http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/notre-dame-prof-our-schools-are-committing-%E2%80%98civilizational-suicide%E2%80%99

Notre Dame Prof: Our Schools are Committing ‘Civilizational Suicide’

Dr. Patrick Deneen has taught in some of America’s finest universities. He has been a professor at Princeton, Georgetown, and is now in the political science department at Notre Dame.

So what’s his assessment of America’s best students?

“My students are know-nothings.”

In an extremely important essay posted to Minding the Campus titled “How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture,” Deneen further describes his students:

“They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.”

Deneen accurately diagnoses the problem: that schools today no longer seek to initiate students into a particular tradition, their tradition:

“But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?
 

Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural?  What are the Federalist Papers?”

Usually, people assume that this distressing situation is due to the failures of the modern education system. But according to Deneen, that is not the case. On the contrary, he writes that modern students’ ignorance is the education system’s “crowning achievement… the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide.”

He explains:

“What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like ‘critical thinking,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘ways of knowing,’ ‘social justice,’ and ‘cultural competence.’  

Our students are the achievement of a systemic commitment to producing individuals without a past for whom the future is a foreign country, cultureless ciphers who can live anywhere and perform any kind of work without inquiring about its purposes or ends, perfected tools for an economic system that prizes ‘flexibility’ (geographic, interpersonal, ethical).”

If one holds to G.K. Chesterton’s maxim that a pessimist criticizes that which he doesn’t love, Deneen is no pessimist. He cares deeply for his students, and is frustrated that they haven’t been taught “what is rightfully theirs.”

But he is no false optimist either:

“But even on those better days, I can’t help but hold the hopeful thought that the world they have inherited—a world without inheritance, without past, future, or deepest cares—is about to come tumbling down, and that this collapse would be the true beginning of a real education.”

As Alasdair MacIntyre lamented in After Virtue, “[T]he barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.” It’s perhaps too late to avoid a new Dark Age. Now is the time to begin the effort of recovery and rebuilding.

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http://getschooled.blog.myajc.com/2016/07/03/will-georgia-see-own-version-of-voters-remorse-if-opportunity-school-district-passes/

Will Georgia suffer voter’s remorse if Opportunity School District passes?

Men draped in European Union flags were among the tens of thousands this weekend demonstrating against Britain’s vote to leave the union. (Andrew Testa/The New York Times)

The day after approving England’s exit from the European Union, many voters in that country resorted to Internet searches to figure out what the EU was and what it actually did. I suspect we’ll see similar Googling after the November election in which Georgia voters are likely to approve Gov. Nathan Deal’s Opportunity School District.

Because Georgia voters won’t get any clues about the OSD from the kindly referendum wording they’ll find on their ballots: “Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended to allow the state to intervene in chronically failing public schools in order to improve student performance?”

That benign ballot question doesn’t make clear the OSD will be able to forcibly come into a district, take over a school and reconfigure it. Nor does that deliberately vague ballot language reveal the proposed OSD is most closely aligned with a state takeover model in Tennessee, which has met with community opposition and failed to improve academic outcomes.

At a recent education conference, Vanderbilt University researcher Gary Henry discussed his evaluation of the Tennessee Achievement District, telling reporters, “We’re just not seeing the data that this is helping kids.”

Georgia has a history of jumping on education bandwagons, even if those wagons appear to be losing their wheels and barreling toward a cliff. It’s understandable Deal and the General Assembly want to improve school quality. The pace of economic change today demands an agile workforce that is not only competent, but capable of learning new and sophisticated skills quickly. That requires an education beyond a high school diploma.

But state leaders have chosen contradictory paths to reform. On one hand, they imposed a 2015 deadline for all Georgia districts to pick a flexibility plan to foster greater innovation; districts had to reinvent themselves as some form of charter (system charter, system of charter clusters or system of charter schools) or what’s called “Investing in Educational Excellence” system, or IE2.

Most districts were in the early stages of using this newly granted flexibility when Deal announced his OSD proposal. Statewide, 127 schools are eligible for state takeover based on test scores, down from 139 last year. About half are in metro Atlanta. DeKalb County has the most with 28; Atlanta has 22, including some that have closed or will be merged or closed next year. Fulton County has 10 schools, while three of the eligible schools are state-approved charters.

