Rather than continue on with what is going on now behind our backs in K-12 education globally, let’s go back in time first to pick up some of the ‘deep pillars’ from the late 80s and 90s that ground the supposed “social capital that is comprised of human character, competence and values.” In my book Credentialed to Destroy I laid out the template for what was called Transformational Outcomes Based Education. I also covered events taking place in the mid to late 80s in the West that suggested insider preparation for the “Fall” of the Berlin Wall and Communism. Today’s post should be seen as building on the Deep Pillars also laid out in the book. We need to grasp every aspect that political insiders, think tanks, institutions of faith, and other public policy forces who turned out to be involved, were quietly advocating and implementing to achieve a particular vision for the future.
This is from an essay “Citizenship: Transcending Left and Right” contained in a 2004 book Building a Community of Citizens: Civil Society in the 21st Century. I found it referenced in footnotes as I followed up again on the deceit surrounding the Common Core and other education ‘reforms’ currently. If this quote reminds anyone else of Amitai Etzioni’s New Golden Rule, he is listed as a consultant on the book. As we have encountered the Bradley Foundation a great deal as we have followed widely disseminated education narratives that happen to be false, I should note that their then President, Michael Joyce, also wrote one of the essays in that book.
“A closer look at these issues will reveal that today’s crisis of values has nothing whatever to do with ‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’ institutions. It is a by-product of individualism…The real source of these problems is in us, as we search for a way to integrate the modern emphasis on individual self-expression with a vision of values, community, and purpose that transcends the individual self–a way to integrate freedom and order.”
How often do we now hear the phrases ‘self-government’ or ‘self-governance’? We simply assume it means something having to do with our individual autonomy. Turns out we get to have a “new kind of politics” grounded in psychology and the “self-governance of individuals and communities…[a] two-dimensional value system underlies the self-governing approach to the world, which borrows the best of both capitalism and socialism and combines them in an integrated vision.” That would be an integrated vision of course to be imposed invisibly by Bipartisan laws few read, a new vision of education, and “a change in the spirit of individuals and the community that comprises them.”
Let’s skip to another book from 1998 brought to us by the Center for Public Justice that “pursues civic education programs from the standpoint of a comprehensive Christian worldview. The Center advocates equal public treatment of all faiths and seeks political reforms to strengthen the diverse institutions of civil society.” It turned out that Antonio Gramsci was not the only visionary to see Marching through the Institutions as the way to later prevailing consciousness and culture. So have groups, politicians, and think tanks many of us have simply assumed to be representative of Conservatism. It turns out though that the best way to get Marx’s Moral Revolution in place is to get religious faiths on board as well, control education, and redefine concepts like Liberty and Freedom we all think we understand.
Naming Educators as the Levers Shifting the Human Personality To Marx’s Moral Revolution
is the post I have to simply assume everyone is familiar with so we can move forward to what was laid out in then Senator Dan Coats’ 1998 Kuyper Lecture and printed as Mending Fences: Renewing Justice Between Government and Civil Society . It is once again selling the vision that liberty requires a certain kind of citizenry and democracy is a “set of habits…[that] depends on an internalized willingness to respect the rights and dignity of others.” All of our encounters with Classical Education about the principles of the Good, Character, and Virtues appear to go back to this vision where “these virtues require more than intellectual assent; they must take root not only in minds but in hearts.”
Yet again, we have a vision where civil society institutions are supposed to “protect against individualism, turning our attention to the needs of others, the benefits of cooperation, the necessity of trust, and the value of the common good.” All citizens and especially students with their still pliable minds and hearts need “those ideas and sentiments” that will free “individuals from the solitude of their selfishness.” When I wrote Credentialed to Destroy I laid out the transformational vision of Social Reconstructionists. I cited to admitted progressives who had been explicit about their intentions. Turns out so have the so-called Right and institutions of faith and they have resurrected a Dutch politician from the 19th century, Abraham Kuyper to do that while pretending a reconstructionist aim is simply a matter of faith. (Italics in original in Mending Fences)
“There is a common good greater than individual rights, and society must actively and tirelessly seek it. Kuyper exclaimed, “We shall not be satisfied with the structure of society until it offers all human beings an existence worthy of man.” In a beautiful passage Pope John XXIII defines the common good as “the sum total of those conditions of social living, whereby men are enabled more fully and more readily to achieve their own perfections.”
But I did promise deep pillars and we have remained in the 90s, haven’t we? In my tiptoeing through the footnotes, I not only found the books cited above, but also a 2007 book Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future. Written by John DiIulio, Bush 43’s first faith-based czar, it had an Appendix I had never seen referenced before from June 25, 1988. The document was called the Williamsburg Charter: A National Celebration and Reaffirmation of the First Amendment Religious Liberty Clauses and whatever the 100 highly influential people who signed the charter thought they were endorsing, the actual function of the document is to commit to an internalized Marxian moral revolution. Yes, I am sure as I have read a lot of the language when no one is pretending anything other than driving the deep pillars the Human Development Society would need in values, beliefs, emotions and other motivators of future action.
Yes the references are a bit oblique at first, tucked away into phrases like the “remarkable opportunity for the expansion of liberty” and a desire for the “ordering of society” around common “commitments and ideals” that all people are to live by. It is inherent in the language too that “rights are universal and responsibilities mutual.” Remember the definition of ‘precepts’ from the last post and their current sudden ubiquity, as we go back to the paragraph that follows “A time for reconstruction” heading:
“We believe, finally, that the time is ripe for a genuine expansion of democratic liberty, and that this goal may be attained through a new engagement of citizens in a debate that is reordered in accord with constitutional first principles and considerations of the common good. This amounts to no less than the reconstitution of a free republican people in our day. Careful consideration of three precepts would advance this possibility.”
First, the criteria must be mutual which gets translated to mean that the “intention of the Framers” is not enough. We reconstituted citizens must also internalize as habits “consideration of immutable principles of justice.” Should we look to Kuyper or a 1930s Pope as quoted above? Secondly, the “Consensus must be Dynamic”. One wonders if an earlier draft said Dialectical instead, but that might be too obvious to get all 100 signatures. We are told that “Reconstitution requires a shared understanding of the relationship between the Constitution and the society it is to serve.” We the People must affirm those principles in practice. Supposedly this mandate is NOT authoritarian because it is civil society imposing at the level of hearts and minds in order to “contribute to the spiritual and moral foundations of democracy.”
That’s clearly John Dewey’s definition of democracy which explains why one of the Rockefeller heirs wrote a book about him and his work driving a Religious Humanism vision that I keep hearing being mirrored in Faux Narratives. The third precept is that the “Compact Must Be Mutual”. Suddenly, “the First Amendment…is the epitome of public justice and serves as the Golden Rule for civic life.” Personally, I think being told by so many public officials that a “general consent to the obligations of citizenship is therefore inherent in the American experiment, both as a founding principle (‘We the people”) and as a matter of daily practice” is certainly a violation of the spirit of the phrase “the government shall not…”
Let’s end there as these quotes place so much of what I documented in my book and then later on this blog into their true transformative functions. The empathy push from the last post makes so much more sense if we now supposedly have a “responsibility to comprehend” the perspectives of others. Pushing a common core of mandated values, attitudes, and beliefs fits with a desire for “a broad, active community of understanding to be sustained.”
Take a look at that Williamsburg Charter in one of the variety of places it can be found. It will do wonders toward our finally achieving an accurate “community of understanding” about what is truly going on in education and why.