Learning is experiencing what someone teaches me, letting it soak through and change me."
Change me. Guided Inquiry. Planned activities and role playing "infusing the use of narrative, interactive methods and multi-media sources."
No danger of a backward glance from these programs aimed at creating a "new collective memory."
The danger comes from the internal redesign of what is clearly intended to be programmed future behavior.
In the name of democracy. Social Justice. Fairness. Globalization. Engagement.
Posted in Accreditation, Belmont Challenge, Common Core, Education for All, Outcomes Based Education, Quality Learning, Social and Emotional Learning, Sustainability, UN Millenium Development Goals	| Tagged ASCD Whole Child Initiative, Benjamin Bloom, Communitarianism, Democracy Collaborative, Facing History, Gar Alperovitz, Life Adjustment, new economics foundation, Ralph Tyler	| 10 Replies
Constantly Casting Aside Those Things that Become Useless in this Caravan of Civilization: Who Decides?
No wonder a well-stocked individual mind is becoming forbidden. I had hardly finished the previous post before an insight as I read that day's materials sent me after the global human rights/human behavioral curriculum clearly intended to come into the US as the Common Core and elsewhere as 21st Century Learning. Every day now seems like a game of Bingo as the real implementation rolls forward in education to finally put into place what HG Wells actually called The Open Conspiracy back in 1928 in a work that was intended to be a blueprint, not the fiction that earned him fame. Then again he and Julian Huxley were old friends and actually wrote a book together–The Science of Life. I guess we shouldn't be surprised then that so much of the focus is on using education for social experimentation to gain political transformations. So many of the people we run across over time had similar ideas because they all seem to have known each other.
We have been the ones without the knowledge of all these connections and revealing resources. So getting ready to go down the Human Rights road, I read this quote this morning while I steeled myself to write (my bolding):
"At Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy, history teacher Matt Baird called his high school's 1-to-1 program 'radically democratic.' Information 'doesn't necessarily flow from the teacher to the student in the form of a test. Information is something that can be gathered, used and utilized by students in the way it is in the real world,' he explained, adding, 'It's not an awful lot of people who take standardized tests for a living. We don't really want school to be a proxy for real life. We want school to look like real life as much as possible."
The education historian in me immediately recognized that real life focus and the way Baird so obnoxiously preaches its superiority to an academic knowledge focus as what was called Life Adjustment back in the 40s and 50s. Nothing indeed new under the sun of Radical Ed Reform once you have the template I laid out in my book. Life Adjustment had been on my mind this week as well as it fits so well with what are now being called "Authentic Learning Opportunities" in connection to the Common Core. When I went off to find my notes on Life Adjustment, guess what came out that aligns perfectly with the NEA's 2011 CARE Guide we have looked at in the last 2 posts?
It was the NEA that pushed what was then called Life Adjustment as the new purpose for ed in its 1947 Organizing the Elementary School for Living and Learning. In anticipation of today's New 3 Rs of Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships the NEA wanted schools to put "human relationships first." Now that declaration is why the human rights post got bumped behind this one since Why explanations should always precede the How. Does this sound familiar in the current era of Whole Child Codes of Conduct and Positive School Mandates? In 1947, apparently in recognition that an America rich enough to provide one side's armaments and rebuild Europe afterwards, was rich enough to transition to a Human Needs focused Development Society, suddenly there must be education with "a school environment where the satisfactory adjustment of all pupils is a primary consideration…This 'R' is of even greater importance than the 3 'Rs' yet it has received little time or attention in the school's organization."
Do Colleges of Education or the accreditation agencies today get to decide the answer to the question the NEA asked back in 1947 as part of its post-war, Let's Transform the US intentions and make the impending Cold War a moot point, philosophy? "Is it more important for Dick to excel everyone in his class and bring home a report card of all A's or learn how to live with all the other boys and girls in his neighborhood?" Today's Collaboration mandate is Educators and Business Interests declaring that they get to decide the answer to that question and none of us are to have any ability to veto that transformation of the historic purpose of education.
Me? I went back to the words that John Keats wrote so well back in 1958 in his Schools Without Scholars that was also a tirade against a Life Adjustment focus. He noted that the difference between making the child's interests the focus [today's Relevance and Engagement] and making a body of knowledge the focus is about more than just "the nature of learning" and "the nature of things learned" although I will note that today's Common Core rhetoric tries to ignore that both of those are being turned upside down. If we knew we might refuse to defer to the professional educators' insistence they now get to decide. No, most importantly, as Keats also recognized, Life Adjustment under whatever name it uses in a particular decade is about "the true role of the individual in society."
Now it seems with all the requisite communitarian focus and the "Universe of Obligation" required inquiry I will explain in the next post, Keats could not have been more prescient to our current dilemma being imposed via education. Are we going to allow schools to shift to required practices so that a teacher must now "conduct her class from the point of view that the individual has only a functional significance in society?" That is after all the view of the Career Pathways for All that the federal Departments of Ed, Labor, and HHS are now soliciting proposals for as School to Work is back. http://www.jff.org/news-media/long-sought-compromise-unites-parties-improve-us-workforce-development-system
I would be what Keats called a traditionalist: "dedicated to the proposition that society is merely a function of individuals." As I put it in my book, do not use the word society as a noun unless we are talking about Mrs Astor's Ballroom size. The title quote also comes from the 1947 NEA push and the same question still applies. What if the taxpayers paying the bill KNOW what is still useful much better than politicians or cronies or educators who live as parasites off the bounty produced by others? What right does a District Administrator or Principal dedicated to Mind Arson, the political transformation of the US, and active deceit to parents have to decide what is useful for the future and what is to be cast aside? Should a union like the NEA have the right to decide that either? Accreditors? Every one of these people or entities survives off of taxpayer funds and most of the adults leading these entities have no clue what actually produced the financial bounty they take for granted. And they have the veto power over what is needed for the future?
