Unapproved personal knowledge is a meme-buster. If you are not sure why I say that think of the images of the South Carolina flooding and then attach the descriptions of “freak weather-related” vs “caused by climate change.” One affects us emotionally and makes us want to do something. Known, unassigned stores of fact can destroy a given narrative. Let’s use two examples from just this past week. Has anyone seen a picture of the Oregon shooter’s mother? If we simply got our news from the evening networks, we would not know the mass murderer was mixed-race, just like our first Black President. Facts in the way of the narrative.
Part of the research into the sequel to my first book Credentialed to Destroy means that I have had to become an expert on Big Data. Let’s just say I have a lot of unapproved, demonstrably true facts at my command. So when this video https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/haunted-by-data came to my attention as a touted solution, I immediately knew it was a tactical keynote. The speaker misstated the nature of the problem to get a solution authorized that would actually make the problem of personalized data even worse. Words to the Wise: with behavioral data, it is the ongoing flow that is crucial to insights that allow neurological rearranging. Remember we have Learning Progressions to stipulated outcomes or Competencies. Once there and locked into place at a psychophysiological level to prompt and guide future behavior, the Oligarchs do not need to keep monitoring.
After that Big Data works just fine for social and economic planning purposes. That last one comes from a report on Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy that just came out from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. http://www.rewritetherules.org/ Once again actual knowledge of what has transpired in the last several decades and what impairs and helps create prosperity is a tremendous obstacle to accepting the prescribed actions by the politically influential. Finally, the US is embarking on adopting Qualifications Frameworks just as I warned about in my book. Only the names are changing to create a better narrative I suppose. On Monday the first ever National Credentials Summit was held in DC. http://connectingcredentials.org/summit-recording/
Like Stiglitz, this is a group of people interested in redesigning and planning a ‘fragmented system’–this time in the name of those who want a credential that will guarantee them a good job. Once again factual knowledge impedes the panacea being spun, but it is a chance to see Anthony Carnevale [see tag] as more than just the author of those Workplace Manuals for the Bush 41 Labor Department that still guide the admitted to vision now of K-12 education as workforce training. We get to see how much former governors just love to go to work for trade groups pushing a politically planned economy or education reforms. Even former Prime Ministers like Gordon Brown find post-office full employment via the Rise of the planning Oligarchs.
Last week the GEFF connected advisor Tom VanderArk linked to the final version of the Bipartisan Convergence Center’s vision for us. http://education-reimagined.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/A-Transformational-Vision-for-Education-in-the-US-2015.09.pdf It is just full of both false narratives justifying the need for transformation, as well as true declarations of intentions to change the children so that they are adaptable to the kind of changed social and economic systems Stiglitz and the Lumina Foundation (that called for the Credentials Convening linked to above) had in mind. In that planned, collectivist economy and society that still intends to use nonprofits and private companies to fulfill “the needs” of the people, unauthorized knowledge is in the way.
That report explains how the “learner-centered paradigm for learning functions like a pair of lenses that offers a new way to look at, think about, talk about, and act on education.” I bolded that part of the phrase because the ‘pair of lenses’ analogy is what the last post said was a means of framing an individual’s orientation at an unconscious level. Unapproved, personal facts get in the way of our simply putting on the prescribed ‘pair of lenses’. That report confesses the intention to use K-12 education to prescribe the specific core knowledge, skills, and personal dispositions ALL students are to internalize. Did any dictator in history ever aspire to more intrusion, unless we count keeping everyone but a designated elite (the oligarchs) completely illiterate?
Complete illiteracy is easy to notice. Prescribed ignorance, tied to useful false beliefs and regularly manipulated emotions, and then all coupled to doled out allowed core knowledge and practiced, approved behaviors, is what we are really looking at here. Unapproved knowledge impedes the Rise of the Oligarchs in our Vision 2030 UN-led world and it must not be allowed. http://www.iclei.org/details/article/advancing-sdgs-at-the-local-and-subnational-level-input-to-un-negotiations-on-post2015-development.html is a confession that the UN, mayors, city councils, and school administrators all know that most of the 2030 vision will be carried out globally at a local level. They have even coined the term ‘localization’ for this deliberate disguise for planned global control via local administrators and politicians.
