Pulling Up the Moorings Once Again to Transform Reality into the History of Desired Desires

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Robin

If you want to “create a world where individuals will work even when they know that much of the fruit of their labor will go to those who are less fortunate,” you are going to need to use education to target prevailing social norms. If you believe that Marx’s famous quote “From each according to his ability and to each according to his need” has “morally resonant appeal” and wish to see a future society that does not dismiss that appeal “out of hand as mere sloganeering,” a perch as a World Bank economist is a tremendous platform to try to go about making it so. 21st Century Learning, perhaps?

It especially helps if you have a good working relationship with a Nobel Prize winning economist who wants to reframe economics in terms of Individual and especially Group Identity. And that economist, George Akerlof, in a 2010 book Identity Economics, recognized the value of his theories on education as the premier social institution with influence on almost everyone. An enduring influence on “what people care about, and how much they care about it.” A good working definition of Identity is values, beliefs and emotional commitments. Probably not coincidentally, precisely what the actual Common Core implementation targets for change. Which is interesting as Identity Economics defines “good schools” as those that “transform students’ identities and norms.”

Almost precisely like Transformational Outcomes Based Education sought to do in the 90s version of these education reforms. Names change but never really the goals. One of the aspects of Common Core that is consistent throughout but in the small print is its stated desire to create ‘habits of mind.” Think of those as unconscious reflexes. Now compare with Akerlof’s recognition that people “act as they do, naturally and without question, mostly out of habit. They are products of their social environment and unaware they might have behaved differently.” Remember also schools are a social environment of long duration.

So if you can use education, preschool, K-12, or higher ed (all of the above is even nicer to a future Transformationist) to create the desired feelings and values and influential conceptual understandings that filter daily life you can go a long way toward changing the future. Especially if you also rely on another insight from social psychology Akerlof points out: “individuals’ behavior depends on who people think they are.” So effective schools should get at Identity and define it in politically useful ways. Early and often. Like Chicago voting.

Now to do all that a theory of psychology based on a philosophy built on changing the nature of things in the real world would be very useful. And a factual theory of knowledge devoted to understanding the nature of things would be an obstacle because it would accept the world as it is. And maybe even keep a fondness for the past. Which would be in the way of someone who wanted to create a Worldview around his belief that:

“life is activity and to live means to satisfy one’s desires. Life is experienced as Desire: it is through desires that the subject realizes the discrepancy between the world as it is and the world he would like to have.”

Now I would assert that all of the mentions today that education must be Relevant and Engaging and about Real-World problems are merely a more subtle means of achieving that driving emphasis built on Desire. To change the world to something new. And if UK Professor Ivan Markova wrote in 1982 that the twin Hegelian themes of activity and creativity in the acquisition of knowledge “have been emerging in various forms in social, clinical, and developmental psychology for some time and, quite probably without the knowledge of the authors concerned, that they have been reflecting Hegel’s philosophy.”

If those pros were unaware, what about now? Hegel’s philosophy is obviously a touchy subject to have as a foundation. A Soviet heritage is bad enough but tracking even further back to a common ancestry with what launched two World Wars and the Holocaust is undeniably even worse. And if the psychologists in 1982 were unlikely to know this history, how much less likely is it that a teacher or principal or administrator or politician know about this background to student-centered learning? To launder a notorious heritage you simply make it a basis for the amorphous terms “pedagogy” and “Best Practices” and “Constructivism” and then pronounce it as a better way to learn. Grounded in emotion is an easier way to remember and you simply leave out Hegel’s desire to bring values and human experience into how all science is done.

And since few know of the linkage back to Hegel, modern 21st century educators cannot rely on Scottish novelist and statesman Robert Buchan’s excellent advice from more than 100 years ago. “A man who has been nourished on German metaphysics should make a point of expressing his thoughts in plain workaday English, for the technical terms of German philosophy have a kind of hypnotic power; they create a world remote from common reality where reconciliations and synthesis flow as smoothly and with as little meaning as in an opiate dream.” And you are wondering what does metaphysics have to to with Identity Economics and the Common Core?

Oh, you know the changing conceptualizations students are to be taught as they ignore obvious characteristics and look for new “cause-effect relationships”? Even something like RECAST, Revealing Causal Structures, that we have talked about is ultimately grounded in Hegel’s Conceptual Frameworks. Or CORE-Cognitive Reorganization. With his name left off and no warning that these are aspirational theories designed to alter current reality. When we talk of providing the Enduring Understandings that will frame everyday experiences, that’s Hegel’s insight on the usefulness to a change philosophy if education were to now be built around the recognition that “implicit presuppositions and conceptual frameworks do determine what is observed.”

Hegel so wanted to shake human consciousness that he talked about the importance of wars in human history. And pointed out that a “person has to go through disturbing experiences personally in order to grow as a person.” Which reminded me of precisely the curricula Bill Ayers and Maxine Greene and Nel Noddings were all describing in this post as necessary for “real moral growth.” http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/priming-delicate-minds-for-a-desired-disruptive-revolution-what-is-the-real-damage/

The idea of using activity and interactions with others to achieve personal growth is also Hegel. Which means the criteria of Student Growth that the US federal DoEd is requiring that teacher evals be based on ultimately tracks back to Hegel and his theories on how to change consciousness. Moreover, a change in values, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings or a willingness to apply new concepts constitutes Student Growth. And usefully for the economists that started this post that would also be a useful change in Identity and over time prevailing norms.

I could walk you through how an Indeterminate Situation with no fixed linear answer as those Pearson assessments I have described fits within the kind of higher-order thinking that changed consciousness that Hegel described as Synthesis. What the Hewlett Foundation calls Deep Learning. But I believe you get my point that the overlap is high. The book is called Paradigms, Thought, and Language if you too want to immerse yourself in all the Hegelian foundations of what we are calling the Common Core. Or try to dispute all these troubling implications. Remember in the last post when the advocates for Vygotsky sought to assert that these theories need not result in totalitarianism? Showing the history was very much on their minds even if no one is giving us the heads up on the dangers of what we are mandating in our K-12 classrooms. This is how Markova ended her book:

“In all other areas of psychology the Hegelian framework will undoubtedly be the one with the future, and Hegel’s philosophy will prove a deep source of inspiration. Finally a word of caution…action can be sinister if based on non-recognition of the other person as a human being. The future of mankind depends on taking actions in which human beings mutually recognize each other as human beings.”

So are people basically good as so many of these philosophers and economists want to believe? Will we remember the lessons of history before we once again light this Hegelian powder keg for achieving social change?

I suggest we remember another turn of the 20th century insight when these German ideas were first exploding onto the world stage. It’s from a novel by the same Robert Buchan where his character wisely notes:

” You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Satan.”

The actual Common Core implementation and the intent of its assessments and the accompanying economic, social, and political transformations go far beyond a touch or a push.