Or what is 'useful?. This 1947 quote mirrors the School districts touting now that they no longer have a 'deficit' focus. Teachers are to "cease thinking of marking children and will start thinking how much the child is growing day after day, week after week, how much progress he's making toward the kind of boy or girl which our town, our America, and our world finds useful."
Useful for what? Useful to whom? If that decision is no longer in the realm of the individual student or parents, but has been outsourced to others who benefit from Mind Arson, what kind of society are we becoming?
Instead of town, today's language is community. What functions does the community want each individual to have? Ask yourself who benefits from making the focus of the school the use of a device like a computer coupled to Non-Cognitive factors. Now that I have refreshed my recollection and augmented yours on Life Adjustment, we can contemplate what that focus has always intended to do. We can now examine the implications of what Columbia prof, Jacques Barzun, wrote in 1961 was an inversion of the entire purpose of education as students are all assumed to have "the supremely gifted mind, which must not be tampered with, and the defective personality which the school must remodel."
That's today's assumption as well. What shall we do about these current unabashed intentions? Most of the barriers that have delayed this desire for wholesale transformation for so long in the purpose of education have fallen or died.
It's up to us now to become those barriers again. Protect the children. Protect ourselves most of all. There are few things as dangerous as a parasite that has no idea where it actually gets its sustenance.
Posted in Accreditation, Career Pathways, Common Core, Outcomes Based Education, Quality Learning, Social and Emotional Learning	| Tagged amitai etzioni, ASCD Whole Child Initiative, Communitarianism, Life Adjustment, Marxist Humanism, New 3 R's, Positive School Climate, Student Growth	| 9 Replies
Shaping a Mind is More Important than Stuffing It: Grasping the Psychosocial Key to Fundamental Transformations
In fact, after that essay "An Education for Humanity" was written in the early 60s, psychological research began to show that a fact-filled mind was hard to reshape. The excuses for making education about mind arson would vary from then on, but never the aim: "a new organized system of thought and belief" that "would provide a new vision of human destiny." This is the same intentional cultural evolution I explain in my book, except I was missing the precise term Julian Huxley created for this new type of evolution–'psychosocial'. Now doesn't that intention make all the focus now on the Whole Child and a Positive School Climate and Positive Behavior Interventions for all students and Pearson owning the rights to BASC, Behavior Assessment System for Children, and desired utopian Character Traits hiding in a new Student Code of Conduct so much clearer?
If that "inside the student's mind and personality" target was always the change arena of this revised vision of an education that could supposedly bridge the gap between the cultures on both sides of the Cold War (according again to UNESCO's first Director General Julian Huxley), what were the actual goals? First, to create a "strong moral bond" between each student and the "wider community" where he lives. Secondly, to foster a belief in the "oneness of mankind." OK, you say, that does sound a lot like a communitarian emphasis we found when we followed the actual definition of Career Ready in the 21st Century back to the actual guidelines as well as the definition of Global Citizenship the Common Core is pushing through affiliates.
Third should really begin to sound familiar. Definitely not a goal for education that got stuck in the 60s with the Bay of Pigs or the Cuban Missile Crisis. To "give the rising generation a 'world view.'" Now Elvin acknowledged this would likely be controversial so, then as now, it is simply to be made into the domain of professional deference of what it means to be an educator. And not just a right to dictate the acceptable world view–defined as "a view of man and his nature, of the earth and its history, and of the universe of which it is a minute part" to be enforced by adminstrators and Edudoctorates who mostly have no individual knowledge of any of those particulars. This was, and is, not to be just an intellectual understanding. No, the idea is for the world view to create "a total response" that encompasses the imagination, morality, and the sciences all at the same time.
This all encompassing vision of what education should do to a student, literally described as "should fuse in a total personal synthesis" may sound like the realm traditionally associated with religion. Elvin appreciated that and said this:
"I should make it clear that I mean a type of response that for some people takes place in association with their religious beliefs but that per se is not dependent on any religious creed or dogma and is felt equally by those who are in this sense without religion."
Before I move on to the current CARE Guide from the NEA and that Teaching Diverse Students Initiative being imposed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a component of Equity and Excellence under the Common Core, I want to juxtapose that admitted new goal for education as a means for finally achieving what was then called the Fulfillment Society. Its new names of course are now a Subjective Well Being focus as part of the Great Transition.
In 1943 the US Supreme Court reversed previous case law to hold that students could not be punished for failing to perform the Pledge of Allegiance if it violated their religious creed. Justice Jackson wrote the majority opinion where he decried any "compulsory unification of opinion." He wrote a passage I want us all to reflect on in a time when every education degree is now apparently coming with a compulsory unification permission slip in a country where that ought to be unconstitutional: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not know occur to us."
That SCOTUS opinion was about the classic clash between the "power of the majority to command conformity from the individual" which is unfortunately the lode star of the 21st century even though it could only command a dissent in 1943. Back then the belief that the US Bill of Rights was created to be a bulwark to curtail Majority Mischief was still firmly in place. The CARE Guide and the Diversity Kit takes all these traditions and throws them out the 3rd story window into a bonfire below. Under it, education becomes the means to "prepare students for their responsibilities in an interdependent world." The Guide takes on with excitement "the role schools play in developing the attitudes and values necessary for a democratic society." In case we have any illusions about what is to constitute such a society, the Guide wants public schools to challenge "all forms of discrimination in schools and society through the promotion of social justice."
