Tag Archives: USGCRP 2012-2021

The Need to Know as We Understand It Today May be a Lethal Cultural Sport

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That needs to be radically restricted if not abolished root and branch. So said anthropologist Bernard James in his 1973 book The Death of Progress in a passage so reminiscent of Paul Ehrlich’s long-expressed desire to use education to create  Newmindedness and James Burke’s to create Non-Axemaker Minds that I just HAD to borrow it. And for similar reasons too. See what I mean?

“There is a sense of desperation in the air, a sense that . . . man has been pitchforked by science and technology into a new and precarious age. [In this age] the final period of decay of our Western world, the predicament is clear. We live on an overcrowded and pillaged planet, and we must stop the pillage or perish.”

And like the Bioregionalists and the Ecology educators like David Orr, it’s always the rational mind that is the central target for change. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/we-need-a-radical-change-in-our-mode-of-consciousness-even-a-new-sense-of-being-human/ . There was one modern scientific discovery and technological innovation though that didn’t send Professor James into a social engineering frenzy–the computer and communications technology. What today usually gets abbreviated as ICT or as the National Science Foundation likes to call it–Cyberlearning. As in let’s throw tens of millions of taxpayer dollars or new debt into making ICT the focus of all education. K-12 and higher ed. No Cronyism there.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/01/03/15cyber.h32.html?tkn=TLLFZjQZBrz3EptDVf4qQPg2Wz33qWsMGN2A&cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1 is the January 3, 2013 story called “Federal Effort Aims to Transform Learning Technologies.” Since I have written several posts where education professors and administrators and UNESCO reports explicitly acknowledged that such Digital Literacy efforts actually are designed to gain Equity in Achievement by limiting the ability to think, I decided to look into this expensive program further.

The National Science Foundation’s Cyberlearning Initiative is very much in the Limit the Capacity to Think,Make Tool Use and Social Interaction the Purpose of School, Tradition. You know the one that has everything to do with taking down the basis for Individualism and free markets and disruptive technology innovation and nothing to do with the transmission of useful cultural knowledge from the past? Since that would bolster the rational mind and each person’s ability to conceptualize the future for themselves? Or be ingenious? Oh, but I am getting ahead of myself again.

This 2008 NSF report that must have the tech companies salivating is called “Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge: A 21st Century Agenda for the National Science Foundation.” That mouthful, which I quoted in full for a reason, goes a long way towards explaining the NSF’s agenda in creating all the poor math and science curricula in the 90s that became notorious in the Math and Science Wars. Which is important now as NSF also goes after higher ed courses to gain equity in credentialling. Moreover, it explains the education vision in both that USGCRP 2012-2021 report http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-reality-is-ignored-or-disregarded-when-do-we-become-a-state-against-its-people/ as well as that troubling Research Goal 6 described in the previous post. And also NSF’s work on the Belmont Challenge and the Future Earth Alliance. Busy folks. In fact, “Altering Minds and Behaviors without Telling You” might be a good 21st Century motto for certain parts of the NSF. So convenient isn’t it that  NSF now reports to a close Ehrlich colleague, John Holdren.  He is not telling us either although if you read his past books and articles, he already has.

Consistent with that remake the world and control human behavior aspirations is cyberlearning as a means of “steering” humanity and signalling

“the intertwined tapestry of concepts relating the goal-directed actions, predictions, feedback, and responses in the systems (physical, social, engineering) for which cybernetics was to be an explanatory framework.”

Yes, long before Peter Senge took up the mantle of Systems Thinking to make a lucrative living foisting it on schoolchildren and naive business executives, we had Norbert Wiener who helped develop Cybernetics to try to make human systems more predictable and controllable. And, no, nobody EVER asks us “Pretty Please” or May I?”. So Cyberlearning is based on Cybernetics theories and involves Learning in a networked world. And the NSF report wants to make it quite clear that cyberlearning involves “learning with” the tablets, Smartphones, and laptops that are currently being pushed at great expense. Absolutely does not mean “learning about” the ICT infrastructure. Mercy no, that might bolster the abstract, logical mind and we need to prevent those as much as possible in the 21st century. No matter what the cost in dollars or forgone future prosperity or destroyed individual promise.

