Tag Archives: ASCD Whole Child Initiative

Naming Educators as the Levers Shifting the Human Personality To Marx’s Moral Revolution

Posted on by
32

The full quote was Change Producing Levers and it bemoaned their current disassembled status. But that was decades ago before education doctorates became about implementing Marx’s Human Development Theory in the schools and classrooms. And before all that psychology research from the late Soviet Union got rolled into pedagogy as we have discussed several times. And before Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, grounded in Hegel and Uncle Karl’s hope that man could change himself and his values and external conditions through practical activity in the world, got renamed to pitch to parents as student centered or project based learning.

Honestly I was a history major and I have spent the first five decades of my life not giving the disgruntled German revolutionary dreamer much thought. Especially since I wrongfully assumed it was a tired old defunct ideology anyway. But it just kept coming up as I charted what the real Common Core implementation, the one compelled by degree programs and actual definitions and the accreditors and laws and regs no one else seems to be reading, looked like.   So I dusted off my Phi Beta Kappa key for inspiration and rubbed it like a charm for good luck, shook the cobwebs out of my non-student brain, and dove into what turns out to be a still vibrant world of Marxist scholars looking for our answers. Especially why I kept seeing references to some unpublished 1844 manuscript that was still supposedly a vibrant vision for the future. The 21st century future.

I started with Gar Alperovitz’s new book that had struck me as fitting a vision of a small “c” communist future. That insight then pulled up economists Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick lecturing and writing away in an inspired way that showed no signs of being a defunct ideology. In fact they have said there are more Marxists today teaching in American colleges and universities than ever. I believe them but it also suggests that our collective guard is down about something that is still a real but unappreciated threat. If educators in higher ed and K-12, especially administrators, are committed to reorganizing our society and economy around Uncle Karl’s belief that:

“In a properly human society, we would find our freedom through our relations with other human beings. A proper human life is one which is lived, at least in part, for the sake of others.”

And no, Karl was not referring to spouse, kids, and friends. But that does read remarkably consistently with what is called Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development and the Universal Love Principle which we encountered in Hong Kong and all through teacher training in the US. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/using-education-to-shut-down-free-choices-and-then-redefining-as-personal-autonomy-orwell-lives/

So lucky me tackled several books by NYU prof Bertell Ollman that were quite enlightening on how important it was to Uncle Karl to provide the Concepts of Understanding that would then filter daily perceptions. Check. We had rather noticed the omnipresence of conceptual frameworks and how the planned assessments are tied to those supplied Enduring Understandings and Understandings of Consequence. And Harvard Project Zero’s CORE–Cognitive Reorganization. So the lineage goes back to how to spark an inner change at the level of the mind and personality. That will then ramp up the motivation to take action to change the world.

Another enlightening prof I tackled this week from London was Jonathan Wolff. His insights may also help explain why Bill Ayers goes running around declaring himself to be a small “c” communist apart from a propensity to be obnoxious. Wolff quoted from The German Ideology where Karl wrote that “communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established or an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

A quote to keep in mind as education and other degree programs trumpet their purpose of creating Social Change Agents. And with education reforms globally admitting their purpose is wholesale social, political, and economic change. Away from the concept of the individual and the primacy of the rational mind. And before we really dive into our Uncle Karl Scholarship 101 Cliff Notes version dialogue, remember how I have told you several times that the accreditors all over the world answer to UNESCO? That accreditation is actually being used as a driver of cultural and noetic change in higher ed, graduate programs, and K-12 and that the standards tie to what we have identified as the vision of Humanist Marxism we discussed two posts ago?

Well it now turns out UNESCO actually has a division called MOST–Management of Social Transformations–that ties to virtually everything controversial that I have ever written about. Including the Belmont Challenge and International Human Dimensions Programme–IHDP– that Paul Ehrlich has bragged will fundamentally alter human behavior. I mention both of those programs again because they are operational right now with far-reaching visions of global change. Especially to citizens of the world’s only superpower. See the tags on right to find those posts if you have never read them.

Now we come to Princeton political science prof and Sovietologist, Robert Tucker. He wrote a 1961 book called Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. Now Professor Tucker had little use for Karl’s economic vision but he believed that:

“the aspect of Marx’s thought that is most live and relevant to the concerns of men in the contemporary West is the purely utopian aspect, the part relating to the post-revolutionary future…his vision of the future world was, if not scientific, at least rather prophetic of real possibilities. Marx’s concept of communism is more nearly applicable to present-day America, for example, than his concept of capitalism.”