As Atlanta Public Schools school chief Meria Carstarphen said in a meeting with the AJC, “The state gives us mixed guidance. They tell us you have to choose a flexibility model and then tell us you are a state takeover site.”

When districts complained about his state takeover idea, Deal told them, “What’s your idea? If you have no idea, you’re saying you’re satisfied with having failing schools in Georgia.”

But, in fact, many districts are putting new ideas in place to improve their schools, most notably Atlanta and DeKalb. Both have new, high-energy superintendents who are reorganizing and re-invigorating their schools, and Carstarphen and DeKalb’s Steve Green deserve the opportunity to stay the course for a while without state intrusion.

If Deal wants to fix education, he ought to start with a program already controlled by the state — annual Milestones testing. Georgia is one of four states that experienced significant testing glitches two years in a row.

In fact, voters ought to Google “Georgia testing problems” before the November election. It may sour them on the OSD, no matter how sweetly worded the referendum question appears on the ballot.

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http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/what-us-students-miss-not-learning-latin

What U.S. Students Miss by Not Learning Latin

Although it’s not primetime news in the U.S., a 15 year-old student from Athens, Georgia, recently made international waves when he became the first American to win the Certamen Ovidianum Latin competition in Italy.

Josiah Matthews took home $1,000 in cash and other prizes for translating a passage from Ovid and then writing an essay on it – in Latin no less.

According to The Athens Banner-Herald, Josiah got his start in Latin at a young age by overhearing his father teach the language to an older sibling. Josiah now has several Latin students of his own, including one from Australia.

And Josiah himself isn’t yet done learning languages. To Latin he has added Greek, Italian, and German.

Josiah’s success seems reminiscent of that enjoyed by other students learning Latin in several U.S. and Australian schools. Recent reports have suggested that reintroducing the so-called “dead” languages of Latin and Greek may actually boost scores in reading, math, and science.

So why does learning Latin seem to give students a leg up in life? Latin educators and authors Harvey and Laurie Bluedorn suggest seven possible reasons in their book Teaching the Trivium:

1. Latin is basic to English.

As the Bluedorn’s explain, roughly two-thirds of the English language is based on Latin. Thus, knowing Latin increases understanding of English, a fact that may explain why Latin students score so much better on exams such as the SAT.

2. Latin is a springboard for mastering other inflected languages, such as Greek or German.

Just as English is largely based on Latin, so other modern languages are also composed of Latin roots, some up to 80 percent! As the Bluedorns note, learning Latin before these languages “is like having a ticket to Europe or to South America with an 80 percent reduction in price.”

3. The study of Latin sharpens the mental process.

“The task of searching for words and structures in our own language to compare with that of another language, develops and trains skills of accurate observation and logical analysis.”

4. Everything in a culture is embedded in its language.

As the Bluedorn’s explain, learning Latin naturally gives way to learning about Latin culture, a fact that opens the door to greater understanding of America’s legal and social systems.

5. Technical language is Latin.

Want your child to become a doctor, scientist, or lawyer? Teach him Latin.

“Medical, scientific, and legal terms are all Latin and Greek. Because a great deal of these studies is terminology, then, if we know the terminology of these three disciplines, we will have a lifelong advantage over others.”

6. Latin is also valuable for further studies in all disciplines.
According to the Bluedorns, the other disciplines which Latin knowledge aids include “history, theology, literature, art, architecture, ad infinitum.”

7. Latin is useful in English.

“Many of us learned some Spanish, German, or French in high school or college. How much of it do we use? … [E]veryone who learns Latin vocabulary and grammar will use it often, even if he continues his studies only in English.”

Given these benefits, would we see greater knowledge and understanding if more U.S. students were introduced to the nuances of Latin?

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http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/nov/25/daisy-christodoulou-seven-myths-education-profile

‘Britain’s brightest student’ taking aim at teaching’s sacred cows

When Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths About Education came out as an ebook last year, I didn’t read it. Just another rightwing moan, I thought, saying schools should get back to the 1950s, teaching nothing but facts, grammar and multiplication tables. I’d heard it all before. Like so many other such rants, it would go big in the Telegraph and Mail, and be largely ignored elsewhere.