Public schools are explicitly to push the idea that this new vision of education and "appreciation of diverse cultures" as long as they are not White or grounded in traditional Judeo-Christianity or Asian American, is built on the supposed "American ideals of freedom, justice, equality, equity, and human dignity. This is acknowledged in documents as varied as the US Declaration of Independence and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights." No, actually those are not American ideals and they are frequently in opposition to what is laid out in that Declaration of Independence. The US refused to ratify that UN Declaration that is now to be imposed via education affirmation anyway.
Wondering why I pulled out Asian Americans? Because they are listed in the Power Relationships Activity for Educator Reflection as a 'voluntary minority' who 'freely' immigrated to the US. Involuntary minorities "are those who have been conquered, colonized, or subjugated by the US, such as Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and American Indian/Alaska Natives." So much for the 2008 Presidential election being about putting race behind us. No, students are to learn that "all people share basic needs" and that "each of us learns a set of behaviors and beliefs from the people we grow up with." Some of those are now to be deemed unacceptable and slated for an extinguishing process via education and others will be glorified for intact preservation. Guess which?
Also slated for discussion as a new value is that a student should 'achieve her potential' in order to contribute to the social whole. If that holistic orientation instead of an individual one is not clear enough, how about a statement that "positive feedback should be stated in terms of student's ability to help family or community?" If that servant function on behalf of the supposed greater good is still not bearing down on our sense of where this is all going, how about "student should be helpful and cooperate with his peers, giving assistance when needed. Helping is not considered cheating?" All can learn in the 21st century, but for the bright kids most of the learning will be social.
The Guide really does expect all schools to be having constant discussions of race and to simply accept that "people of color are more likely to perceive prejudice than others. Not surprisingly then, there will be intergroup tensions in many schools, especially when students live in separate, racially homogeneous neighborhoods." Which is of course now to be regarded as unacceptable. No longer free to live where we wish or believe as we wish or to value what we wish, courtesy of the Whole Child reeducation process to create a new kind of guiding common core. Does this sound totally toxic all the time for every student to anyone else?
I am going to close this post with the declaration that "one of the primary roles of educational leaders is to give voice to shared values." It is thus quite clear that education degrees now are to be all about enacting Elvin's vision of Education for Humanity and not Justice Jackson's holding of what is an acceptable purview for any official relying on the coercive power of government.
If the intended level of personal coercion via education to create responses from an unconscious level is not already crystal clear, let me end with the purpose of Positive School Climate per the explanation of questions in the Student Survey:
"Repeated articulation of these values, backed by relevant action, can increase consensus and motivate others to act accordingly."
That's a great deal of incentive to insist that real differences among students must be addressed by making joint activity the classroom focus to allow "modeling behaviors, thinking processes, and procedures."
With this vision in place some of us really need to update the Declaration of Independence so that these Educrats can grasp its real significance.
It may take a multimedia powerpoint though to get through. Maybe role playing through the inevitable toxic consequences of these to be required activities and behaviors and discussions.
Posted in Common Core, Outcomes Based Education, Quality Learning, Social and Emotional Learning	| Tagged ASCD Whole Child Initiative, Career Ready Practices, CASEL, Communitarianism, Great Transition, PBIS, Positive School Climate, Subjective Well-being	| 29 Replies
Social Cohesion Can Commence Once Reality is Born Largely from Beliefs and Boundaries Co-Created with Others
"Around Us" was the last part of the quote the title comes from. The next line is "Although we need these boundaries and beliefs to function, we should not take them too seriously." I suppose that flexibility may be the most succinct definition of the hoped-for Growth Mindset we have encountered yet, but this post is not actually about Carol Dweck. Remember Robert Theobald from our last post? In 1997, still awaiting the long sought revolution, he published yet another book reworking success: new communities at the millenium that laid out in its conclusion the "new belief structure" that would be necessary for a "radically more positive world" where each of us has a "core future commitment to the maintenance and development of social cohesion."
Since my unusual, but terribly reliable method, of tracking the Common Core via its required actual implementation in schools and classrooms has turned up in just the last week repeated attempts to impose Theobald's vision, the Baha'i values and compliance vision, and the cybernetic theory of doling out information in a controlled manner to create predictable future behavior we had best move on to the invisible how. Since the last two have been covered in previous posts, let's see what Theobald thought would be the New Belief Structure in place by 2011. I can assure you in education, radical intentions and methods do not go away. They don't even always get new names. First though I want to use the guiding belief that we have now seen recurring consistently as the marching banner since the 60s taken this time from Theobald (quoting Pope John Paul II from 1994):
"If in his providence God had given the earth to humanity, that meant that he had given it to everyone. Therefore the riches of creation were to be considered as a common good of the whole of humanity. Those who possessed these goods as personal property were really only stewards,…since it was God's will that created goods which serve everyone in a just way."
Inspirational man, but somehow his sense of where wealth actually comes from was clearly warped. Anyway, this sentiment provides the perfect rationale for massive redistribution both within affluent countries and from rich to poor countries with no thought that anything vital might vanish in the process. Theobald turned this into a fundamental global governing "idea that great wealth and deep poverty were unacceptable in a just society." He sold the idea that this New Belief Structure should become "one of the great rallying points for a changed vision adopted by a growing segment of the population." Yes and continued intentional mind arson and perspective shifting as the mission of K-12 and higher ed combined with weak job growth and explosive student debt only drives the allure of that same rallying cry now.
