AFFECTIVE DOMAIN: The area of learning that deals with feelings, beliefs, values, attitudes, motives… all those inner factors that determine behavior and responses to stimuli. By changing or modifying the affective domain, educators can control behavior–or so they believe.
ASSESSMENT: A means of measuring student progress toward national and state goals.
AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT: Alternative tests which assess student ability to solve problems and perform task under simulated “real life” situations. It measures student responses which demonstrate what students think, do and have become. These outcomes are recorded during normal classroom involvement. Teachers may use hand-held computer scanners that scan the students’ bar coded name and responses, then transfer the information into a computer later.
Summative Assessments in the Classroom: “…are given periodically to determine at a particular point in time what students know and do not know. Many associate summative assessments only with standardized tests such as state assessments, but they are also used at and are an important part of district and classroom programs. Summative assessment at the district/classroom level is an accountability measure that is generally used as part of the grading process. ….
n Formative Assessments: “…part of the instructional process. When incorporated into classroom practice, it provides the information needed to adjust teaching and learning while they are happening. In this sense, formative assessment informs both teachers and students about student understanding at a point when timely adjustments can be made. These adjustments help to ensure students achieve, targeted standards-based learning goals within a set time frame. Although formative assessment strategies appear in a variety of formats, there are some distinct ways to distinguish them from summative assessments.”
AT-RISK: Any “student who is at risk of not meeting the goals of the educational program…or not becoming a productive worker.” (Iowa State Standards) Programs such as Parents As Teachers (PAT), 21st Century schools, Healthy People 2000 and others define at-risk in categories such as PAT’s famous “other, that wonderful catch all.” (See Parents As Teachers)
BENCHMARKS OR MILESTONES: Tangible, incremental steps toward meeting specific goals and national standards.
BRIDGING: A teacher helping students make connections between what they are studying and real-life, out-of-school experiences.
CERTIFICATE OF ADVANCED MASTERY (CAM): An advanced achievement credential that follows the CIM and supposedly proves mastery of “higher-level educational outcomes”.
CHANGE AGENT: A term utilized by many, including President Clinton and leading educators, to summarize a major task of educators: to change our schools, our children, our nation, and the world.
CHARACTER EDUCATION: An attempt to teach students global or core values. It sounds good, but character qualities such as responsibility, respect, and honesty are redefined to fit the global paradigm. Traditional morality will no longer fit nor be tolerated.
CHOICE: Allowing parents to enroll their children in any public schools within the district or inter-district, or–depending on the scope of the choice program–provides tax credits that can be applied toward tuition in private schools. All schools receiving federal funding must adopt “voluntary” national standards which force students to conform to core beliefs, values and attitudes. “Such choices should include all schools that serve the public and are accountable to public authority.” (America 2000)
CIM, CERTIFICATE OF INITIAL MASTERY: Replacing the high school diploma, the CIM (under this or another label) will be the “new job ticket”–the reward for demonstrating “mastery” in the various attitudes and citizenship skills deemed necessary for employment and citizenship
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT: The mental process of acquiring information, building a knowledge base, and learning increasingly advanced reasoning and problem-solving skills from infancy through adulthood.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE: Mental confusion and emotional tension caused by incompatible values. Created through classroom stimuli such as hypothetical stories or pagan ritual that conflict with home-taught values, it forces most children to rethink and modify their values to resolve the conflict.
COLLABORATIVE LEARNING: Group learning. Views all knowledge as “the common property of a group.
COLLECTIVE: The opposite of individualism and free enterprise, it emphasizes utopian ideals such as Marxist equality and “serving the greater whole”. Examples: a commune or a communist farm “owned” and operated by all the people.
COMPREHENSIVE HEALTH EDUCATION: A sequential pre-K through 12 curriculum to address the physical, mental, emotional and social (including holistic) dimensions of health.
COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL HEALTH PROGRAM: The school, as the hub of the community, offers health (including sex, AIDS, etc.) education and services, integrated school and community health promotion, nutrition/food service, guidance-counseling, etc. (See School-based clinics)
CONFLICT RESOLUTION: A psychological technique for dealing with (often hypothetical) conflicts. It manipulates a child’s value system, trading old absolutes and convictions for compromise positions. In a legal context, it is used to avoid litigation. (See Consensus Building and Common Ground)
CONSCIOUSNESS: Individual or collective (public and cultural) awareness or the moral and spiritual consciousness of a nation. This consciousness reflects the common world view or paradigm.
CONSENSUS BUILDING: The process by which students, schools, communities or groups of people learn to compromise individual beliefs and ideas in order to seek “common ground” and come to consensus. This pre-planned consensus may be dictated from the top-down (national to local), yet be promoted as grass roots ideologies. It changes beliefs through pressure to conform to group-thinking.
CONTENT STANDARDS: Descriptions of what students should know and demonstrate in each subject area.
CONTEXT: The setting or circumstances that surrounds a particular event, statement or story. Since most events or stories are understood or interpreted according to its context, a teacher can change traditional meanings by altering the context. The Biblical word “truth” gains a totally different meaning when used in an Indian myth such as The Truth about the Moon, which doesn’t tell the truth at all.
COOPERATIVE LEARNING: Small groups of students with varied abilities who learn to share responsibility for achieving group goals. High achieving students carry the weight of a group assignment for which all receive the same group grade. It is supposed to eliminate competitiveness and individualism while teaching cooperation, problem solving, and responsibility for achieving group success instead of personal success. Promoting collectivism, it lowers academic standards by forcing high achievers to bear the burden of success for others.
CRITICAL THINKING: Challenging students’ traditional beliefs, values and authorities through values clarification strategies and Mastery Learning. (See Sex Ed and Global Values)
CULTURALLY APPROPRIATE STRATEGIES: Practices that celebrate diversity and enable students to succeed in school regardless of race, gender, national origin, religion, age disability, marital status, family background, or economic status. They sacrifice the rights of individuals to supposedly gain the collective good of the whole.
CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK: A stepping stone between national standards and local curriculum which tells local districts what they must teach to meet state and national standards.
DELPHI TECHNIQUE: Communication technique used to manipulate a diverse group toward a consensus position through circulating information for comment in several rounds synthesizing the responses until all agree. If a participant’s view cannot be synthesized with the groups after repeated rounds, then the premise must be declared invalid and abandoned. Breaks down moral barriers and shifts students world view from the old to the new paradigm.
DISCOVERY LEARNING: The student supposedly generates and tests his own ideas, conclusions, concepts, etc., creating his own understanding of reality and giving new meanings to traditional words. In reality, he or she is prompted toward a pre-planned understanding through stories, suggestions, questions, and group dialogue
DISSONANCE: See Cognitive dissonance.
DISTANCE LEARNING: A broad term encompassing technology that extends the learning community beyond the classroom walls. Courses are offered via satellite and the Internet, and email links students directly to peers, professors, programmers and change agents around the globe. Dustin Heuston of Utah’s World Institute for Computer-Assisted Teaching (WICAT) shares his delight in the power of this technology: “We’ve been absolutely staggered by realizing that the computer has the capability to act as if it were ten of the top psychologists working with one student. You’ve seen the tip of the iceberg. Won’t it be wonderful when the child in the smallest county in the most distant area or in the most confused urban setting can have the equivalent of the finest school in the world on that terminal and no one can get between that child and that computer? (See Clinton’s War on Hate Bans Christian Values)
DREAMCATCHER: A “magical” spiderweb inside a sacred hoop (circle or ring) which, according to the contemporary myth, stops bad dreams but allows good dreams to float through. Supposedly an American Indian fetish, children make it in crafts classes and hang it on or near their beds — expecting miracles.
EARTH-CENTERED SPRITITUALITY: A pantheistic, monistic blend of the world’s pagan religions. It views all life as being interconnected and trades God for a spiritualized Mother Earth, nature spirits, or other supernaturals. (See Gaia)
EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT: The national and international, bipartisan leadership that plans and promotes today’s transformation. Diverse and often divided, it is bonded by a common vision of the transformative role of education–and of their own role as change agents.
ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIO: The computer-driven permanent record for each learner, which contains and discloses personal information. (See No Place to Hide)
EQUALITY: All schools conforming to an “equal” standard determined by the needs of the slowest learner. It limits a student’s ability to excel and explains why OBE is referred to as “dumbing down”.
EURYTHMY: A form of movement defined and promoted by Rudolf Steiner, a former Theosophist (a follower of the channeled messages from “Ascended Masters,” especially the Tibetan Master Djwhal Khul, spirit guide to Alice Bailey), and the founder of the Waldorf Schools.
FABIAN SOCIALIST: A member of the Fabian Society which sought the gradual worldwide spread of socialism by peaceful means. The Huxley brothers, Aldous and Julian were Fabian socialists. Aldous wrote Brave New World. Julian Huxley became the first head of UNESCO, where he laid a socialist foundation the global education program now being implemented around the world. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society
FACILITATOR: (1) A non-directive, non-judgmental teacher/leader who creates an environment for learning, records student progress, and motivates students to exercise self-direction in determining and achieving educational goals. (2) A change agent who chairs hand-picked committees or groups to direct discussion toward the “right” predetermined conclusions or consensus. This process is called “managed change.”
GAIA: (1) The name of the ancient Greek earth-goddess, (2) a “scientific” hypothesis by Dr. James Lovelock, who views the earth as a living, self-directing organism, (3) a feminine, pantheistic lifeforce that embodies, nurtures and guides the evolution of all life. See illustration in the article, From the Littleton Crisis to Government Control.
GENDER NORMING: Grading student, not on merit alone, but on subjective gender expectations by staff based on student’s gender coupled with class performance. An attempt to “level the playing field.
GLOBAL EDUCATION: Prepares students to be global, interdependent citizens by developing a global consciousness which embraces “universal” values and pantheistic, earth-centered beliefs that supposedly will save the planet and unify its people. Teaching global idealism and training students in political activism, it builds a malleable young army ready to support the United Nations and other organizations calling for a world government. Watch out! The process of building world citizens is detailed in Brave New Schools.
GLOBAL SPIRITUALITY: A blend of the world’s New Age and earth-centered religions. Since most are pantheistic, monistic and polytheistic, they fit together–but exclude monotheism, especially biblical Christianity. Those that don’t fit the pattern needed to model the new global spirituality, are simply molded or adapted to fit. Thus, a universalist revision of “Christianity” would be acceptable – one that deletes the cross and Jesus Christ as the only way. See Establishing a Global Spirituality.
GUIDED IMAGERY: A visualization exercise directed by a teacher/facilitator to produce a relaxed or altered state of consciousness. Since the facilitator often guides the students toward pre-planned images, the exercise becomes ominously like a class in witchcraft. As Starhawk, founder of the Covenant of the Goddess, wrote in The Spiral Dance, spell casting and magic are based on a four-fold formula: relaxation, concentration, visualization, and (mental projection). See Star Wars joins United Religions at the Presidio.
HIGHER ORDER THINKING SKILLS (HOTS): Psychological manipulation using “application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation” (the higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy) without the factual knowledge needed for rational and objective thinking. Students base their “own” conclusions (to which they are led by a trained teacher-facilitator) on biased, politically correct information and disinformation. (See Lower Order Thinking Skills and Chapter 3 of Brave New Schools.)
HOLISTIC EDUCATION: Education involving the whole person–body, soul, and spirit. It integrates all subjects and infuses all learning with a pantheistic, monistic spirituality.
HUMAN CAPITAL or RESOURCE: The new label for all people, adults as well as children, who are being shaped to match the supposed needs of the global economy. The goal of our new U.S.-UNESCO education system is lifelong training and socialization for a global workforce managed through consensus groups and Total Quality Management (TQM).
INCLUSION: Assigning all students to regular classrooms, including those with severe disabilities, thus turning each class into a special education class.