That quote calls for both a deep breath and a sit down and gulp reaction. 1961. Especially as Tucker goes on to make the point that is so critical to the education reforms that commenced all over the West in the 1960s. Prompting outrage from the get go but never accurately perceived. The sought revolution is not military confrontation and it needs no pitchforks. “The world revolution would be the universal act of human self-change.” If that’s not clear enough, Tucker goes on:

“The revolution involved is not a political one but rather a revolution of man’s attitude towards himself and the purposes of his existence, a revolution of values.”

And if that is not clear enough Tucker goes on to say the sought change is “psychological” and “a moral revolution within the self”. This Growth (as in each student in the federally mandated teacher evals) is the “outcome of a gradual process” (like over years of collected data now starting in preschool). If you wonder why the ASCD is pushing the Whole Child as an essential component of the Common Core and why every one with any power over the classroom is decreeing a social and emotional learning focus, we need go no further than Tucker’s insistence that the revolutionary change needed to target each person’s personality. As Tucker wrote graphically: “it is only there, and by the individual’s own moral effort, that the egoism can be undone and the revolutionary ‘change of self’ achieved.”

Now I am not trying to spook you but those passages accurately describe precisely what is being targeted. And now we know for sure why. And for most of us the terms Marxism and Communism are bounded by visions of the Kremlin and Mao and Stalin. We remain dangerously unaware of the real threat to the West from Uncle Karl’s philosophies. And how it can come in and create the desired, revolutionary changes in values, attitudes, and beliefs without notice. And at a psychological level within the student.

The year after Tucker’s book many of leaders in the Behavioral Sciences in the US visited the USSR on an officially sanctioned trip to look into the psychological research being done there. Ralph Tyler and BF Skinner were both on that trip and Skinner kept a diary. And Ralph Tyler came back and basically wrote the legislation that launched Title 1 and the massive federal involvement in US education. And Skinner pushed the operant conditioning potential of education, especially if tied to the computer. And in 1965 federally funded research began to change the nature of the colleges of education to make Behavioral Sciences the focus. Others have written about that BSTEP program and the revolution it controversially ignited.

But not in the context of Tucker’s book about where the real communist, little c, revolution needed to begin.

I will leave you to mull all this over. But I will add that all the economic and social transformations we have encountered in post after post that all seem to be different names for the same vision are all consistent with this little c vision of the economic future and social citizenship.

Oh, one more thing. Robert Tucker turned out to be the father-in-law of Robert English. You know who wrote the 2000 book that gave the award-winning, officially sanctioned story of how Gorbachev’s New Thinking was actually the Marxist-Humanist thinking?

Small world, huh?

 

Making Race and Class Oppression the Locomotives Driving the Positive School Climate Mandate

Posted on by
20

That does seem confusing doesn’t it? Instead of transmitting the knowledge gathered through the Ages so this current generation of students can mull that over and build on it, we seem to be embarking on a Game of Fruit Basket Turnover in our K-12 schools and colleges and universities. Required by federal regs or at least executive orders, NCLB waivers, and accreditors’ edicts. Whatever it takes to get Equity in Credential Attainment. Even if that means no one knows much and the scabs picked at and pulled off to gain a widespread sense of oppression to justify and create demand for a wholesale political, social, and economic Transformation create a toxic, flammable mixture of citizen rage. Plus cultivating dependent citizens with unrealizable expectations that only a Strongarm State can hold together.

Before I walk you through “The 10C’s: A Model of Diversity Awareness and Social Change” currently being cited by ASCD as part of their Whole Child Common Core Initiative as well as the National School Climate Center as part of the creation of the required Positive School Culture, let’s remember that famously true saying that “a society that values equality more than liberty will end up with neither.” If government officials can enforce equal results despite real differences, they are treating citizens in vastly different ways. Not only is that not equal, governments that develop a taste for telling certain people what they can and cannot do want to continue that power. And with everyone. Let’s think about the untouchable power of Government Officials in such a Political Favorites and Clients Economy with what really made capitalism unique. Since so many people seem to confuse the Crony Capitalist/Political Class Dirigiste economy with Capitalism now:

“In a free market system, in order for one to get more for himself, he must serve his fellow man. This is precisely what Adam Smith, the father of economics, meant when he said . . . in 1776 that ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ . . . Free-market capitalism is relatively new in human history. Before the rise of capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving one’s fellow man.”

