Friday, September 26, 2014

Reeducation Camps

Treasure of Social Comity Requires Sacrifices of Individual Sovereignty, Posted on September 26, 2014 Written by Robin Eubanks, InvisibleSerfsCollar.com
Many of us have seen news reports in recent days on stu­dent walk­outs in the Den­ver sub­urbs. The School Board wants to ensure that cer­tain tra­di­tional areas are still empha­sized in Amer­i­can his­tory, while the stu­dents see the inter­ven­tion as pro­pa­ganda. The adults involved seem a bit shocked that what they see as facts is seen by high school stu­dents as an attempt to manip­u­late their belief sys­tems. Why can’t the stu­dents prop­erly under­stand who the Peo­ple in the White Hats are in this con­tro­versy they seem to want to ask?
I think it would help if every­one under­stood high school is too late to intro­duce facts and knowl­edge into a cur­ricu­lum that has long been about shap­ing val­ues, atti­tudes, and beliefs in desired direc­tions. The fed­eral ed lab in Aurora, Col­orado, McREL, after all, orig­i­nated the trans­for­ma­tional con­cept in K-12 edu­ca­tion of Sec­ond Order Change many years ago to force irre­versible change in stu­dents’ worldviews.
We can only repair the dam­age done if we appre­ci­ate what has hap­pened in our schools and why. It relates to the e-Governance we started look­ing at in the last post as well as the cre­at­ing the shared visions and col­lec­tive pur­poses needed to effec­tively bind the indi­vid­ual to the deci­sions made by oth­ers. In his 1999 book The Dou­ble Helix: Tech­nol­ogy and Democ­racy in the Amer­i­can Future, Edward Wenk laid out the new vision of pol­i­tics our stu­dents are actu­ally being pre­pared for. Gov­ern­ment is to be “con­sid­ered as a steer­ing sys­tem and not sim­ply a power bro­ker.” This fits, atten­tive read­ers will remem­ber, with the admit­ted use of con­cep­tual under­stand­ings and the manip­u­lated social con­struc­tion of real­ity to cre­ate an invis­i­ble steer­able keel in the stu­dents who are tomorrow’s cit­i­zens. Student-centered learn­ing then instead of the subject-centered empha­sis of old is nec­es­sary to build that keel. The ulti­mate con­se­quences also fit with what Hayek warned us of in the pre­vi­ous post.
When the School Board tries to inter­ject facts into the class­room, with­out appre­ci­at­ing that the keel is already there, it becomes easy for the adults closer to the class­room, who know what they have con­structed over years, to steer the out­rage. Facts=Propaganda if the Keel is already in place with­out par­ents, stu­dents, and most tax­pay­ers know­ing it’s there. Why is it there again? Ulti­mately, this gen­er­a­tion of ado­les­cents is being and has been primed to regard pol­i­tics as a term used to “describe how ele­ments of a diverse soci­ety use their power to bar­gain col­lec­tively, then strate­gies and tac­tics for their achieve­ment, all within an agreed upon set of val­ues and rules of engage­ment. This is Amer­i­can soci­ety in action.” That’s the vision of Amer­i­can soci­ety and pol­i­tics the stu­dents are act­ing on, while the school board is still locked into a vision of tra­di­tional rep­re­sen­ta­tive government.
“Con­sen­sus must be gen­er­ated” so that gov­ern­ments can steer with a “high degree of har­mony” towards a vision of Equity and social and eco­nomic jus­tice for all. Many K-12 and col­lege stu­dents have been thor­oughly embed­ded in this vision for years. The Com­mon Core is merely a means to make sure it is in place every­where. Pub­lic or pri­vate. Sub­urbs, cities, or rural areas. To align the US with what is going on in other coun­tries towards the same ends.
We adults are the ones who sim­ply assumed that the edu­ca­tion tem­plate had con­tin­ued on much as it had pre­vi­ously been. Once social comity becomes the estab­lished goal of the future at all lev­els of gov­ern­ments, then “social func­tion­ing needs a con­sen­sus on goals and a mech­a­nism for its gen­er­a­tion and ful­fill­ment.” We get that mech­a­nism by K-12 and higher ed sign­ing on, as well as the media, plus “who­ever con­trols tech­nol­ogy.” No won­der their related foun­da­tions are so involved.
ICT gen­er­ates the visual images that serve as a “kalei­do­scope” of what the future might be and are not bound by what­ever has suc­cess­fully existed before. Wenk wanted every­one to rec­og­nize that “Gov­ern­ment is not mainly or the only machin­ery of gov­er­nance. In Amer­i­can democ­racy, every­one should con­sider them­selves part of gov­ern­ment rather than hold­ing it at arm’s length and fig­u­ra­tively hold­ing the nose. Only by engage­ment through enlight­ened civic lit­er­acy, civic dis­course and com­mit­ment can the diverse needs and desires of all be nego­ti­ated.” Hence the C3 Social Stud­ies Frame­work and CCSSO pre­scrib­ing desired Cit­i­zen Dis­po­si­tions. As some­one deeply steeped in his­tory, this is a pre­scrip­tion for dis­as­ter, which is why accu­rate knowl­edge of the past is no longer being encour­aged or much tolerated.