But the book became one of the most talked-about in education in the past 20 years, prompting praise and anger in roughly equal measures. BBC Radio 4 gave her half an hour in its series The Educators. She was praised by the then education secretary, Michael Gove. A Sunday Times book reviewer reckoned she had aimed “a heat-seeking missile” at “the heart of the educational establishment”, and tipped her for head of Ofsted in 2021. This year, Routledge, publisher of scholarly education books, put Seven Myths into print.

So what’s different about Christodoulou? First, she’s young: barely 30, with just four years in secondary school classrooms behind her. Second, she writes in lucid, vigorous, jargon-free English. Third, though she makes her case with passion, she writes forensically, relying not on anecdote and assertion, but on evidence (or at least what she claims as evidence), drawing particularly on the latest research in cognitive science, and scrupulously footnoting sources. Fourth, she focuses on classroom pedagogy, not on arguments about schools’ resources or control. “We pay too little attention to the actual content of lessons: what gets taught and how it is taught,” she writes.

Above all, she aims straight for the most sacred cows to which even Tory ministers sometimes pay obeisance. Claims that you can teach “transferable skills”, that the 21st century changes everything and that “teacher-led instruction is passive” – all these are myths, she says. She is scathing about how Ofsted highlights and praises lessons where pupils do things “spontaneously”, such as spelling French words correctly, as though it were unnecessary to instruct them on such things. She dares to criticise John Dewey, a staple of teacher training courses, for his opaque writing style and to chide Charles Dickens for creating, through Hard Times’ Thomas Gradgrind and his daughter, the myth that teaching facts turns children into emotionally stunted adults. As a West Ham supporter who played for Warwick University’s women’s football team, she even critiques how we develop young footballers, arguing that children shouldn’t play 11-a-side matches on full-sized pitches until they’ve learned ball control.

I met Christodoulou at the London headquarters of the Ark academy chain, where she is research and development manager. Intense, articulate, dressed in black, she cuts a somewhat forbidding figure as she talks at bewildering speed. She argues that understanding, creativity, powers of analysis and so on cannot be learned in a vacuum: they must always be based on sound background knowledge, committed to long-term memory. “It’s said that people can look things up to get facts. But when you look up a word in a dictionary, you need knowledge to understand the definition. I remember teaching a child who wrote ‘I am good at football’, and asking him to replace ‘good’. He came back with ‘I am congenial at football’. He’d found it in a thesaurus but his grasp of English was too weak to use it properly.”

Learning to use words is like learning to drive, she says. “When you start, you rely entirely on working memory about how to change gear and so on. But you gradually commit that knowledge to long-term memory so you don’t need to think about it. Which is just as well because you need your mind free to concentrate on where you’re going and what’s on the road. Nothing is learned properly until it’s in long-term memory.” Broadsheet newspapers, she says, assume a wide range of readers’ knowledge about history, geography, politics, literature and culture generally. If you had to look up every reference, you would never get past the first paragraph.

Christodoulou is particularly critical of Ofsted for praising history lessons where pupils design heraldic coats of arms and English lessons where they make puppets of Romeo and Juliet. “It’s a question of what they’re thinking about in these lessons. And they’re not thinking about history or literature. They’re thinking about how to draw a crest shape and how to colour between the lines or about how to make puppets. Fine, if that’s the aim of the lessons, but it isn’t.” Time spent on projects often means less time spent learning.

Discovery learning, she argues, is criminally wasteful. “It’s very difficult to learn from the real world. Apples dropped from trees for centuries, but only Newton discovered the laws of gravity. As he said, we have to stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Is she seriously suggesting that schools shouldn’t teach skills and children should spend all day learning knowledge? “I’m trying to change people’s views of the relation between knowledge and skills. We’ve created a false dichotomy. Skill is bound up with knowledge. Skills are domain specific. You can’t play chess unless you’ve learned the moves. I absolutely agree that the end of education is skilled, creative, critical individuals who can sift evidence. It’s a question of how we get there.”

It is hereabouts that Christodoulou begins to lose me. She is adamant that there was never a golden age; she doesn’t believe things were better in the 1950s. Nor does she think it’s a matter of swinging a pendulum so that we have less skills teaching and more knowledge teaching. “Cutting-edge” research in cognitive science takes us into new territory, she says. Her book states: “If pupils commit knowledge to memory and practise retrieving it from memory, that will cause skilled performance … Time that is given over to teaching skills … won’t actually improve skills … Time spent imagining how to design a role play about complex moral issues in science is time not spent actually learning about atoms, compounds, mixtures and the states of matter.”