Shoving into the abyss is more like it regardless of anyone’s good intentions. And without much accurate actual knowledge and a deliberate cultivation of a desire for change, there does not even seem to be a parachute or a tool to catch a ledge.

As Powerful as a Religious Conversion: Bestowing Deep Understandings for their Revolutionary Effects

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Robin

In one of those obvious statements that really deserves a sarcastic “Really Sherlock?” response, did you know that people differ in their ability to come up with explanations and structures to organize their thoughts? Which is of course unfair. So in the interests of fairness and equity and without any mention of the political usefulness, schools and effective teaching should now be about providing those so-called Cognitive Structures. That enable thinking and motivate acting in the future. Thinking Tools. How nice. Then there need not be any “cognitive consequences of cultural opportunity.” Single parents, second language, learning disabilities. School will provide the Enduring or Deep Understandings that “serves to organize perception in new ways.” That conceptual lens that may not be true and is not spontaneously generated by All children will now fortuitously be Provided to All children.

Then All Children Can Learn and coincidentally will believe the same things that can have very nice side effects for anyone looking for Fundamental Transformation. Here’s a quote from a 1988 book reprinted regularly through the 90s about the research done with Native Hawaiians as part of the Kamehameha Elementary Education Program (KEEP). It had Ford and Carnegie Foundation funding as well as the National Science Foundation. KEEP was part of a restructuring template to make schools places providing assistance so Each Student can Learn. In the unadvertised sense of behavioral or belief system changes. Much more lasting than mere factual knowledge you see. Only someone working at someone else’s expense would dare say:

“We do not yet know under what circumstances cognitive structuring is to be preferred over questioning, or vice versa. The potential power of cognitive structuring is not in doubt. As in instances of religious conversion, the acceptance of a cognitive structure can have the most revolutionary effects on human behavior and experience. How and why this occurs remain largely mysteries, although our understanding of these remarkable processes is increasing.”

Now it would be possible to provide Concepts and Generalizations and Understandings that are politically neutral but once we get beyond fractions that does not appear to be what anyone has in mind. Old Timers in the Ed Wars will be quaking in their boots when they read that Lynn Erickson was citing Hilda Taba as a model to be emulated in this area of Conceptual Understanding. I will let you look Hilda up. But the idea that human development in school takes the “individual child in whatever form and guides and nurtures the mind, body, and self-concept” should give us all pause. Let’s put that in the context of World Bank economist Kaushik Basu writing in concluding Beyond the Invisible Hand:

“We can come to have norms where behaving otherwise is met with so much social disdain or self-loathing that no one does so. And in the long run, the norms can become so much a part of us that we end up following them not for any reason but rather because that is our instinctive behavioral response.”

And there’s nothing quite like providing “accepted explanatory belief systems” that are practiced with daily over years to transform those norms to instinctive responses. So nice from someone who also wrote that the “demise of the USSR is thus an indictment of a perverse brand of capitalism, not of socialism.” Gulp. Lots of political value in providing the concepts that guide everyday life. And don’t think the radical educators and political schemers (who are sometimes the same person) do not know it. They have been gloating over this for decades beyond our sight but not unrecorded for posterity.

We have covered Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky and his Cognitive Tools repeatedly as well as the related Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) beehive at UC-San Diego. It would probably surprise you then to know that in June 2007 the American Education Research Association (yes it was about the time AERA elected Bill Ayers as one of their guiding light execs) published “Vygotsky’s Neglected Legacy: Cultural-Historical Activity Theory.”

Now neither CHAT nor Vygotsky strikes me as neglected in the least. I am practically feeling crushed by the frequency at which they pop up without looking. I think that essay though was intended to mainstream these theories in preparation for offense and implementation in more classrooms. The fact that the paper received funding from the Canadian government and had a co-author from Singapore further suggests we are dealing with a coordinated psychological assault against the individual mind anywhere that ever upheld Anglo-Saxon common law. This is a little long but important. Concepts matter and Concepts aimed at Reorganizing Thought matter most of all.

“Because CHAT addresses the troubling divides [not to me. I prefer the division thank you very much] between individual and collective, material and mental, biography and history, and praxis and theory, we believe that it is deserving of wider currency in the educational community. . . In part, the vigorous dialectical materialist grounding of psychology in Marxism that A.N. Leont’ev pursued may have slowed the reception of CHAT in the West. Yet we emphasize that these powerful analytic tools, existing even in Vygotsky’s works, have little to do with totalitarian regimes that have falsely masqueraded under the banner of Marxism, socialism, or communism.”

I believe that translates as nasty dictators misappropriated those lovely intentions of Uncle Karl and needlessly besmirched this lovely tool for future human development. This time we will get it right and will only manipulate people’s driving belief systems and values in beneficial ways. For their own good. For the Common Good. For the Planet. And you and I may find Dialectics to be an off-putting word we could do without but that is because we fail to appreciate “the dialectical nature of consciousness, which includes cognition, memory, and personality, among others.”

Well, I guess the dialectical part comes from wanting to fundamentally transform it and CHAT is apparently a PRIMO tool. Did you know that “dialectics is ‘possibly the most appropriate frame of reference for the study of human development, and indeed was actually developed as an explanation for human development?” Well, actually I did point that out http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/who-knew-karl-marx-had-a-human-development-model-or-that-it-fit-our-facts-so-well/ but now we know once again why it fits our Common Core and global reform realities so well.

I am not going to belabor the number of times those coauthors used that D word in that essay. I will, however, mention that the result of all those contradictions and synthesis of Concepts results in a Deep Understanding. Which is exactly the phraseology the Hewlett Foundation keeps using to describe where it sees the Common Core going. And it dovetails with the Education for Life and Work report from last summer. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/so-now-common-core-rejects-individual-thinking-to-embrace-soviet-psychology-ecology/ .

Boy it sure does look like Leont’ev is getting his transformative experiment in the West that he told Urie Bronfenbrenner he aspired to back in the 60s. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/imitating-the-ussr-in-striving-to-discover-how-the-child-can-become-what-he-not-yet-is/ is the post where I explained that ginormous discovery. That is even more important now as we think about all those false conceptual lenses in Urie’s Ecological Systems Thinking Theory. Which is all through the new C3 Social Studies Framework.

One way to think of the to-be-supplied Concepts and Cognitive Structures and Mental Maps is to see them as “schooled concepts.” The Russians so got the importance of the difference between what can be understood only as a result of formal instruction and everyday practices that the 1988 book mentioned above includes the Russian term nauchnoe ponyatie along with the cite to Vygotsky. These Abstract Concepts are learned at school and then applied “downward” from “generalization to palpable example.” All our mentions of Real World problems and Relevance seem to be based on the recognition from Vygotsky and his followers that “Everyday concepts stand between schooled concepts and the experienced world. Schooled concepts, in Jovian detachment, can connect with the world below only through the everyday concepts that have risen through practical activity. …The constant relating of schooled with everyday concepts enriches and saves schooling from aridity, but this relating also profoundly changes the nature of the everyday concepts that are touched, making them ever more systemic, autonomous, and tool-like.”