INDIVIDUAL EDUCATION PLAN (IEP): The individualized behavior modification plan for changing a students beliefs and behavior through stimuli, response, assessment, and remediation. The control mechanism of Mastery Learning, it adapts to each student’s rate of change and degree of resistance and indicates corrective measures. Masquerading as an academic plan, its goal is to mold minds to fit the global community and workforce. The goal is to use computers programmed according to each child’s needs, weaknesses, interests, and resistance or “locus of control.
| “A lifework plan [IEP]is a personal information system that will benefit decision-making. It is a living document, frequently revised. The lifework plan should [include] . . . individualized learning plans and/or career development plans. It should provide a format such as a portfolio for collecting relevant materials. Most educators foresee a computer record-keeping system that supplement paper files.” From the glossary at Maple River Education Coalition |
“Lifework Plan (also known as IEP or Individual Education Plan): DCFL defines it as follows: “A lifework plan is a personal information system that will benefit decision-making. It is a living document, frequently revised. The lifework plan should [include] . . . individualized learning plans and/or career development plans. It should provide a format such as a portfolio for collecting relevant materials. Most educators foresee a computer record-keeping system that supplement paper files.”
INFUSION: A strategy that hides or blends politically correct social philosophies and matching activities into the basic content of the curriculum.
INTEGRATIVE EDUCATION or CURRICULUM: Organizing learning around broad themes, thus making it easy to infuse global, new-paradigm suggestions and activities into standard lessons. See note with practical explanation at the end.
INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES: blending various subjects (math, art, language, etc.) in order to teach and demonstrate the unity of all things. See systems thinking.
INTRINSIC MOTIVATION: A system of rewards based on the inner feelings of the child.
JOURNAL: A daily record in which students express and deal with their feelings and emotions. When included in the student’s assessment portfolio, it violates the students’ right to privacy. Unlike traditional journals which recorded facts (travel, business, etc.), these journals contain expressions of feelings and attitudes that stress emotional responses, encourage the child to focus on feelings rather than facts, and become revealing indicators of progress toward new values or resistance to change.
LIFE SKILLS, LIFE ROLE COMPETENCIES: Preparation for all life roles. The total development of the child–body, mind, and spirit — as a learner, worker, consumer, family member, and citizen. What the student must believe, think and do to meet the exit outcomes.
LIFELONG LEARNING: A continuos, lifelong program to re-educate the masses in preparation for the 21st Century workforce and community. All adults must meet the social, psychological, and work skills standards required for work and citizenship. (See articles on the UN Plan for Your Mental Health, Clinton’s War on Hate, Star Wars, and others.
LITERACY, ENVIRONMENTAL: Embracing the global view of the “environmental crisis” and accepting the politically correct understanding of Global Warming, Ozone holes, etc. Has little to do with the traditional meaning of literacy.
LITERACY, FUNCTIONAL: Basic literacy skills (such as reading a map or following instructions) needed to live and participate in society. Does not necessarily mean the ability to read in the traditional sense.
LITERACY, HEALTH: Accepting the new politically correct standards and responsibilities for personal and community health, including mental health. (See The UN Plan for Your Mental Health)
LITERACY, WORKPLACE: Literacy focused on specific job skills; learning the factual, communication, reading, and math skills need to perform required functions.
LITERACY, CULTURAL: Viewing life, people, and nature from a politically correct or new-paradigm perspective.
LITERATURE BASE: Teaching language arts, civic responsibility, and character through literature. It enables teachers to manipulate a child’s belief system by choosing new-paradigm literature and/or interpreting literature according to the new paradigm.
LOCAL CONTROL: A smokescreen to pacify critics. A euphemism, since all control rests with those who determine the national standards and assessments. Local educators are only free to find ways to meet those national standards.
LOWER-ORDER THINKING SKILLS: Include knowledge, comprehension and memorization, the cornerstones of traditional schools, which have been demoted to lower-order skills. (See Higher Order Thinking Skills and Mastery Learning)
MAGIC GATHERING: An increasingly popular and psychologically addictive occult card game used by young and old nationwide, often after years of involvement with the occult role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Used to teach math to gifted students, it is gaining popularity –inside and outside classrooms–even among elementary ages students. A New York student, excused from playing Magic in his classroom, was given a card called “Soul exchange”. It pictured spirits rising from graves and advised: “Sacrifice a white creature.” On the playground, his school-mates “summon” the forces on the cards they collect by raising sticks into the air and saying “Spirits enter me.” They call it being “possessed.” All except one parent had given their uninformed consent. (See article on “Pokemon.”)
