Tag Archives: CASEL

Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies: Is This Really Mental Health First-Aid?

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Let’s say the political transformation truth came out instead of talking about the Common Core as a means of creating common content expectations from state to state using common tests (neither of which happens to be true as I have shown). That is unless you count content as those Life Skills of Psychosocial Competence that now go by 21st Century Skills to sound better and move us towards our planned future. And I actually do mean Planning with all the fervor of a PhD candidate in Urban Studies at an Ivy League school. Maybe one of the Cambridge Cousins where too many profs have been enthralled with Systems Thinking and Theorizing and trying to get people’s behavior to fit the computer models for decades.

But no we can’t make it about 21st century skills up front as the reason because that P21 Partnership was going over like a lead balloon as attendees at conferences kept wondering “Where’s the content knowledge?” So P21 said it was folding up shop and leaving its Tucson home where it was in such close proximity to Peter Senge’s version of Systems Thinking. That it would just move into the CCSSO’s offices in DC. And thanks so much for offering the room.

Now some people were relieved and others alarmed since the conflict-laden CCSSO (look at who sponsors it to see what I mean. Hello tech companies and accreditors!) was a co-sponsor of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. And CCSSI is what the states have adopted supposedly to make content consistent. Might P21 influence the implementation? Yes. See previous post. Now we know this CCSSO interest group of the top ed officials from each state have also sponsored several other troubling initiatives that are clearly warping what the classroom implementation will look like. There’s that C3 Social Studies Framework to impact curricula and assessments and give students false beliefs to practice filtering reality through during their school years. There’s CCSSO’s work with the Asia Society on Global Competence and with Harvard’s Project Zero. PZ is also doing Global Citizenship work for IB as you may remember. And saying both its IB and CCSSO work can just go by the name Global Consciousness. Just call me “Robin Reads A Lot.”

We are going to talk about Consciousness in this post. Cultivating it with the desired concepts and filtering metaphors and desired values, attitudes, and beliefs. For a collective, common-good primary orientation. And actively manipulating it when the Mind that Came from Home has undesired beliefs and is too independent. Maybe they deny an Obligation to All Humanity or maybe their dad is a Physics prof wondering how it is Science to have no interest in actual data that is inconsistent with the hypothesis that increasing carbon dioxide because of man’s activities must lead to catastrophic consequences.

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/01/09/0956797612452864.full.pdf+html is an article published recently  in Psychological Science by some Stanford profs (do you think they know Paul Ehrlich or Bandera or Roy Pea or Linda Darling-Hammond?) discovering that interdependent action and awareness is not such a good motivator in Western countries, especially the US. This research was funded by our ubiquitous and increasingly interested in our personal behavior and changing it federal agency–the National Science Foundation. The article closes like this:

“For interdependent action to become chronically motivating, it needs to be valued and promoted in American worlds and by American selves to the same extent as independence is. Until interdependence is more consistently and effectively represented in the ideas, practices, products, and institutions–that is, the culture of the American mainstream, successfully encouraging the perspective that our destiny is “stitched together” may require invoking independent behavior to achieve interdependent ends.”

Like those the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior or the Belmont Challenge or the International Human Dimensions Programme are all pursuing now with our tax money as I have described? All eyeing education as the answer to the mindsets they need? What are the odds of all this being coincidental? Especially when I add in that the UK in 2001 got a much more up front standard to prompt all the social and emotional change and interdependent emphasis. No slipping through the windows and chimney and unpublicized Executive Orders as in the US. No, the “Standards in Scotland’s School Bill (2001) indicates that education should be directed at the development of the personality, talents and mental and physical abilities of the child or young person encouraging the development of their fullest potential.”

Now any similarities to Uncle Karl’s Human Development Theory we have discussed are wholly coincidental. It’s not like anyone with influence over British education at that time missed Marxism and the influence it had wielded. So this passage brings in intrapersonal and interpersonal skills and Educating the Whole Child and Emotional Intelligence. So the Brits and the Scots and the Aussies and the Canadians all looked at the veterans in developing such curriculums. The Americans. We have CASEL and the recommended Responsive Classroom program. Oh but back in 2001 it would have been known by its earlier name, Peaceable Classroom based on esr’s decades of Conflict Resolution and Social Responsibility work. Or there is PBIS or also Positive Behavior Support Systems. Especially popular in Colorado where the McREL ed lab pushes it as a useful tool of Second-Order Change in education.

Then there is PATHS which those Scots had turned to. PATHS is more than 2 decades old and is considered an ABCD model for the classroom–the affective/behavioural/cognitive/dynamic model of development–”placing primary importance on the developmental integration of affect, the vocabulary of emotion and cognitive understanding as they relate to social and emotional competence.” PATHS is not just for deficit urban areas although that is where it was researched on children and still gets used. See Cleveland last week.  http://www.air.org/files/Avoid_Simple_Solutions_and_Quick_Fixes_Osher_January_2013.pdf . PATHS also gets promoted now by the National Center for Mental Health Promotion and Youth Violence Prevention. And we know from an Ed Week article from a few weeks ago “Making Mental Health Part of the School Safety Solution” that all these SEL curricula are to be used as Mental Health First-Aid, supposedly to make the chances of another Sandy Hook or Columbine less likely.  Long-time readers know Colorado and CT are awash in SEL and other change the student’s personality and have been for a long time.

Why does it always come back to personality development? Beyond the clear connection to Uncle Karl’s aspirations for “creating something that has never yet existed”? I found 3 different passages from 3 sources to be stunningly illuminating on what is really going on. The first came from an essay on “The Changing Vision of Education”:

“We want the concepts, values, and skills of global education to be learned in a deep and genuine way that becomes part of each learner’s repertoire for acting in the world. As David Elkind says, once growth by integration has been accomplished, it is difficult–if not impossible–to break it down.”

Remember that mention of what Growth means because that is the new measure of the effectiveness of what happens in classrooms. Is student growth occurring? And there is nothing coincidental about the use of that term. I know because the 1976 book Schooling in Capitalist America spent a great deal of time describing the vision for “balanced human development for fostering general human fulfillment and growth.”  It’s a vision they said was consistent with the “development of a revolutionary socialist movement in the United States.” They were hoping to use education institutions, “social theory, and concrete political practice” to get most of their vision in place without violence. In their “Strategies for Social Change” passage the authors remind us of why educational institutions are so important.

“socialism is not an event. The consciousness developed in struggle is the very same consciousness which, for better or worse, will guide the process of socialist development itself.”

And they want that consciousness to become widespread among citizens. Now won’t those ill-structured performance assessments grounded in real-life problems be an excellent means of creating that consciousness? Since socialism is seen by its advocates as a State of Mind. One grounded in emotion. Certainly makes all the deliberate cultivation of false beliefs and mentions of filtering lenses to be practiced with in activities at school make far more sense. It is also consistent with a speech Linda Darling-Hammond gave  about 2009 where she giddily and unwisely mentioned that the Common Core was really about social and emotional learning. That content was just something to practice those behaviors on. The latter point can be clearly seen in documents I have where the continuous improvement is to be in desired behaviors, not knowledge.

We really are being scammed here on the difference between rhetoric and reality. And the sought goals behind closed doors could not be more Transformational. Luckily for us behaving as Miss Marple Who Reads A Lot has been a tremendous source of relevant info.

Now my third point is sort of fun. Remember I have mentioned the UN came out with a World Happiness Report in 2012 trying to get us all primed for transitioning to Quality of Life Societies where our happiness consists in the Wellbeing of All? Yes Kumbayah. Well its co-author, Richard Layard, gave a speech in March 2012 called “Mental health: the new frontier for the Welfare State.” It’s on pdf and youtube.