My thanks to the great Walter Williams for reminding us that a world where the federal government now intends to mandate that “I=We and We=I” through the schools may well take us back to those days of officially sanctioned plunder. That no government in history has ever been able to decree an equitable, just and peaceful society. Remember that as we go though the 10C’s. Where they say they are going has always been unattainable and is in fact undesirable to many if it means living as part of a Yoke, like Oxen or Cattle, being told what to Do and Feel and even what may be Known. Let’s be very careful we do not allow everything that works to be destroyed by educators and politicians and Businesses seeking to profit from Connections pushing an Impossible Utopian Dream.

The 10 Cs is a two-part model that includes the 5Cs of Awareness and the 5 Cs of Change. And it is not a model just cooked up for the Obama Administration’s ed reform push. No, it goes back to 1995 so it was created originally to be part of the 90s version under the Clintons known as Outcomes Based Education. We were always supposed to have our values and personal attitudes manipulated via education in fundamental ways. Our schemers prefer a different definition than they tend to tell us about. They wish to try to draw out a new kind of human being. You don’t mind a little experimenting on your children, do you?

The 5 Cs of Awareness are: Color, Culture, Class, Character, and Context. The 5Cs of Change are: Confidence, Courage, Commitment, Conflict, and Community. That last word is where all these education reforms we have examined are going. Community “means working collectively and collaboratively with others toward a shared vision.” And if a student does not share the vision at the start of the 10 Cs he must at the end. You see, the 10 Cs regards individualism as an unacceptably Eurocentric belief. School then becomes about creating values, attitudes, and beliefs so that each student not only values their own 10 Cs, “but the 10 Cs of others as well.”

Not a moment then to waste to see how students are to be taught to see themselves and others. Remember too that like emotions, this is also a type of learning accessible to all. The plan is to start with “an inventory of ourselves and examine our own experiences to more effectively confront issues of personal and societal oppression.”  First, each student is to be taught to look at skin color as an essential, unchangeable aspect of one’s individual/group identity. Charming, huh?

Then we move on to Culture which the students are told is always changing. I would point out that is not necessarily true but is very useful for schemers who would like to jettison an existing culture while creating a new one based on Theories of Utopia as well as political theories that have a tragic past. The students will be told that male and female are socially constructed, assigned roles that differ from culture to culture. The Culture lessons seem to be long on a “Free to Redefine” element without any accompanying lessons that redefinitions have consequences.

“The third C is Class and addresses power relations. It examines individual and group identity relative to power, authority, hierarchy, status, and the degree of access to, control over, or ownership of resources, including wealth, education, employment, housing, etc.” Now most kids have little idea what decisions and training went into their parents having what they have, or not, and the good or poor choices made. We are setting ourselves up for students decreeing “Ice Cream for All!” with no awareness there is a limited amount of milk and sugar available and it’s already been sold to others for necessary uses apart from dessert.

Instead, of reality and the inevitable tradeoffs of finite resources, we are to get student jam sessions that “the failure to recognize power imbalances is a key obstacle to productive and authentic dialogue about diversity because it avoids the fundamental issues of access, ownership, and control over one’s own/group life.” So students are to be encouraged by teachers and principals and facilitators (all living on salaries and benefits paid at taxpayer expense) to each “identify and accept the power that we do have, and creatively use that power in the service of social justice.”

Oh yeah, as part of that lesson students get told “we all have an obligation to use whatever power we possess in ways that work for peace and justice.” Something to keep in mind during the upcoming holidays if your college student comes home for turkey and dressing with a barrelful of new attitudes being cultivated for those tuition dollars. Not just a K-12 model you see.

Character then turns out to be all about the importance of Group Identities. Beyond the Eurocentric comment, it tells middle class White students that they believe in individuality because their “group identities of Color, Culture, and Class have been validated at every turn.” So Dominant Group Members put their primary emphasis on their C of Character. Only someone living at taxpayer expense would think deemphasizing personal Character in favor of parity with Social Group Identity was a Good Idea. Let’s just chalk this C up to the continuing assault on the legitimacy of the Individual.