In fact on page 11 of that report you can find a chart called “Advances in Communication and Information Resources for Human Interaction” that puts working with symbol systems like reading and math and academic content very low on the totem pole of 21st century aspirations for students. And what makes it to the top you ask reluctantly? Why, that would be “Virtual Observations [aka videos], Collaborations, Social Networking, and Web 2.0.” I kid you not. That’s the Marxist/Deweyan ultimate wish list of Social Interaction, Participation, and Engagement as the purpose of education. It also dovetails to the 1989 UNESCO agenda described here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/values-and-vocational-creating-citizen-drones-via-education-worldwide/ . The report still guiding education “reform” globally.

One of the creators of that chart is heavily involved with Cyberlearning and Informal Learning generally. Stanford Professor Roy Pea is not only in a position to “Do Lunch” with the Ehrlichs and Linda Darling-Hammond and so many other of our Transform Education Schemers but he was kind enough to do a Cyberlearning slideshow in 2011. That got uploaded on August 15, 2012 just in time for the new school year.  http://www.slideshare.net/roypea/berkeley-cyberlearning-030811final . Have fun with the whole show but it is Slides 17-19 that really caught my eye. They make it quite clear Professor Pea considers ICT and Cyberlearning to be a Lev Vygotsky mediated tool.  Complete with pictures.

Vygotsky, for newcomers, was a Soviet psychologist determined to use pedagogy and education to create the perfect Soviet man (and woman I am sure). He understood that cognitive tools can either strengthen the abstract mind (like reading phonetically) or weaken it (like ICT substituting for personal knowledge). Slide 19 leaves no doubt in my mind Professor Pea very much understands what Vygotsky aspired to do in his research. Disrupt previous cultural-historical processes [also known as knowledge of the past] in favor of something new. A different future and culture. As in Designing New Minds, Values, and Overall Personalities I suppose. And Pea also leaves no doubt (Slide 49) that the expensive National Education Technology Plan is part of all this mind-weakening, Transformative, Design a New Future through the introduction of new Cognitive Tools, assault.

Designing the Future. Now how hubristic, as in Will Lightning Strike at the Nerve?, does that sound? But sure enough, on January 18, 2012, there was a Cyberlearning 2012 Summit in DC we were not invited to. So we will have to rely on this helpful graphic of what went on. http://cyberlearning.sri.com/w/images/b/b9/Illustration_Banner.jpg . And there on the far left we see “People and Technology Working Together Designing the Future.” Apparently all it takes according to the graphic is the NSF using multimillion dollar grants to bribe educators and institutions who will in turn Transform Education. Making ICT and the Internet and the Visual instead of mental the Whole Point of Education.

Well, that will affect the future as we shut down much of the human capacity to think rationally that brought, quite literally, Civilization. Print and the mental manipulation of it played a big part. Especially after the invention of the printing press and the Reformation made literacy widespread in the 16th century. Leading to the explosion of knowledge and technology Bernard James wanted to stop in our title.

But can we really design the future? I don’t think so. But let’s talk about that latest bit of public sector hubris in the next post. We will look at what Ehrlich and UNESCO and the European Union and NSF all have in mind when they talk about Foresight Knowledge.

Because I am a firm believer that forewarned is forearmed. Especially about Foresight.

Sorry. Couldn’t resist that.

 

 

 

Hyping Catastrophe to Eliminate the Supposed Mismatch Between Human Minds and the World We Inhabit

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Going through the actual Performance Assessments in the last post reminded me of what a useful mind altering and emotion manipulation tool they will be for someone like Climate and Population Alarmist Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich has long wanted  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/learning-to-learn-or-how-to-replace-old-minds-with-sustainable-new-ones/  to use education to “change the way we perceive the world, the way humanity sees the world in order to survive.”   But I did not know when I wrote that post that both he and the US Climate Change Aspiring Professional Bureaucracy and Collection of Rent Seekers would publish reports that came out late last week. Just full of plans on how to use education to physically change minds and arouse emotions to support their lucrative “research” agenda.