Which I would suggest puts the idea of Mental Health First-Aid as a daily part of every classroom in a whole new, and apt, light. 21st Century Political power for a desired welfare state. Everywhere.

 

Truly Effective Teaching Involves the Awakening of All Three: Heart, Mind and the Soul

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The graphic levels of personal, psychological, manipulation laid out in the Chapter on “Whole Systems Thinking in Education and Learning” (from the same source as the Change the Filtering Mindset from the last post) sent me scurrying for a way to put what was going on into perspective. It fits too well with what was being pushed in the name of Transformational Outcomes Based Education in the 90s for me to pretend “Oh No, they do not really mean that.” It fits with the actual PBIS/Social and Emotional/Deep Learning Emphasis of the CCSSI classroom implementation I have been profiling for months.

This is the reality, folks, and the prevailing belief is that no one in the US or elsewhere in the West can stop Transformative Noetic Change now–both within individual students and culturally for entire societies. If this were a science fiction movie, this would be the point where the female heroine whispered to the sound of thundering hoofs and gathering clouds of dust that “They are coming.”

Who is they? Why a modern day class of what the Soviets called the Nomenklatura, politicians, bureaucrats, hangers-on, and Crony Businesses all wanting to either live at taxpayer expense or have access to the privileges and protections of an aggressive regulatory state. People, this is the historic norm. The norm of a lack of individual personal freedom that parts of the world for a few hundred years in human history managed to put behind them. Until the uniqueness of this way of living became taken for granted like a Legacy Trust Fund that had always provided and every one ceased to learn the habits of mind that had made it possible in the first place.

That we are looking at a massive act of Global Social Engineering is not news to me http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/real-change-will-require-new-values-and-new-ways-of-thinking-or-social-engineering-is-hard/ but it may be news to you. My scurrying for history though this time took me to 1942 and Anthropologist Margaret Mead and the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion.  There I got an open acknowledgement, decades old, of an intention to use the Social Sciences, what she calls the “recipes of science” and her concern, sort of, over the implications:

“to manipulate people, we shall arrive at a totalitarian rather than a democratic system of life.”

See I am not being hyperboliic in imagining these Aspirations as the essence of what traditionally merited the phrase Totalitarian. Margaret Mead herself said the “plans for altering our present culture” by using the social sciences as “experimental material” commits us “to the manipulation of persons, and therefore to the negation of democracy.”

If it negated it in the perilous times of 1942 when the essence of Totalitarianism was well-known and a daily reality, it still does in 2012. By the way, Mead’s answer was not to reject the manipulation via Social Sciences, like Pedagogy, but rather to stress the Values of  the Means Used rather than the Ends sought in some desired Blueprint of Change. So instead of emphasizing the known Fair Shares Society of Goodwin Liu and Social Citizenship or the Future Earth Alliance as the End, we get the Value of educating every student equally, a Means. No less Manipulation. Still Social Engineering. What we call a Distinction without a Real Difference. Mags, this Means-End distinction given the Totality of the intended Social, Political, and Economic Transformation may have made you feel better in 1942. But we are still dealing with what you recognized  as the “negation of the moral autonomy of the human spirit.”

I am now back in the 90s and the 21st Century with a quote on how to gain Transformative Individual Change in Students in order to drive “the shift in society as a whole” via education. This is a long quote with my snark in brackets to remind you we are already dealing with all these described dimensions. Italics in original quote.

“Learning should involve ‘three awakenings of the mind, the heart and the soul (if) truly effective teaching’ is to take place . . .learning can involve the cognitive dimension (which is traditionally seen as the core of teaching) which involves the intellect; the affective dimension, when intellectual knowing moves to a personal and connected [Relevant as in Willard Daggett's Relevance makes Rigor Possible] knowing involving the emotions [which is why we hear the term "engaging the student" over and over again now and why Spence Rogers' PEAK teacher training materials keep mentioning targeting the feelings of the students]; an existential dimension where students are faced with questioning their values and ways of living and with the challenge of the reconstruction of their own sense of self [this is what is meant by the euphemisms of Challenging and Rigorous and Higher-Order Thinking that make parents of Gifted Students falsely believe their Child will get the Academic Knowledge that is fast becoming Forbidden as bolstering the Independent Axemaker logical Mind]; an empowerment dimension, which, if the existential crisis is resolved, involves a sense of responsibility, commitment and direction [College and Career Ready's Real Definition bound up in Amitai Etzioni's Communitarianism?]; and an action dimension, [Isn't that John Dewey's definition of the religious achieved through education?], which, if the questions raised by the first four dimensions have been resolved, involves the development of informed choices at personal, social, and political levels.”

Programmed via Peter Senge’s Systems Thinking and holistic intervention via the classroom on how to handle yourself politically? An Inculcated Mandate for Altruism and the Common Good with little ability to discern whether the assigned definition really makes Long-Term Sense? I really did go look up brainwashing in two different dictionaries after reading these plans. And the only thing good about having a child in a high school and district seeking to be a leader in this Transformational Educational Change template in the US is I personally recognize hearing the plans for every last one of those dimensions. I am not in the faces of the Gypsy Principal and Super only because I have bigger plans for this information. To tell you, concerned parents and taxpayers (and quite a few teachers who still want to teach real content) all over the world, what is coming and why.

Before I finish with the rest of the quoted plans, the blogosphere started noticing the real Common Core implementation this week in this story http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/12/obamacore-the-substitution-of-propaganda-for-great-literatiure-in-our-schools.php. Good. They are rightfully concerned with the federal government dictating to schools that a certain percentage of high school reading has to be Nonfiction. The story accurately recognizes that this mandate will lend itself to political propaganda in the classroom. Yes, absolutely, and that’s the whole idea. Especially readings that engage Heart and Soul in a compelling manner so that the instilled Beliefs substitute for Rational, fact-based Thought.

Imagine if the concerned parents and taxpayers outraged over the nonfiction mandate fully appreciated the story we have been uncovering? Or the intention in the next paragraph after the five dimensions I just described to use Joanna Macy’s despair work on students. Now won’t a federal Nonfiction mandate come in handy when you already intend to have students “engage with their feelings and pain for the world in order to reconnect with it“? The official recognition by the Credentialed Transformational Schemers that “a true sense of empowerment must come from both the head and heart.”

Well, they left out the Soul that time in the quote but not because there has been any reconsideration of what we saw in previous posts. Wait until I explain in the next post how the government would just like to have a monopoly on Values and sees the promotion of Religious Pluralism, officially sanctioned now of course, as the best way to get to get there.

If I were a fiction writer with a soaring Imagination, I could never come up with a story that rivals merely reporting the Facts on what is really going on via Education. Well-hidden facts to be sure but Verifiable nevertheless.

Creating New Minds, Different Values, Equity in Credentials: Can this Really Lead Us to Prosperity?

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Contrary to the slogans Prosperity really is not available by government fiat but it sure can torpedo it. Beyond regulation, poor choices by politicians and other officials with the power to distribute other people’s money (like School Supers or the accreditors or even “private” businesses like Amplify or IBM or AT&T or other tech companies) who push harmful education ideas while capturing taxpayer money can destroy value. Poof! Take those dollar bills and light them afire! No you say. It was paid in salary or revenue to a connected company, it did not go poof.

But what happens when the resources confiscated from the taxpayer through property taxes or an ESPLOST or their federal or state income taxes buys less than the value that would have been created in the private sector? Where it would have been spent by a purchaser who cared about whether he was getting actual value for what he was spending. We are all poorer because that money was taxed away from private hands to a less efficient spender. So it needs to be spent for a good purpose.

