Why yes that is a quote from a Future Worlds Project
financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie
Endowment for Peace in the early 70s. At least we now
know why education just keeps coming up as the vehicle
of choice to initiate social change without that
fundamental fact being particularly noticeable. Even if
caught, we just get told to defer to the professionals
so that the political coup can continue at a slower
pace. Drastic Gradualism is actually the term used to
get the West to a radically different social, economic,
and political system. Hopefully by the year 2000 was the
Plan. The 70s were to have been the years to use
education to change the prevailing Consciousness before
initiating the mobilization for change in the 80s. The
precise language used was to:

“supplant the outmoded
values/ belief system associated with the state system
[they mean nation-state, not those pesky political units
the US has 50 of] in a pre-ecological age. [in other
words, before Paul Ehrlich started writing about
impending disaster]. The emergence and diffusion of a
new value/belief consensus [helpfully
provided as a Conceptual Understanding so ALL students
will know it] is a vital precondition
for the kind of active politics that
would accomplish the transformation of
the structures of power and authority in subsequent
period of time.”

Now how many of you have heard that Common Core
cannot be incremental? It MUST be comprehensive. Reforms
in teacher evals, curricula, assessment, instructional
practices, etc. ALL at once. The kind of social
engineering that even a weak student of history would
know better than attempt. Even if everything about the
Common Core was actually about academic content. Which
it most decidedly is not.

Well our new World Order planners as they honestly
appear to be proud of being [again from then Princeton
prof Richard Falk’s book] said it was because (their
italics) mechanical penetration of
existing curricula was not enough. No,

“organic reorientation  of the educational
program, which is what would enable students to develop
an understanding of what is needed, what is
desirable, and what can be done. By organic
reorientation we mean more than new materials for
old courses, or even curriculum revision; we mean, in
essence, changing  the implicit
symbol and belief systems that underlie the
whole way citizenship, national
goals, and even personal fulfillment
are approached in the educational system.”

That’s what Outcomes Based Education was trying to
achieve in the 90s and why it really set off what were
misleadingly called the Math and Reading Wars. That’s
what the laundry list of actual changes coming in under
the heading of the Common Core are actually up to now.
So your question is why? Which honestly calls for a
vocabulary alert. Ding. Ding. Courtesy of a different
Ivy League professor who originally published his book
in Germany in 1970.

The phrase is Humanist Marxism and as you might
gather the M word gets dropped from most discussions of
its elements. At least in public and especially in the
United States even though the book by Wolfgang Leonhard
did get translated and published for English consumption
in 1974. The same year as Falk’s book. Think of it as
game plans and rationales. Not really for my consumption
but footnote tracking is a superb researching tool.
Especially if you are willing to make musty old used
books your Mothers Day present.

It turns out, according to Professor Leonhard, that
the Russians and the Chinese broke Uncle Karl’s and
Engels’ well-laid out rules for revolution when they
launched their plans on agricultural societies. To get a
classless society that will stick you
supposedly need a certain high level stage of economic
development: “without it only want is made
general, and with want the struggle for
necessities and all the old filthy business would
necessarily be reproduced.” So obviously Humanist
Marxism is a strategy for a redo. This time targeting
the wealth of Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and
basically any place where a respect for the individual
and the rule of law and industrialization had allowed
wealth to accumulate. Those were and are the places that
met the real ground rules for Revolution and if the
proper Framework were followed, the idea is that the
transformation can be peaceful.

Of course that is premised on using education to
change those prevailing values and beliefs and that has
just never gone as planned. Which is really annoying to
lots of NGOs and public sector employees and
multinational companies wanting to just deal with the
appropriate Ministry in every country where they do
business. Otherwise consumers can be fickle to deal with
and satisfy consistently. Bureaucrats can be satisfied
with good pensions and gourmet meals and regular
conferences at luxury locations. Much easier way to do
business as long as you already have a seat at the table
and lobbyists at the ready.