These research observations could be used to help teach students to better understand reality as it exists but that would not be transformative. Or perhaps as Engaging. Instead the weaving of schooled concepts with the everyday is to be used to create activities and projects and learning tasks with the purpose of “a fundamental restructuring in which all are transformed: actions, relationships, and thinking.” The cite is to another Soviet psychologist. This time El’konin.

I am not looking for Boogie Men (or women) here but we clearly have a constant refrain of Transformation. And I am getting an increasingly uncomfortable feeling that many influential people at the helm or employed by influential institutions or foundations believe that the Human Development aspects of Uncle Karl’s writings make a good Overlord theory for the 21st Century. And they do intend to give it a try in real time on a massive scale all over the West. But especially against the World’s only Superpower and its economy.

And the US for the most part is completely unaware that this most subjugating of theories against the primacy of the individual is coming in under an “How All Children Can Learn” banner.

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

Posted on December 8, 2012 by Robin

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.

Using Education to Shut Down Free Choices and then Redefining as Personal Autonomy: Orwell Lives!

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Robin

George Orwell that is and the Newspeak he warned about in 1984 where thought is confused because none of the official terms being used means what is commonly assumed. We have talked about that before in education with terms like Quality Learning or Excellence. But what about when personal autonomy means the choices made after primary education is used to monitor personal behaviors and interactions with others to make sure that a person is putting the needs of the group first? Or that the person is building their self-identity during those crucial adolescent years around being a member of a Group?

You think you see where this is going? Yet more insistence on the primacy of the Common Good? You would be correct Sir. Ten Points in the Bonus Round of Diminishing Personal Freedoms as THE 21st Century Goal for All Learning. Everywhere apparently. This is from the controversial Moral and National Education Project that went live for Hong Kong primary children last month and for the remainder of secondary schoolchildren in September 2013. And before anyone says “That’s the other side of the Globe. It will not impact US or Canadian schoolchildren.” The sources cited are American profs. Ontario profs.

This is a global political coup being mounted through our K-12 schools. At least the Hong Kong parents, students, and politicians knew enough to be outraged. They aptly called it brainwashing but to no avail. We in the US still have comparable obligations being imposed in classrooms but it is hiding behind Positive School Climate mandates and the actual Orwellian definitions of College and Career Ready or Deep Learning Strategies or Higher Order, Level 4, Thinking.

“As far as altruism is concerned, children should be taught to extend their love and sacrifices to their parents and significant others to include acquaintances, neighbors, strangers in one’s country and people in other countries.”

How useful to anyone in power to redefine personal autonomy as the choices of someone AFTER they have been indoctrinated through K-12 education to have such a sense of mandated altruism. Isn’t this all the Kremlin or Mao and every tyrant in history ever wanted? To have educators instill this so-called Universal Love Principle so that young people believe:

“They are expected to sacrifice their personal needs, benefits and even their basic rights for the sake of the stability and prosperity of the country. Betraying one’s country is not only immoral but also evil and sinful.”

Betraying one’s country is selling state secrets, not refusing to defer to the majority consensus! Seriously. Moral education is being defined as teaching that the “majority’s opinion and interests precede individual’s opinions and interests.” Now won’t this come in handy with the promotion of Systems Thinking and telling each student they are merely a part of the much broader Whole?

US Constitution be damned if the Colleges of Education decide to remove the primacy of the individual emotionally. Through their monopoly over what happens in the Classroom. And if you think again this is Hong Kong, search out Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development/Universal Principle and see how influential it is in teacher education for the classroom. Or here, about two weeks ago, Bronfenbrenner Ecological Systems Theory as the basis for Child Development activities in Pennsylvania classrooms. http://imaginepennsylvania.com/2012/10/expanding-views-of-child-development-urie-bronfenbrenner/

So yes I am lifting these quotes from Hing-keung Ma’s work but she in turn is quoting the Western education profs and feminist profs like Carol Gilligan and we have the same names for the same interpersonal and mandated social altruism as we are seeing in the West. The highest stage of Ma’s world social altruism in preparation for a desired sense of world citizenship is called Global Perspectives. That just happens to be the name of the company with its affective inventory (Global Perspectives Inventory) of desired personal traits in college students created to implement the radical new vision for US colleges and universities.http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/college-ready-as-a-goal-of-k-12-is-not-helpful-if-first-you-gut-the-historic-purpose-of-college/

The way to foster world citizenship then is using the concept of moral education to push these ideas of universal love and universal justice on schoolchildren. What a dream for parasitical UN bureaucrats and their tax free salaries to have students all over the West being taught these ideas as Systems Thinking and Education for Wellbeing as we saw in this post on what Australia is mandating with US advisors. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-education-transforms-values-and-feelings-and-beliefs-to-control-behaviors-are-we-free/ In fact the advisors are from the same US college campus where that Global Perspectives Inventory was created. What are the odds?

So self-actualization in this Orwellian world of Newspeak becomes a declared aim “at the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” And woe be us once public employment plus beneficiaries crosses that 51% threshold to be a majority where education says self-actualization means:

“if there is a conflict of interest between an individual and the majority, the individual should be prepared to sacrifice himself/herself for the majority.”

Well this is certainly yet another way to fracture the concept of the Unitary Self as the Regional Equity and Environmental Justice advocates seek. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/distributive-justice-is-not-enough-we-must-break-the-illusion-of-the-unitary-self/ Seriously long term regular readers are thinking. What is going on? This is all clearly related. And global. And a stealth implementation of what are clearly collectivist political and economic theories. Could you please give us a date you say? Somewhere in particular to help us really frame what we are dealing with here?

Well, I have quite a few illuminating choices to answer that one but this week’s Tiptoe through the Footnotes Journey yielded yet another Glittering Gem of an Epiphany. This one is from 1968–an important year because we are at the height of the Cold War and the beginning of the student riots that changed American culture and education so much.

The book, The Learning Society, is by a man, Robert M. Hutchins, who was once the President of the University of Chicago in the 30s and 40s. We have talked before about Ralph Tyler and his Eight Year Study which laid out a way to implement the progressive vision for education originated by John Dewey http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-standardsoutcomesobjectives-what-is-the-real-common-core/ . Hutchins was a close friend and mentor to Ralph Tyler in addition to being his boss. It was Hutchins who put Tyler in the chair positions at Chicago where the entire concept of Behavioral Sciences and Systems Thinking originated. So when one of the scheming Systems Thinkers cited the book, I thought it was time to read it.

