Many of us have seen news reports in recent days on stu­dent walk­outs in the Den­ver sub­urbs. The School Board wants to ensure that cer­tain tra­di­tion­al areas are still empha­sized in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, while the stu­dents see the inter­ven­tion as pro­pa­gan­da. The adults involved seem a bit shocked that what they see as facts is seen by high school stu­dents as an attempt to manip­u­late their belief sys­tems. Why can’t the stu­dents prop­er­ly under­stand who the Peo­ple in the White Hats are in this con­tro­ver­sy they seem to want to ask?

I think it would help if every­one under­stood high school is too late to intro­duce facts and knowl­edge into a cur­ricu­lum that has long been about shap­ing val­ues, atti­tudes, and beliefs in desired direc­tions. The fed­er­al ed lab in Auro­ra, Col­orado, McREL, after all, orig­i­nat­ed the trans­for­ma­tion­al con­cept in K‑12 edu­ca­tion of Sec­ond Order Change many years ago to force irre­versible change in stu­dents’ world­views.

We can only repair the dam­age done if we appre­ci­ate what has hap­pened in our schools and why. It relates to the e‑Governance we start­ed look­ing at in the last post as well as the cre­at­ing the shared visions and col­lec­tive pur­pos­es need­ed to effec­tive­ly bind the indi­vid­ual to the deci­sions made by oth­ers. In his 1999 book The Dou­ble Helix: Tech­nol­o­gy and Democ­ra­cy in the Amer­i­can Future, Edward Wenk laid out the new vision of pol­i­tics our stu­dents are actu­al­ly being pre­pared for. Gov­ern­ment is to be “con­sid­ered as a steer­ing sys­tem and not sim­ply a pow­er bro­ker.” This fits, atten­tive read­ers will remem­ber, with the admit­ted use of con­cep­tu­al under­stand­ings and the manip­u­lat­ed social con­struc­tion of real­i­ty to cre­ate an invis­i­ble steer­able keel in the stu­dents who are tomorrow’s cit­i­zens. Stu­dent-cen­tered learn­ing then instead of the sub­ject-cen­tered empha­sis of old is nec­es­sary to build that keel. The ulti­mate con­se­quences also fit with what Hayek warned us of in the pre­vi­ous post.

When the School Board tries to inter­ject facts into the class­room, with­out appre­ci­at­ing that the keel is already there, it becomes easy for the adults clos­er to the class­room, who know what they have con­struct­ed over years, to steer the out­rage. Facts=Propaganda if the Keel is already in place with­out par­ents, stu­dents, and most tax­pay­ers know­ing it’s there. Why is it there again? Ulti­mate­ly, this gen­er­a­tion of ado­les­cents is being and has been primed to regard pol­i­tics as a term used to “describe how ele­ments of a diverse soci­ety use their pow­er to bar­gain col­lec­tive­ly, then strate­gies and tac­tics for their achieve­ment, all with­in an agreed upon set of val­ues and rules of engage­ment. This is Amer­i­can soci­ety in action.” That’s the vision of Amer­i­can soci­ety and pol­i­tics the stu­dents are act­ing on, while the school board is still locked into a vision of tra­di­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tive gov­ern­ment.

“Con­sen­sus must be gen­er­at­ed” so that gov­ern­ments can steer with a “high degree of har­mo­ny” towards a vision of Equi­ty and social and eco­nom­ic jus­tice for all. Many K‑12 and col­lege stu­dents have been thor­ough­ly embed­ded in this vision for years. The Com­mon Core is mere­ly a means to make sure it is in place every­where. Pub­lic or pri­vate. Sub­urbs, cities, or rur­al areas. To align the US with what is going on in oth­er coun­tries towards the same ends.

We adults are the ones who sim­ply assumed that the edu­ca­tion tem­plate had con­tin­ued on much as it had pre­vi­ous­ly been. Once social comi­ty becomes the estab­lished goal of the future at all lev­els of gov­ern­ments, then “social func­tion­ing needs a con­sen­sus on goals and a mech­a­nism for its gen­er­a­tion and ful­fill­ment.” We get that mech­a­nism by K‑12 and high­er ed sign­ing on, as well as the media, plus “who­ev­er con­trols tech­nol­o­gy.” No won­der their relat­ed foun­da­tions are so involved.

ICT gen­er­ates the visu­al images that serve as a “kalei­do­scope” of what the future might be and are not bound by what­ev­er has suc­cess­ful­ly exist­ed before. Wenk want­ed every­one to rec­og­nize that “Gov­ern­ment is not main­ly or the only machin­ery of gov­er­nance. In Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy, every­one should con­sid­er them­selves part of gov­ern­ment rather than hold­ing it at arm’s length and fig­u­ra­tive­ly hold­ing the nose. Only by engage­ment through enlight­ened civic lit­er­a­cy, civic dis­course and com­mit­ment can the diverse needs and desires of all be nego­ti­at­ed.” Hence the C3 Social Stud­ies Frame­work and CCSSO pre­scrib­ing desired Cit­i­zen Dis­po­si­tions. As some­one deeply steeped in his­to­ry, this is a pre­scrip­tion for dis­as­ter, which is why accu­rate knowl­edge of the past is no longer being encour­aged or much tol­er­at­ed.