That’s problem No 1 anytime the government decides to take money. That is true of all government but it is especially acute with school districts. Especially now. Why? Education reform now is heavily “influenced by the writings of Vico, Spinoza, and Hegel, Marx, and Engels [who] developed a theory of society now described as historical or dialectical materialism.” I mentioned that here  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/so-now-common-core-rejects-individual-thinking-to-embrace-soviet-psychology-ecology/ but the book I mentioned in the last post, Computers as Cognitive Tools, and an article cited there “Beyond Amplification: Using the Computer to Reorganize Mental Functioning” make it crystal clear that the Skill Dominant Initiative and the Digital Learning Mandates and the No Transmission of Knowledge are ALL driven by political ideology. That really is taxpayer money spent poorly. A bonfire in fact, not just a Poof.

Collectivist, Remake Minds and Values Ideology. No ifs, ands, or buts about it even if a particular pushing administrator or Principal is unaware of the tainted past and Horrific Intentions of what they are implementing. That’s the beauty of Government Coercive Power. Do it or find another job. There are always people wanting to do business via political favors rather than crafting a superior product or service and taking real risk of capital.

This is the new view of education sought in the reforms in the 90s and now through the CCSSI ruse we have talked about http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/didnt-the-president-just-admit-ccssi-was-a-ruse-to-change-classroom-interactions/. This is not a dispute then about what to teach or how. Stripped of the rhetoric designed to obscure the reality of sought Political Transformation, we are in the midst of a dispute about what kind of country we will be in the future. Will the individual be free and have real personal autonomy? Or do politicians get to use operant conditioning techniques in K-12 education to change values and make curriculum choices to limit permissable knowledge? Is a student merely a lump of clay to be molded by the state to fit its needs and especially the needs of those employed by or seeking revenue from the government? That’s what the real CCSSI implementation assumes. That’s what Digital Literacy and Mandated Sight Reading Methods are all about.

Symbolic cultural tools identified by Soviet psychologists Vygotsky and Luria as strengthening individual mental capacity like written language must be weakened. Tools with the innate capacity, like the computer, to weaken mental function by becoming a substitute for it, must be pushed. It is desired cultural evolution where we are under attack to STOP “our nature-transcendent innovation as a species.” Just like Paul Ehrlich wanted when he pushed his Newmindedness and James Burke wrote about as the Axemakers Gift that must be stopped. Here’s the political vision being pushed by our ed schools and the accreditation agencies all over the world. It is the essence of what CCSSI is seeking and why Arne Duncan wants all curriculum to be digitized by 2017 at the latest.

“Human nature, on this view [reference to Marx and others listed above], rather than being a product of environmental forces, is of our own making and continually ‘becoming.’ Humankind is reshaped through a dialectic of reciprocal influences: Our productive activities change the world, thereby changing the ways in which the world can change us. By shaping nature and how our interactions with it are mediated, we change ourselves.”

So the computer and digitizing content and making the visual dominant instead of relying on symbolic transformation and haranguing any teacher pushing factual content each become a means of “cultural redefinition”. The dialectic just outlined of “shaping who we are by changing, not just amplifying, what we do.” Together these initiatives being imposed all at once are designed to actually pummel the individual student mentally and psychologically. No wonder there is a tragic history to these mandated social and emotional learning coupled with limits to knowledge shifts.

Over this past weekend, a Canadian education site pushed this Open Letter to Educators. Not complaining mind you but wanting these thoughts to gain widespread attention. Without the paying public even knowing.

“Education isn’t about teaching facts. It is about stoking creativity and new ideas. It is not about teaching students to conform to the world as it is. It is about empowering students to change the world for the better.”

Now how can someone without knowledge of history and what has gone tragically wrong and why, or economics with its built-in appreciation for unintended consequences, actually be in a position to change the world for the better? Changing the world for the better has always grown from the ascendancy of the individual and freedom of choices. Now realistically how can education reform designed to gut all that change the world for the better? This is education reform that destroys value instead of enabling its future production. There is no future prosperity here no matter what Amplify’s press releases say. Just prosperity for connected businesses that hire former School District Supers that can rely on doing business with taxpayer money with their former associates.

Now is wholesale social change an appropriate decision for educators or computer or broadband vendors or accreditors to be making? Especially in a country like the US with the US Constitution protecting the mind as property and the primacy of the individual instead of government? http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-the-system-seeks-to-destroy-the-ability-to-think-can-james-madison-save-us/

Instead of knowledge the computer becomes a means of collaboration and testing hypotheses against the computer’s prepackaged scenarios (where the Earth will be frying itself whatever the actual temps or facts) and solving complex problems that may actually be insoluble (at least by a central planner but the computer will not tell you that. And the teacher may now be forbidden to) and making plans and setting goals. That’s knowledge in our new Digital world. I may have been horrified by the educational vision of Mooresville, NC http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/mind-thieves-everyday-examples-that-add-up-to-a-cultural-and-political-tsunami/ but Amplify’s website saw it as the August 10 featured story.

Likewise, I find the vision of graphic novels centered around a pretend Zombie Apocalypse for middle schoolers to be horrid. See for yourself and decide http://www.zombiebased.com/blog/2012/09/30/zbl-featured-on-amplify-com/. Amplify sees it as an innovation to be touted on its website and celebrates that ZBL “appeals to kids the same way a videogame does.” Yes, at an emotional, visual, non-rational level.

Let’s end with what its creator says he intends the students to be learning from ZBL: It is supposed to be a framework for teaching middle school geography (in a way most of us would associate with Cultural Anthropology and Sociology).

“The story has several parts: Students prepare for the impending outbreak, then they have to survive the chaos, find a new settlement, build a new community, and plan for the future of their new home. Instead of just studying existing maps, for example, they have to design their own to track the spread of the zombies. In the end, students have to use higher-order thinking to solve real-world problems, or almost real world that is.”

So students are being taught virtually nothing about the world where they actually dwell and must ultimately get by in. They are immersed in imaginary scenarios that encourage them to trash the world as it exists and aspire to a different future.

Only in a sector of the economy used to living off OPM, Other People’s Money, could such ludicrous ideas as remaking education to fit Marxian political theory gain widespread currency. And I am afraid it will be up to those of us without the magical Education Indoctrination degrees to put a stop to it.

What would we do if medical schools reverted back to bleeding as the remedy for all ailments? This is not dissimilar.

 

 

Ridiculing the 1860s Mind as Unsuitable for the 21st Century: Cui Bono?

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Sometimes these days my life feels a bit like that Broadway farce A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Yet another official power grabbing, crony rewarding, and individual subjugating report will come out that I catch and know I need to tell you about.  Then as I continue my snooping into what is going on out in the real world, I get the perfect illustration of why this all matters. Even if you don’t currently have a child in K-12 or in higher ed.

I was going to explain this week’s release of the troubling “Using Science as Evidence in Public Policy” from our politicized National Academy of Sciences (again! John Holdren is VERY busy) where the “Science” is the Social Sciences, not Chemistry or Physics. Shades of what we detailed here.http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-reality-is-ignored-or-disregarded-when-do-we-become-a-state-against-its-people/ And Evidence is Needed because of the official belief and desire that our economy and society, an Ecosystem according to the Planners, needs to be managed by decisionmakers with the proper credentials instead of people themselves.

So I attended an “Innovation in Education Conference” on October 24 put on by the State Chamber of Commerce with official support from businesses likely to benefit from the new emphasis on digital literacy and technology and  Sustainability and Soft Skills and a new Culture as the focus of the classroom. In the sought Mercantile post-Consumer 21st Century Communitarian world we have discussed numerous times http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/didnt-adam-smith-write-a-book-explaining-why-this-is-a-bad-idea-back-in-1776/ this is not a shocking concept anymore. I do wish though these vendors seeking government contracts and political protection from competition for their current products would quit pretending their education advocacy efforts were all “for the children.” Philanthropic endeavors where they just wanted to give a heads up for future workforce hiring purposes.