Hutchins lays out a new vision for global education that will be applicable to all students–to set their minds free. Education that cultivates the Common Good. What Hutchins called an “education designed to help people become human” by “connecting man with man.” An education that is not about the transmission of information since “why should data be memorized if they can be instantly available by pressing a button?” Education that promotes a “deep understanding” of issues and questions where “there is more than one answer or no answer at all.”

Sound familiar? An education that “introduces all men to the dialogue about the common good of their own country and the world community.” Now Hutchins wanted this education for new values centered around the concept of Humanity to be pushed everywhere. To use education to change the culture to “one in which living wisely and agreeably and well is the object.” Communist China and the Soviet Union and Kuwait and India and Japan and Africa and the US. But these countries differ drastically in the level of influence their students and citizens have over government actions. Or refusals to act.

What we are seeing in 2012 is just a continuation of this previous attempt to snuff out personal liberty and individualism everywhere on this globe where these ideas have ever flourished. And especially in those countries where they are cherished. So in the US we get our assault on freedom wearing Orwellian masks and tucked into little read but still binding regulations. But the assault is no less real.

And the draw bridge is down. And the Armed Guard went into town to fetch some mead for a planned banquet. And the moat has been drained to allow for easy to access organic gardening.

We are wide open and largely unsuspecting. And it is coming.

The Intentional Insurrection in Texas–Supers Override Governor, Legislature, and Taxpayers

Posted on September 28, 2012 by Robin

Because the desired social, political, and economic Transformation is always the actual Goal behind all these ed reforms that become notorious, or will when fully implemented, I have joked that the only real question for a Principal, Super, Prof, or Accreditor mandating them is “Are you an Intentional Insurrectionist or an Inadvertent One?” In other words, are you on board with the attempts at a Mental Revolution of the Western Mind to devolve back to the Visual and Emotional and Instinct and away from the Abstract and Reason and Genuine Intellectual Analysis based on Actual Individual Knowledge? And if that seems to be an unduly strong statement, please read some of the earlier posts. Especially why Paul Ehrlich wants Newmindedness and James Burke wants education to reject the Axemaker Mind.

Texas is a fascinating special case because what was going on there became the subject of discussion in the 2000 Presidential Race and a Model for NCLB. And now it is an issue because Texas, one of the largest states and an important driver of textbook content, has very loudly and deliberately rejected participation in either Race to the Top or CCSSI. Wanting to be able to drive its own ed policy and its own content. Last month I explained that both President Obama and Ed Week were using the term “common core” to describe not the CCSSI content standards but the “Standards of Teaching and Learning.” http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/didnt-the-president-just-admit-ccssi-was-a-ruse-to-change-classroom-interactions/ Texans need to read that description because the school and classroom practices and activities I am seeing at Annual Meetings and professional development sessions and conferences around preparing for the new STAAR assessment and the new Readiness Standards look just like what I would see in any state with a Learner-Centered Classroom, not a Content/Instruction Centered One.

Texas is thus proof you can get to what I call the Transformational Outcomes Based Education Stage without the political establishment at the State level ever Knowing what has happened. Part of the ease of deception is the Orwellian use of Language and Unappreciated Definitions in Ed World, notably Rigorous when STAAR was adopted. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/what-if-higher-order-thinkingdeliberate-confusion/ The fact that the Legislature was now gearing a measuring assessment to John Dewey’s Indeterminate Situation where students react from emotion because there is no fixed solution and the problem-solving is not linear or based on the resolution of taught material was apparently left out of those presentations in Austin. I wonder if the presenters were some of the same people involved with pushing Saul Alinsky’s community organizing in the Austin schools or now adopting SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) for Austin preschoolers and elementary school students as part of a national program as we described in the last post? Be very careful who you get advice from in this area.

That’s always good advice but especially so in Texas where as the title says, we have Intentional Insurrectionists determined to implement Equity Education and Education (in their determination) fit for a democracy (little d just like Dewey) in the 21st Century. The May 2008 document “Creating a New Vision for Public Education in Texas” was based on meetings that started back in September 2006. Before I get into the specifics of those radical intentions of listed Supers (who actually regard themselves as acting as Modern Day Founding Fathers rejecting the Articles of Confederation as insufficient for their intentions), how many Texans know that Texas went to Outcomes-Based Education back in 1984? That would make Texas an early adopter.

According to a 2001 Dana Center report Texas deliberately jettisoned what it called the “deficit model” of knowledge transmission that was impacted by where students lived and who their parents were to measuring what all students are able to do. And using something termed Proactive Redundancy–multiple ways to achieve specific learning goals. My purpose is not to give a history of Texas education. It is to point out that the Achievement for All Students Transformation in Texas was done at the cost of changing the rules and the purpose of K-12 education. And constantly changing the measurements of what was going on in the classroom to obscure the effects of ever decreasing knowledge that is the inevitable and sought result of the OBE focus.

The newest so-called test, the STAAR assessment, is based on Norman Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) Chart that is also used in Florida. It is what the Critical Thinking push is actually all about there as well. No I am not going to state the obvious connection. You can in your own mind but leave me out of it. Too many well-connected people involved who seem to genuinely believe they are doing Good Things in Education. But the facts are what they are and Webb’s DOK is expressly based on Ralph Tyler’s Objectives work and Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy (Mastery Learning, OBE’s previous name) work. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-standardsoutcomesobjectives-what-is-the-real-common-core/ Sometimes the true connections exceed anything a writer of fiction would ever come up with.

So Level 4, Extended Thinking in the DOK, gets met if the student if the student does not know anything but is engaged in a nonroutine investigation with multiple solutions that the student examines and then processes the possibilities over an extended period of time. Dewey loved his Indeterminate Situation Theory because he believed the resulting emotion of frustration would be a great motivator in students to reject the world as it currently exists. Linear, factual, traditional solutions apparently are insufficient motivators to be a Social Change Agent. Instead, the Indeterminate Situation was thought to motivate Transformative Social and Political Change.

In the 21st century then we can anticipate lots of Critical Thinking around Sustainability Modelling and overpopulation. The actual facts and temps be damned. After all factual knowledge is only Level 1 on the DOK and thus totally unsatisfactory. I guess all that Systems Computer Modelling around the discredited 1976 Club of Rome report Limits to Growth also qualifies now in Texas as Level 4 Thinking in the classroom. Systems Thinking also fits with the language of that Super Insurrectionist Vision. Someone had clearly read their Bela Banathy and Peter Senge.

By the way, since Outcomes and Objectives became notorious terms in the past as synonyms for the whole behavioral and affective orientation (values, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings) of these student goals and performance is the term the CCSSI assessments are using, I see the creative minds in Texas have come up with another euphemism–Expectations. Student Expectations. What the student can do with the Content listed. Which reminded me quite frankly of a CCSSI document I had seen less than 2 weeks ago. Put out to make sure that supers and principals and teachers in the CCSSI adopting states were not teaching the content and emphasizing knowledge as the point of CCSSI. That the point of content learning is the worthy task performances and problem solving activities and projects that students engage in. The authors Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins want to make sure everyone understands that that the Common Core rejects this previous “content” coverage mentality.