Memory of knowledge will “cause” skilled performance? Just like that? What I think she means is that skills need to be rigorously connected to well-grounded knowledge if they are to be taught effectively. The error is to teach them in isolation, as abstract entities. She tells me that, in future editions, she will make this more explicit. Most teachers, however, would say that almost nobody tries to teach skills separately from knowledge and that the only evidence Christodoulou produces to show they do are passages from Ofsted reports, taken out of context, and a Royal Society of Arts programme adopted by a small number of schools. “The programme isn’t anti-subjects or anti-knowledge,” says Joe Hallgarten, the society’s education director. “It’s a framework through which to teach competencies in addition to knowledge.”

Christodoulou was once the star – hailed by one newspaper as “Britain’s brightest student” – in a winning University Challenge team, and I suspect her exceptional facility at retaining information makes it hard for her to understand other people’s difficulties. I point out to her that the problem for most teachers is to engage children and the real issue is not that schools don’t teach knowledge but that they often do so ineffectively, subjecting pupils to dull, unimaginative, poorly presented lessons. “I completely agree that pupils have to be engaged,” she says. “Anybody can give lots of information, anybody can entertain. The difficult thing is to provide activities that advance understanding and sustain interest. Primary teachers are very good at that. I often wish I’d trained as a primary teacher.”

She comes from London’s East End and grew up in a now-demolished council tower block. Though her father (whose own father was a Cypriot immigrant) eventually qualified as an electrician and her mother as a therapist, the family also ran a stall in London’s Petticoat Lane market where she helped out. She went to a local state primary but, under the Tories’ assisted places scheme (abolished by New Labour), won a free scholarship to the independent City of London Girls, despite her father’s fears that she would turn into “a stuck-up so-and-so”. I ask her how far her views on learning were formed by her schooling but she answers, in a manner that brooks no argument, that “we hear too much from people extrapolating from their own experiences instead of looking at the evidence”.

After a first in English at Warwick, she opted for the Teach First scheme rather than academic research – “I didn’t want to spend time in libraries” – and started at an inner-city London comprehensive, which went into special measures in her second term. Difficulties with the pupils led her to read more about educational theory and cognitive science when she left after three years to take an MA in literature. “I found a body of research that hadn’t got into teacher training at all and that views widely accepted in schools were directly opposed to what the research showed.” She went back to teaching for a year, before working at the curriculum centre at Pimlico academy – part of Lord Nash’s Future Academies chain – and then at Ark.

Though she comes from a Labour family, she’s a member of the Liberal Democrats and once stood for an unwinnable council seat. She doesn’t want to talk politics, however, but sport. As she sees me out, she says she’s a Surrey county cricket club member and author of an article on how test matches echo Greek tragedy, published recently in an upmarket cricket quarterly. When I say I prefer Lord’s, where Middlesex play, to Surrey’s Oval ground, she peers at me with alarming intensity and asks “what don’t you like about the Oval?” Perhaps she could be a writer or radio commentator on sport. But she denies journalistic, broadcasting, political or academic ambitions – and indeed ambitions at Ofsted – and insists she intends to do more school teaching. We shall see.

The seven myths, according to Daisy Christodoulou

Facts prevent understanding

Teacher-led instruction is passive

The 21st century fundamentally changes everything

You can always just look it up

We should teach transferable skills

Projects and activities are the best way to learn

Teaching knowledge is indoctrination

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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/06/16/public-schools-teach-students-to-hate-america-as-left-appeases-muslims-with-religious-literacy-training/

Public Schools Teaching Students to Hate America As Left Appeases Muslims With ‘Religious Literacy’ Training

Progressives are concerned about reports of Muslim students feeling “marginalized” and discriminated against after the shooting massacre by an Islamic terrorist in Orlando, but there is little concern that – for years –students in the United States have been taught to dislike their country.

The Washington Post is reporting that Muslim students in the United States are experiencing bullying and discrimination in the wake of the shooting massacre by jihadist Omar Mateen at a gay bar in Orlando, Florida.

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“The fallout, we’re just very, very concerned,” said the Rev. Mansfield Kaseman, Montgomery County, Maryland interfaith community liaison. “This can trigger bullying and taunting and criticism.”