MAGNET SCHOOLS: A public school focused on a specialized area of learning, which may have formed a partnership with a private organization.
MASTERY LEARNING: A psychological process based on the premise that all children can learn if given enough time and help. It uses behavior modification techniques (stimulus, response, assessment, remediation) to change the students’ beliefs, attitudes, values and behavior. The student must “master” each sequential step toward the required “outcome” (and demonstrate this mastery by modifying behavior patterns) before advancing to the next stage. (See IEP, OBE, Global Education)
MEDICINE (American Indian): Magic, spiritual power, as used in medicine man or medicine wheel (See list of symbols).
MIND MAPPING: A new way of diagramming complex conceptual relationships. With their imagination, students create a network of lines connecting words and brief phrases.
MONISM: All is one; everything is interconnected, bound together through a pantheistic force that infuses everything with spiritual life.
MOVEMENT (Eurythmy): Using free-form movement as an artistic expression. Today, it is often based on Eurythmy, a form of movement defined and promoted by Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the Waldorf Schools.
MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION: Teaching tolerance, “respect and appreciation” for the world’s diverse cultures, beliefs systems, and lifestyles – especially those that clash with traditional values and biblical truth –with the acknowledged goal of producing public consciousness of the unity of all things. It shows little tolerance for biblical Christianity.
MULTICULTURAL PERSPECTIVE: All are one, not matter what religion or values a person chooses. (See preceding definition) A global world view, a way of thinking or a way of understanding reality based on a new politically correct “consciousness” or “awareness” that all things are essentially interconnected through a pantheistic spirituality.
MYTH: A culturally significant fictional or fantasy story which attempts to explain some aspect of reality (the origin of the coyote, why it rains, etc.) but has no basis in factual reality.
National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP): “The Nation’s Report Card” which measures student progress by testing different subject areas in alternative years. Also gathers personal data on children and families to fill out longitudinal profiles that includes beliefs, attitudes, behavior and values.
National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE): Founded by Marc Tucker, it conceived the CIM in a 1990 report called America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages. See “Zero Tolerance for Non-Compliance“.
New Standards Project (NSP): A partnership formed by Marc Tucker (head of NCEE) and Lauren Resnick to establish a “world-class” system of standards and assessment that reflects international standards and culminates with the CIM and CAM.
NON-GRADED SCHOOLS: Teaching children of different ages and ability levels together, without dividing the curriculum into steps labeled by grade designation. Rather than passing or failing at the end of the year, students progress at their own individual rates. Letter grades are usually replaced by authentic assessments.
OUTCOME-BASED EDUCATION (also called OBE, Standards-driven Education, Achievement-based Education, Performance-based Education…): The national, multilevel delivery system for Mastery Learning. Driven by national standards which match international standards, it forces states and local schools to teach according to national guidelines, curriculum frameworks, work-skills competencies, etc. by tying much-needed federal funding to compliance. Almost every other definition in this glossary list describes a facet of OBE, so scan the entire list. See also this broader definition of OBE and Outcomes-Driven Developmental Model (ODDM). The latter turned out to be a dismal but expensive failure.
OUTCOMES: “What students must know, and be able to do, and be like.” Determined at the national and international level, they must be met locally. Called learning goals, performance objectives, standards, competencies or capacities, they all require students to embrace “new thinking, new strategies, new behavior, and new beliefs.”
PAGAN: A person who embraces a polytheistic/pantheistic (earth-centered) religion. Many call themselves pagans, which they consider a good, not derogatory, name.
PAIDEIA PROPOSAL: An education plan based on an ancient holistic Greek concept explained by Marilyn Ferguson in the Aquarian Conspiracy: “The paideia referred to the educational matrix created by the whole of Athenian culture, in which the community and all its disciplines generated learning resources for the individual, whose ultimate goal was to reach the divine center in the self.” (See Chapter 7 in Brave New Schools) Its four-step process — pre-test, teach/train, post-test and remediation — matches Mastery Learning. It was adapted as a model for Outcome-based Education by Mortimer Adler, a zealous advocate of a one world government and designer of classroom games that encourage global socialism.