Now I got someone very angry at me recently when I called CCSSI a Bait and Switch since no aspect of the real implementation does anything but dispute the fact that it is about national criteria of content knowledge applicable from state to state. But then I have analyzed all the relevant documents too carefully to have any room left for wishful thinking. I think what is happening in Texas reenforces the point I have made earlier that this really is about using the schools to mount a stealth political coup. The way Banathy described his purposes for the Learner Centered Classroom is consistent with how the Best Practices book describes the purposes for Standards for Teaching and Learning and what the Hewlett Foundation describes as the purpose for Deep Learning (which is deemed to align with CCSSI). They are all also consistent with that Texas Super 2008 Visioning document that will have to wait until the next post for its own description.

Recognizing the points being made in the descriptions of Texas Student Expectations for STAAR and the Readiness Standards now in effect and the troublesome implications of official references to P-16, I decided to see if McTighe and Wiggins and their Understanding by Design had any role in Texas transitioning to STAAR. Oh. My. Goodness. They are every where there in the last year. So whatever the intentions of Texans and their politicians, what is coming to your schools and classrooms reflects what the rest of the country is being forced into under the CCSSI mantle.

Isn’t that interesting? You would think the actual impetus really was national and international.

Constructing an Alternative Vision of Either the Natural or Human World As the Basis for a College Degree

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Robin

Somehow the Beatles song “Say You Want a Revolution” just popped into my head as I was typing that title and preparing to give you the full quote from “The Degree Qualifications Profile” published by the Lumina Foundation in January 2011. http://www.luminafoundation.org/publications/The_Degree_Qualifications_Profile.pdf is the link if you want to give this egregiously bad idea a good look. The quote I am about to give you is on page 13 under “Intellectual Skills, Engaging diverse perspectives, bachelor’s level”:

” Constructs a cultural, political, or technological alternative vision of either the natural or human world, embodied in a written project, language, political order, or technological context, and explains how the alternative perspective contributes to results that depart from current norms, dominant cultural assumptions, or technologies–all demonstrated through a project, paper, or performance.”

Perhaps performing a Dance of Despair of what will happen if fossil fuels remain in use and we remain a consumer-oriented society that values economic freedom. Art students could show the lovely Green World that would exist if we returned to an agricultural economy that used windmills and water wheels for power. Oh, that’s right, no artificial damming. Make that just windmills and solar cells and lots of back breaking labor as we return to washing our clothes in streams and drying them on rocks.

I wish I could say I am being facetious but that is close to the vision in these books and speeches (they do leave out the details about laundry but I remember those Little House books well) that underlie this supposedly new economy for the 21st Century that needs a new way of thinking. One that is not very keen on thinking as it has been traditionally understood in the West from the Enlightenment on.

In fact to read Peter Senge and the systems thinkers he represents who aspire to shape K-12 via Common Core or the Lumina DQP I am talking about today or Deep Ecologists like David Orr and Thomas Berry from this post http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/we-need-a-radical-change-in-our-mode-of-consciousness-even-a-new-sense-of-being-human/ is to constantly be assaulted with an insistence that the 21st Century must embrace radical new minds, mainstream Eastern spiritual practices in everyday life starting in K-12, develop a communitarian economic system that would destroy prosperity, constantly teach and monitor whether students, K-12 and college, are regularly demonstrating that they put others and the common good before their interests, etc.

I have written about the consequences of these initiatives before but the Lumina DQP really is an assault on how little of the past any student is to be allowed to know. And if you think the colleges and universities can escape this noxious mandate, the accreditors got on board almost immediately to “test” Lumina’s framework. And the accreditors control who gets to participate in the federal student loan program. That’s a lot of leverage for the entities behind the 8 Year Study and developing “objectives” and “outcomes” and alternative assessments to distract the typical taxpayer or parent paying the bill that the focus of first K-12 and now college is shifting away from the transmission of knowledge.

Truly if someone in the Soviet KGB had hatched a scheme during the Cold War and afterwards on how to take down the US specifically and the West generally via its noetic system it would be hard to top the very policies and practices the accreditation agencies have imposed. Whatever their actual intentions or rationales accreditation has been and continues to be a highly effective and lucrative means of national and international cultural destruction.

Finishing up Peter Senge’s 2005 book Presence and its description of an integrated science I found horrifying but that I also recognized from recent carpool comments as I drove, it hit me how much Senge’s systems thinking reminded me of Marx’s famous quote:

“It is not thinking that determines being, but being that determines thinking.”

I think that is just as wrong as can be and I imagine you do too. After all we are essentially having a mental conversation through this blog to discuss some very troubling and potentially tragic ideas. My thoughts and all those private conversations I have had with amazing minds, some long dead, are a large part of the adult I have become. And that’s precisely the problem. That’s not a factual quote or something Marx and Engels and their admirers believe to be true so much as something they want to be true. It is aspirational.

Add in the reality of the K-12 monopoly and who may teach and what and how. And now all of higher ed, public and private, is subject through the accreditation agencies and their powers to penalize noncompliance via the student loan program. Greedy schemers or political idealogues or just naive ignoramuses making a living as Professors or Principals or Supers and pushing whatever is required are now in a position to realize that Marxian aspiration from so long ago.

To make sure that nothing in education, K-12 or higher ed, public or private, occurs that bolsters the independent, abstract thinking capacity of the individual that would disprove that doctrinal statement. To try to undo the belief system and any Axemaker Mind attributes that came in from home or via religious practices. Instead, if you look at the math wars and reading wars and values clarification and SEL and implementing Dewey’s vision and systems thinking and 21st Century Learning, it is all about the Being side of Marx’s political aspiration.

In fact that is also one of UNESCO’s primary visions for education and Education for All–Learning to Be. Coincidence? I rather doubt it given what historians who have tracked UNESCO practices and preferences have written about which side they empathized with in the Cold War. Do you think celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Ho Chi Minh’s birth is a good reason for an official celebration?

Back to the DQP now that we have put all of these previous posts in a firmer context of where this is all going and why it matters so much. To each of us. Anywhere. It is clear that the DQP builds on the “standards for teaching and learning” ruse version of the Common Core we described here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/didnt-the-president-just-admit-ccssi-was-a-ruse-to-change-classroom-interactions/ . Every description either mentions “learning” or “outcomes” as the goal. The DQP even says explicitly that (their italics, not mine):

“beyond what graduates know, what they can do with what they know is the ultimate benchmark of learning. They emphasize a commitment to analytic inquiry, active learning, real-world problem solving, and innovation–all of which are vital in today’s evolving workplace and in society.”