Using two small surveys in which a total of 300 young Muslim students in the Washington, D.C. area participated, the Post reports that “students, educators, advocates and community leaders” are observing discrimination toward Muslim students, presumably by their American classmates.

According to the Post:

In one survey, nearly one-third of Muslim students in grades three through 12 said they had experienced insults or abuse at least once because of their faith. The survey, by the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, also found that more than 1 in 10 said they were physically harmed or harassed at least once because of their religion.

A second survey — from the International Cultural Center (ICC), in Montgomery Village, Md. — showed that many Muslim students have felt harassed, humiliated, bullied or abused by classmates during the past six months because of their Islamic faith; 10 percent felt a teacher or administrator had treated them unfairly during the past six months.

“Any time a student feels marginalized, that’s a concern,” said Donna Hollingshead, associate superintendent for school administration in Montgomery County.

The Post reports that one female teen in Bethesda was “distressed” because she was receiving “hard looks” from others because she wears a hijab.

“I’ve never seen her that way before,” said Chris Murray, a teacher who is running a summer course to help improve “religious literacy” among teachers so that they can have greater awareness of the needs of Muslim students.

“I’m scared Islamophobia will be on the rise again,” said another student, Hafsa Shahzad, a sophomore at Wootton High School.

The concerns chronicled by the Post, however, are decidedly geared toward how Americans need to work harder to make Muslims feel more comfortable in the United States.

At The Daily Signal, however, Mike Gonzalez asserts that schools should first be teaching students not to hate America. He points to the use of the popular A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, which presents America as “a spectacular experiment in oppression.”

Quoting from Zinn’s description of the founding of America, Gonzalez writes:

[Zinn’s history] set the stage for the grievance mongering that passes for history classes today, and is still widely used. It has sold over 2 million copies since it was first published in 1980 and continues to sell over 100,000 copies a year because it is required reading at many of our high schools and colleges. That’s a lot of young minds.

This is how Zinn described the founding:

Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.

At the radical Zinn Education Project, Alison Kysia authored “A People’s History of Muslims in the United States: What School Textbooks and the Media Miss,” an article in which she teaches a vision of Muslims as an integral part of the fabric of the progressive movement in the United States, with a presence in every social justice struggle along the way.

“Students need these stories of Muslims throughout U.S. history in order to talk back to the dominant media stereotypes of Muslims as lying, violent, brown foreigners,” Kysia concludes. “If we gave students the historical examples in this article and more, they would realize that the history of Muslims in the United States is not limited to 9/11 and, in fact, spans from the late 15th century through today.”

Gonzalez asks the key question regarding jihadist Mateen:

Let’s debate how an American like Omar Mateen, born in Queens, New York, and raised in Fort Pierce, Florida, can turn into a terrorist bent on executing his compatriots. How does he grow up cheering the 9/11 attack in high school, thinking that women ought not to drive, and swearing allegiance to the Islamic State?

Americans might ask further: why are people who want to “fundamentally change” America running the country? Indeed, those who have been educated to believe America is hateful will govern accordingly.

American education is about to take another leftward lurch from the Common Core standards, to the Advanced Placement U.S. History framework, and now with the Advanced Placement European History (APEH) curriculum – which diminishes Christianity and ignores Islamic conquests in Europe and Islam’s tradition of jihad.

“The almost complete excision of Islam’s 1400-year violent confrontation with Christendom also makes it almost impossible for students to understand that killings by modern jihadists fall squarely within the historical tradition of Islamic war,” David Randall, National Association of Scholars director of communications and the author of a report on the APEH framework, told Breitbart News. “The jihadists actually understand that history far better than students educated by APEH do.”

In California, as Gonzalez observes, the proposed K-12 curriculum is a roadmap for a multicultural America in which assimilation into American culture is considered a combination of “Social Darwinism, laissez-faire economics, as well as the religious reformism associated with the ideal of the Social Gospel.”

4 yrs ago today @POTUS announced #DACA, a policy that's given thousands of young people hope for a brighter future. 

— John King (@JohnKingatED)10:40 PM - 15 Jun 2016

As Breitbart News reported, in the proposed California 11^th grade curriculum, President Ronald Reagan is presented as a leader who appealed to “social conservatives,” a segment of the population that is characterized as opposing “safety net” programs.