Now Research Agenda has clearly become a euphemism for telling us what we must or cannot do and to gain unprecedented levels of political, social, and economic control. At least in the US and any other country of free citizens. I will start with Ehrlich since we have been tracking his aspirations for New Human Minds Incapable of Ingenuity and Inventiveness for a while. His essay entitled “Can a Collapse of Global Civilization Be Avoided?” is clearly designed to elicit an “I certainly hope so. What must we do right now?” response. It starts with a mention of previous collapses and then cites to Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. Very dramatic. We instinctively visualize those statues on Easter Island with no trees around and wonder will that be us? Except Ehrlich’s 1989 book on the conscious evolution of new human minds has a Jared M. Diamond listed as one of the helpful commenters on his manuscript to be thanked. I am starting to think that civilizational collapse books unless we change as outlined are a booming business.   http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845.full.pdf+html

Not to be mean but it is a hyperbolic essay clearly designed to try to create hysteria and the Ehrlichs’ mania for control over us shows through repeatedly. He also envisions some sort of rule by academics which appears to be all the rage at Stanford. I wonder if he and Linda Darling-Hammond do lunch in the sunshine to talk about those SBAC Performance Assessments or how Effective Teaching just happens to coincide with creating New Minds? Anyway, to avoid collapse:

“there is a need for natural scientists to collaborate with social scientists, especially those who study the dynamics of social movements. Such collaborations could develop ways to stimulate a significant increase in popular support for decisive and immediate action on the predicament.”

So we taxpayers get to pick up the bill for all those social and natural scientists whose payday is contingent on finding such potential catastrophes and planning for them. And lobbying us and persuading us we are the misguided ones. No conflicts there. And then hitting us up for more money to fund continuous planning. Now Ehrlich wants “fundamental institutional change” in educational systems and he happens to mention a new project at Stanford–the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere.” MAHB wants to create a new kind of intelligence, foresight intelligence, that sounds ever so much better than Newmindedness or Peter Senge’s Systems Thinking even if it works much the same. FI as I shall call it is the 21st century aspiration to “implement behavioral, institutional and cultural changes necessary for humans to ensure a sustainable and equitable future for all.”

Which sounds to me like the kind of aspiration likely to produce civilization collapse as all sorts of unappreciated reasons that things work at all get punted in the name of wholesale Transformation to “reduce humanity’s ecological footprint and social inequities before it is too late.” Collapse triggered by computer modelling by rent seeking parasites determined to ignore reality in their lust for power and money or just naivete. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261577/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-Met-Office-report-reveals-MoS-got-right-warming–deniers-now.html?ito=feeds-newsxml came out over this weekend directly on point.

I am not picking on the Ehrlichs but this entire operation of gutting it all using the plans of people whose only skin in the game is that they get paid well for such advocacy is ludicrous. The unintended consequences are likely to be horrific and the intended ones seem quite grim as well unless you are in the planning class. That becomes quite apparent when we don’t accept Ehrlich’s description of MAHB as “nascent” like a newborn just opening its eyes. Instead MAHB had a 2011 name change from its previous more apt description of the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior. And just in case you are worried that MAHB might have all-encompassing aspirations. They do include the “values, attitudes, and actions of individual and collective actors.” Which will certainly make those performance assessments timely since that is what they target and measure. MAHB also wants to change towards sustainablity to take place “across all domains of human life”–mentioning “institutional arrangements, social structures, norms, and cultural practices.”

Only someone without a knowledge of history or economics could advocate deliberately redesigning and changing all those things and proclaim it is to avoid civilizational collapse. It’s much more likely to bring it on as all the factors that create human progress and prosperity get targeted for gutting to enable widespread submission to such schemes. Ehrlich even calls these changes via education a “soft means” to advance public policy but the landing is likely to be quite hard. Laying out the fellow international players does not help. It just adds to the toxicity of the brew being hatched to use “social science and humanities” to sway minds by metaphorically lobotomizing them.