It’s that 2nd sentence that is the real killer because that assumed evolution is based on a rejection of capitalism and free markets and individuality and fossil fuels and personal liberty. That’s the Ecosystem redesigned and planned economy with the tech companies gathering data and running models so that government agencies can tell citizens what behaviors are deemed Sustainable and permitted or unSustainable and forbidden. Every bit of college coursework envisioned by that DQP pertains to physical activity and experiences and projects examining and solving “a contemporary or recurring challenge or problem.” The student even “justifies the importance of the challenge in a social or global context.” No refusing to get on board with the need for a Transformation with a capital “T.”

It is hard to imagine the Soviet or Chinese thought police or the administrators of Moscow or Beijing Universities in the 1970s having more interest in limiting what their citizens were allowed to know or do than what the “standards for teaching and learning” prescribe for Common Core in K-12 or the DQP pushes in higher ed. And then we have initiatives like AACU’s “Character Traits Associated with the Five Dimensions of Personal and Social Responsibility.” When did personality attributes become a matter for the federal government to intervene on? Or state or local?

Can someone please tell me where freedom is hiding in this vision of education? In the fact that there are no gulags yet?

Trust me, between systems thinking, SEL, and deep learning the mind will become its own permanent prison. And then what? What happens when you have expectations of a future without the knowledge or skills to back it up? What happens when the schemers finally begin to recognize central planning fails for reasons other than inadequate computing power or insufficient personal data?

See Mom. Told you I would make good use of that history major. No wonder it is being officially disallowed.

Self-efficacy, Cultural Proficiency Training, Critical Reflection, and Change Agency Development

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Robin

That’s what Success for All under the Common Core actually embodies. Tucked away in a 2010 Framework for Equity and Transformative Improvement in Education we have a statement on why “deeper learning” strategies had to be added as a primary goal as we discussed in the last post. And why we needed the Common Core State Standards Initiative in the first place. And why it is really about a limited number of essential skills. You see, school is now to really be about “a broadened definition of what we mean by ‘success.” All students are to build precisely just those skill sets I listed in the title. Why? Well, they will:

“equip citizens with the capacity to engage more fully in educational settings, in our ability to more fully understand life, and to create more effective public institutions. The ‘critical reflection and change agency’ skill area in particular is vital for building deepened understanding around the complex relationship between our economic, environmental, and social well-being, and participating in helping to improve these arenas and ensure that practices within each are just.”

Let’s mull that over for a minute. That would explain how all students, whatever their background, can learn. It would also increase graduation rates as everyone can become an active change agent in the society they feel is unfair. To simply redesign society to be more just. Except society was never designed in the first place. Our Western institutions evolved out of need and survived because they worked. If not perfectly, well enough not to be toppled in a wholesale search for something that might be better. This idea that school is now to be about priming students to help build better government institutions is nonsensical. Who will staff these better institutions? Better trained public employees to be of better service to the citizens seeking justice? With those sets of Skills?

The Framework calls the skills in the title a pivotal choice and italicizes the sentence. I will too.

“Hence, to make a collective decision to narrow the overall goals of skill-building in educational systems is to limit how well we prepare current and future generations to participate in and transform our institutions and social structures.

I wish we would quit talking about skill-building altogether and get back to actual knowledge. But those skills? Participating in and transforming public institutions and social structures is not the purpose that springs to mind when you put your 6 year old on the school bus or when you proudly sit there waiting for the diploma names to be announced. “Capable of organizing a march for equity without supervision” is not my idea of a 21st century skill that makes you diploma worthy. But those are in fact the listed deeper skill sets and reasons for broader notions of student success. Why? The stated reason is It will allow credentials to go to “those from low-income backgrounds, who are students of color, who may live in extremely challenging home and community environments, and who may have been struggling severely in their academics for many years.”

But they will not know anymore and the only economy that can take care of young people without genuine knowledge and skills is a stagnant state-run one with no actual growth. Which means no revenue to pay the costs of the government and its aid to the miseducated Change Agent Generation it is creating. Even in the popular delusion that we are going to retreat to some type of equitable post-carbon economy with a Land worship agrarian existence like the Native People had before Westerners showed up with the oppression of private property, there is no prosperity anymore. Not to mention a terrible set of misguided beliefs about what tribal life was like. Self-sufficiency means no surplus and no reserve against famine when natural disasters strike. I have been reading the Bioregional Plans all this week and none of them indicate they were written by anyone with a modicum of sense.

This education goal is delusional at so many levels. Which is why we need to be talking about it now. As this nonsense is going into place. As the high school Honors Lit teachers are jettisoning real book discussions in favor of Mind Mapping ideas with drawings. The 2010 Hewlett Education Program Strategic Plan we quoted from in the last post even acknowledges that the Common Core State Standards Initiative was just an excuse to get “states and schools to revisit assessment, curriculum, and instruction.”

Because this kind of a Perceive Need to Change Society and then Plan How to Do It Curriculum just does not score well on tests of actual knowledge and skills. So the 2009 ARRA Stimulus Act funded those new ways of measuring students first. One impediment down. The curriculum is what goes on in the classroom which is part of the reason to push digital tablets and computers and I-Phones and Kahn Academy tapes at home. It leaves the classroom for social interaction. The students themselves essentially become the curriculum.

Examples of Cultural Responsiveness listed for each student go beyond “appreciation for and tolerance of diversity” although that is listed as the first level. The second involves “uncovering individual conscious and unconscious bias, how these play out at classroom, school, and district levels, and beginning to draw on the backgrounds and knowledge of students and their communities as strengths and assets.” I guess the Second Level could be called the Getting to Know and Appreciate You, All of You, Curriculum. No wonder there has been a move to get rid of Honors and Gifted classes. They interfere with this new “overall educational environment” of personal interaction as the primary point.

Finally, the Third Level of Cultural Responsiveness is to “focus on structural inequality and how power differentials among demographic groups, conscious and unconscious bias, and decisions about how to structure public institutions and deliver services have created predictable barriers and stratified outcomes for people of color, low-income people, and other specific groups.” As the Framework bluntly puts it:

“Without knowledge of structural inequity and how to remedy it, we will not have the capacity to become true agents of change for a more just society.”

The assessments then are designed to be formative–changing the student and measuring the extent of the changes in these skill sets and values, attitudes, and beliefs. That’s the purpose of the learner-centered classroom instead of the teacher-centered one we traditionally associate with education. It still had content as the focus. And content would not be equitable. As the Framework said at another point: “if we do not develop deep knowledge of the past and how we created our present social conditions, we will be doomed to continue them.” So instruction also had to be targeted and was.

There are apparently to be lots of tales of racism and oppression and exploitation to create the spirit of Transformation desired. To instill it deep within each student’s core beyond the range of conscious thought.

