Let’s go to a quote from Ken Wilber, who ties to Robert Kegan from the last post, as well as the actual learning standards implementation in K-12. This quote came from a 2007 book called Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution: How the Integral Worldview is Transforming Politics, Culture and Spirituality and its author, Steve McIntosh, works closely with Carter Phipps from two posts ago on intentional cultural evolution. Ervin Laszlo wrote one of the back cover touting blurbs. This is all tied together in other words, even before I link to a previous Wilber post where he referred to these aims via a new kind of education as Mystical Marxism. http://invisibleserfscollar.com/mystical-marxism-shapers-of-our-current-world-system-or-building-new-mental-software/ is from 2013. McIntosh is bemoaning the fact that postmodernists have the right goals in terms of fairness for all, but that “they do not really know how to bring about the change of mind they seek” at the level of “consciousness and culture.” He thinks Wilber ‘articulated’ the current problem well when he said:
“Simply asserting that we should all learn a worldcentric ecology, or embrace a global compassion, is a noble but pragmatically less-than-useful project, because worldcentric waves are a product of development, not exhortation. As noted, the ‘new paradigm’ approaches exhort a goal without elucidating the path to that goal–they are cheerleaders for a cause that has no means of actualization, which perhaps explains the deep frustration among new-paradigm advocates who know they have a better ideal but are disappointed at how little the world responds to their calls.”
Learning standards and competency frameworks, whether in K-12, higher ed, or ICF Core Competencies to be qualified to train executives, are the 21st century tools to provide a mandatory means of actualization. They force a desired internalized development at the level of the mind and personality into Habits of Mind that invisibly bypass this implementation frustration Wilber laid out. Not explaining the ‘vision-logic’ of these changes correctly means that it is difficult for those who recognize a problem and the perfidy of so many pushing (or obscuring) this template from successfully organizing an effective opposition in time. I think that is why we saw the strange characters juxtaposed around common aims in the last post. If, in fact, “this new frontier of human understanding is largely approached through philosophy rather than science,” it suddenly makes sense why psychology, education, and normative political science are the new tools.
As McIntosh admitted, “in order for integral philosophy to achieve its mission of helping to bring about the next historically significant stage of culture, it is important for integral philosophy to be described in ways that allow for inclusion for a variety of different spiritual belief systems.” Boy, have we ever seen that, haven’t we? Yet in the end all the labels and rationales seem to be headed toward the real purpose of Marx’s writings as described here. http://invisibleserfscollar.com/naming-educators-as-the-levers-shifting-the-human-personality-to-marxs-moral-revolution/ is also from 2013. So what makes this Integral Vision so different? Let’s go back to Wilber again as he called for a “vision-logic” that would provide “the beginning of a truly higher order synthesizing capacity of making connections, relating truths, coordinating ideas, integrating concepts.”
Does that sound to anyone else like the Higher Order Thinking Skills that federal law now requires be assessed for at least 95% of all students in a state at least annually or federal funds may be forfeited? How about the DCIs-Disciplinary Core Ideas and Cross-Cutting Concepts laid out in learning standards? Wilber said this approach “represents an integration of intellectual capacity with intuition in a way that brings together the body and the mind so as to produce a new ability to recognize relationships and approach problems with enhanced creativity.” Just the thing if fundamental transformation is on the 21st century docket, huh? McIntosh states that this new to-be-instilled capacity is “best described as ‘dialectical evaluation,’ because unlike reason or logic this new ability is centered in volition rather than cognition. That is, the new insights provided by ‘vision-logic’ come about through the use of our will–it’s a process of evaluation informed by head and heart–as opposed to the exercise of reason and logic, which is more analytical and strictly cognitive.”
I believe that also why the new federal ed law now in effect insists that the required state learning standards must judge ‘achievement’ on the basis of performance, not mental knowledge. We get a convergence between School Choice and Classical Education and what “many mystics and spiritual teachers” want for a new vision of education once we learn from McIntosh “how the triad of beauty, truth, and goodness can become an organizing principle of the emerging spiritual culture of integral consciousness.” Gulp, how’s that for a Convergence between Left and Right? Mystics have called these three most intrinsic values–the three essential ‘windows on the divine’–and McIntosh quoted the Indian guru who inspired the creation of the Esalen Institute on the “most powerful effect” of targeting:
“1) the way of the intellect, or of knowledge–the way of truth; 2) the way of the heart, or of emotion–the way of beauty; and 3) the way of the will, or of action–the way of goodness.”