Which brings me to the http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/download/NCAJan11-2013-publicreviewdraft-chap29-researchagenda.pdf National Climate Assessment draft released by more aspiring Planners and Permanent Rent Seekers last week. The US Global Change Research Program was already on my radar screen for its “You will Believe This No matter What the Actual Facts” Attitudes in previous reports.  http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-reality-is-ignored-or-disregarded-when-do-we-become-a-state-against-its-people/ I wish taxpayer funded agencies in supposedly free countries did not behave in ways that provoke descriptions previously used for the Soviet Union. But the Soviets too were quite consumed in using education to limit the likelihood that citizens had the mental capacity or store of accurate information to challenge the plans of the nomenklatura. So the analogy is unfortunately apt.

Research Goal 6 on page 1041 of that NCA draft lays out the plan for education and workforce development. I know you will be Shocked, Shocked to learn it just happens to mirror what Spady called Life Role Complex Performances and others are describing as Deep Learning (Hewlett), Higher Order Thinking (Webb’s DOK), Second Order Change (MCREL), Global Competence, and 21st Century Skills. You’d almost think there was active coordination going on. Here goes [my snark in brackets]:

“Building human capacity to respond to the emerging challenges described in this Assessment [are you as tired of that word as I am? It should be listed in Terms of Duplicity for Aspiring Statists] requires expansion of skills within the existing public and private sectors [lucrative retraining for academia. Like an annuity] and developing a new workforce that excels at critical and interdisciplinary thinking. [They don't know much and much of what they believe is false but they are passionately devoted to these beliefs and committed to acting on them.] Useful capacities include facilitation and communications skills [a 2 inch leap], integration of new technologies and data sources into existing programs and practices [vocational with lucrative ICT contracts available for Cronies], management of collaborative processes to allow for imaginative solutions [unimpeded by knowledge to prompt a logical "this won't work" response], development and use of sustainable technologies to reduce climate risks [more ICT contracts and Solyndras and Fisker exploding batteries], and building frameworks for decision-making in an internationally interdependent world.”

Education, K-12 and higher ed, used to be about empowering each of us as much as possible with the knowledge of what worked, or didn’t, in the past so we could make good decisions as adults about our own lives and what we valued. No more. Now it is apparently about hobbling our ability to be independent so we will surrender “decision-making” to others.

And we won’t mind or even notice.

Now once again. Where is the likelihood of collapse really coming from?

 

If Reality is Ignored or Disregarded, When Do We Become a State Against Its People?

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The natural science world is currently abuzz over a paper by Anthony Watts of the website Watts Up With That released Sunday, July 29, that shows that untainted temperature data reveals very little actual global warming. Certainly nothing unusual. The warming cited to justify all this redesigning of education, the economy, and societies all over the West appears to be coming from tainted, poorly located, sites like airports or parking lots. Then NOAA, a US federal science(?) agency, that clearly takes its work on behalf of the US Global Change Research Program  http://library.globalchange.gov/u-s-global-change-research-program-strategic-plan-2012-2021 as a mandate to create global change whatever the actual temperatures or the causes of any increases, skews everything upward again. Making modelling a truly terrible substitute for reality. You see, the Watts paper shows NOAA adjusted the well-sited increases by a factor of about 3 times. Creativity to Create a Sense of Crisis is probably an apt description for these apparent shenanigans.

Now this might just be a scandal among science insiders if we did not also have documented social change transformation aspirations like the Belmont Challenge and the Future Earth Alliance and now that USGCRP 2012-2021 report that looks suspiciously just like the US operating plans and the same time line for implementing the Belmont Challenge in the US. Let’s see,  the definition of “Advance Science” being used in that report says it is to integrate “natural and human components of the Earth system.” Well, being a human component sounds a bit better than being a sociotechnical system from another federal report cited in the July 27 story but it is not much of an improvement. We still have federal agencies and federal funding going to destroy the historic concept of the individual that Western civilization was built on. Quite successfully and prosperously I might add.