Is it too late to stop this vision for American education? I hope not because this National Equity Plan is a prescription for widespread disaster. And the resulting death of the America we know and most of us love and the loss of the freedom to make our own decisions and widespread prosperity like the world has never seen before will not be an accident. And it won’t be manslaughter.

This is intentional. The only possible excuse for what too many adults living at taxpayer expense are pushing is that they do not know the likely consequences of what they are deliberately pushing.

And that’s not much of an excuse. And I for one am taking names.

So our question for most of these Principals and Supers and Professors and some of the Teachers needs to become: “Are you an Inadvertent Insurrectionist of this fine country with a few warts that can be fixed? Or an Intentional One?

We taxpayers and parents have every right to know. And we need to know soon. Like last week in some districts.

When Deep Learning and Systems Thinking Radicalizes the Student, Factual Reality Ceases to Matter

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Robin

To the student, that is. The problem for society is that factual realities like incentives and consequences and what makes an economy grow and what will make it contract or even implode are still out there. Like gravity, reality and economics and the likely result of giving government officials unrestrained power to make decisions for others will have their way regardless of intentions. Or whether anyone understands them or even believes in them. I wish more educators and politicians and charitable foundation employees involved in all these machinations would remember the wise words with which the eminent economist Ludwig Von Mises closed his epic book Human Action in the wake of the carnage of the Second World War.

Von Mises was writing about the regularity of “phenomena with regard to the interconnectedness of means and ends” in human activities. That’s what he regarded as economic knowledge. You and I would call it the wisdom that helps one successfully navigate daily life.

“The body of economic knowledge is an essential element in the structure of human civilization; it is the foundation upon which modern industrialism and all the moral, intellectual, technological, and therapeutical achievements of the last centuries have been built. It rests with men whether they will make the proper use of the rich treasure with which this knowledge provides them or whether they will leave it unused. But if they fail to take the best advantage of it and disregard its teachings and warnings, they will not annul economics; they will stamp out society and the human race.

I am not quoting Von Mises to scare anyone. Well, I guess that is not really true. Think of it as an Impetus Bout of Deliberate Fright. It is time for those of us who are knowledgable about history and economics to speak up and tell those who are not, notably many Principals, Supers, accreditors, professors of sociology or education, and way too many politicians and public and private bureaucrats, that there are unacceptable costs for everyone associated with their planned education policies. Pushing Transformational Outcomes Based Education and its close cousin Systems Thinking and SEL through the schools and classrooms will not be a victimless, lucrative for insiders, Success For All scheme. It will make victims of all of us and the Educrats seem to be the least knowledgable on the likely consequences of their actions and inactions. That means-end correspondence Von Mises was referring to.

Virtually all of the actual curriculum for Common Core I have seen makes Sustainability the focus of classroom activities. And not in the sense of conservation of natural resources and please do not litter. As a connected Swede, Carl Lindberg, put it, the whole point of the UN inspired international Education for Sustainable Development is to “create a feeling of global responsibility” in each individual. Needless to say, teaching young children and adolescents that they are merely parts of a broader community that ultimately encompasses the whole planet via systems thinking is a useful tool to create just such a useful feeling. To cultivate that Senge-Scharmer Blind Spot we discussed here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/second-order-change-why-reform-is-a-misnomer-for-the-real-common-core/ so that each student’s perceptions and future behaviors can be manipulated.

To that manipulation toolbox the educators intend to use to gain Transformative political and social change without our consent, we need to add what the Hewlett Foundation calls Deep Learning Strategies. Deeper Learning is part of the Foundation’s 2010 plan to “equalize education for all students.” This will of course involve a levelling process for the intellectually gifted and involves a high level of ignorance for all but at least it is equitable. And the politicians and bureaucrats will not have to worry about Axemaker Minds pointing out the likely consequences thereby impeding the implementation of theories and planning. And those established businesses need not be as concerned about an Axemaker Mind creating market-disrupting new technology. Of course we will be in the situation of tragic concern Von Mises worried about when too many will remain too ignorant to even have the opportunity to disregard needed knowledge from the past.

This is what Hewlett defines as deeper learning (they really love to bold it too. I suppose to show their enthusiastic embrace). Remember this is all anyone is to get to know and this dovetails perfectly with the well-connected 21st Century Skills push. Almost verbatim. And before you get too excited about the mention of Core Academic Content, let me give you the examples they use:

“Learn about water, oxygen and nitrogen cycles, food webs, and similar topics.”

So the academic content relates to thinking of the world around you as full of systems. The academic content then either relates to Sustainability issues or other “real world challenges” the students will be asked to try to solve. Using their nonexistent base of conceptual knowledge and search engine skills. Hence the push for Relevance as part of the new 3 R’s of the Common Core implementation.

I have already given you the example of core academic content as one of the five key elements and Hewlett’s example. They mention “mastering core academic content” too. Since this comes up all the time with Common Core, I need to point out that “mastering” does not mean knowing. It means applying. No need to stock that conceptual mental hotel with facts. Mastering thus frequently contemplates classwork with the relevant facts presupplied. No need to worry though about bias or propaganda being part of the given facts. It’s not like there is a political purpose associated with the Common Core.

I will tell you the remaining four keys along with Hewlett’s specific examples. I also want to point out that the Hewlett Foundation believes that the purpose of academic content under Common Core is to “understand ecosystems.” Except the deep, emotional understanding being sought for each student is more Paul Ehrlich Newmindedness than Von Mises based in reality. Apparently though that emotional, connected to a New Vision for Future Society element makes for “better retention of content knowledge.” What’s better–Deeply remembered nonsense or slightly forgotten accuracies? I am afraid we are about to find out if we do not act soon.

Here goes:

Think critically and solve complex problems. Examples: Re-create a natural ecosystem in a terrarium. Collect data to understand the interdependence of physical and biological elements.

Work collaboratively. Example: Work in a team to design, build, and monitor the terrarium.

Communicate effectively. Example: Present data and conclusions in writing and to an audience.

Lastly, Learn how to learn independently. Example: Use teacher feedback, test results, and reflection to guide future learning and improve study habits.

Sounds perfectly dismal to me but I can see how this would add up to preventing more Axemaker Minds from developing. And Hewlett matters. They were one of the petitioners behind the socio-cultural learning theory push the Obama Administration officially adopted that we talked about here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/so-now-common-core-rejects-individual-thinking-to-embrace-soviet-psychology-ecology/

And Hewlett’s vision for how to educate low income and minority students so they are essentially primed for the hoped-for Insurrection is embodied in how they and other educators define “Excellence and Equity.” That will be the next post.

You are not going to like it but it is what is showing up in the suburbs as the New 3 R’s. It also explains the community organizing push we chronicled here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/keep-urban-schools-weak-to-force-economic-and-social-justice-then-make-the-suburbs-close-the-gap/

It all fits so well it makes you wonder if there is not an active coordination around a common purpose.