But I am a tough, old, experienced corporate negotiator who has seen a great deal of what makes a business work and recommended walking away from deals that do not. When your audience is politicians and public and private sector bureaucrats, they can be fine, well-intentioned people. But you get a bobbing heads agreement to social policy talking points where the individual with his or her own money on the line in a free market would say ” Wait a minute. What are you really urging?”

The dangers of the herd and trying to manage and rearrange an economy at the political level are even more acute when the policies sought go to changing personality traits of children and limiting their ability to think rationally at all. While locking in the policies as a taxpayer paid contract with a district Super or School Principal or even the state. As a Student of History, let me just say that Benito in the 20s and 30s had a name for that kind of Corporatism trying to squelch the individual in favor of the collective while profiting from the lucrative connections. And no it was not a movement of the Right. It was collectivist socialism with the revenues of the economy being split among political favorites in addition to government officials. Jonah Goldberg wrote an excellent book about it.

Back to the Luncheon. The talking point was the supposed need for a new kind of education for the 21st century centered around the student (let’s all chime in snarkily “to actually change their values, attitudes, and beliefs”) through making school about using computers and digital technology. Missing was the fact that Soviet Psychologist Lev Vygotsky recognized that these external cognitive tools would change  people mentally once you made use of the device the focus. The known and desired hobbling effects on the human mind were conveniently left out of the presentation.

So whatever the convenience of the computer as a tool,  Totalitarian governments have also rejoiced that it can become an Individualism Extraction Device. The repeated rhetoric about lecturing by the best prof or teacher you ever met is mostly an illusion to sell the devices and broadband and get it to the classroom. And education conferences in the US were giddily calling this digital tech initiative a Trojan Horse and a subversion technique to finally get John Dewey’s vision of democracy by 1990. Yes, I do have a copy of the book. And rereading it yesterday did delay this post.

So politically connected Joel Klein who is now heading up the company Amplify  http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_536.html was the Keynote Luncheon Speaker. A state politician did the introduction and emphasized the constantly pitched need to change education for the 21st century economy. The intro made a reference to not needing the kind of education suitable for the 1960s. That was an odd decade to use since that is when the onslaught via federal government money coercing changes via behavioral and social sciences really began in earnest. It was also when SAT scores stopped advancing. Plus economists have noted it is when real per capita growth in the economy began to slow down dramatically.

So I am thinking a 1960s mind would probably be darn useful for a genuinely innovative 21st Century economy that really was about mass prosperity. And here is where I believe Joel Klein went off his prepared normal presentation based on quotes I recognized and reports I have actually read celebrating education that is visual and Tablet-based instead of intellectual. He got up and said, probably to emphasize the need for dramatic change, that traditional education was actually promoting an 1860s mind. Horrors was the desired reaction Joel wanted from his audience and nodding and bobbing heads in agreement is what he got. Not surprising as every experienced trial lawyer I know can play an audience.

But let’s think about this for a minute as I think this is an important herd lesson on precisely why you do not want the government using education to monitor and plan people’s personalities so they develop a communitarian mindset. Selling contracts with taxpayer funds to put devices in place that consciously seek to shut down the ability to think abstractly and independently. Manipulating emotions of 5 Year Olds via chosen vendors in the name of Soft Skills and Positive School Culture.

The 1860s mind being belittled and scorned was the Age of the Individual with almost universal genuine literacy. Did you know coal mining camps in the 1870s put on Shakespeare plays with widespread participation from the miners? The 1860s Mind fought the bloodiest war in US history because it so valued the individual that slavery became unacceptable. The 1860s Mind hatched the Industrial Revolution and the great inventions of the 20th century. And the greatest mass prosperity the world has ever known. And if bad things happened in the 20th century, they were never launched in a society or a culture that cherished the individual. They were always launched in societies that pushed the collective.

There is a mention in that Amplify press release above about Digital Learning leading to an “equitable society” which sounds like John Dewey’s little “d” democracy to me.  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/why-quality-learning-may-be-the-last-thing-you-want-for-your-child/ . I think taxpayers have a right to know that is what is being sought and what the likely costs are even if they have already stupidly approved the revenues to be delivered up in an ESPLOST referendum. Taxpayers and parents should know that the real assault is on Axemaker Minds  in suburban schools created at home by attentive parents. Now to be under organized assault at school. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/blending-sustainability-and-education-to-gain-arational-nonlinear-minds-and-new-behaviors/

I am going to close with a point from the Computers as Cognitive Tools book  I mentioned above coupled with a point from a book on Ecological Literacy to get to a new Postmodern World that came out about the same time. The 1990 conference focused on the ability of the computer to be a pedagogical tool that would reshape the student’s mental processing. The computer can also be used to instruct and transmit knowledge but that is expressly not the function educators want. Recognizing that reality lurking behind the lovely videos or Powerpoint speeches, lets go back to  Professor David Orr who we have met before.

As always the whole point of Ecology Policy Making has to do with “changing the way we think and what we think about” to shift away from the Modern World’s emphasis on the “I’, the interiorized ego” capable of rational thought.

“I think it is time to ask about the software of sustainability as well, and thus about the qualities people will need to build and maintain a durable civilization. . . [One with] people motivated by a sense that their wellbeing is linked to that of others and to other life forms.”

We have nodding heads about matters with unappreciated actual stakes and likely tragic consequences. We have a current federal desire for Policy Making via Social Sciences being sought in the name of implementing Peter Senge’s Systems Thinking and destroying lingering Climate Skepticism. Once again we see why the schemers do not want Axemaker Minds with knowledge of history coming out of classrooms or sitting in the audience.

Ooops.

Squelching Climate Skepticism While Employing Operant Conditioning Tactics Against Schoolchildren

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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?

Embrace and Seize Technology’s Potential to Capture the Hearts and Minds of Today’s Students

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That quote comes again from the Texas Vision Statement that we started talking about in the previous post. “Hearts and Minds”–that unconscious level that motivates and guides human behavior. No wonder one of the listed Participating Insurrectionist Supers has since moved on from Dallas to Cobb County, Georgia (a major suburb of Atlanta) where he is now pushing Digital Learning on middle schoolers despite parent and taxpayer objections. As the Vision Statement makes clear, apart from the fortunes to connected vendors, the digital mandate has a political purpose.

Digital devices like computers are cultural tools that diminish individual mental functioning. The tool does much of the work instead of the mind. Careful then with still developing minds.  And, no, that’s not just my opinion. There is a great deal of research that has now been translated and imported from Soviet psychology explaining which cultural tools aid the mind’s independent functioning. And which ones function like a vacuum cleaner sucking away the ability to conceptualize and think rationally. Guess where anything that kicks up the visual lies? Especially computers?

But before we talk about some of the silly and downright harmful assumptions in that Vision Statement about the Digital Revolution, let’s look at why the Hearts and Minds are being actively targeted. With all the zeal of a sugary cereal maker during Saturday morning cartoons. I am going to give the full quote here because I want you to appreciate how this links up to the planned dominance of social and emotional learning in the classroom and the Positive School Climate and Culture we have been chronicling. It really is about targeting future behavior of what should be independent individuals. Why? Well, consistent with what we have found in the real definitions of what College and Career Ready actually mean, our Insurrectionist Supers want to create “a new sense of community committed to the common good.” See how influential Amitai Etzioni is in education now?