Central to this New Belief Structure and New Images of Citizenship in what Theobald called "common ground work" was:
a)controlling our ego needs and growth beyond them;
b) learning to screen reality through our own senses and the stories and myths we have learned;
c) emphasizing our collective intelligence and using our diversity to support the emergence of new systems;
d) acknowledging the importance of spirituality; and
e) "Recognizing the importance of using values–honesty, responsibility, humility, love, faith, cooperation, and a respect for mystery–as a compass that guides our choices."
Values again. That common core we keep encountering globally. Guess where I found it just this week as an agenda item on a recent School Board Working Agenda in the Metro Atlanta School District with the duplicitous Conversion Charter we have looked at? In the new Student Code of Conduct. When parents sign off at the beginning of the year that they have seen the Student Handbook and agree to abide by it, they will now actually be signing off on listed "Character Traits" with language about desired values and morals and ethics without likely appreciating the wholesale transformation from the inside-out they have just sanctioned in their children.
At least Hong Kong citizens got somewhat of a head's up when Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development and Universal Love became a controversial component of the new definition of citizenship mandated via education, all we Americans get are vague references to Student Behavior or Positive School Climates. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/hiding-educations-theft-of-individual-freedom-behind-the-positive-school-c/
This post was always going to be about values since I have had UNESCO's instructional modules to make that a central focus of ed globally for about a month now. I was just laying the groundwork with our Baha'i discussion since UNESCO itself said religion must change back in 2007 and that spirituality was a necessary component of Global Citizenship. I wanted to make this post about why the Southern Poverty Law Center would recently issue 2 different reports within weeks of each other trying to taint opponents of the Common Core http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/publication/public_schools_in_the_crosshairs.pdf and Agenda 21/Regional Land/Equity Planning. http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/publication/agenda_21_final_web_0.pdf
SPLC is clearly engaged in a coordinated effort to prevent people from accurately perceiving admitted facts and declared intentions. We can think of Common Core as the Means to a Quiet Revolution and a Tool to Alter People's Values, Attitudes, and Beliefs. Agenda 21 and Catastrophic Manmade Global Warming are the Excuses for Why the Transformations are Necessary and Tools to Control Physical Space and People's Behavior. I can wish more of the critics SPLC cites were paying attention to the objections I am carefully laying out, but anyone's accurate reporting of openly declared intentions or coursework is not theorizing about conspiracies. So what is SPLC really up to?
Remember how I call Common Core an explanation 'bucket' that obscures all the real intended changes like Positive School Climates, making social and emotional learning the primary focus, or making education about using a digital device instead of academic knowledge? Classic Bait and Switch has been my drumbeat in my book and now on this blog. I knew SPLC had created a racially oriented and economic justice focused curriculum. http://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/teaching-tolerance What I did not know until I started looking into their incentives to issue such misleading reports was that SPLC had partnered with the NEA to create TDSI–Teaching Diverse Students Initiative or that SPLC was partnering with the accreditors of teacher ed institutions to ensure its adoption in all teaching credential programs. Lots of incentive, in other words, for the SPLC to malign critics of effective tools for wholesale radical transformations.
Basically what SPLC is obscuring is the heart of the actual planned implementation in classrooms across the US under the mischievous banner of the Common Core and what now counts as Student Achievement and Growth. How about working with Glenn Singleton to create 'dispositions' in students pursuant to "Beginning Courageous Conversations about Race"? That can be one of the Character Traits district administrators now get to require from students under those new mischievous codes of conduct.
Recognizing the intended mischief from Fulton's proposed new Code of Student Conduct and having asked detailed questions of administrators to make sure I understood precisely what was to be imposed, I came home to think about the potential for that Character Trait Code given what I knew of Fulton's Charter, accreditation, and the intentions of TDSI. file:///D:/Downloads/PRRAC%20-%20Race%20_%20Racism.htm Not to pat myself on the back, but it really is no exaggeration to say I speak ed fluently and usually understand the underlying theories now better than all the edudoctorates in the room. After all, most of them now are credentialed because of what they are willing to do to us and our children and this great nation, not for what they actually know.
The phrase–"Student's Quantity of time on task engaged in desired behavior" may earn a doctorate these days when repeated constantly, but it probably should not be spoken out loud to parents. It does sound like social engineering. Nor should "Nothing as valuable as a good theory for social change" Kurt Lewin be quoted by name publicly as an example of the useful Freeze, Unfreeze, Refreeze behavioral manipulation strategy to deal with current teachers not on board with the technology shift.
If administrators think it's OK to coercively brainwash adults, just imagine the plight of the children entrusted to their care in a world where changing the child is now the whole point of what is student achievement. Anyway, nobody can say I do not put my angst about where education is going and what the inevitable consequences will be to fruitful use. Yes indeed. Within an hour after leaving that meeting, I had the CARE Guide the NEA created with SPLC to "move beyond the restructuring of schools to the 're-culturing of education." http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/CAREguide2011.pdf
That would be the real focus of K-12 that SPLC needed to protect. It explains the importance of Core Values to the Vision. That would of course be the vision "Creating Change through Social Justice" and dramatically redefining the purpose of schools and negating academics as traditionally understood. Unless it is useful for new purposes like preparing students for everyday life, or perceiving 'power relationships,' or learning to exalt the 'collectivist perspective' and reject the 'individualist perspective.'
We have a lot to talk about that is to be done under the cover of what counts as Excellence or a legally required closure of the Achievement Gap. It's not what we are expecting and it certainly is something we need to fear as long as we remain unaware.
