THE DEATH OF FREE WILL Part 1

PART 1 of 5

By Charlotte Iserbyt

NewsWithViews.com

 

“To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have but one and the same life.” – William Ellery Channing 1780-1842

 

Something is drastically wrong with the present restructuring of education. I hope this article will persuade parents and traditional public school administrators and teachers to work together to stop the dismantling of what was once considered the finest educational system in the world. The traditional system’s successful administrative structure which allowed elected school boards (working with superintendents, principals, and teachers) to provide our children with an academic education, should not be changed to accommodate the needs of the corporate fascist/socialist (government/business) partnerships and tax-exempt foundations. 

One must understand that the situation with low academic test scores and unacceptable behavior of students was deliberately created over a period of 80 years, starting in the 1930s with the Carnegie Corporation’s plan to use schools to bring about a Soviet-style (performance-based) planned economic system. See reference to Carnegie Corporation's Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (1934) and Carnegie-Soviet Academy of Science Agreement (1985). The latter agreement was signed the same year Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev signed the U.S.-USSR Education Exchange Agreement. 

The first experiment with Outcomes/Performance-Based Education (the restructuring system being implemented today) was Carnegie Corporation’s “Eight Year Study” (1933-1941).

To get an idea of the enormity and severity of the problems addressed by this article, see the OECD-SSRC Stupski Next-Gen Data System Workshop (October 2010) presentation which states the following: “We will build capacity to leave a dying system and give birth to a new one…”

Solution—the following government agencies which control local education must be abolished: 

U.S. Department of Education, its laboratories and centers, and all federally funded state departments of education. Also, legislation must be passed prohibiting outside meddling in state or local education matters by corporations and tax exempt foundations. Such legislation would prevent international, national or corporate entities from administering attitudinal assessments and collecting private data on students, their families, educators and/or members of small businesses. 

It is doubtful that major conservative groups would help in this endeavor. Our best hope is to enlist the help of traditional teachers and administrators, and small business owners, who would have to go up against their prospective organization leadership. It might work. It’s worth a try. 

This article is written for the benefit of parents, our children, and the teachers of our children; it explains the following:

Link 1: Re-inventing Schools Coalition
Link 2: Back to Basics Reform or. . .OBE . . .Skinnerian International Curriculum and the deliberate dumbing down of america
Link 3: Jed Brown on Behavioral Conditioning
Link 4: Educators Push Back Against Obama’s “Business Model” for School Reform
(If a link becomes broken, please do a Google search for the title.)

The last nail of so-called school reform is being struck in the coffin of traditional American education which made our nation the envy of the Free World and which produced famous scientists, engineers, mathematicians, writers, artists, musicians, doctors, etc. 

The reform is not new. It started in the early 1900s when John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s Director of Charity for the Rockefeller Foundation, Frederick T. Gates, set up the Southern Education Board. In 1913 the organization was incorporated into the General Education Board. These boards set in motion “the deliberate dumbing down of America”. In Frederick T. Gates’ “The Country School of Tomorrow” Occasional Papers No. 1 (General Education Board, New York, 1913) was a section entitled “A Vision of the Remedy” in which he wrote:

“Is there aught a remedy for this neglect of rural life? Let us, at least, yield ourselves to the gratifications of a beautiful dream that there is. In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our moulding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.”

The above quote sounds like something from one of the public/private school-to-work/tax-exempt foundation partnerships involved in the Reinventing Schools Coalition agenda, as well as other innocuous sounding current-day initiatives that are being implemented across the nation.

The above Rockefeller agenda was followed up by the Carnegie Corporation’s little volume on education entitled Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (Charles Scribner’s Sons: N.Y. 1934) — funded to the tune of $340,000. This little book called for using the schools to turn the United States into a socialist nation, ultimately to become a member of a socialist/communist world government. Author Francis Gannon wrote that Harold Laski, the philosopher of British socialism, said of this report:

“At bottom, and stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the Report is an educational program for a Socialist America.”

Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies is the most important book I ever laid my hands on. You can find it here. Following are important and revealing excerpts from Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies:

“The Commission was also driven to this broader conception of its task by the obvious fact that American civilization, in common with Western civilization, is passing through one of the great critical ages of history, is modifying its traditional faith in economic individualism [free enterprise], and is embarking upon vast experiments in social planning and control which call for large-scale cooperation on the part of the people…” (pp. 1-2)
“. . . Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that in the United States and in other countries the age of ‘laissez faire’ in economy and government is closing and that a new age of collectivism is emerging.” (p. 16)

In 1951, Human Relations in Curriculum Change was published (Ed. Kenneth D. Benne and Bozidar Muntyan, The Dryden Press, Inc., NY). The book contains “Selected readings with an emphasis on group development.” Most works—written by social scientists and philosophers of-the-day—appeared in publications during the 1940s decade; some included references dating from the 1930s decade. Human Relations in Curriculum Change discusses “social engineering” (theory, methods); “re-education of personnel in knowledge, skills, and attitudes”; schools as potential laboratories for “experimental social science”; “human engineering”; “group thinking”; “change agents”; Kurt Lewin’s “change process” theory; “consensus”; and more.

In Critical Theory, Marxism, Dialectical Method and Total Quality Management (2002), author Judy McLemore explains that the editors of Human Relations and Curriculum Change selected for inclusion “the research experiments and writings on group development and human engineering by various transformational Marxists to create a blueprint for the ‘re-education’ or brainwashing of the masses and subsequent transformation of America. It is a master plan for ‘inducing and controlling changes in social systems,’ that is, changes in the individuals within schools, government, universities, industries, etc. by way of the ‘group’ (Benne Preface, 24). . . . The plan includes a dialectical method of ‘resolving’ personal individual beliefs and dispositions of traditional Americans into a ‘common social outlook’ defined by these Marxists (336). By common they mean of the same mind, feelings, habits, knowledge, motivation, beliefs and values. In effect they mean to mold each individual personality to conform to a facilitated group adaptable to change.”

Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (1934) and the old progressive theories and practices that appeared in Human Relations in Curriculum Change (1951) are accommodated by school/workforce reforms today that promote so-called global competitiveness and global citizenship. (Note: the term progressive was “in the middle of the last century, what socialists and communists used for themselves because they believed they had the key to the future."[1])

Please use this article “The Death of Free Will” to fight state implementation of the federal Common Core Standards. Use this article to fight the totalitarian Pavlovian/Skinnerian performance-based workforce training agenda that will dumb down students as well as teachers . . . which will pay teachers for students’ good grades (teach to the test/what are they testing?) and very likely also pay children as well for good grades.

This agenda MUST be stopped or all of us will suffer: our children, their teachers, and our free political and economic system of government. Once FREE WILL is destroyed, there is no protection from descending to the level of animals, subjected to “training”. Only human beings can be educated. Why have we opted for animal training, with or without the computer, rather than continuing to educate our children in the traditional way for upward mobility?

This is the ultimate war for our children’s minds and souls. No other war has ever been more important. If you don’t have time to read this entire article, please at least click on the links at the beginning of this article as well as their associated links. Descriptions of the links follow. See Charlotte's 9 min. vedeo below. For part two click below.

Click here for part -----> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,

Endnote:

1- Project MUSE - Sewanee Review, Vol. 118, No. 2, Spring 2010, The John Hopkins University Press.

Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

Monday, April 11, 2011 by TruthDig.com
by Chris Hedges

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.

Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.

“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”

Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.

“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”

“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”

The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.

“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”

“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”

The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.

“It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,” Socrates said.

Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love—love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.

“The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.

“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”

Obama Amplifies Bush Education Policy

This is How a Tipping Point Feels
By Anthony Cody on August 15, 2010

We are accustomed to discussing education issues as if they were a realm of their own, with Arne Duncan (and maybe Bill Gates) as the biggest players. We debate policies like merit pay and charter schools, and sometimes reference the influence of economic and social factors, but we sometimes lose sight of the larger political context that is driving these policies.

Things are getting ready to shift.

It is said that education policy is like a pendulum. It tends to swing from one extreme to another. In the 1970s, when the progressive social movements peaked, we had the rise of desegregation, whole language instruction and constructivism, with a great emphasis on student-centered instruction. The past decade the pendulum has swung way back to the other extreme, with the rise of test-driven accountability and pre-digested curriculum.

How educational leaders have responded to this is very instructive. Diane Ravitch is a fascinating case study. She genuinely believed that we could drive improvement in our schools through tough standards and high-stakes tests, and actively promoted these methods. As the decade unfolded and evidence accumulated that this was not working as intended, the honest historian in her forced a change of stance, and she has become a sharp critic. She is a bellwether.