And how do the Credentialled Comrades living (and retiring) at taxpayer expense intend to accomplish that Community-first Goal? Well they have apparently been reading all the Transformational Outcomes Based Education (OBE) work from the 90s because the Vision Statement also announces that “Beliefs create vision and drive action.” Which means if you can just impose OBE, or its more in vogue now sibling–Systems Thinking/ Systems Dynamics, in the classroom early enough, you can get future voters emotionally committed to Sustainability, Biodiversity, the evils of Capitalism, the idea that “Governments Must Facilitate everything.” Whatever. Factual reality ceases to guide perceptions from daily experience once you have captured the Hearts and Minds of the children. And that apparently is exactly what our Supers have in mind and want from the Principals under their command. I mean, employ. (my bolding for emphasis).

“Attention of leaders is focused on the dominant social systems that govern behavior beginning with those that clarify beliefs and direction, develop and transmit knowledge [notice that wording. This knowledge is not the product of the Best Minds of the Ages], and that provide for recruitment and induction of all employees and students into the values and vision.”

Oh, comrades, Employees AND students. No wonder tenure is finally being reformed with the NEA’s blessing. It’s to be part of getting us to a single Purple America instead of Blue States and Red States. Doesn’t that sound more like something that would come out of Moscow in the 30s in connection with Young Pioneers recruitment?

And how do you capture Hearts and Minds? Why you need “engagement-centered schools” where “student engagement is and remains the first focus.” That’s emotional engagement, remember? The whole premise of Second Order Change and Dewey’s Quality Learning. And that Level 4 Thinking on the Webb Depth of Knowledge Florida and Texas, those two gigantic states, both now use.

Willard Daggett, another one of those well-paid facilitators of first OBE and now the CCSSI and STAAR school implementations, has a new saying that “Relevance makes Rigor Possible.”  In other words, like John Dewey, these educators want to use student’s personal interests to get them emotionally engaged with developing possible solutions to the World’s Many Problems. To believe as Bela Banathy asserted in his Nine Dimensions for Human and Social Development that we are all just part of larger social systems that can be redesigned if only you embrace the proper vision.

So instead of using K-12 schooling and then colleges and universities or vocational training to counteract some of the visual input and artificial stimulation and hybrid text messaging that is so dominant now outside of schools, the vision coming at us all over the country is to make school activities and experiences mirror this digital reality. The digital reality that actually weakens mental functioning.  And of course we conveniently have Systems Dynamics computer modelling available so that classes can reenvision what will happen to various sub-systems if only you shift a variable here and an assumption there. Utopia via software Transformation.

There is a dangerous assumption permeating all these documents on ed reform and digital literacy and even the values accreditors want fostered in K-12, colleges, and now even grad schools like law and medicine. That employers and private sector businesses and our economy and professions will all need to change fundamentally to reflect the types of Minds and Values and Beliefs and Feelings the educational institutions intend to produce. (And as a former client I would not pay for lawyers who prefer to do Group Work.) Plus we have been at this long enough to recognize that was the whole point of attacking the Noetic system in the first place through education.

Education is a means of both getting at future voters and targeting the ultimate control and direction of markets and the economy and production and consumption. Processes that work best as individual decisions. Schools were the undefended, already socialized, part of the US and all Western economies. They give easy access to Hearts and Minds and in they come. On our Dime. Lying to our faces if we are prescient enough to discern this is not about how to best teach desired academic content to students.

Everything I have written on this blog to date lays out various ways and means and goals to use education to Transform, in the most radical sense of the word, the US and the rest of the West. Starting at the level of the human mind and motivating Values and Beliefs and Feelings and coming outward. ALL of it. Community, Environment, Economy. All redesigned and subject to the guidance of a cadre of Leaders who are quite sure that this time they will not be among those devoured in pursuit of a Communitarian-first Ideal. Because Leaders who would push such schemes on an unsuspecting, trusting public, will be so much better at creating and guiding the future than independent individuals who get to keep the upside and live with the downside of their personal decisions. Because governments and their coercive powers NEVER get captured by selfish people.

I am going to close with the vision of the values and capabilities to be fostered with digital devices in pursuit of democracy with a small d. Which sure does function like a 21st Century version of Communism with a small “c” unless, I suppose, you work for one of the Connected Businesses or the Government itself.

“Its goal is to provide all students with equitable opportunities to learn, participate in society, and further social change.”

To be a Cog in the redesigned sub-systems. To accept your assigned role. To glory in the dictated Values and Beliefs.

To be a modern day Serf to a 21st Century Nomenklatura. That’s the real vision behind these ed reforms. Everywhere. Not just Texas. They were just arrogant enough to write it up.

Thanks for that by the way.

 

Instilling Desired Feelings and Political Values via SEL in Children–Taps for the Republic?

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If the purpose of preschool education and K-12 and college are all now to be centered around changing guiding human values that might be obstacles to redesigning all of our social systems, like schools, businesses, the economy, and cities, is there anything left of the historic concept of individuality? Personal liberty? If an education degree or a credential in social systems or systems design or organizational learning gives a carte blanche at taxpayer expense to reenvision human systems to be other than what they are, shouldn’t we just face the facts and march to the National Archives and just light that US Constitution afire now? Say never mind, it was a good run. Nice experiment in prosperity. Time to move on?

Do educators and professors and accreditors get to unilaterally decide among themselves that we live in “changing times” and they have decided to “revisit” our “many traditions, rituals and customs” to determine their continued “appropriateness?” Do they get to decide what will be “sustainable behavioral choices” for us and then select what “values systems” will be appropriate for the future they have picked out? For us? Assuming of course that they will be part of the leadership? Here’s an example of the kind of nonsense guiding the systems thinkers who are training educators to change the nature of education with this vision (think of holographic as the opposite of hierarchy. They believe such terms make this sound Scientific instead of a political theory looking for guinea pigs):

“The holographic diffusion of culture means that it pervades activity in a way that is not amenable to direct control by any single group of individuals. [Because that direct approach was apparently the schemers first choice] What we can do, however, is design social systems with the conditions for desirable cultures to emerge. This process of design results in the human creation of intentional community.”

No, that is not how it has ever worked successfully. This has, however, been tried numerous times in the past with the levels of the disaster varying from financial ruin to destroyed futures to mass murder on an epic scale. Treating people and their social systems as if they can be manipulated like a circulatory system or planetary gravity is called scientism. Friedrich Hayek, Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote quite a bit about this fallacy of treating the social sciences as if they were natural sciences. It would be good for the sake of our civilization if mastering this important distinction were a prerequisite to having any authority over a student and their education. But, no, we get the educators excitedly speculating over “how to recreate our systems, how to redesign them.”

Mentioning that the word community is derived from the Latin communis which means to “make common” and that the point of school is now to create a “we” of the students “as meaningful relationships evolve” is NOT the purpose of school in any country wishing to survive as a Republic. It is a quick path to tyranny anywhere it has ever been pursued. It is not the place  of school officials or accreditors or the various parasitical vendors pushing whatever brings in education grant money in a given decade to decide to make the school a holistic community where:

“the more genuine the participation and the more deeply manifested the relationships become, the more ‘whole’ and authentic it seems to be.”

Now this post was originally just going to be about CASEL publishing a 2013 Guide for Preschool and Elementary School Children on Effective Social and Emotional Learning Programs laying out the Five SEL Core Competencies. It reminded me of Milton Rokeach’s work   http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/targeting-student-values-attitudes-and-beliefs-to-control-future-behavior/ that we have already found so alarming. New names, old Pursuit, same Collectivist political Ends. But a reader sent me a 2005 paper on Banathy and systems thinking in education after the previous post that is where these quotes so far are coming from. The paper envisions that new values instilled through the school can be used to make redesigning social systems possible. And we now know enough about PBIS and what Continuous Improvement is really monitoring and what Growth and Student Achievement as benchmarks will actually be measuring to see that we need to catch this design fallacy and resulting Values targeting early and fast. And in some poor districts like Tucson and Portland, Oregon, it may be too late.