http://landing.deloitte.com.au/rs/761-IBL-328/images/deloitte-au-ps-education-redefined-040815.pdf from Australia is a reminder that this planned ignorance and the ties to workforce development are not limited to the US. We can also go back in time to the report UNESCO created in 1968 to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Called “The Right to Education: From Proclamation to Achievement (1948-1968),” it made “the full development of the human personality” the new purpose of education globally just like Uncle Karl envisioned as a necessary component of his sought Human Development Society or little ‘c’ communism. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/who-knew-karl-marx-had-a-human-development-model-or-that-it-fit-our-facts-so-well/
Not to be paranoid, but when that Re-Imagined Education Project mentions its “vision of all children learning and thriving to their full potential,” it certainly sounds like a rephrasing of the ‘full development of the human personality’, doesn’t it? When it calls for a “Coordinated Network of Institutions, Organizations, Agencies, Associations and Federations, and Businesses” it is using the word ‘network’ to replace the word ‘system’ used in all these other cites. The intention to fundamentally redesign, plan and direct is the same. This Network “offers open-walled, relevant, and contextualized learning resources and opportunities to learners and creates avenues for learners to be involved in and engage with the community.”
Sounds like what the Credentialing Summit is calling for as Seamless Pathways in a no longer ‘fragmented’ employment system. It would also fit with the communitarian, promote the Good of Others in daily behaviors, requirement that we found in the definition of Career Ready Practices. Let’s stay in the present for one more quote: “Additionally, this network promotes collaboration and communication amongst entities working to support learners’ health, nutrition, safety, and wellbeing.” Since those needs can only be met if the learners’ entire family also has their ‘needs’ met (see http://www.communityschools.org/assets/1/AssetManager/Better-Learning-through-Community-School-Partnerships.pdf ) , we are back to an obligation to meet such needs for all families with children. Just like Marx laid out, as well as the UN in that 2030 Vision all of our elected leaders signed on to about a week ago.
The UDHR is already showing up in much of the curricula coming in under the banner of the Common Core and Global Competency. Does everyone appreciate that it called for “economic and social equality” back in 1948 and empowered UNESCO to achieve it via education and planned changes to prevailing culture? That communitarianism was always at the center of the imagined future global vision and that only politically connected Oligarchs thrive in such a society? Essentially everyone thriving becomes a means of ensuring there will be no unauthorized breakouts of individuality or genius innovations. Here is the Oligarch plan via the UN and now ‘localization’ from 1968:
“When liberty, equality and fraternity are achieved, so too will be achieved the free, full development of man’s personality within the community; and thus man will be considered as an end and not a means. [BS narrative alert]…Duties toward the Community (Art. 29 of UDHR) For man may claim his rights, in the name of freedom and justice, only in so far as he consents to assume his duties, and becomes aware that the members of every human community are all interdependent.”
That’s why the focus keeps coming back to personality, even if the excuse is bullying, a Positive School Climate, Workforce Competencies and Soft Skills, Grit and Perseverance, or Character Education. Again to 1968: “the permanent task of education remains: to form the personality of every human being–the personality that will allow him to resist the loss of his individuality in his work and his leisure-time occupations, and to set forth, be it modestly, upon the conquest of the good things of the world. And these are not material goods only, but also intelligence, beauty and goodness.”
I guess the last three are what is hiding in the present as those to-be-stipulated Dispositions. It will not be the individual student or any of the rest of us picking them out and, once again individual, unapproved stores of knowledge impede the plans. That is why UNESCO in 1968 called for “not a well-stocked but a well-organized mind.” Organized around the designated core knowledge, approved themes and concepts, and supplied principles and values–”it presupposes a certain limited sum of basic knowledge, deeply rooted and constantly available.” Basic knowledge that creates a “capacity for action.” That would be action though along approved pathways of course.
Education then, in 1968 and now, in the US and in every other developed country, “forms men and women who will become the active agents of progress, ready to face what has never been faced before. Culture forms a close link between the concepts of education and the future…Culture, no longer the privilege of an aristocracy, is becoming the leaven of democracy. Every worker is a citizen. Specialization must on no account be an obstacle to the grasp of broader problems.”
Because broader problems should only be understood through the lenses of approved core knowledge. This ignorance and manipulated narratives of course greases the path for the Rise of the Oligarchs.
Genuine, Unapproved Knowledge–the ultimate 21st Century Rebellion of the would-be serfs.