State mandated learning standards, the new Catholic Curriculum Framework, charters, school mission statements, social and emotional learning mandates, and Excellence visions as the necessary legal fulfillment of civil rights laws are just a few of the ways to force just that “most powerful effect”. It does that because the “new way of seeing things best described as integral philosophy…[is] a philosophy of evolution that literally causes evolution.” It does that when legal mandates lay out the “systems of values” that must be used “for large groups of people [think of the scope of schools, higher ed, and executive coaching alone] by defining what and who is valuable and this has the effect of bringing orientation and direction to the lives of the people who ascribe to that worldview.”
That necessary worldview gets practiced until it operates at an unconscious level, guiding intentions and motivating actions that only seem to be a product of individual choice. The Integral Vision and the type of revolutionary education it inspires, for either adults or children, is driven by the “recognition of the spiritual quality of values–goals, ideals, desires, intrinsic qualities, standards of perfection–[that] serve to energize consciousness and culture and nourish these internal systems with meaningful sustenance.” As McIntosh notes, “if we think about values in terms of beauty, truth, and goodness [or social justice and race, which work too], it makes the rather abstract notion of values more specific while retaining the level of generality we need to really understand values as a category of human experience.”
What are state performance standards other than a mandated form of prescribed human experience to be assessed in terms of officially desired internalized outcomes? The fact that they are mandatory and that they also serve as “conceptual categories [that] actually lend themselves to bring about evolution in both individual consciousness and collective culture” is omitted from the think tank presentations and school meetings. It’s up to all of us then to recognize what we are looking at. If it is true that “each stage of consciousness constructs its worldview out of agreements of values…that are tailored to its location along the timeline of history”, we need to realize that we are once again in the situation of another lost invite to the planning meetings that developed these values now being imposed.
The values and “concepts of understanding” that are to “act as compass headings for the improvement of the human condition” are apparently not subject to debate. Best then that we recognize how they are to work:
“Beauty, truth, and goodness are relative because they are always working to contact consciousness where it is, and then move it to increasingly advanced states. This is what the structures of consciousness and culture actually do–they act as dynamic systems of value that take these universal directions of improvement and translate them, down-step them, so that they can be applied to a given set of life conditions–so that they can be used to make things better ‘on the ground,’ if you will.”
That’s what Benjamin Bloom called Mastery Learning in what was the predecessor of Outcomes Based Education. Now those same aims get evaluated in terms of whether a student is on track to possess the characteristics associated with a prescribed Portrait of a Graduate or Student Profile. All were and are, like Integral philosophy itself, aimed at transforming the external culture by instilling Values and Ideals that will motivate purpose, actions, and goals “guided by the value of goodness.” Why? Because “as we can see throughout history, it is often ‘just ideas’ that end up changing the world.” If the Good, Truth, and Beauty can serve as an italicized-for-emphasis ‘conceptual cathedral’ that act as “a key to the ‘physics of the internal universe,'” we need to grasp that purpose before blindly accepting the false tenets that Classical Education is some kind of rescue from the federal mandate of the Common Core.
It simply accelerates the real purpose of the Common Core to get at the internalized level of cognition, emotion, and will. Everything seems to be going to the same place because that is where the needed Moral Revolution is to occur. The Integral Vision, per McIntosh, is simply the “appreciation of how values are the substance of every worldview, serving as the energy-source of systemic metabolism for these internal universe structures.”
That metabolism is no longer freely chosen by the individual, but imposed by political authority through required Standards, Competencies, or Masteries.
Scratch the surface of any of those terms and we consistently find mandates aiming to use “the importance of values because it can see that it is values themselves that are actually evolving within the realm of consciousness and culture.”
I bolded it in that quote because we need to see this politically prescribed evolution too, not just become the ‘product of development’ of prescribed competencies and standards imposed by others.
We also need to grasp that this intended evolution of Consciousness and Culture may be deliberate, but it is NOT a voluntary evolution taking us there.