Now I know for a fact that Austin, Texas; Nashville, TN; Oakland, CA; Sacramento, CA; Chicago, IL; Anchorage, Alaska; Cleveland, Ohio, and Washoe County (Reno), Nevada have all formally committed to be Collaborating Districts for this SEL Initiative.  http://www.austinisd.org/sites/default/files/dept/sel/docs/TOA%20combined.pdf is the Logic Model Diagram for one of these districts. As you can see, “permeate” would be an accurate verb to describe the planned SEL presence in the daily classroom of young children.

And remember what I have said before, all children cannot do well academically but everyone has feelings. So SEL is a focus that means everyone can learn the desired behaviors {specify what students are able to do] and there are political benefits if you are of a controlling disposition. Because of the nature of accreditation in education and the various unappreciated obligations and definitions in those NCLB waivers, this is coming everywhere. And soon.

I am going to give CASEL’s descriptions verbatim but before I do that, please remember that this will be in elementary school classrooms where we refuse to teach reading phonetically because that would introduce students to an abstract symbol system and thus nurture abstract thought. I have seen the Common Core literacy progressions and they amount to doling out the words and concepts students are to be allowed to encounter and become familiar with. Years to learn words that most kids could be ready for by second grade if taught properly. And I am not guessing on the reasons either even if the classroom teacher has no idea. Finally, Common Core distinguishes between oral and print and formal and informal in a way that appears tragic. And I really was not happy to read this week that those distinctions tracked back to Mikhail Bakhtin and his war against individualism. So here, please appreciate the planned manipulation already in place:

Self-awareness: The ability to accurately recognize one’s emotions and thoughts and their influence on behavior. This includes accurately assessing one’s strengths and limitations and possessing a well-grounded sense of confidence and optimism.

Self-management: The ability to regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations. This includes managing stress, controlling impulses, motivating oneself, and setting and working toward achieving personal and academic goals.

Social awareness: The ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others from diverse backgrounds and cultures, to understand social and ethical norms for behavior, and to recognize family, school, and community resources and supports.

Relationship skills: The ability to establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships with diverse individuals and groups. This includes communicating clearly, listening actively, cooperating, resisting inappropriate social pressure, negotiating conflict constructively, and seeking and offering help when needed.

Responsible decision making: The ability to make constructive and respectful choices about personal behavior and social interactions based on consideration of ethical standards, safety concerns, social norms, the realistic evaluation of consequences of various actions, and the well-being of self and others.

Whatever you expect from your area schools or need in future employees, Race to the Top and Common Core are premised upon the classroom being accessible to ALL students. Repeated references are made to a levelling purpose for public education. I have seen what the accreditors envision and it fits with those Five SEL Competencies and virtually no transmission of knowledge beyond basic, politically useful concepts.

The systems theorists have plans for radical transformation as we saw in the last post and others. As a result their goal of education in the 21st century is an “individually and socially competent citizen.” Not much knowledge there, but remember these same schemers plan to redesign the economy. To fit the education qualifications they are willing to provide.

All on our dime as usual.

Who Granted Permission to Spearhead Societal Evolution to a Global Cooperative Consciousness?

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Not just once as an aside but multiple times. Loud and clear. No ambiguity. Well, at least not if you read the actual Bela Banathy book Systems Design of Education: A Journey to Create the Future that I mentioned in the last post. Still not convinced since that Educational Leadership article said 1992. Well, but school districts are redistributing that 1992 article right now to illustrate what they mean when they say they want to use systems thinking in the classroom as part of the implementation of CCSSI. Want more current proof? How about how well Professor Charles Reigeluth’s Handbook Chapter on “Systems Design for Change in Education and Training” fits with that Fulton County Georgia district charter that Ed Week heralded as a national template when it went live on July 1, 2012?

Did you know Professor Reigeluth also teaches a course called “Systemic Change in Education and Training” that used both Banathy’s book and Peter Senge’s books so that credentialed educators can be prepared to redesign education and the American economy around systems thinking and design competence just as Banathy envisioned? No wonder the Model Standards for the Educational Leadership degrees mention that it is grounded in Human Development Theory. Which is precisely what Banathy describes as taking the place of the content instructional view of education. So the principal or super or other administrator with a recent (last ten years or so) Educational Leadership degree, especially a doctorate, got a heavy dose of Banathy’s vision for using a radically revised vision of education to be “a key agent in the transformation of the society.” When they weren’t being bombarded with Paulo Freire social justice or John Dewey’s Reconstruction vision.

So many of the administrators living off of your property taxes and state and federal taxes have been led to believe that we are in a Post-Industrial Information Society where there is a tremendous gap between the types of minds society will need in the future and what schools and colleges have typically produced. Social institutions that no one ever designed in the first place but which evolved are going to be trashed in favor of a new type of education and a planned economy developed around systems thinking and Sustainability. What could go wrong? I guess ignorance really comes in handy with these advanced education degrees because a knowledge of history would reveal that this scheme has catastrophe written all over it. Let’s disregard the lessons of the past indeed.

Let’s look at specifically at what Banathy laid out since as we now know it was the basis for what was being field tested in Colorado in the 1990s and it is coming to school districts right now under district charters, training by Senge or the Waters Foundation, or just the nature of the education degree work of the administrators in charge or your district. A promise to fulfill this vision and other political transformation visions for education may well be the entire basis for being able to use the title “Doctor.”

Banathy says that a key core idea and value in creating new images of education is the idea that:

“we should undertake to design our societies and their environments so that people of the future will be able to design their lives in ways that express their own humanity.”

Now I am a bit tempted at this point to start humming the song “Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows” I learned at summer camp and then give a lecture on what happens when you try such a gutting and redesign in order to centrally plan an economy and a society. Here’s the problem with just rejecting Banathy and then showing up at a school board meeting to lecture the Super on precisely the kind of social engineering hubris that killed 100 million people in the 20th Century. This vision is not just confined to Ed World. It’s the guiding vision behind the Future Earth Alliance and the Belmont Challenge we have talked about. It is the mission of that USGCRP 2012-2021 report we have also talked about. It is embodied in the Ecosystem representing both the economy and the environment which has been the purpose of numerous conferences and workshops and reports over the last several years. I monitor the National Academy of Sciences releases weekly for just this very reason.

The US federal government really does envision that the tech companies can organize the American economy around Sustainability with supercomputers and sufficient personal data on citizens. So Banathy’s vision may seem farfetched to those of us paying the bills and trying to survive in the nonpolitical private sector but lots of tax money is being spent right now in pursuit of this very vision. If it cannot work, now is a really good time to be talking about it. We are not over the falls yet but I hear them and can see that sudden precipitous gap in the nearby horizon. In fact truth be told, I think too many school districts have already gone over. I believe that was the essence of what led to the Atlanta cheating scandal. And we already have too many teens and twenty-somethings with credentials and expectations and manipulated values but no real marketable knowledge or skills from previous, non-national pushes of this vision. Graduates who have just their time and perhaps a willingness to show up regularly to offer an employer. Teamwork preferred.