PANTHEISM: All is god; a universal spiritual force infuses all things with spiritual life. It can be called the Great Spirit, Gaia, Mother Earth, a cosmic force, the Source, ultimate wisdom, etc.
PARADIGM SHIFT: A cultural transformation, a change in consciousness, a new way of thinking, understanding and explaining reality. Today’s paradigm shift means replacing the Judeo/Christian world view with a New Age/Neopagan paradigm establishing earth-centered spritituality and global socialism.
PARADIGM: A world view, a model or pattern, a mental framework for thinking, for organizing information, and for understanding and explaining reality.
PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT: Holds parents responsible for making sure the child attends school, completes prescribed homework, and learns whatever else schools will decide once the system is implemented. (Will schools tell parents what and how they must teach at home?) A way of involving parents in the consensus process, where they, too, will become part of UNESCO’s “Lifelong Learning.”
PARENTS AS TEACHERS (PAT): Brings the state educator into homes to make sure each child starts school “ready to learn” and “able to learn”. The child is given a personal computer code number, and a computer record is initiated that will enable the national data system to track each child for the rest of his life. Parents as well as children are evaluated. (See Chapter 7 in Brave New Schools)
PARTNERSHIP: A unified effort by two or more entities, to implement the national education goals – or any other government program that fits into the new global management system. (See “Local Agenda 21: The UN Plan for Your Community“)
PEER TUTORING: Children teaching children. Assigning fast learners to tutor slow learners limits the progress of the former and may subject the latter to peer ridicule.
PERFORMANCE-BASED ASSESSMENT: An assessment system which leans heavily on open-ended answers and extensive writing. According to government research, it often falls short in validity, content, disparate impact, objectivity, and scoring reliability. Dr. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. calls it “The original term used by specialists in the psychometric literature for what is called variously ‘authentic assessment,’ ‘exhibitions,’ and ‘portfolio assessment.'” See Education Terminology Every Parent Must Understand
PHONICS: Learning to read by decoding words. Students break words down into component parts and relate letters and groups of letters to the sounds of spoken language. (Contrast with Whole Language)
POLYTHEISM: Belief in many gods, spirits, counterfeit angels, or other supernaturals.
PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT: Measuring student progress by evaluating his or her “portfolio”: a collection of work which includes art projects, written assignments, journaling, and a variety of other work that demonstrate learning.
PRIVATIZATION: Transferring educational policy-making and implementation from the public domain into the private or business arena where educational leaders become accountability to rich funders (such as the Carnegie, Ford, Danforth, Rockefeller, Spencer, and Annenberg Foundations), rather than concerned parents and their representatives.
PROCESS-BASED INSTRUCTION: The process by which you find an answer is more important than the content. This process is led by a teacher/facilitator trained to provide suggestive questions then let the students work together toward a consensus. The group’s “creative” and collective thinking is what counts. A correct answer is secondary.
PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION: A movement, initiated by John Dewey, to replace the traditional schools of the 1800’s with a new system based on a humanistic/global social philosophy. The new ideal stresses informal, active, child-centered approaches that would produce the “right” kind of world-class citizen.
QUEST: A generally ineffective anti-drug program based on situation ethics and values clarification strategies. Undermining a child’s sense of right and wrong, it opens the door for students to think, imagine, and do the unthinkable.
RE-LEARNING: The aim of Soviet education in former Communist countries around the world. In America today, it means dismantling the old ways and establishing new ways of thinking and choosing. It applies to adults as well as children.
REGIONAL EDUCATIONAL LABORATORIES: Private, non-profit corporations funded, in whole or in part, under Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. They develop programs that link their research to practices in the schools of their respective regions. Far West Regional Educational Laboratory (FWREL) and Mid-Continent Educational Laboratories (McREL) lead in the national/international transformation. See Regional Educatonal Laboratory. (Read about Shirley McCune, former head of McREL, in the article on Star Wars Joins United Religions at the Presidio.
REMEDIATION: A stage in the OBE/mastery learning loop, which applies to students who resist change or fail to show expected progress. Remediation continues until the student learns the required outcomes and demonstrates them on standardized tests.