I have run too long again. Next time we will walk through that 174 page core document together.
Posted in Accreditation, Common Core, Outcomes Based Education, Quality Learning, Social and Emotional Learning, Sustainability	| Tagged ASCD Whole Child Initiative, Carol Dweck, cybernetics, Global Citizenship, Growth Mindset, Kohlberg's Moral Development Theory, Kurt Lewin, NEA 's Purple America/Project Love, Peter Senge, Piotr Galperin, Positive School Climate, splc-Southern Poverty Law Center, Universal Love/Mandated Social Altruism	| 3 Replies
Illusion Remains the Deadly Enemy of Hope, its Smiling Murderer: Continuing Our Journey to Keep Hope Alive
To explain the whys of what I have so unambiguously now documented, I frequently go back in time to others who have played the role of prescient Cassandra urging the Trojans not to bring that strange gift of a wooden horse within the unbreachable walls. Today's title comes from an essay Whittaker Chambers published in Cold Friday to convey his reaction to the mid to late 1950s Eastern European revolts against Communist oppression. Chambers always understood what was under attack from ideologies that target "the view we hold, unconsciously or not, of the world and its meaning and the meaning of our lives in it." Since I have been asserting for a while that this is precisely what the Common Core and 21st Century Learning and cybernetics and Radical Ed Reform through the decades is actually targeting, let's look at the full quote:
"In this age, hope is something that must be taken by the throat. This is to say, hope, to be durable and real, must begin with things exactly as they are, not as we suppose they were (even a few tranquillizing months ago), or as we wish they might be…The terms of hope are not to delude ourselves about this in order not to suffer in the shattering spins of fear that casts out hope. The deadly enemy of hope, its smiling murderer–is illusion…hope for you (as it has been for [the Eastern Europeans]) can truly begin only when complacency has been eaten off as by an acid bath, consuming the temptation to illusion."
Never thought of myself or my book as an acid bath before, but the metaphor may well be apt. The way out is consistent with what I tell audiences when I speak. We need to keep our focus at this point on the actual implementation being required. It is provable and alarming. Right now intentionally created illusions impede our way out of this planned darkness of raw political power merging the religious and the secular, the public and the private, and society and the economy. In fact I found those Chambers' quotes when I was mulling over that the Baha'i see no boundaries to their planned usurpation of authority over the minute details of our personal beliefs and conduct. With the raw power and all-pervasive tentacles of the UN and its affiliates behind them and UNESCO pushing their values as the integral core of global education reforms, we have a problem.
Confronting the actual intentions seems the only way out. Baha'i came out of Islam and clearly retains Islam's doctrine of absolute deference to political authority. Likewise, Baha'i clearly contemplates what Totally Integrative Education now seeks as well, the "political and the sacred are indissolubly merged." I am also seeing in the consensus mandates of the required Discourse Classroom or the Fostering Communities of Learners mandate what an American scholar of Islam, Franz Rosenthal, analyzed as consistent with the Muslim concept of hurriyya where an individual Muslim "was expected to consider subordination of his own freedom to the beliefs, morality and customs of the group as the proper course of behavior." Moreover, Rosenthal noted "the individual was not expected to exercise any free choice as to how he wished to be governed…"
That attitude, that was common to Communism and is a tenet of both Islam and Baha'i, is radically opposed to the Western conception of the primacy of the individual and reason and the conception of freedom that came out of the Enlightenment. The individual has been the essence of traditional education, especially after the printing press and easy access to books made literacy widespread. Now we are back to a Whole Child education that explicitly targets personal values, attitudes, and beliefs with the federal government collecting data to keep track of how the personal transformation from the inside-out is going. We need a Douglas MacArthur moment from when he confronted State Shinto in Japan after World War II.
"Shintoism, insofar as it is a religion of individual Japanese, is not to be interfered with. Shintoism, however, insofar as it is directed by the Japanese government, and as a measure enforced from above by the government, is to be done away with."
And it was. Today we have comparable attempts to indoctrinate students into collectivism as the only viable solution and transformation as the only acceptable action. The Baha'i books I cited in the previous post are full of those aims. Instead of reiterating those, I want to point out that these aims also come from a different direction that greatly influenced what would come to be known as LBJ's Great Society. Now with the 50th anniversary eminent, we had best fully appreciate what was really sought in the first place. The planners are not done yet. Back in 1961 Robert Theobald published The Challenge of Abundance laying out his vision of how the West must change now that it had sufficient wealth and technology to meet all needs. He also described using education as the means to obtain the necessary new attitudes and values. This is from page 1:
"the attitudes necessary for the most rapid rate of growth are not those which encourage a meaningful life for the individual or a valid sense of community."
That desire is still what we are dealing with today and it is what also drove the Swedes to dramatically alter their ed system in the 60s as we discussed in ways that mirror what is being sought today in other parts of the world. The idea, which I believe is erroneous but it IS the foundation for all these sought transformations via education, is that the "society of abundance could, at last, provide independent means" for everyone to reach their potential and thus for the first time in history have "true freedom." It was Marx's vision and it drives UNESCO today as Scientific Humanism. It also goes by Human Capability theory now and has an international conference coming up in Greece.
Education is always such a crucial component over the decades this has been sought because, as Theobald wrote: "such a society is possible only with the acceptance of limited desires. We too can have a society of abundance in the rich countries before the end of the twentieth century [yes, a bit off-schedule here in the US!!!. hence the hurry now]. But abundance is not a specific quantity of goods; it is a state of mind, a set of attitudes. Man can never produce all he could use, abundance depends on the acceptance of a reasonable standard of living."