So there’s good reason we keep encountering the
phrase about using education to transform the economic,
social, and political system. Except the M word gets
left off now and the actual idea is that after gaining
the support of a majority of voters, the “laws and
institutions obstructing the advancement of [the
redistribution vision] will be abolished.”  Use the rope
ladder to gain control and then change the rules. No
wonder the US IRS targeted the Tea Party with these very
real contemporary plans for change using democratic
methods and education and the federal printing press to
lure compliance with the HM vision.

Now I am not going to dwell on the Personal Identity
and Development of the Full Personality aspects of this
vision because we have addressed it repeatedly. But it
is why there is so much emphasis in the actual mandated
implementation of the Common Core on social and
emotional learning. And why Karl Marx’s Human
Development Model fits our facts so well as I explained
in an earlier post.

My readers interested in Agenda 21 and the
restrictions on land development and equitable regional
development will be fascinated to know this is straight
out of Marx and a big part of what Humanist Marxism
planned to pursue in the West. Yes it was news to me
too. Can’t imagine why the typical poli sci prof forgets
to mention that Marx and Engels wanted:

“measures designed to overcome the differences
between town and country and aimed at ‘combining the
advantages of urban and rural life without the citizens
having to suffer from the one-sidedness and the
disadvantages of either.”

And the HM economic vision is about co-operative
enterprise that meets needs, not wants. Planned to meet
the needs of the community and each individual. Which
would explain why we keep encountering that very
economic vision in so many places now and so many
previous posts. M&E as interpreted via HM also plans to
liberate the “human personality from the division of
labor” which does rather explain the rise of the
Competency movement since it is assumed that “nobody has
one exclusive sphere of activity.” Someone wrongly
believes it is better to have a fully developed surgeon
than an able one.

Combined with everyone’s “comprehensively developed
abilities and aptitudes” we get education that demands
“first of all that intellectual and physical work should
be fused, and that schooling should be combined with
practical work through polytechnical education.” For
ALL. Which is precisely where high school reforms are
quietly going in state after state as a stealth
component of the Common Core.

Now I think you are getting a feel for Humanist
Marxism whatever it is calling itself for PR purposes.
Even when it is wisely broken into parts in an effort to
avoid detection. And I promised in the last post we
would talk a bit about Gorbachev and the so-called New
Thinking he embraced in the mid-80s. A book published in
2000 seems to have had everyone’s cooperation to be the
definitive story of  what happened. Called Russia
and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals & the
End of the Cold War it tells us the New Thinking
was

“To be sure, many reformist intellectuals retained a
broadly Marxist outlook. But theirs was less the Marx of
class struggle and revolution and more the Marx of
broader humanistic interest and concern for mankind’s
alienation. It was a Marxism that led back to a European
tradition of social-democratic reformism. And, given the
Stalinist legacy, it led to a search for ‘socialism with
a human face,’ …For most liberal, these goals were
embodied in the model of the Prague Spring.”

All three of these books used that phrase “socialism
with a human face” as the aspiration. It’s the
aspiration for the related education reforms as well. It
also means whether known or understood by the average
person or not, these remain the intentions for the
Common Core. Now the purpose of English’s book is to
give a palatable story of why the USSR ended peacefully.
Changed ideas. Except English has the New Thinking as
coming from Evald Ilyenkov and his philosophies of a
revised dialectics based on social problems generally,
not just issues of class. And Gorbachev would have known
of the Humanist Marxism movements going on in the West,
especially in higher ed. And the related movements in
the UN and OECD . And all those trips of educators to
the USSR and providing Soviet psuchology and philosophy
for English translations. What led to the
Cultural-Historical Activity Theory school now being
pushed all over the World.

That’s where the New Thinking fits. Lots of people
have known that. It is we parents and taxpayers who have
not been in the knowledge loop. Who were not told these
plans for education. Who did not attend the conferences
laying out how to mobilize action to get the desired
transformation.

We are the ones who were and are supposed to remain
ignorant for long enough for this to be a done deal. Now
the question will be can enough people find out in time
to avert these visions of where we are to be taken in
the 21st Century. Without permission.

Sorry this went long but it was too important to
break up.