It is a fascinating, frustrating and exciting time, this tipping point we are approaching. The broader political setting is hugely important. We are two years into an administration that made fantastic promises to an America hungry for change. "We are the people we have been waiting for." Obama and his electioneers tapped into every hopeful beat of our hearts. We would bring the troops home from Iraq, close Guantanamo, stop the phone tapping, rein in corporate greed, and inspire the world with a more humane foreign policy.

In education, we were told we would enter a new era of "mutual responsibility," stop spending the year preparing for bubble tests, and stop blaming teachers for all the problems in our schools. We thought we would have a leader smart enough to understand that slogans and profiteers will not be our saviors, and that local leadership at the school and community level is the wellspring of school improvement.

But here we are, approaching the two year mark. At first, we were dismayed, when cruel practices of NCLB were extended. Did they not understand what they were doing? Could they not see this was not consistent with our shared vision? So we wrote, we organized on Facebook, we lobbied, and we spoke by phone with the Secretary himself. It has become clear they know exactly what they are doing, and nothing we say matters.

Teachers are not alone in this feeling. The chance to rein in corporate salaries has been squandered, and companies who received billions in bailout funds have showered their executives with billions in bonuses. The hedge fund managers - heavy investors in charter schools, by the way, have invested in politicians as well, and our system remains rigged in their favor. The war in Iraq, which Obama pledged to end this summer, drags on endlessly, and Afghanistan may well do to the American empire the same thing it did to the Soviets. A mixed blessing, perhaps, but a colossal waste of lives and resources.

Diane Ravitch is gaining company. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, not a radical by any means, just filed a column that describes the situation this way:

...if Duncan really wants to stop the biggest bully in America's schools right now, he'll have to confront his boss, President Obama. In federal education policy, the president and his education secretary have been the neighborhood toughs -- bullying teachers, civil rights groups, even Obama's revered community organizers.

Milbank points out what many of us have been saying for months.

Obama has taken the worst aspect of Bush's No Child Left Behind education law -- an obsession with testing -- and amplified it.

Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed -- despite evidence that such practices are harmful. In the process, he's offended just about all the liberals involved in or advocating for education without gaining much support from conservatives.

One must assume that Obama has made a Clintonesque political calculation. Faced with tremendous pressure from an alliance of corporate-sponsored education reform organizations and their allies in the media, Obama chose the easy way. He appointed an education secretary who would advance their agenda, apparently assuming that this was a battle he did not need, given all his other troubles.

But those of us working in the schools are not concerned about political calculations. We are trying to make sense of a society that has abandoned those in poverty in every meaningful dimension, and dropped even the pretense of desegregating our schools, and yet expects teachers to close the achievement gap all by ourselves.

Some of us are pendulum-pushers, and some are pendulum-riders. A curious thing has happened as we approach this tipping point. Even as evidence accumulates and is documented by honest scholars such as Ravitch, the "education reformers" are becoming more desperate to shore up their collapsing project. They are very smart, and have incredible resources at their disposal. Even in the midst of an economic crisis, they have marshaled billions of dollars to purchase people's energy. The Race to the Top was ingenious, and so well-timed, as to put maximum pressure on states struggling with impossible revenue shortfalls. So now we have new projects within the education reform effort. There is money for the "new and better" assessments that will solve all the problems we had before with those "bad" assessments. There is money for teacher pay, so long as it is tied to test scores. Those who buy this (or are bought) increasingly insist this trend is irreversible, and "resistance is futile," as a certain queen once asserted.

Those of us who have a name as teacher leaders may even be offered opportunities on these projects, and may have to do some soul searching and investigation, to be sure we can live with the results that our work may yield.

We who are pendulum pushers are hanging on, holding our ground, and continuing to push back. The time has come for the pendulum to start moving the other way.

With an actual pendulum, it is gravity that eventually wins out over the momentum of the device. In the case of education policy, as with corporate banditry and endless war, we cannot wait for the laws of physics to do the job. We need to be pushing, slowing the swing, and pushing it towards a new direction. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in The Tipping Point, there are moments when ideas catch hold and begin to spread almost like a virus. There is some combination of outrage and hope that crystallizes into social change. I hope these ideas are infectious. It is about time for this pendulum to swing.