As of 2012, by the way, the Ford Foundation began calling that very same concept the Line of Plenty. Think about that passage every time you read about education creating a Growth Mindset instead of a Fixed Mindset. The Growth is in the new values and attitudes and beliefs about the role of the individual and the primacy now of the community and the perceived common good. It really is about getting the desired evolution from the inside-out that will allow the social, political, and economic transformations that have been sought for many years, behind our backs. We cannot afford to maintain the illusion of good faith disputes over content or how to best tech reading or math. The reality is that everyone from John Dewey to the Baha'i to the Club of Rome and Theobald are all determined to use education globally are;
"asking that man become unselfish. This is not necessarily impossible. 'Selfishness' stems, at least in part, from the fact that Western economic and social systems are set up to encourage individualism. If we reduce the necessity for economic conflict, it may be that we can develop a co-operative form of society."
History reveals a very expensive mess coming out of these intentions Theobald laid out in 1960, but this remains the true aim in 2014. Common sense tells us that such aims will continue to push us towards a kleptocracy, but too many of the decision-makers now in education have a vested interest in continuing and expanding the organized theft from taxpayers. All the more reason to ramp up the mind arson to avoid detection for long enough to get another lucrative contract or lock-in that pension or promotion.
It does create a tremendous irony though that all these destructive policies and determined pursuit of changes to students' values, attitudes, and beliefs involve the use of so much deceit to try to put in place "a new idea–we must demand that man should become responsible and willing to make decisions on the basis of the general interest of the community."
Because that goal is always so beneficial to those who hold the strings of economic, social, and political power. Ever fearful of the magnificence the unencumbered individual mind is capable of.
Keeping hope alive indeed. Piercing through the deceit straight to the core of the actual intentions.
Posted in Belmont Challenge, Common Core, Outcomes Based Education, Quality Learning, Social and Emotional Learning	| Tagged amitai etzioni, capability as a human right, Carol Dweck, Communitarianism, Courtney Cazden, cybernetics, FCL-Fostering Communities of Learners, Great Transition, Growth Mindset, Martha Nussbaum, Marxist Humanism, Positive School Climate, Subjective Well-being	| 14 Replies
Substituting Human Values for Spiritual Growth Lets Education Become the Driver Towards the New World Order
Did you ever come across something that both intrigued and terrified you at the same time? That is how I feel about the official Baha'i materials that I have now gotten a chance to read. Especially alarming was my insight that there was nothing to keep these religious or spiritual principles from simply being renamed and then required as a component of an anti-bullying campaign, or a characteristic of an IB Learner, or as conducive to a Positive School Climate, or even required emotional competencies or Life or Soft Skills. In other words, invisibly part of Student Achievement or Growth with no tip-off to parents or a community for the kind of wholesale change in consciousness schools are now being used for.
So being the intrepid investigator I am, I found the Baha'i tenets being pushed as the Psychology of Child Development, moral education, peace education, character education, and Integrative Ethical Education. Missing of course the Baha'i label for the most part unless you actually go to the website of the Center for Global Integrated Education or check into what Achieving Coherence in education means and discover that the Pedagogy of the Empowered does after-school programs. This link from 1991 and a UN talk is par for the course http://watsongregory.homestead.com/files/un_talk.html as Baha'i universal principles get dropped into what is to be quietly pushed during the 1988-97 World Decade for Cultural Development.
Dangerously for someone trying to look out for such desired conversions many Baha'i remain members of their Christian, Jewish or Muslim faiths as well and there is no "clergy or ecclesiastical order within the Baha'i faith." It is thus not clear how many, like Watson are "an educator, working on my education doctorate at Harvard University, with an emphasis on sustainable development" using the schools or universities to collect a paycheck and spread their 'worldview'.
Not to sound paranoid, but reading that the son of the founder of a faith, that so closely tracks the tenets of Marxism in pushing the unity of mankind and reconstruction of society through converting the heart and values and 'mental processes' via an emphasis on education, also saw North America as the "cradle of the administrative order which Baha'u'llah had conceived" was quite an epiphany. So was discovering that the Baha'i faith in the West was based in Chicago where in 1912 that same son and anointed spiritual leader had laid the cornerstone of the building that became the "Mother Temple of the West" while on a tour of 40 American cities and towns. That would be the same place that gave rise to the Behavioral Sciences in 1948 and where CASEL, the hatchery of so much social and emotional learning curriculum, is now located.
We can add the overdrive expansion of the influence of Baha'i faith to those troubling ideas that simply erupted in the 80s that I describe in my book that indicated that plenty of people in decision-making positions all over the world had gotten the word that State Communism was about to have a funeral. But not so strangely anymore with No Autopsy of the Ideology. Successor ideologies that would serve similar ends were apparently to get their chance.
In 1984 the entity in charge of Baha'i, the Universal House of Justice, published The Promise of World Peace. In 1985, the book Ervin Laszlo recommended in his 1989 The Inner Limits of Mankind was published so we also have The Baha'i Faith: The Emerging Global Religion to consult on what those tenets might be. A universal system of values and beliefs to be adopted in full and adhered to in full that simply substitutes the phrase 'human values' for what are in fact acknowledged 'spiritual principles' of Baha'i is a school that is proseletyzing even though a Christian prayer at a graduation or sports game would bring the ACLU swooping in threatening litigation.