Are Educators Free to Plot Mental Insurrections in Students with Impunity?

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Robin

Does being an educator–Teacher, Principal, Super, Professor–come with a magic “Get Out of Jail Free” card along with the degree? Especially those doctorates. Can educators push emotional and psychological practices in the classroom or Systems Thinking or Values Clarification or Soft Skills or Character Education or Inquiry Learning or the Student Centered Classroom or a myriad other terms that the Creators acknowledge are means to alter a Student’s Consciousness? To try to get to the Blind Spot that impels behaviors in an effort to obtain Communitarian Social Change?

A mentality that ceases to think of itself as a legitimate individual and finds its Sense of Self in doing for others. Where that altruism is not a free choice but was carefully cultivated in the classroom when the mind and personality remained malleable. If I can locate the originators of the theory or policy or practice saying what its real purpose is, and that purpose seeks to use the school to obtain social and political and economic transformation, does an education degree or title make it a permissable practice anyway? Are we Americans or Canadians or Brits or Australians or anyone else under political attack via education really without recourse?

John Dewey first developed the term “Social Reconstruction” to define the use of the school and classroom to change the student from the inside-out. It needs a mind that is not dominated by the abstract or the logical and is not full of facts that allow its own analysis. For Dewey the rational needed to be heavily infused with emotion so the mind would not be constrained from imagining the world as it might be. He recognized that a fact-filled brain will want to see possibilities from preexisting alternatives. John Dewey wanted a world as it had never been. His modern-day acolytes want that now. For all of them freedom gets redefined not as a matter of individual liberty and personal choices. No to be free in Dewey world:

“we need to imagine the possible beyond the actual, and to be moral we must distinguish those possibilities that ought to be (i.e., that are truly desirable) from those that are not.”

Most of the classroom practices track back to Dewey or someone who models their aspirations around Dewey. He is not the point of the post so let’s shorthand the essence of his vision by saying that the real website Marxists.org has numerous postings about Dewey. His biographers and his friend Sidney Hook and the Bolsheviks themselves all believed he took Karl Marx’s unfinished vision for using education as a cultural tool and made it into an effective weapon. We should take them then at their word and discuss whether it has any place in a country with aspirations of continued freedom for the individual. Otherwise the Colleges of Education and accreditation bodies and UNESCO etc have a license for insurrection. To simply use Dewey’s theories and practices but give them appealing names like Excellence or Quality Learning. Insurrection with Impunity at are Expense. Pension and Generous Health Benefits too.

In his Pedagogic Creed John Dewey said:

“Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.”

That attack on individual consciousness these days comes in through an IB Learner Profile or a Positive School Climate/PBIS requirement or the 3 R’s. It comes in through the letter home to parents describing an Honors Lit class that mentions interpreting books through personal experiences and cultural backgrounds and written reflections. That class may say lit and they may still “read” books but the focus of the class has shifted to the students. Who They Are, Where They Come From, What They Value, and What Needs to Be Changed to Have Growth. You the parent will simply assume the Growth is academic and relates to knowledge. That’s a social interaction classroom and you will likely only know it if your child already has an Axemaker Mind and feels bored and manipulated.

Remember the post when I told you the US Government had announced its intention to use education and the social sciences to shape mindsets for Sustainability and anti-fossil fuels regardless of the actual temperatures or whether there is fraud involved in the so-called science? http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-reality-is-ignored-or-disregarded-when-do-we-become-a-state-against-its-people/ This week the head of Australia’s Green Party, Christine Milne, who is a vital part of that country’s governing coalition, displayed her anger over anyone still disputing Manmade Global Warming even though, as I hope you are aware, there is a lot to dispute and the 4th IPCC Report has been shown to be full of unfounded assertions or propaganda. Here’s her response with my bolding:

“Denialism has much more to do about values and world view than it has to do with actually understanding the science. So we should have been using the social sciences a lot sooner than we have been to work out ways to talking to people’s values systems rather than to their intellectual capacity.”

Young people with still malleable minds who have been entrusted to educators in the belief that school is about the transmission of knowledge and marketable skills. Not a means for fostering an insurrection with captive minds as a permanently available vehicle widely distributed among future voters.

Speaking of worldview, what worldview is it to assert that a belief that people have intrinsic abilities and talents is Social Darwinism that must be combated and rejected as a basis for education? What worldview argues that math and science are merely social constructs and gloats that the Common Core implementation will finally allow educators to target those teachers still trying to teach it as a body of knowledge and procedures? What sort of country will we be if genuine math and science can no longer be taught to any student because it is not accessible to all students? Instead all students get applications and open-ended problem-solving and human activities like projects that are a means of interaction. What kind of worldview equates oil drilling and coal mining as unacceptable forms of oppression and domination of Gaia’s resources and then equates the mindset that would do that to owning slaves?

Different educators seem to have different grievances that make them susceptible to these schemes of Social Reconstruction via education. Some may be Inadvertent Insurrectionists genuinely unaware of the background of what they are pushing. Others, quite frankly are simply not very bright, and love any theory of learning that makes them feel better about how the students with Axemakers Minds made them feel. No more Axemakers Minds though is economic suicide but how would the Less Talented with a Career on the Public Payroll at Taxpayer Expense know that crucial fact?

To close this very legitimate inquiry on “What are we going to do?”, I can tell some of what is going on in professional development for teachers in preparation to implement the Common Core by searches that end up on my blog doorstep. One of the searches that I have been getting daily for more than a week now is “education misrepresent reality: Discuss.” Clearly trying to convince teachers to move away from the transmission of knowledge. So I did a little Reverse Engineering searching myself and found a 1979 book deliberately seeking Dewey’s vision of using education to alter consciousness to eventually obtain social and political change. Stealthily.

I also though found Paulo Freire and his theory that the transmission of knowledge, what he calls Banking Education, is an “instrument of social control” because it “controls by manipulating the content of the imagination.” Instead he wants a “problem-posing education.” The lecture-based curriculum, says Freire, “is compatible with the aim of promoting the oppressive cultural forces of the dominant authority in society and with the disempowerment of students.”

When educators believe all this nonsense and it guides their policies and practices, why can’t the Hispanics and Blacks and Rich and Poor and Male and Female and Gay and whatever other groups that are being played as Victims or Targets but who know better simply say no? Could there be anything in the US or any country right now that is more unifying than a rejection of the Dewey vision of education as Social Reconstruction? The vision that disparages facts and fluent reading and sequential math because they all foster individuality and are barriers to political manipulation.

Don’t we have a winning, very diverse, coalition here that Just Says No to Social Reconstruction and using education to try to alter perceptions of reality? Some things are simply too important not to be willing to be confrontational over. Respectfully of course. At least at first.

Invisible Serfs Collar

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

Tag Archives: Deep Learning

Pulling Up the Moorings Once Again to Transform Reality into the History of Desired Desires