Here are the Nine Dimensions Banathy proposed to “constitute an internally consistent and integrated guiding image for human and social development.” You know the image for education that is replacing the to-be-rejected idea that the “key function of education is the transmission of the knowledge of the past.” Talk about doomed to repeat it. Here goes verbatim in order to get to a “new image for humankind.” No, I don’t think Banathy studied hubris in the Greek tragedies of Sophocles. (His caps and it is pages 45-46 if you have a copy. My snark added)

“a SOCIAL ACTION dimension, implemented by social justice, and an increase in cooperation and integration of our social systems (this cooperation is really popular with existing Big Business and colleges and universities. Its historic name since I have a knowledge of past is Dirigisme or Corporatism);

an ECONOMIC DIMENSION with a focus on economic justice and integrated and indigenous development (so everyone will have roughly the same wealth and income unless you are politically connected and we will move away from an industrialized society);

a MORAL dimension of strengthening self-realization, social, and ecological ethics (why there was a CASEL report on these very Competencies published last week);

a WELLNESS dimension that nurtures the physical, mental, and spiritual well-being of the individual and the society (apparently there are no church/state concerns when the practices push Eastern forms of spirituality like Buddhism);

an EDUCATIONAL dimension of nurturing the full development of individuals and social groups (I have a Soviet document from the 70s with almost the same language except it uses the term “Full Personality”);

a SCIENTIFIC dimension mobilized for promoting human and social betterment (behavioral and social sciences are to be the dominant sciences in the 21st century to better control technology);

a TECHNOLOGICAL dimension of placing technology under the guidance of socio-cultural intelligence and human wisdom, and harvesting its potential for the nonviolent resolution of conflicts, and the improvement of the quality of life for all (see above snark. The Middle East at the moment illustrates this will not work and the very aspiration increases our risk);

an AESTHETIC dimension in pursuit of beauty, in cultural values, in the arts and humanities, and the enrichment of the quality of our inner lives (because in this post GDP/non-economic growth planned world inner qualities will have to replace desired consumer goods);

a POLITICAL DIMENSION of self-determination, governance for peace development, global cooperation and integration, and for the improvement of human conditions. ( I think the pictures outside American embassies in the last 2 weeks illustrate this hope will likely have tragic consequences if the US follows this position).

So the current vision for education being actually imposed under the pretense of the Common Core is ultimately about those Nine Dimensions. Can we please put on the Broadway tune ” The Impossible Dream” and start moving American and global education back away from the abyss this vision actually represents? Because rejecting knowledge from the past has DOOM written all over it.

Targeting Student Values, Attitudes, and Beliefs to Control Future Behavior

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I have long known that the function of Transformational Outcomes Based Education and its close sibling, Systems Thinking, is to be able to predict and control the behavior of future adults. Future voters. To change the prevailing culture in a society by attacking its noetic system. Prevailing feelings, beliefs, and values all get targeted by educational institutions for change to get a lasting change in behavior. Such goals (especially when enforced now via a Data Quality Campaign collecting and monitoring such info) may meet the very definition of Totalitarianism, but honestly, who will know in time? How many people will know that a cognitive goal means your belief system is the target? Or that it became fair game for manipulation by administrators and professors who either aggressively deplore capitalism and individuality, or do not understand the importance of either, and just want their paycheck and promotions.

As I mentioned in the previous post while investigating the current intentions of Systems Thinking, the name Milton Rokeach came up several times with work going back to the 1960s. That’s a crucial time period for me because it means a pedagogy or curriculum originally developed to be a weapon against the US during the Cold War has survived to the present. Something designed originally to destroy the rational capacity to think and free decision-making as an individual based on your own set of facts and concerns (assuming as many did that the Soviet Union would prevail over the US) remains in place under a new name. Still with the same purpose but different beneficiaries. Ready to compel behavior from instinct and emotion. Literally without a second thought.

It is very alarming that late in the book Presence the authors are discussing the Dark Side of Acting from the Heart. It is not something being pointed out to Principals and Supers and teachers being asked to promote the practices in the classroom. For someone like me who is deeply interested in history, it is too much a reminder of the unconscious impulse to act as a collective instilled in the German people via education in the 19th century. They thought it was the answer for the humiliation of being defeated by Napoleon. Talk about poisonous seeds.

It is Values most of all that Rokeach targeted because they are the fewest in number and have the actual ability to compel behavior. Can you see why Sustainability is to be the focus of so much of the Common Core implementation? Values also influence attitudes and emotions and the belief system. Values influence perceptions from daily experience. Think about how often you have watched or heard someone reject what should have been definitive proof with an “I just can’t believe it.” So they didn’t. That’s what values do and why manipulating them is so important if you wish to push a political ideology like collectivism or government intervention and direction of an economy.

I must say I always thought the regular use of the term “Competency” now was just to mislead people from recognizing that we are back implementing Outcomes Based Education again. I had even noticed how a Digital Learning advocate had used Objectives (Ralph Tyler’s term from the 8 Year Study) synonymously with Outcomes (Ben Bloom and Spady/Rogers’ term) and Competency. Turns out though as Milton Rokeach makes clear in his 1968 book Beliefs Attitudes and Values Competency combines both skills and values into a single term. The public then assumes a Competency focus of course includes academic knowledge. It is school or college after all. And the educators get to change and influence student behaviors through unappreciated value changes. The emphasis will be on what the student can do and if the actions are largely driven by emotion so much the better. There’s a reason Rokeach’s book has an Appendix laying out the potentials for Advertising of such an education emphasis.

How many parents will recognize the emotional and psychological manipulation being planned and documented under PBIS or Positive School Climate or recognize that Continuous Improvement is affective in emphasis? I may have joked about Purple America and Project Love but this values curriculum by the hugely influential NEA is meant to both make money and change American student values. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/does-purple-america-come-with-a-toy-dinosaur-or-is-it-just-more-sel/

And let me tell you how Rokeach planned to fundamentally shift both Individual and Societal Values to increase the emphasis on Equality in each student’s psyche at the expense of Freedom. It’s not the sort of thing a child comes home and tells you about. He used Student Surveys (don’t worry it’s not like Student Surveys are being included as explicit component of the Effective Teacher Measure that gives the school a reason for asking Anything Wished) and asked students to rank different values. Those students who ranked Freedom higher than Equality were then told how they rated their own interests as more important than the needs of others.  The exact quote used to needle the students was: “they generally care more for their own freedom than the freedom of others.” Practically like telling them they need an S tattoed on forehead and a Red T-shirt that says Selfish to wear around campus.

And all the self-awareness being pushed? Sometimes with the hugely pretentious name of Metacognitive? That just makes it easier to get the sought value changes, either by specifically targeting self-conception as we saw in this post  proposing to teach what a racist society we remain. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/self-efficacy-cultural-proficiency-training-critical-reflection-and-change-agency-development/
Or by targeting alleged hypocrisies, incongruities, inconsistencies, or contradictions between self-conceptions or self-ideals. Just as no one wants to think of themselves as being against freedom even though forced equality requires an all-intrusive government, Rokeach learned just how effective it was to point out variances in an individual’s values from the group norm. (Aren’t those Common Core student surveys going to come in so handy?) To use his nerdy phrase verbatim this disclosure usually “aroused a negative affective state of self-dissatisfaction.” People do not like to be self-dissatisfied for long so the survey information becomes the impetus for lasting “cognitive and behavioral change.”

And with those types of effects, no schemer since has been willing to leave Values alone whatever the outcry. Values and moral reeducation, I mean education, morphed into Outcomes Based Education and now Soft Skills and Social and Emotional Learning. It is still about targeting Values for change. As we discussed in this post in July, the Canadians adopting many of the same initiatives as the US on a similar timeframe have at least been honest enough to admit the real Common Core is desired values to be instilled in each citizen that have nothing to do with cherishing the Maple Leaf or Stars and Stripes. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/how-disabilities-law-is-already-being-used-to-gain-ehrlichs-new-mind-and-the-future-earth-economy/ And when you get that kind of international consistency in education you always know UNESCO is lurking around nearby.