“California’s proposed new K-12 history and social science curriculum is a carnival of leftist bias and distortion,” Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center warned at National Review. “If it receives final approval, the problem is likely to spread across the country, as publishers forced to meet the demands of the most populous state offer their revised textbooks nationally.”

“Is this the approach we want to have, especially at a time when a force like the Islamic State will only be too glad to fill the patriotic vacuum, or should we teach again that America is an exceptionally free and prosperous nation that requires love and affection and constant attention?” asks Gonzalez.

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http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/rewiring-students-brains-at-a-neural-level-to-constrain-guide-and-motivate-desired-future-behaviors/

Rewiring Student’s Brains at a Neural Level to Constrain, Guide, and Motivate Desired Future Behaviors

Part of the reason for the time gap between the last post and this one is my youngest child has now officially graduated. Hallelujah! Knowing what is really going on in American and global education in the name of euphemisms like standards, competencies, Whole Child, Positive School Climate, and Higher Order Thinking Skills I am afraid I think of schools now as psychological Auschwitzes. That is not a phrase I use lightly, but unfortunately, there will be no respite from this deliberate neurological assault on minds and personalities until we parents and funding taxpayers recognize what is really targeted for change and why. Also we need to grasp just how experimental all these sought shifts actually are.

During the last two weeks documentable, official confessions of just how much our children’s very synapses and whether the regions used in thinking are rational or tied to emotions have come out on an almost daily basis. Originally I thought all the reports I have read and downloaded since May 1 were tied to desired teacher training over the summer for a rollout next fall. That was before I came across the Human Brain Project’s announcement that it had shifted to the active, operational stage in April 2016 after being in the planning stage since 2013. Then I discovered that USC, the employer of Professors Immordino-Yang and Damasio from the last post, was one of the US partners of HBP. So are the entire U-California university system, Yale, and the University of Tennessee as well.

The US BRAIN Initiative (which began in 2013 too) coordinates actively with HBP and goes to its programmes in Europe. Turns out part of that initiative included a Bioethics Commission http://bioethics.gov/ where we can locate the BRAIN 2025: A Scientific Vision report as well as the two Gray Matters reports that leave our government’s desire to interfere with internalized mental processes for political purposes in no doubt. It is also chaired by Penn Pres Amy Gutmann who was probably chosen by President Obama precisely because her 1987 book Democratic Education called on schools to shift away from the ‘well-intentioned misperception’ that schools have an “obligation to impart information.” Instead, Gutmann wanted teachers to develop the moral character of students so that they “feel the force of right reason” to reshape society.

There’s that ‘feeling’ hype again. I know it is not coincidental because I have a few additional writings we can survey. I have Damasio’s 2010 book Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain where he stated that “emotions are the dutiful executors and servants of the value principle.” A useful target for emphasis for planners hoping to alter the drivers of future behavior. Since Professor Damasio elsewhere mentioned “the need to manage the behaviors of humans,” forcing student thinking to be grounded in emotion would appear to be an excellent place to start. UNESCO agrees too since I located an August 2015 paper stating that the new purpose of ‘curriculum’ in the 21st century is to make sure there is no “contradiction or dissociation between the cognitive and the ethical dimension in learning.”

In order to advance the ‘concept of social justice’ and the new UN “guidelines on the meaning of education based on the ideal of building more just societies,” educational experiences must be created so that each student’s commitment to the ideals of social justice is not “an adherence that is purely rhetorical or cut off from how people actually behave.” Rounding out our support is this paper that I-Y coauthored   http://iesteulada.edu.gva.es/portal/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Neuroscience-and-learning.pdf which ended with a diagram that makes it clear it is Emotional Thought, and not High Reason/ Rational Thought, that 21st century education wants to cultivate. Why? Because of its useful role in desired ” moral decision-making.”

Now all these reports have a great deal of aspirational goals for a changed society pretending to be how the mind works or how education must now be changed. Educationists cite Damasio as “neuroscience research says…” Ed Week cites I-Y for how emotions must now guide educational practices and no one seems to bring up Professor Gutmann’s earlier book. The truth is though this is not how the brain or education must now work, but rather how it needs to be altered if people are to be changed at a neurological level. Guided and motivated then by new values and images of how the world might be. Now you may be saying rightfully that I am not a neuroscientist, although I have read a great deal of their writings, and one of them, Zenon W. Pylyshin, helpfully told us back in 1980 precisely why the rational/High Reason brain is so targeted now by K-12 education.