All the push sur­round­ing Dig­i­tal Learn­ing and Lap­tops For All it should give us pause since Wenk rec­og­nized, and aimed for, what sub­sti­tut­ing those man­u­fac­tured visu­als and vir­tu­al real­i­ty would do to “crit­i­cal­ly alter the con­scious­ness of the recep­tor.” That would be the stu­dent, your beloved child that you dropped off this morn­ing and entrust­ed to a sys­tem intent on trans­for­ma­tion. Well aware of the ques­tion that Wenk saw and intend­ed to use: “What does infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy do TO us as well as FOR us.” In Wenk’s world gov­ern­ment, indus­try, and peo­ple will all inter­act and then be bound by what the deci­sion-mak­ers decide. Peo­ple are sup­posed to become sat­is­fied with the abil­i­ty to offer their opin­ions to “those who gov­ern them.” If this seems like a sci­fi book or lim­it­ed to one ide­alogue, it’s essen­tial­ly the vision laid out by Mari­na Gor­bis of the Insti­tute for the Future in her 2013 book and speech­es glob­al­ly.

It’s essen­tial­ly the vision of the future and our new oblig­a­tion to func­tion as a col­lec­tive that Richard Falk (of the Carnegie and Rock­e­feller-fund­ed World Order Mod­els Project) laid out recent­ly here. The new APUSH Frame­work and the La Pietra Con­fer­ence we looked at in that tril­o­gy of posts make much more sense when we are aware of a well-fund­ed and deter­mined effort across decades “about mov­ing from the here of ego­is­tic state-cen­trism to the there of humane geo-cen­trism.” Since Falk’s angry quotes at the time of the Boston Marathon bomb­ing show he in no way wants a real­i­ty of hate to get in the way of his vision of the future, we can be sure that today’s trag­ic videos of sliced off heads will not change the vision either. It is up to us to rec­og­nize it.

Whether most of us are aware or not, Falk, the OECD, the UN enti­ties, and pub­lic offi­cials at all lev­els are push­ing edu­ca­tion and land use reg­u­la­tions designed to cre­ate the “cit­i­zen pil­grim” who “com­bines the iden­ti­ty of a par­tic­i­pant in a com­mu­ni­ty and the acknowl­edg­ment that the desired com­mu­ni­ty does not present­ly exist, that its essen­tial nature is to bond with a com­mu­ni­ty that is in the midst of a birth process.” No won­der those Den­ver high school stu­dents believe accu­rate facts from America’s past con­sti­tute pro­pa­gan­da in the present. They are par­tic­i­pat­ing in a birthing process and many may hope to become mid­wives of it. No won­der we just keep encoun­ter­ing a required com­mu­ni­tar­i­an mind­set lurk­ing behind actu­al def­i­n­i­tions of being Career Ready or hav­ing a Pos­i­tive School Cli­mate.

If every­one with polit­i­cal pow­er glob­al­ly is push­ing a com­pa­ra­ble vision of the col­lec­tive future and that vision requires what Falk called “dras­tic shifts in polit­i­cal con­scious­ness,” then preschool, K‑12, and high­er edu­ca­tion will become ded­i­cat­ed to cre­at­ing those very shifts. Those stu­dents are mere­ly show­ing they are heed­ing the “call for an engaged cit­i­zen­ry respon­sive to the need and desire for a recon­sti­tut­ed future as well as a repaired present.” Why, it’s that Nean­derthal School Board major­i­ty show­ing it has not yet yield­ed to the Tran­si­tion clar­i­on call that requires “infus­ing both polit­i­cal lead­er­ship and the elec­torate with the val­ues and per­cep­tions of the new real­ism.”

That again is the new real­ism that is actu­al­ly not very real­is­tic to those of us deeply ground­ed in knowl­edge of the past and con­ver­sant with what has ever cre­at­ed mass eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty. No, we are appar­ent­ly to be stuck with edu­ca­tion designed to cre­ate over years “the engaged pil­grim devot­ed to the here and now of polit­i­cal action (as well as the pur­suit of a vision­ary future), whether by way of exhibit­ing empa­thy and sol­i­dar­i­ty with the suf­fer­ings of those most vul­ner­a­ble or by work­ing toward inno­v­a­tive steps serv­ing human and glob­al inter­ests.”

The good news in all this is that these stu­dents have been con­scious­ly sub­ject­ed to behav­ioral engi­neer­ing so that they will have Growth Mind­sets that are mal­leable to change. They are only irre­versible if par­ents, tax­pay­ers, future employ­ers, and the stu­dents them­selves remain unaware of the delib­er­ate­ly con­struct­ed World­view.

That they were sub­ject­ed to fuzzy math and Whole Lan­guage pre­cise­ly so that their per­cep­tions could be manip­u­lat­ed.

The key to decon­struct­ing the keel is to know it is there.

The key to defeat­ing these open dec­la­ra­tions of a planned tran­si­tion to col­lec­tivism is know­ing they exist.

Con­sid­er this post as join­ing my book Cre­den­tialed to Destroy: How and Why Edu­ca­tion Became a Weapon to be clar­i­on calls towards defeat­ing these col­lec­tivist aspi­ra­tions. While there is still time.

Sound­ing the alarm tru­ly is the begin­ning of the way back from the precipice.