RESPONSIBILITY: Demonstrating high level of effort and perseverance to attain goal. In the context of the new global paradigm, it implies “serving the collective” in the spirit of co-operation.
RESTRUCTURING: A systemic or system-wide movement to change the entire education model in order to achieve the new national goals. This revolutionary, never-ending change process includes: Mastery Learning, Outcome-based Education, and Partnerships with business and community leaders, churches, and parents. Almost every word in this glossary describes a part of today’s restructuring effort.
SCANS –The Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills: Links education to the Department of Labor in a joint effort to create a workforce that meets the future needs for a global workforce and produces students that are competent in prescribed work skills, including attitudes and group thinking. It can direct students into specific training, limit their options, bring intrusive government influences into all aspects of life.
SCANS COMPETENCIES: an official list of competencies from the U.S. Department of Labor describing work skills that “effective workers can productively use.”
SCHOOL-BASED DECISION MAKING: A form of school governance that replaces elected school boards or school system administrators with a council consisting of principals, teachers and selected parents who support the new system. Designed to implement the changes with minimal hindrance, it is not accountable to elected officials or concerned parents.
SCHOOL-TO-WORK or SCHOOL-TO-CAREER: The link or partnership between the schools and business established through the SCANS competencies, which provide a criteria both for testing and training the global workforce.
SCHOOL/COMMUNITY BASED CLINICS: Comprehensive health services offered near or at the school. Individual health plans (for treatment, prevention, birth control, abortion counseling, psychological tests…) would be developed for each student — and eventually for all family members. The controversial genital exams forced on young girls are part of this program.
SELF-ESTEEM: Confidence in self-worth and personal skills, awareness of personal abilities and how to relate positively to others. An excuse for purging all biblical beliefs which could produce feelings of guilt and shame–and therefore lower self-esteem.
SERVICE LEARNING: Combining community service with politically correct instruction that encourages students to see social problems from a collective new-paradigm perspective — and to see spiritual differences through the filter of a pluralistic, unbiblical worldview.
SHARED RESPONSIBILITY: The school, community, and parent share the responsibility for raising children. The school can hold parents accountable for the teaching/training role assigned to them, but parents have little or no control over the school’s responsibility to their child.
SITE-BASED CURRICULUM: Though written by local teachers, this curriculum must be designed to prepare students to meet the national outcomes. Often compiled from various sources, it is not easily identified or understood by concerned parents.
SITE-BASED MANAGEMENT: A non-elected management (made up of the principal, selected staff, lead/master teachers, and a few supportive parents and students) which either replaces the elected school board or reduces its members to figureheads. Parents and taxpayers who oppose the transformation lose all representation.
SPECIAL EDUCATION (redefined): Planned for all children “at risk” of not meeting the national standards. (See chapter 7 in Brave New Schools)
SPEEDE/EXPRESS: Monitors the student’s academic progress recorded in the CIM databank and sends an IEP format to higher educational institutions, agencies or corporations when indicated. Part of the NCS’s (National Computer System) microcomputer-based software for K-12 schools.
SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION: The belief that the earth evolves spiritually as well as physically. To speed the evolution toward ultimate perfection (Teilhard deChardin called it the Omega point), people must grow in consciousness, becoming increasingly aware of the oneness (monism) of all life and tuned to the universal forces that guides and inspires progress. (See Faith in Evolution)
STAFF DEVELOPMENT: A long-term process tied to the top-down, nationwide revolution shaking the whole system. Since teachers cannot manage the behavior modification strategies until they themselves have been properly trained, their “development” is essential to the change. Like their students, they must be pre-tested, trained, evaluated, re-trained, re-tested…. all life long.
STAKEHOLDERS: All who are significantly effected by specified programs.
STANDARDS-DRIVEN EDUCATION: See Outcome-based Education.
STANDARDS: The national criteria for student performance. It provides benchmarks set to the “highest in the world” to assure “competitiveness” and “citizenship” in the coming global economy. (See Mastery Learning)
STUDENTS: Includes teachers, parents and other adults; all must be retrained. (See Lifelong learning.)
