Common Core, K-12 Schooling, & How to Turn Children into Real Estate

As far as I know, this is especially the case in Scandinavia:

In Finland teachers are the most trusted and admired professionals next to doctors, in part because they are required to have a master’s degree in education with specialisation in research and classroom practice. “Our mission as adults is to protect our children from politicians,” one Finnish childhood education professor told me.

Eubanks’ view, however, is that the “specialization” training (along with the “personalization” of education) is 100% politically motivated. Not that teachers are knowingly complicit with the agenda, but that, a) they are materially invested in following, & not questioning, the program; b) they are also being sold on, & have themselves been “educated” into buying into, the phony rationale for it, and probably know little of the socio-psychological tenets being applied.

Eubanks argues that the whole personalized learning angle is not to mold the education to the child but the reverse, to get a map of the inner space of the child in order to be able to turn it into real estate, so to speak. One of her key points is that it is not about the content of the education (math, English, etc) but the environment created in which the learning happens. I would say it is an excessively liminal one (lacking structure) in which, for example, students are given questions that have no right answers in order to find out more about their personality quirks, and from there, how to recalibrate them and make their views compatible with the collective. Much of the lingo is along the lines of collectivism, co-operation, and so forth; individual points of view are encouraged to be expressed, but only in order to be subtly corrected. The right answers are those that are consensual, i.e., ideologically correct. This prevents intellectual development and hence autonomy, making state-dependent workers, infant adults. Yet it is also cleverly dressed up in neoliberal jargon, a.k.a, newspeak, to sound benign and progressive.

The article about Finish schools quoted above paints such a rosy picture, and besides the use of “personalized” it’s hard to see what could be so wrong with the methodology being described. This is why looking more closely at the long-term aims and methods is potentially so revealing and disturbing. Eubanks is a lawyer and she avoids speculation, only presents evidence permissible in her virtual court of law (her blog). Much of this evidence comes from the openly declared aims of the education managers (change agents), but which parents are never told about except in Orwellian terms of obfuscation.

I think some of this is observable at a ground level, in the way in which ideology more and more supplants rational thought, and how opinions are coming to be considered synonymous with facts (& feelings with opinions). Who can discuss facts about immigration or transgenderism with the dominant neoliberal mindset, or for that matter, with the Christian fundie/neofascist opposition (though ironically, they seem closer to a factual grasp of the situation), when feelings trump facts? This is being implemented in schools & colleges in the way all opinions have to be equally respected, no matter how wrong-headed. Facebook only has a “like” button, “dislikes” are potentially harmful to our self-image/lifestyle choice, etc. Constructed (cybernetic) identity reigns supreme.

Another thing that seems part of this progressive method is to erase boundaries between teacher and student, i.e., adult & child, the dangers of which (beside a general Lord of the Flies atmosphere), I will leave to the reader’s imagination, except to refer them back to this post, and say cui bono?

To listen to “Guiding Fictions” (Robin S. Eubanks talking on The Liminalist), go here.

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