Is Yokeability really a word? Well, we need it to show why both admitted Progressive Change Agents, supposedly right think tanks, both political parties, and so many other influential people signed that Williamsburg Charter. Interestingly, the author stated at the end of the Godly Republic book that although he had heard of the Charter copies of it were “hard to find.” I am not surprised given the infamous vision it was actually committing us to funding, and our institutions, to creating. DiIulio stated it was not until 2005 “while visiting Calvin College” that someone gave him a copy. If Calvin College rings a bell, it is probably because that is where the current Ed Secretary, Betsy DeVos, attended college. As I have plowed through all these books about a faith-based vision that I did not really want to write about, but could not avoid, I realized that everyone seemed to want to instill the concepts, Ideas, beliefs, values, and habits that would create a ready-and-motivated-to-act Maker of History.
Moreover, even though those books I cited broke out the so-called faith-based vision to be partners in meeting human needs and to get taxpayer funds for doing so, I recognized last week as the Rockefeller Foundation rolled out its 100 Resilient Cities strategy at a late July meeting in NYC, that the so-called FBOs (faith-based organizations) were no longer being talked about separately as they were in the 90s and the Bush 43 years. Now they have a new acronym–CBOs–community based organizations. If we had not walked through the books linking all these FBOs to a new vision of humanity, transformational change, and a new form of citizenship, the true nature of the change and all the different partners would be hard to see. You may want to check out this site https://www.ujimaboston.com/ to see what the vision of the future currently looks like.
Likewise, the book I cited on Building a Community of Citizens had a companion book published in the same year called Educational Innovation: An Agenda to Frame the Future that used the state of Pennsylvania as the example and Transformational Outcomes Based Education as the technique to be used. Frankly, I got the best feel for what the Right and FBOs wanted to do in a very odd place–a 2013 book by Hillsdale College President and Heritage Foundation Board member Larry Arnn. Heritage is a signor of that “hard to find” Charter and I looked into the book The Founders’ Key because of all the deceit surrounding Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative and the Common Core as well as the tendency to attribute erroneous narratives to the so-called ‘Founders’ vision.’
We have come across the phrases self-governance, self-discipline, or self-regulation as the so-called new purpose of education. Arnn laid out a similar function under the title the ‘well-ordered soul”, which he viewed as an obligation of governments to create so that it “must settle into the characters of the people.” He quoted James Madison approvingly for saying that the “passions [of the public] ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.” Yikes! Arnn defined the “well-ordered soul is one in which the reason moderates and guides the passions toward good action.” We could ask who gets to decide what that ‘good action’ is, but that would require parents who grasp that math, science, and classical literature are actually not about the transmission of knowledge anymore and they might dispute that shift.
To get some sense of why I say the Right Pincer also wants Marxian Makers of History to transform the world that currently exists let me quote from Arnn in his Conclusion as it may be the single best example of what a dialectical view of history actually reads like. Moreover, this vision never had to be translated from German unlike Uncle Karl’s.
“History, then, is a story of circumstances playing on human beings. Human beings are shaped by these circumstances, and also they shape the circumstances back. We discover this through modern philosophy, a branch of science. Philosophy [putting theory into practice? action research?] becomes a form of making. It supplies the hope that we can shape our world to fit our will.”
I am not sure you or I belong to the ‘we’ or ‘our’ making such decisions and then enshrining them in ‘transformative’ or ‘innovative’ education. Let’s look somewhere else I found that same Maker of History vision as in “Stop telling our story! We decide what happens next. Because it’s our story now and we are making history ourselves.” I have warned before that during the Cold War, intellectuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain were pushing Marx’s Human Development Society vision on the West. That stage when all needs could supposedly be met because capitalism’s ingenuity had produced a magic technology (identified as the computer and intercommunications technology like the Internet). That post-capitalist stage was called little ‘c’ communism by Uncle Karl.