Is the difference that Baha'i teaches submission to the authority of government? The Oneness of all Mankind? That of course, according to the basic teachings of Baha'i, "implies not only a new individual consciousness, but the establishment of the unity of nations, of world government, and ultimately of a planetary civilization." All this from a book advocating for Baha'i and insisting that "We must express unity by building a truly universal and unified social system based on spiritual principles. The achievement of such a system represents the God-directed goal of human social evolution." Oh good, because that's within the purview of someone with a teaching certificate or a foundation job or a doctorate in education.
What if you do not believe that all the world's religions push the same basic message? Is that no longer a sanctioned belief to have and act on in the 21st century? What if a Baha'i commitment to the "spiritual conquest of the planet" makes us nervous and a statement that religion is not "personal salvation we are seeking, but a universal one" seems like a political coup towards collectivism using education as the stealth means of destruction? Is there no recourse when the principles being pushed, quoting Shoghi Effendi, this time acknowledge:
"Our aim is to produce a world civilization which will in turn react on the character of the individual. It is in a way, the inverse of Christianity, which started with the individual unit and through it reached out to the conglomerate life of man."
You know if something is the inverse of something else, don't then later assert that all religions are basically equal as part of a bootstrapping sales pitch for the "newest" one. If K-12 education is requiring that all students perceive the fundamental 'connectedness' and interdependence of all peoples and treating such system thinking as required under the C3 Social Studies Common Core Framework, what recourse do we have when we discover it is a core Baha'i principle? What do we do when the actual Common Core classroom implementation replicates what Gregory Watson laid out as "Educational Imperatives from the Science of Systems"? What happens when the sought change in perception or new schemes of thoughts to be coerced through the K-12 classroom tracks back to Baha'i as well as an explicit rejection of the "concepts of an outdated worldview–the mechanistic worldview of Cartesian/Newtonian science" when those concepts remain factually true but unwanted? Not a transformational tool to change hearts and minds and inspire action for change and global justice?
What happens when the reform required tracks back to a Baha'i desire that "once we begin to see things differently, we can begin to feel differently, after which we can begin to behave differently. Abstract knowledge does not have the potential to empower changes in our behavior to the degree that experiential knowledge does, especially when this experience comes to us as children." Doesn't that give new meaning to the push for universal preschool and an accreditation mandate too or the so-called Maker Culture and project orientation that is equitably accessible to all learners? Do self-declared religions get a free pass to sponsor revolutionary change through education that will lead to new social structures just as long as the UN recognizes them and loves their potential for empowering change?
Historian Arnold Toynbee is quoted in The Promise of World Peace that the "present threat to mankind's survival can be removed only by a revolutionary change of heart in individual human beings. This change of heart must be inspired by religion in order to generate the will power needed for putting arduous ideals into practice." Is there no recourse to such a declared intention as long as the Baha'i link is left off the worksheet? How about required service learning actually grounded in the Baha'i principle that "religious values are expressed in the service to others" and that "work performed in the spirit of service is worship"?
What if the transformative education going euphemistically by 'quality learning' also tracks back to the Baha'i desire for a "rebirth of the human personality." That goal of "individual development is always seen in the context of the collective progress of the entire human race… and this places an emphasis on the qualities which the individual needs to acquire in order to help that collective progress."
What do we do when the acknowledged intention of a curriculum or instructional practices or Whole Child mandate turns out to be "not to produce a human being whose greatest virtue is to harm no one, but to give rise to social activists and change agents?"
What happens when the definition of 'culture' quietly shifts to "include behavior patterns, the individual view of him/herself, of society, and of the outside world"?
Especially when such a stealth shift also wants "those who hold power in the world" or "decision-making authority" to simply mandate and lead the change?
Schools are thus not the only place being pushed to impose a nonconsensual coup over all grounded in new values and beliefs.
Posted in Belmont Challenge, Common Core, Education for All, Outcomes Based Education, Quality Learning, Social and Emotional Learning, Sustainability, UN Millenium Development Goals	| Tagged ASCD Whole Child Initiative, C3 Framework, CASEL, Ervin Laszlo, IB Learner Profile, Peter Senge, Positive School Climate, Student Growth	| 45 Replies
Educating for Radical Change and New Values in an Age of Abundance: Defining the New Kind of Person to be Produced
Have you noticed that everywhere we look, across time and in other countries, the consistent message is to create a new system of values? New values that form a personal core so they are available to fuel future action or fulfill future psychological needs in these times of change. It's why certain religions are being urged to shift their belief-systems. It's why Milton Rokeach originally created the very term Competency back in the 60s that is now with us more than ever. It lies at the heart of what Career Ready turned out to mean and embodies the personal and societal transformations the UN's IPCC reports want to require preemptively, whatever the actual weather or temperature trends over time.
To ground the consistency of this message I have once again gone back in time. I cover important aspects of this story as it relates to education as a weapon in the Cold War in my book. As a history devotee though, there turns out to be additional details now available to augment our discussion of How to Get to Fundamental Transformation and Why the Pursuit has been Consistent and Unrelenting Over Decades. The Berlin Wall coming down in fact seems to have acted as an accelerant. So let's go back in time to something anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in an essay for a 1966 book Automation, Education and Human Values.
I first tried to approach the fact that Uncle Karl was more relevant to what was sought in the West back in this post http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/political-primer-101-what-is-the-marxist-theory-of-the-mind-and-why-does-it-matter-in-2012/ and in a subsequent post explaining that Marx had a Human Development Model of society that would kick in at a certain point as technology developed through capitalist innovation. This was quite frankly to be the utopian time of "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Mead, like so many others we have now encountered from the 60s or later in the US or Europe, was assuming that stage had been met. It is also what Sweden was relying on in its changes we looked at and why its former Prime Ministers just keep showing up to guide the UN's vision over the rest of us.