The fifth C is Context. “The reality in which individuals and groups exist in time, location, environment, and the socio-political, economic, and historical conditions which influence individual and group experience.” Yes, it sounds to me like Bronfenbrenner Ecological Systems Thinking that we talked about here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/so-now-common-core-rejects-individual-thinking-to-embrace-soviet-psychology-ecology/ . Heh, at least we are finding consistency in the Real Common Core implementation. Even if it IS light years from the rhetorical sales campaign. So Context shapes the meaning of Color, Culture, Class, and Character and is like “the basket that holds the other Cs together.” So our students who are largely ignorant of past history are being encouraged to think you can redesign societies, economies, and political structures. They will not see the Likely Downside of Wholesale Change. They are just being pushed to promote it.

How? The C of Confidence–”Reclaiming and redefining one’s personal and group identity and abilities, in ways that are inclusive of all people, will build confidence and unleash creativity that can enrich and enhance the quality of life for all people.” Maybe but history says probably not. Next C of Change is Courage to push for “movements for peace and social justice” despite likely backlash.

3rd C is (sustaining) Commitment. It is the “focus, strategy, determination, and consistency, driven by love. . . that is the deep and consistent passion for justice and embrace of humanity that has always driven social revolutions.” Reality check here from Scrooge. That is not what drives social revolutions. Gracious People. Read some history books not written by Howard Zinn.

The 4th C is (Engaging) Conflict. It means the “reflection, struggle, and creative tension that promotes growth and justice. . . when channeled appropriately, it is a force that can propel us forward.” Yes, right into an abyss. Just ask the French about 1795 how well delusions over human nature as a basis for a revolution worked out there.

And that gets us back to the 5th C-Community. Or not. I personally do not think these 5 Cs will create Community. I do think that widespread pushing of these 10 Cs will destroy a great country. Extinguish the greatest beacon for freedom the world has ever known. Squelch the only economic system that encourages cooperation among ordinary people that leaves all of them better off.

No one pushing the 10 Cs has to live with their likely pernicious consequences. We do. and we have every right to know about and object to this planned focus of K-12 and higher education.

That seems to be already starting judging by some assigned handouts printed out at home by 9th graders. The ones who will be voting in 2016 for the first time. Make more sense now?

Squelching Climate Skepticism While Employing Operant Conditioning Tactics Against Schoolchildren

Posted on by
Reply

For those of you who never took a psychology course and never helped turn BF Skinner’s troubling books into bestsellers, operant conditioning was his idea on training people so that their behavior would be as programmed and predictable as a homing pigeon. Skinner always thought K-12 education had great potential as a social programming device. In the 80s the systems theorists decided that systems thinking would make a stealthier, more effective and lasting, means for operant conditioning. Simply target values, attitudes, and beliefs via the classroom and you impact future behavior decisively.

That targeting was what was going on in the Outcomes Based Education (OBE) controversies in the 90s. Looking at the 2012 Camp Snowball presentations and the flyers for the Summer 2012 Teaching for Excellence training sessions it appears to me to be updated operant conditioning techniques under new names from people like Spence Rogers and Peter Senge with ties to OBE. Engage even the most resistant student!

Plus this week the US Department of Ed announced that it would award 10 bonus points to any district applying for the $400 million of your tax dollars or future indebtedness in the so-called Race to the Top district competition that included “plans to work with public and private partners to help improve the social, emotional and behavioral needs of students.” Ah, comrade, may I suggest the unbelievably well-connected Responsive Classroom we profiled here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/locusts-of-the-mind-boring-gaping-holes-altering-wiring-and-living-on-our-dime/ .

The Ed Week article dated October 19, 2012 (after the national Presidential Polls began to suggest that Arne Duncan may be out of a job in January and unable to continue to shepherd these mind and personality altering plans in person. Best to award grants so the dedicated political minions in the respective district central offices can continue the practices whoever wins on November 6. I mean who will know?) states that these bonus points could make all the difference. Apparently 900 school districts applied already and only 15 to 25 grants will be awarded. Applications are due October 30, the week before the election. So there is still time for a scheming Super to file that amendment and sell future voters into mental servitude. Part of the democratic purposes of schooling indeed.