And UNESCO really does now seem to serve as the repository for schemes in the West against capitalism, individualism, and rational, logical, academic knowledge. But during the Cold War, much of that same aim came from the NEA, especially its ASCD subsidiary. In March 1978, Educational Leadership published a special issue called “Education of Judgment and Action: Personal and Civic.” It appears to be the launch of the formal push to make Values Education an integral part of US education going forward. The listed rationale was:

“the cultivation of decision making particularly as it relates to political virtues that are appropriate to constitutional self-government and that are required to achieve a society that stands for justice, equality, and freedom in the modern world.”

And that’s how the War commenced to permanently change the behavior of future voters via the schools by changing the underlying Values. To cultivate that herd instinct that can cause any nation so much grief. And if you actually read the 1978 essay “The Status of Education of Judgment” by one of Rokeach’s favorite values educators, John R Meyer, you would learn that the value of freedom to be fostered is not the traditional American belief that it is a natural right existing prior to any compact with government. No, the essay rejects that definition of Freedom in favor of the John Dewey definition then being pushed hard again (1977) by Columbia Teachers College.

“Freedom is a social benefit conferred by the collective intelligence of society.”

Aha, I believe we have found the long-lingering root of the problem of national Values education. And now it is international with UNESCO and OECD running what are to be instilled as Values. Yikes!!

 

College Ready as a Goal of K-12 is not Helpful if First You Gut the Historic Purpose of College

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That would be the Transmission of Knowledge about what the Greatest Minds in History Understood and Wrote About and Lived Through and Experimented Over until they had figured out many of the mysteries of Nature. But then that knowledge supposedly allowed man to subordinate nature and our systems theorists like Senge and Scharmer and Deep Ecologists like Orr and Berry from the previous post think we need to stop exploiting nature. Assume our new position as just another species without the magical gift of abstract reason. Rely on feelings and instinct and working on relationships with others and surely Peace will finally come. And the species will all get along just like everyone did in their natural environment before that intrusive stranger Christopher Columbus showed up in the Americas and ruined it all.

As I am reading these high on hopes and short on facts utopian schemes related to Ecology and New Minds, I keep wanting to scream at the book- “You are celebrating cultures that engaged in human sacrifice.” Often. But then my history major and Axemaker Mind are proving to be an obstacle with climbing aboard the Sustainability nirvana train.

We talked about how the President used the term “standards for teaching and learning” and “first time in a generation” and Ed Week insisted he meant CCSSI. We said not so fast http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/didnt-the-president-just-admit-ccssi-was-a-ruse-to-change-classroom-interactions/ . Well he said the same thing in his nomination acceptance speech last week. Moreover, the Democratic platform itself does not mention CCSSI by name or make any commitment to content or the transmission of knowledge. Its goal is to have ALL students “College and Career Ready.” Sounds good except we have already determined Career Ready is just generic skills of getting along coupled with a communitarian emphasis on daily demonstrating that you put others first. The primacy of the Common Good. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/birth-to-career-finally-and-quietly-creating-the-soviet-mindset-but-here-in-the-usa/ Now with that title we can be sure the platform drafters have not been reading my posts. Otherwise they would have recognized they were tipping off their real goals for American education and local schools and classrooms.

Today we take on the second half of that express K-12 Goal for All Students. What does College Ready actually mean when we put all the pieces together? Well back in January, the White House put out its vision for American higher education complete with festivities. Called A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future http://www.aacu.org/civic_learning/crucible/documents/crucible_508F.pdf it contains an extremely troubling political vision where your campus activities and what you are willing to actively advocate for determine who gets a diploma in the future. Others, notably Peter Wood at the National Association of Scholars, have mentioned this report. I am going to focus on aspects that have not been covered.

The first involves picking a new company formed in 2008, Global Perspectives, to essentially shepherd the Crucible Moment vision on behalf of the federal government. Paid of course. That seems a surprising and lucky break for a newcomer until we look into Global Perspectives and discover the Dean of the College of Ed where Bill Ayers was deemed a suitable prof and where CASEL is located. Social and Emotional Learning for a Political Purpose Grand Central Station is apparently an accurate name for certain departments at U-Illinois at Chicago. When we pull up the Global Perspective Inventory to be used on college students, ages 18-24, on their “journey of life.” GPI wants these young adults to

“grow, change, and develop along several dimensions–intellectual, social, civic, physical, moral, spiritual, and religious. And we develop holistically and not departmentally, i.e., we simultaneously develop our mind, sense of self, and relationships [remember our new 3 R's?] with others. . . We live in a global world, in which multiple perspectives about knowing, sense of identity, and relationships with others are distinct and serve as powerful influences in our society.”

College as a real time, experiential Cultural Anthropology dialogue. How enlightening. Now GPI’s college vision for what it calls “holistic human development” is based on two theoretical perspectives [have you noticed no one implements based on theory when they are paying, only when the taxpayer is?]: intercultural maturity and intercultural communication. GPI then cites our old friend Robert Kegan as the source of its views of intercultural maturity. You know, the Harvard prof working with Peter Senge to get K-12 school districts pushing systems thinking as part of their Common Core implementation? http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/do-you-live-in-a-district-piloting-deep-and-continual-personal-change-in-the-individual-student/ How exciting for students to have the opportunity for Deep and Continual Personal Change for years at a time extending into college. Except that kind of psychological and emotional manipulation using data and feedback and grading and credentials is not typically associated with a Free Society. At least not one that will remain free for long except on paper that few will really understand anymore.

Since students are going to be swimming in systems thinking throughout their formative years, let’s look at the college version to go along with all the posts we have done on K-12. Intercultural maturity is the theory that:

“as people grow [bolded because Growth is now the measure a number of states are using to measure what happens in the classroom] they are engaged [my Gypsy Principal's favorite word] in meaning making, i.e., trying to make sense of their journey in life. In doing so they not only rely on their thinking, but also on their feelings [there it is again, to be dominant over reason and logic and facts] and relating with others [a synonym for relationships again] in forming and reforming their journey in life. He [Kegan] has identified and labeled three major domains of human development: cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal.”

Now before you get too excited at the mention of the word Cognitive remember this is all holistic human development which is based on the silly notion of using education to promote the idea that thinking, feeling, and relating are all equally important. Two come naturally and one only kicks in with instruction and practice. Treating them equally in school and college means thinking will actually be little more than instinct and emotion itself. Sure enough Cognitive becomes about “How do I know?” and acknowledging multiple perspectives and no Universal Truths. A point that is itself I must say Not True. If you do not believe me try going out a 5th story window asserting that Gravity is a Social Construct.

So despite all the knowledge of the Ages this is a view of college that celebrates ignorance and reinventing the wheel, maybe if you are lucky which the American Native Tribes never did. The Intrapersonal domain is “Who am I?” and becoming aware of your values, strengths, and personal characteristics and sense of self. Seems like a waste of tuition to me. I can remember having those insights from studying the Great Works and having the Great Conversation. Now it is just a dialogue among representatives of various interest groups to discuss grievances. How sad.

The Interpersonal domain “How do I relate to others?” tracks how willing the student is to “interact with persons with different social norms and cultural backgrounds, acceptance of others, and being comfortable when relating to others.” Now does it strike anyone else with these definitions of what should be occurring in college, the Critical Reflection and Change Agency push we discussed here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/self-efficacy-cultural-proficiency-training-critical-reflection-and-change-agency-development/ will be the best K-12 prep for this view of college? Far more than studying Great Literature or knowing Chemistry or what led to World War 1. See the benefits of College Ready as the Goal when you change the nature of College?

Now once again I have run out of space to start another angle to College Ready. Next will be the Diploma Qualification Profile. Accessible to everyone willing to recognize and then campaign for Transformative Political, Social, and Economic Change. In the US and globally. And once again the accreditors are the enforcers for the poisonous vision.

Stay tuned.