In a published paper “Computation and Cognition” created while he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Pylyshin laid out precisely how the human mind was thought then to work with nary a mention of these now omnipresent emotions or feelings. Here is a quote from the end that tells me precisely what had to be suffocated for the social transformation use of the mind to prevail. The mentioned George Miller is another famous behavioral scientist.

“we ought to be far more impressed with the extreme flexibility that thought can exhibit. For example, we ought to take seriously the fact that there seems to be no specifiable limit to what the human mind can imagine or think. As George Miller recently remarked to me, the salient property of mental life is surely that we can will it to do practically anything we wish: given the appropriate goals and beliefs, we can alter our behavior and thoughts to a remarkable extent by a mere act of will.”

Feels a bit like eavesdropping from decades away, doesn’t it? We now know that picking our own goals, beliefs, and values is precisely what K-12 education intends to make sure no longer happens. In fact, now we can shift back to that BRAIN 2025 vision since it too envisioned mapping the brain because of its ‘special province’ as the “interior terrain of thinking, feeling, perceiving, learning, deciding, and acting to achieve our goals.” If anyone has any doubt that this initiative is about a transformative, social justice agenda this quote should obliterate all doubt: “our brains make us who we are, enabling us to perceive beauty, teach our children, remember loved ones, react against injustice, learn from history, and imagine a different future.”

Our Founding Fathers may have seen our beliefs as a form of property not to be subject to government interference http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-the-system-seeks-to-destroy-the-ability-to-think-can-james-madison-save-us/ but we get no such deference in the 21st century. To quote again  from an initiative we are now spending $500 Million per year to pursue: “In advanced organisms our concept of ‘behavior’ must be extended to include sophisticated internal cognitive processes in addition to externally observable actions.” The Bioethics Commission may hype neurological and psychiatric disorders so that the full extent of the neurological manipulation is obscured but BRAIN 2025 states explicitly that the “primary goal of the BRAIN Initiative is to understand healthy brain function.”

The purpose of the Bioethics Commission is not to examine if this emphasis and research is ethical, but to make sure everyone at all levels of education believes that such research is necessary and ethical. In fact, all we get is a question as to whether “inner desires, psychological states, or motivations…deserve more privacy protection than externally observable clues about the mind.” Consistent with my concern that all this agenda is about quietly forcing a shift to the Human Development Society Uncle Karl envisioned without saying that is the actual goal, we have the Gray Matters volume on the Integration of Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society insisting that “the potential of science to improve human welfare grounds a societal obligation to undertake and support” this type of research.

Leaving no doubt as to why we have to discuss these initiatives to grasp why I now call schools psychological Auschwitzes being used to force a transformational political agenda at a neural level, we have that same volume stating “one desirable goal for ethics education is ‘transformational learning,’ which goes beyond cultivating cognitive learning or critical thinking to inculcate ‘habits of mind, attitudes, and dispositions.’” That’s neural change and designed to motivate future behavior from a level unconscious to the neurologically reengineered student. It certainly explains the odd affect and unfocused eyes in this video of high school students hyping personalized learning. http://www.cio.com/article/3002698/cio-role/how-one-cio-leverages-technology-to-transform-education.html .

Volume 2 of Gray Matters opened with a tribute to a now deceased commission member who was described as a “seeker of justice for all.” That certainly fits with the actual intention of all this neuroscience research and the stress on emotions as an integral part. So does this quote that “ethics education has a better chance of informing action when it is continually reenforced and connected to practical experience.” Showing us once again how a certain vision for education going forward is key to this entire transformation of people and institutions, the Bioethics Commission lets us know that Equity is such a focus of this new vision. that “if safe and effective novel forms of cognitive enhancement become available, they will present an opportunity to insist on a distribution that is fair and just.”

Oh. Good. Grief. Once again Gray Matters made it clear that it is not just education being called on to reengineer society at the level of the biological neural mind. The rule of law gets redefined to be a social reengineering tool as well. As a lawyer and student of Anglo-American history and the function of the common law, it is hard to read a federally-financed call “ensuring the progress and responsible application to neuroscience to the legal system and policymaking.”