All the push sur­round­ing Dig­i­tal Learn­ing and Lap­tops For All it should give us pause since Wenk rec­og­nized, and aimed for, what sub­sti­tut­ing those man­u­fac­tured visu­als and vir­tual real­ity would do to “crit­i­cally alter the con­scious­ness of the recep­tor.” That would be the stu­dent, your beloved child that you dropped off this morn­ing and entrusted to a sys­tem intent on trans­for­ma­tion. Well aware of the ques­tion that Wenk saw and intended to use: “What does infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy do TO us as well as FOR us.” In Wenk’s world gov­ern­ment, indus­try, and peo­ple will all inter­act and then be bound by what the decision-makers decide. Peo­ple are sup­posed to become sat­is­fied with the abil­ity to offer their opin­ions to “those who gov­ern them.” If this seems like a scifi book or lim­ited to one ide­alogue, it’s essen­tially the vision laid out by Marina Gor­bis of the Insti­tute for the Future in her 2013 book and speeches globally.
It’s essen­tially the vision of the future and our new oblig­a­tion to func­tion as a col­lec­tive that Richard Falk (of the Carnegie and Rockefeller-funded World Order Mod­els Project) laid out recently here. The new APUSH Frame­work and the La Pietra Con­fer­ence we looked at in that tril­ogy of posts make much more sense when we are aware of a well-funded and deter­mined effort across decades “about mov­ing from the here of ego­is­tic state-centrism to the there of humane geo-centrism.” Since Falk’s angry quotes at the time of the Boston Marathon bomb­ing show he in no way wants a real­ity of hate to get in the way of his vision of the future, we can be sure that today’s tragic videos of sliced off heads will not change the vision either. It is up to us to rec­og­nize it.
Whether most of us are aware or not, Falk, the OECD, the UN enti­ties, and pub­lic offi­cials at all lev­els are push­ing edu­ca­tion and land use reg­u­la­tions designed to cre­ate the “cit­i­zen pil­grim” who “com­bines the iden­tity of a par­tic­i­pant in a com­mu­nity and the acknowl­edg­ment that the desired com­mu­nity does not presently exist, that its essen­tial nature is to bond with a com­mu­nity that is in the midst of a birth process.” No won­der those Den­ver high school stu­dents believe accu­rate facts from America’s past con­sti­tute pro­pa­ganda in the present. They are par­tic­i­pat­ing in a birthing process and many may hope to become mid­wives of it. No won­der we just keep encoun­ter­ing a required com­mu­ni­tar­ian mind­set lurk­ing behind actual def­i­n­i­tions of being Career Ready or hav­ing a Pos­i­tive School Climate.
If every­one with polit­i­cal power glob­ally is push­ing a com­pa­ra­ble vision of the col­lec­tive future and that vision requires what Falk called “dras­tic shifts in polit­i­cal con­scious­ness,” then preschool, K-12, and higher edu­ca­tion will become ded­i­cated to cre­at­ing those very shifts. Those stu­dents are merely show­ing they are heed­ing the “call for an engaged cit­i­zenry respon­sive to the need and desire for a recon­sti­tuted future as well as a repaired present.” Why, it’s that Nean­derthal School Board major­ity show­ing it has not yet yielded to the Tran­si­tion clar­ion call that requires “infus­ing both polit­i­cal lead­er­ship and the elec­torate with the val­ues and per­cep­tions of the new realism.”
That again is the new real­ism that is actu­ally not very real­is­tic to those of us deeply grounded in knowl­edge of the past and con­ver­sant with what has ever cre­ated mass eco­nomic pros­per­ity. No, we are appar­ently to be stuck with edu­ca­tion designed to cre­ate over years “the engaged pil­grim devoted to the here and now of polit­i­cal action (as well as the pur­suit of a vision­ary future), whether by way of exhibit­ing empa­thy and sol­i­dar­ity with the suf­fer­ings of those most vul­ner­a­ble or by work­ing toward inno­v­a­tive steps serv­ing human and global interests.”
The good news in all this is that these stu­dents have been con­sciously sub­jected to behav­ioral engi­neer­ing so that they will have Growth Mind­sets that are mal­leable to change. They are only irre­versible if par­ents, tax­pay­ers, future employ­ers, and the stu­dents them­selves remain unaware of the delib­er­ately con­structed Worldview.
That they were sub­jected to fuzzy math and Whole Lan­guage pre­cisely so that their per­cep­tions could be manipulated.
The key to decon­struct­ing the keel is to know it is there.
The key to defeat­ing these open dec­la­ra­tions of a planned tran­si­tion to col­lec­tivism is know­ing they exist.
Con­sider this post as join­ing my book Cre­den­tialed to Destroy: How and Why Edu­ca­tion Became a Weapon to be clar­ion calls towards defeat­ing these col­lec­tivist aspi­ra­tions. While there is still time.
Sound­ing the alarm truly is the begin­ning of the way back from the precipice.
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