We will never understand what is being sought via education and why it targets new values so consistently as a prime directive until we appreciate that. We also need to know that in 1974 the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Establishment of a New International Economic Order. The countries of the South and the developing world then have been not so patiently waiting for what they regard as their just due (as a response to colonialism) and the NIEO ever since. The magic technology that the NIEO is intimately intertwined with was information and communications back in the 70s. Now it has been updated to computers and broadband for all courtesy of the affluent West.
Let's look first at Mead and then at the 1985 UNESCO paper "The New International Economic Order: Links Between Economics and Communications." Then we can pivot to the ed vision and contemplate the irony of so many foundations created by tech fortunes financing the shift to a planned society built around the use of ICT. Conflict of interest? Mead brought the same kind of lack of bias to discussing economics that she brought to examining the sexuality of Polynesians, which is my sarcastic way of saying her desired ends influenced what she asserted. Nonetheless, she was an influential representative of a then and now common mindset that we best be aware of if we are going to accurately perceive the real aims. She noted that "the problems of a society as abundant as ours, with such extensive natural resources and such a large internal market" are now "problems of distribution rather than production." Taking on the belief common to those who have never spent a moment in the true private sector, Mead wanted planners and decision-makers to be able to decide "how to distribute buying power."
She would really like today's EBT/SNAP cards instead of food stamps, wouldn't she? She saw the early 60s as the "second phase of the moral revolution" that began when the Great Deal "in practice if not in principle" established the "idea that society was responsible for the subsistence of all its members." Phase two of the 'moral revolution' as she called it, which of course always requires new values, is about each member of society having a "right to share in its productivity" via the "right to live well." That 1985 paper citing a 1976 paper called Moving Toward Change wanted everyone to recognize once again that the establishment of the NIEO was not just a call for new economic and political structures and institutions, but to transform "socio-cultural factors" to help all peoples struggle against "all forms of domination." I don't believe gravity was included as a form of domination to be altered, but it is easy to see why education becomes the magic means for change with aims like these:
"[NIEO] is directed not only to making the best use of things and sharing them out more fairly, but to developing all men and women, and every aspect of the individual, in a comprehensive cultural process, deeply permeated with values, and embracing the national environment, social relationships, education and welfare."
The paper also put a great deal of emphasis on how mass media and who controls it can help bring about this new vision and noted how the electronics companies like GE and Westinghouse were buying broadcast networks and publishing houses, especially textbook companies. Connections between education and communications media that are even more profound today even if none of us got the memo about the related Human Development Society with its needs economy or the demand of so many countries to force "Equity" on the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia among others. To think we have been wondering why so many global ed conferences now are held in a Middle East waiting for that 1974 resolution to finally be fulfilled.
Now let's go back to the related ed vision from the 1966 book since it is still relevant and has the kind of graphic descriptions of intent that are only found before a plan runs into obstacles and controversy. For one thing it takes it for granted that the combination of computers and the behavioral sciences will inevitably create a means of "control which must include the manipulation of human beings." Since we now know how important the behavior control theory of cybernetics is to the actual planned implementation of the Common Core and digital learning and the new assessments, the quoted New York Times review of Norbert Weiner's book Cybernetics should still sound alarms so many decades later: John Pfeiffer wrote:
"The story is not entirely a happy one, however, because he [Weiner] did not trust robots. More precisely he did not trust man of affairs to use robots, or their fellow human beings for that matter, with either constraint or compassion."
Me neither. Just imagine if Weiner had all the open declarations we have put together from fellow profs at MIT and elsewhere. What we now hear as the ubiquitous claim of the primacy of the 'common good' in the 21st Century and the need for social justice was clarified in 1966 as the "problem of the one and the many." The 21st century keeps wanting to redo values to confront this same problem, which is why we keep running into cites to Professor Amitai Etzioni and communitarianism lurking behind poorly known new mandates in the schools. By 1966 the wake for the "notion of individualism in the old sense" was already being planned with glee. Education needed to replace a reverence for the past with an emphasis on the present and future so that "purposeful direction" could begin.
Education was to become 'general' with the "wellbeing of all as the key to human relationships powered by justice and compassion." Education "for technical competence" was to be reconciled with "education for emotional or psychic competence." No wonder a Whole Child emphasis or social and emotional competencies just keep recurring all over the world. We are just not appreciating that it is all tied to such an enduring vision of extensive transformations in virtually every sphere. Nor do we quite understand why the template for the Great Society that is so widely viewed as an expensive disaster that created and magnified societal dysfunctions remains a blueprint still being followed.
Let's end with the confession from the 60s that the "humanities, as historically transmitted, as conventionally conceived and defended, as conventionally organized and taught, just will not do" in an "age of advanced technological and social change." That is still the attitude today. Education for transformational social, political, and economic change needs fresh voices "of man's changing efforts, experiences, and aspirations." So if content is not relevant to either "the world of action or to man's inner needs," it needs to no longer be part of the curriculum.
Every once in a while it is important to pause and look back in time for our answers on the whys of what we are dealing with now in education. Now we can better appreciate why education globally is putting new values front and center as both the purpose and focus of the classroom and life experiences generally.
And why so many are so impatient.
Posted in Common Core, Education for All, Outcomes Based Education, Quality Learning, Social and Emotional Learning, Sustainability, UN Millenium Development Goals	| Tagged amitai etzioni, ASCD Whole Child Initiative, Career Ready Practices, Communitarianism, cybernetics, Dialectic Theory of Human Development, Marxist Humanism, Milton Rokeach, Piotr Galperin	| 6 Replies