Now I have been warning you all summer about the dominance of social and emotional learning in the real Common Core implementation and PBIS coming in through federal disabilities law mandates and the ASCD’s Whole Child Initiative and the NEA’s Purple America/Project Love. I have also been trumpeting the unappreciated psychological components of new state definitions of student Growth (especially CO, NC and NV) and Student Achievement. The district Race to the Top requirements give a perfect example of what has really been the rationale for all these so-called reforms.   Mandate SEL or measures designed to destroy the Axemaker Mind and fund alternative means of measuring the outcomes of what is to be going on in these classrooms to gain the desired future political mindset and likely behaviors. Here’s a quote from the Ed Week article again:

“Districts must pay some attention to students’ physical and mental health regardless of whether they shoot for the bonus points. Districts must propose measures of age-appropriate growth in other areas, including at least one health or social-emotional indicator for students in 4th through 8th grades as well as a similar indicator for high school students. For its youngest students, a district must propose at least one age appropriate non-cognitive indicator of growth–for which the department offers physical well-being and motor development or social-emotional development as hypotheticals.”

So the same administrators intent on stopping lecturing of facts and who insist that reading be taught inefficiently through a whole word sight approach will get to pick what social and emotional characteristics children will need for the future. You know that collectivist future where the economy has been designated an ecosystem and redesigned around Sustainability and the Common Good we have been profiling? Because that is what is going on in those professional development sessions we are not invited to.

I know because every day a certain portion of mystified teachers leave those meetings and do online searches of the terms and concepts they found most troubling or mystifying. Or both. Guess whose doorstep the searches gravitate to? There is evil afoot and the teachers seem to have a greater radar detector for the mischief than the administrators. Their bosses. Perhaps because too many are drawn to administration after they proved to not be very good at teaching subjects. Now they have power and our tax money and a federal government and its cronies intent on using education to mount a political coup. For Equality!! One that is supposed to survive a change in White House occupancy or a shift in a state’s governor or a loss of control of Congress.

This week the horrifically politicized National Academy of Sciences continued its efforts to make Lysenko seem like a scheming piker when it comes to using political power to destroy the natural sciences for political reasons.  This report, called “Climate Change Education, Formal Settings, K-14″ announced the intention to use education to stamp out widespread skepticism over Climate Change. Our modern-day political officers have determined that a belief in catastrophic man-made temperature increases is in the best interests of their future plans for transforming the US away from free market capitalism and individualism.

And by golly they intend to use the monopoly over education to inculcate that widespread belief in impressionable children. The report was based on a workshop that took place on August 31 and September 1, 2011 and seems to have been part of the effort to use education and the social sciences to bolster  the Future Earth Alliance vision whatever the actual temps as we profiled here  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-reality-is-ignored-or-disregarded-when-do-we-become-a-state-against-its-people/

The report contemplates that the new Science Standards issued in the name of Common Core will be very controversial. That would be consistent with what we have already discussed in our systems thinking stories that the West and the US especially is being pushed away from the science of the Enlightenment and a distinction between the natural sciences and the social sciences. In their place we are to get the UN pushed (and Marxist belief) in a Unified Science as well as what the Chinese call Experience Science grounded in a Confucianist belief that there should not be such a distinction between people and nature. Which sounds a great deal like what Thomas Berry and the ecologists are pushing that we profiled here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/we-need-a-radical-change-in-our-mode-of-consciousness-even-a-new-sense-of-being-human/

So we are to get a new definition of Science no matter the controversy from those with the proper ed credentials and we must believe in Man-made Catastrophic Climate Change whatever the actual temperature trends or real causes. But since that might become the source of controversy if it was a discrete segment of a particular school subject, the report suggests using Systems Thinking to instill the desired beliefs and to make Systems Thinking a part of all academic coursework.

Now I keep flashing back to visions of the Marxist-Leninist political officer in the movie The Hunt for Red October. “Comrades! First it was my job to make sure the schoolchildren and future voters had the desired political beliefs we find conducive to ruling over you and dictating what you are to do and what you may become. In case all those years of Soviet schooling did not take as we wanted, people like me are put in places of power to monitor adult decision-making that contradicts our glorious empowering ideology.”

No, that was not part of the movie but those political officers were a very real part of how the Soviet Union or Mao’s China operated. And how different really is this planned social and emotional and psychological assault and data gathering to gain desired political beliefs via our schools in the West and Paul Ehrlich’s Newmindedness and the collectivist belief in the Common Good from the last post?

Our schools. Our children. Our tax dollars. Are we really defenseless to stop this blatant assault on our individual freedom and the economic system that brought unprecedented prosperity to the average person? Unsurpassed in the history of humanity?

Is it really to be punted in the name of Education?