Ubiquitous is another one of my favorite words, ever since I took the PSAT in high school and failed to recognize that word as well as ‘usurp’. Looked them up when I got home and have used them ever since. Think of Ubiquitous as a shorthand way to avoid writing the phrase “everywhere we look” and its conciseness is apparent. Now this is a quote from an article called “Neural Plasticity and Human Development”:
“Neural plasticity can best be thought of as the subtle but orchestrated dance that occurs between the brain and the environment; specifically, it is the ability of the brain to be shaped by experience and, in turn, for this newly remolded brain to facilitate the embrace of new experiences, which leads to further neural changes ad infinitum.”
Learning standards such as the Common Core grounded in behavior or Competency Frameworks are simply a means of prescribing the desired ‘orchestrated dance’ of necessary experiences to get the desired neural changes. Preventing parents and taxpayers from grasping that essential fact appears to be at the heart of all the False Narratives. The most recent one hyping a supposed national database of PII pushed here https://truthinamericaneducation.com/privacy-issues-state-longitudinal-data-systems/stop-congressional-assault-student-privacy-parental-rights/ had my inbox busy yesterday and this weekend.
Now given the highly emotional language APP chose to use, parents are apparently to be driven to react from fury instead of to facts and apparently to defer to the fact that there are attorneys involved (as USPIE asserted). Because attorneys never misrepresent anything for the benefit of their paymasters. Someone doesn’t get out much into the real world. Anita Hoge also wrote a related article bemoaning a national data base called “Can the Motherlode of Federal Data Hurt You?”. So much of this psychological manipulation of children could be prevented if we could just eliminate the deliberately false narratives as well as the mistaken ones. When the purpose of education goals is neural rewiring, the national data base hype is a case of misdirection. Don’t look here!
Evidence-Based Policymaking in education is always neural in either its purpose or as a tool. Evidence-Based Policymaking is simply what the Russians called Upravleniye–the steering of people and institutions by government officials at every level according to prescribed goals and models. Governments want to establish the goals and then force all of us into compliance. No need for a national database to do that, education, especially when coupled to a False Narrative of what is really going on, will do fine. http://www.governing.com/col-pay-for-success-savings-trap.html from last month is a much better synopsis of Evidence-Based Policymaking and lets us have an honest conversation as to whether we want to be a society now organized by governments to be malleable and compliant. That’s the real authoritarian purposes.
I am going to go back to The Passion of the Western Mind book, because it appears to me that the much-misrepresented learning standards are an attempt to bypass this ancient debate:
“The true basis of knowledge was the natural world and the information it provided through the human senses. To fill the world with assumed final causes, as did Aristotle, or with intelligible divine essences, as did Plato, was to obscure from man a genuine understanding of nature on its own terms, solidly based on direct experimental contact and inductive reasoning from particulars. No longer should the pursuer of knowledge start from abstract definitions and verbal distinctions and then reason deductively, forcing the phenomena into a prearranged order [Remember Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete and Thinking like a Scientist, Historian, or Mathematician?] . Instead, he must begin with the unbiased analysis of concrete data and only reason inductively, and cautiously, to reach general, empirically supported conclusions.”
The opposite, in other words, to the Classical Education with its Good, True, and Beautiful being pushed by the same people who misrepresent SEL standards, competency-based education, and now this supposed national database. It’s also the opposite of where Conceptual Frameworks and Enduring Understandings and Disciplinary Core Ideas and Cross-Cutting Concepts and Themes take us globally. It’s not just this ideological training to think deductively from commonly prescribed ideas though. It’s the true reason for the SEL emphasis and once again it’s not about PII. This is from a book by Stanley Greenspan to make sure all reasoning is ultimately grounded in emotion so that the brain can be rewired accordingly. It’s called The Growth of the Mind and told me forthrightly that:
“Our appraisal of reality is in part, therefore, a subjective emotional operation in which we call upon our common biology and set of experiences to elucidate a shared sense of reality. This sense, supported by certain critical experiences, such as being part of various groups, in turn supports our social and political institutions.”
Those would be the very same social and political institutions everyone wants to transform in this Upravleniye, Evidence-Based Policymaking future, where governments and politicians set the goals we are all to adhere to, preferably while remaining blissfully unaware of the neural redesign via education. We really need SEL Standards and new, non-cognitive definitions of success because we must believe, at an emotional level, that “all members of society bear mutual responsibility for the welfare of the weakest among us…innovative action is needed to stem the forces now undermining our society’s ability to foster the qualities we most value.” Not quite sure who that ‘we’ is, but this vision demands “an understanding that emotional life is the foundation of intellect and of the judgment and moral sensibility needed in a democratic society.”
Greenspan’s vision of ‘democratic society’ is, of course, what Uncle Karl called the Human Development Society and also little’c’ communism. It requires “a society truly committed to the centrality of affective interchange in development. The real reform must take place in the values that guide our decisions–that is, in the integration of human nature that we use to frame the discussion. {Remember this was also a critical component of the preplanned Charlottesville Conversations?] The false dichotomy between emotion and intellect, between education and interaction, underlies our neglect to provide social and financial supports for families.”
This new vision of what it will take for humanity to flourish is based on a vision of education where “affective experience constitutes the foundation of the human mind.” If the False Narrative was forthright that it, or its financial supporters, also wants to control the subjective, emotional mind and make it the driver of future behavior, people might have a chance to say no. Hence, all the deceit. Greenspan’s work, by the way, was funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health and, as usual, was linked to as support for a vision of education being quietly mandated and implemented. He was forthright that in his vision of education: “To feel successful, children must have standards to measure themselves against.” He also explained that “to be effective, educational reform must reflect the insights revealed by the new research on how the mind develops…First and foremost is the fact that affect and interaction, rather than the acquisition of specific information and skills, are the foundation of learning of every kind.”
That’s not really true, but if it is believed by teachers and administrators and put into practice in schools, the kind of mind a student has can be neurally rewired. I have noticed that the deceit gets fast and furious, just like the recent hysterics over the weekend, whenever the subject of neural rewiring gets broached. If we are to avoid the mass drowning in governmental controls of the Upravleniye/ systems science blueprint, that can happen to lemmings that react blindly to what they are told and believe, we should understand why the Subjective is under such an organized, but covert, attack. Greenspan once again told us while laying out what he regarded as “Our Human Imperative” in his Conclusion.
“if the split between, on the one hand, subjective, spiritual, and emotional and, on the other, objective, rational, and materialistic conceptions of human nature continues to divide us as it has long done in Western thought, we may well continue on our present course. We may look to mechanistic and materialistic solutions, such as tougher social policies and more prisons, instead of attempting to meet emotional needs in a framework of appropriate structures and discipline.”
Eliminating those dichotomies and putting those structures and disciplines in place is what is really going on with Evidence-Based Policymaking. Unless we want to have our children’s minds and personalities further remolded by this compatible vision of education and the planned public policy steering of our workplaces and cities to proceed, we need to discuss what is really going on in terms of the reality being put in place, not the Guiding Fictions created by False Narratives. The False Narratives simply try to prevent us from the panoptic vision of education and the desired transformations that actually fit into place at every level like finely crafted, meshing gears.
All in one view at every level. We need the panopticon of education reforms that started with Credentialed to Destroy instead of this planned shroud of deceit we were supposed to fall for like lemmings.