When the book communism for kids was published by MIT Press in 2017 many of the same groups that push a false narrative surrounding the Common Core and education ridiculed the book as trying to bring back the already tried failed Communism of the USSR or Mao’s China. Since I knew that was not the real danger now and had learned to doublecheck the offered narrative I bought the book. It actually defined communism as the “society that gets rid of all the evils people suffer today in our society under capitalism.” It’s “never been tried before” says the book and what the book described actually fits with what I am reading coming out of 100 Resilient Cities, especially the recent Resilient Boston paper.
See why I am worried? And the same techniques we have encountered from the behavioral sciences that can supposedly create a Revolution of the Heart or a well-ordered soul via Tranzi OBE as I nicknamed it in my book Credentialed to Destroy are to be used to “generate desire…a form of desire capable of jamming images of a better world into every fracture of daily life, from subway rides to service jobs to global poverty. In every moment of social suffering, this desire demands a better way of life.” Use education then, visual imagery, and perhaps even virtual reality gaming, to create communist desire. The book did call for that and all the hostility to the individual in post after post is even more troubling once we recognize that this vision for communism needs “the cracking of the individual self, the end of our isolation…Would we, the collective subject of humanity, through communism, finally realize our own being by appropriating a world that actually belongs to us already, because we created it?”
The book laid out a desired goal “to collectively transform all social spheres” and to fulfill a “demand for social-that is to say, political and economic–democratization.” That is precisely what the hard to download but worth it Resilient Boston laid out. Education and working with local school districts is merely one component of this total transformational vision but it is an integral and explicit component. After all, to be resilient requires achieving racial equity per the plan and that “requires a comprehensive approach. Beyond working to change individual policies and practices, we must also transform our entire systems of thinking and acting…” See why MIT Press translated and published that bini adamczak book?
Nobody is mentioning Uncle Karl and resilience sounds so much better than the ‘c’ word, but the function and, quite frankly, the goals are the same. The goals of course require a political reorganization of society so that “Racial equity means ‘closing the gaps’ so that race does not predict one’s success, while also improving outcomes for all. Equity is distinct from equality in that it aspires to achieve fair outcomes and considers history and implicit bias, rather than simply providing ‘equal opportunity’ for everyone. Racial equity is not just the absence of overt racial discrimination; it is also the presence of deliberate policies and practices that provide everyone with the support they need to improve the quality of their lives.”
That really is what Uncle Karl called his communist Human Development Society vision and we have to be able to recognize what we were never supposed to even hear about in time. The Rockefeller Foundation in its 100 anniversary publication wrote about its social engineering aspirations since its founding and desires to steer humanity in new directions and we really ought to take them at their word. Anyone interested in the organized deceit around Climate Change should appreciate that it provides a rationale for the desired political control and reorganization of all those “social spheres of society”. An obligation for racial equity does the same.
Here’s the definition of a Resilient City and notice how the definition of stresses pulls in the desired Marxian desire to meet needs that the FBOs we encountered have also declared to be part of their religious vision and the Williamsburg Charter. Bolding in original.
“the adoption and incorporation of a new view of resilience that includes not just shocks–such as floods, nor-easters, and other acute events–but also stresses that weaken the fabric of a city on a day-to-day or cyclical basis, such as economic hardship or social inequality.
By addressing both shocks and stresses in a holistic manner, a city becomes more able to respond to adverse events and is better able to deliver basic functions in both good and bad times…We must acknowledge our history, heal our collective trauma, and advance racial equity, social justice, and social cohesion if we are to move forward as a truly resilient city. Building resilience starts with identifying our most important problems first and figuring out the best ways to tackle them together.”
Now think of that resilience vision being implemented by laws we are unaware of and education that we are being deliberately misled about. Think about the implications of a generation of schoolchildren and certain voters being told that the following quote is what Martin Luther King stood for. We all commemorate a holiday for him after all.
“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
Anyone else interpreting that quote from Resilient Boston to be fostering the needed “communist desire” instilled via education and new practices of citizenship at the internalized level of habit in a well-ordered soul? A suitably yoked soul for a resilient and transformed 21st century society?