How often do we see education changes pushed in the name of being ‘internationally competitive’? Let’s take a look at something Andreas Schleicher of the OECD said just a few months ago: “In the past, education was about teaching people something. Now, it’s about making sure that students develop a reliable compass and the navigation skills to find their own way through an increasingly uncertain, volatile, and ambiguous world.” Disagree with that new vision of education? Well, realistically most of us do not get a chance to because that wholesale shift in direction is hidden behind a phrase we simply assume we understand.
Let’s try another one, should the primary purpose of education in the 21st Century be “the intentional attempt in schools to foster the development of students’ psychological characteristics that motivate and enable them to act in ethical, democratic, and socially effective ways”? Again, that’s a shift that parents or taxpayers may never see as it hides behind phrases like Whole Child, Classical or Character Education, or College and Career Ready. In other words, if the typical child is being supplied with the Ideas and Concepts to guide their thinking in predictable ways, we adults are likewise being supplied with poorly grasped new definitions and false narratives about the Common Core or competency-based education that are also intended to guide our thinking and areas of concern.
While my tendons were healing I noticed a sudden push from a variety of education sites for a Parent Toolkit for Student Privacy that I decided to take a look at. I read it and recognized that it wasn’t going to solve the real problems and its release would simply obscure parents ever truly grasping the nature of these education ‘reforms’ and the purpose of standards and data gathering. To use Schleicher’s term, the internalized compass at the level of our children’s minds and personalities would still be wired up at school and parents would remain unaware. Meanwhile they would believe they had ‘protected their child.’ Since parents would remain unaware of the presence of the compass they could not discern the vision it was invisibly steering their child to adopt and support in daily behaviors.
When I started looking more into that Toolkit I saw admitted Progs and purported conservative think tanks and education blogs all writing about this supposed new panacea. After years of doing Due Diligence on desired acquisitions, my gut instinct is always to first look for the funding. In this case, it was not one of the usual suspects like Hewlett, Gates, or Carnegie. Instead, a Rose Foundation was credited. It turned out to be a social justice advocacy based in Oakland, California that functions as a philanthropy pass through so maybe a better-known or infamous charitable name did fund that toolkit after all. https://rosefdn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/theorychange.pdf lays out the Rose vision for how to achieve Community Change
Sponsoring a Privacy Toolkit that essentially misdirects the attention of concerned and attentive parents makes perfect sense for an advocacy seeking community change if the building block for the desired change is creating that desired ‘reliable compass’ within each student during their years of schooling. People cannot rally against initiatives they are unaware of because of a coordinated effort to deceive them. It just cannot be coincidental that so many pushed the same largely irrelevant to the actual problem panacea at the same time. We are apparently supposed to believe that there is a database of PII-Personally Identifiable Information–that will be used to track our child and control their future opportunities for work. We are also being misled that nothing imposed at the state or local level can be dangerous. Sure it can, especially when we are being lied to so we are all unawares.
Last week, the “Engaging the Private Sector and Developing Partnerships to Advance Health and the Sustainable Development Goals” report was released after 2016 workshops took place in NYC and London. Another lost invite. It was all about the need for transforming partnerships at the local level that include business and bind to a different vision of the economy and the purpose of business.” Still think the local is a way out and it is the feds in DC who are the primary promoters of evil? This SDG vision and expansive view of health needs a vision of education that “can facilitate changes in values, worldviews, and behaviour at the level of the individual, community and society as a whole. This works particularly well when agreement exists on common values and the best and most desirable behaviours.”
Agreement exists all right, but it is not on hardly any parents’ radars because of all this organized deceit. A philanthropy interested in social justice and community change would have every reason under this vision of how to achieve the SDGs to push a Privacy Toolkit that makes the desired changes at the level of the individual easier because it is the classic “Look Squirrel!” misdirection. How do we get the desired “empowered, critical, mindful, and competent citizens”? Remember the Positive Education report I covered in the March 6 “Radio Silence” post or the “Inside Out” aims from the last post? Does anyone doubt that the Reliable Compass will also serve as the desired internalized component of Amitai Etzioni’s New Golden Rule I covered on April 4 in “Embody or Perish”?
The June 2017 IPEN Newsletter hyped a new Framework for Character Education in Schools from the same Jubilee Centre we met in this post from last spring on the supposed Science of Virtues. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/locating-the-internalized-information-guiding-human-behavior-so-it-can-be-controlled-and-transformed/ Notice that same aim as well as the word redefinition technique we are still dealing with now. In that case it was what the word ‘Liberty’ is now to mean behind our back. See if this does not sound like the same aims we encountered above repeatedly.
“Schools should consider questions about the kinds of persons their students will become, how the development of good character contributes to a flourishing life, and how to balance various virtues and values…Schools should and do aid students in learning to know the good, love the good, and do the good…Human flourishing is the widely accepted goal of life. To flourish is not only to be happy, but to fulfill one’s potential. Flourishing is the ultimate aim of character education. Human flourishing requires the acquisition and development of intellectual, moral, and civic virtues, excellence specific to diverse domains of practice or human endeavour, and generic virtues of self-management (known as enabling or performance virtues).”
Let’s take a break from that quote to catch our breath and mull over just how manipulative and hidden those aims are. After all, those very same ‘enabling or performance virtues’ are outlined in standards for social and emotional learning. The Faux Narrative though has parents convinced we are back to a concerning database of PII and their poor tracked child. Do you remember my warning about the Marxian Human Development Society and the new kind of citizen with different internalized personal traits, values, and beliefs it would need? Doesn’t this all just fit perfectly? No wonder our attention keeps being directed in unison elsewhere.
“Character education teaches the acquisition and strengthening of virtues: the traits that sustain a well-rounded life and a thriving society…Students also need to grow in their understanding of what is good or valuable and their ability to protect and advance what is good. They need to develop a commitment to serving others, which is an essential manifestation of good character in action.”
If that sounds rather collectivist, it’s because that is precisely the intent we were never supposed to grasp. If fundamental to transforming “social and institutional conditions within all human beings can flourish” is instilling an internalized “ethos of cooperation and mutual goodwill,” what better tool could there be than using education to make that the nature of the “reliable compass”?