USGCRP, according to Mark McCaffrey of CIRES in Boulder, was “known as the Climate Change Research Program or CCSP during the George W. Bush era” when its work was limited to physical science and modelling. Apparently the Obama Administration had much more ambitious plans for climate change and redesigning an economy and American citizens around Sustainability as we have been discussing all summer. So what changed? Well McCaffrey maligns CCSP because it gave “marginal lip service and no funding to social science, education and communication efforts or research.” Instead, the Obama Administration created UNGCRP to be:

“a robust inter-agency effort with international links that now considers social science and effective education and communication to be integral to addressing global change.”

Do you think that’s a typo? It doesn’t say climate change. It says global change. Is that a recognition that AGW was always just a ruse? Well, we know where the international links come from because the Interagency Climate Change task force has the NSF Directorate for Geosciences that is also one of the managing partners of the Belmont Forum. We have the NOAA Climate Program. A desire for a rationale for global social and economic change around Sustainability might explain that determination to find warming no matter what. Finally, the 3rd member of the Global Change triumvirate is listed as the NASA Earth Science Education Science Mission Directorate.I guess someone wanted to reaffirm we are dealing with Capital S Science there. Never a good sign.

All three of these agencies currently report to John Holdren who was a co-author in the past with Paul Ehrlich who wants us to have a new kind of mind. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/how-disabilities-law-is-already-being-used-to-gain-ehrlichs-new-mind-and-the-future-earth-economy/ I am thinking all that new emphasis on the social sciences and education might make handy tools and weapons to gain new, non-Axemaker, minds. As a brief aside, US Senators weighing their vote on that UN Treaty ought to remember the UN now considers education to be their primary policy instrument too.

If the actual measured untainted temperatures show little actual global warming, government officials and the grant seeking professorate class seem to adjust upwards anyway. If a whole word sight dominant reading program shows poor results, you increase the training fees and expand the schools and districts that must use it. If the social and emotional learning emphasis of Outcomes-Based Education has a tragic history since it is deliberate psychological manipulation of pliable minds, you rename it and expand the implementation to a national commitment.

Those are all signs of a political ideology being forced without consent on young minds, businesses, citizens, a whole country. The planet that is supposed to be having an emergency. When you refuse to accept the results of experiments or observations of what works, that is the very definition of political dogma. Pretending it is actually Capital S Science will not change that underlying reality. An ideology systematically rejects empirical evidence. Power seeks to reject or transform reality.  I guess that is where the new robust emphasis on the social sciences and education and communication comes in. Transforming the reality of permitted human behaviors.

We saw the planned vision of consensus creating, managed communication in the July 27 post http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/blending-sustainability-and-education-to-gain-arational-nonlinear-minds-and-new-behaviors/ . We have been chronicling the manipulation of education all summer and the planned reliance on the regional accreditation agencies to act as the day to day enforcers on K-12 and higher ed of this political vision of education for global change.

That leaves the social sciences. Did you know pedagogy itself ceased to be about teaching the content and became a mixture of Marxist political theory masquerading as learning theory, Soviet psychological practices, and cultural anthropology and sociology theories about 25 years ago? It is the ultimate interdisciplinary social science. In a position to create those new non-Axemaker Minds. Especially in those insisting on being called Doctor or those who are Nationally Board Certified Teachers. Those Credentials really do not indicate what you thought. They were actively designed to gain access to positions for imposing political ideologies via education without constraint.

Education coupled with pedagogy, and a friendly cultivated media amenable to the desired communications to create political consensus, are indeed perfect methods for obtaining global change. To create an ideocracy. A country which determines what ideas are acceptable and what kind of minds are allowed. Subjugating knowledge to power has a long history. But only in countries where there is no actual personal liberty or economic freedom. Even if it still exists on paper and old textbooks.

Are we going to continue to allow education to be used to destroy the independence of the individual mind and other manifestations of liberty like private property and personal genuine excellence in our freely chosen pursuits?

It is still a rewriting of the essence of the US Constitution. Now it is out in the open. Please discuss passionately as the still-free individuals that you are. Without any compulsion to reach a consensus on this issue. You are not a subject under government control yet.