The report may insist that “today, and in the foreseeable future, neuroscience does not enable us to read minds. Technology remains extremely limited and cannot reveal the inner desires, psychological states, or motivations that are worthy of the term ‘mind-reading.’” The problem is that covering, Nothing to Worry About Here, statement is not true. Those things are precisely what adaptive learning digital virtual reality platforms, formative assessments, wicked, open-ended problem solving and other now required educational practices turn up. That is a big part of what all the data gathering is about. It’s also why the Personally Identifiable Information hype is such a Red Herring that obscures what is really at risk.

Watching the students on that video, do we really want Presidential Commission’s questioning “whether ‘inner mental or neural processes’ deserve more privacy protection than external or behavioral elements such as words and actions”?

What does ethics actually mean if all these neurological planned interferences can be pursued in the 21st century in the name of education?

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http://thepulse2016.com/jane-robbins/2016/06/14/obamas-education-policy-create-chaos/

How Obama Is Driving Our Schools Into Chaos

President Barack Obama visits a pre-kindergarten classroom in Georgia (photo credit: The White House via Flickr)

In the movie The Dark Knight, which this author didn’t see but was alerted to by the perceptive Benham Brothers, there apparently is a scene in which Batman and the Joker are hanging off a building. Batman asks the Joker what he wants. The chilling reply: “Chaos!”

We are now seeing a remake of this movie in public education, with the role of the Joker played by Barack Obama.

If the Joker were trying to engender chaos in schools, what areas of stability might he attack? The most extreme example would be the very existence of biological reality. Rather than reserve boys’ and girls’ restrooms, locker rooms, dormitories, and sports teams for members of the appropriate sex, he would decree there is really nothing meaningful about biological sex and that, therefore, all private facilities should be opened to anyone who wants to use them.

This new policy would not only reduce school administrators’ ability to protect student privacy and safety, but also would eliminate the very authority of parents over fundamental instruction of their children. The result? Chaos. And if the policy violates the privacy of, and even frightens, students who took for granted the previous protective status quo, even better. Emotional distress and physical danger can only add to the chaos.

The Joker might also attack assimilation of non-English-speaking students, primarily by attacking their means of communication. As discussed in this issue brief from the Heritage Foundation, he might release a policy statement urging states to instruct preschool students in their home languages different from English and to help them retain attachments to cultures separate from the dominant American culture. He would order preschool programs to “embrace and celebrate [students’] diversity” so as to build “a future workforce [because the primary point of education is building a workforce, right?] that is rich in diversity, heritage, cultural tradition, and language.”

Even though the Joker has no legal authority to tell states how to run their preschool programs, he would know that “policy statements” can be influential — especially when they come from the behemoth government that controls billions of dollars in education funding. He would also recognize that engendering language and cultural divisions among school populations can advance what historian Arthur Schlesinger warned against: “fragmentation, resegregation, and tribalization of American life.”

Chaos.

A particularly promising area for the Joker’s intervention would be school discipline. Suppose he could intimidate schools into reducing the discipline imposed on disruptive students. He might dispatch his minions to declare that higher rates of punishment for minority students result from racism, not from student behavior, and then initiate bureaucratic investigations of alleged civil-rights violations.

The effectiveness of such a tactic, as reported by Dr. Mary Grabar, is illustrated by the case of the Oklahoma City Public Schools. Citing statistics showing that OCPS minority students receive a greater percentage of in-school suspensions than their percentage of the student population, the U.S. Department of Civil Rights’ Office for Civil Rights successfully pressured the school district to implement “twelve steps of action” to ensure that lesser offenses — especially if committed by minority students — either go unpunished or are dealt with by extended conversation rather than suspension.

But what about research showing that racial disparities in discipline result from differences in student conduct, not from racism? Well, the Joker would either ignore that with frequent doleful references to the “school-to-prison pipeline,” or he would argue that most of the offenses committed by these students are trivial anyway. Schools shouldn’t crack down on “being tardy to class, being in possession of a cellular phone, being found insubordinate, acting out, or not wearing the proper school uniform,” he would suggest.

The overriding goal would be to keep disruptive students in school. And as proven with the “broken window” theory of policing, lax response to the small offenses inevitably leads to larger offenses. This results in teachers who are hesitant to discipline troublemakers or even afraid of their students. It results in chaos.

One can argue about the President’s motivations. But it’s becoming indisputable that, in education at least, chaos is the result. Looks like the joke’s on us.

Jane Robbins is an attorney and a senior fellow with the American Principles Project. 

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