SYNTHESIS: One of the higher order thinking skills in Bloom’s Taxonomy. Uses the principles of Hegelian Dialectics to join the beliefs or ideas (thesis) of individual students into a new joint belief–the compromise solution or synthesis.
SYSTEMIC CHANGE or SCHOOL REFORM: Total transformation — top-down, system-wide, international as well as national. “Systemic” means “one body having interacting and interdependent parts,” which include pre-school, public elementary and high schools, private schools, colleges, universities, health clinics, and every other kind of community partner. Its motto–from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn who coined the word paradigm: The change “must occur all at once,” it cannot be accomplished piecemeal by “disconnected projects or quick fixes.” The planned deadline is school year 2000-2001.
SYSTEMS THINKING: The “new way of thinking,” by which all things are seen as part of “the whole.” Old definitions and ways of reasoning must be adapted to the new “holistic” or “wholistic” way of looking at nature, people, education, social problems, and the “environmental crisis.” According to Education for Sustainability, page 5 (a publication prepared in partnership with President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development),systems thinking would “teach skills such as problem solving, conflict resolution, consensus building, information management, interpersonal expression, and critical and creative thinking.” And, according to Corinne McLaughlin, first task-force coordinator for the PCSD, “The systems view sees the world in terms of relationships and integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller units.”1 (See Global Education and “World Heritage ‘Protection: UNESCO’s War Against National Sovereignty‘”)
THEMATIC LEARNING: All subjects revolve around one central theme such as American Indians or Aztec culture.
THINKING CURRICULUM: All knowledge or learning must relate to real-life experiences and stimulate the student to make connections, or bridge, various interdependent subjects. (See Integrative Learning)
THRESHOLD: The point where a stimulus of increasing strength produces the desired response. In Mastery Learning, it shows how much psychological stimuli — and what kinds of conditions — will cause a student to behave the desired way (the required outcome)
TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT (TQM): A strategy for managing “continual improvement” through statistical tools and continual assessments, monitoring, and remediation – always correcting any deviation from the vision and mission of the organization. This management system can be effective when used by corporations to evaluate and improve products. It is a tool for government control over the thoughts, beliefs and behavior of “human resources” when used in education. Administered through the site-based management, it emphasizes the “customer” or “stakeholder”, which includes everyone but the concerned parent.
TRANSFORMATION: The process of “rethinking our present educational system and reshaping it to meet present and future needs of students and society.
TRANSFORMATIONAL OBE: An anti-intellectual, highly politicized plan for eliminating traditional education and changing the beliefs of students through psychological formulas for behavior modification. (See Mastery Learning)
UNGRADED PRIMARIES: Since students “progress at their own speed”, they remain in the ungraded primary class as many years as it takes to achieve the stated outcomes. (See Mastery Learning)
United States Coalition on Education for All (WCEFA): The U.S. arm of the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA), established to link national goals and standards to international goals and standards. (See systemic change)
UNIVERSAL VALUES: Honesty, integrity, tolerance, and other values believed to be common to all the world’s cultures. A serious look at history counters that presumption. Blinded by the light of politically correct history lessons, we forget that evils like torture and slavery were worldwide traditions characterized by cruelties far beyond America’s experience or comprehension. Slavery and other horrors common to pre-Christian times ceased around the world only when confronted by the fast-spreading Bible-trained social conscience of the 19th century.
VALUES CLARIFICATION: A strategy for changing a student’s values. It prods students to criticize traditional values, then choose “their own” values based on personal opinions and group consensus. Parents’ values no longer count! (See Sex Ed and Global Values)
VISUALIZATION: Mental images formed in response to specific suggestions, which can lead children into an altered state of consciousness ranging from simple relaxation to a deep, hypnotic trance. Children may or may not encounter or communicate with spiritual entities such as “their animal spirit” or “a wise person.” The Bible calls these spirits demons. (See Establishing a Global Spirituality – the Real Purpose of Multicultural Education)
VOUCHERS: Tuition credits used by parents to pay for their child’s education in a private school of their choice. The catch: any school accepting these vouchers must conform to national goals and standards. “A simple fact of political life is that public regulation follows money…. Private schools that operate with public money will be subject to public regulations, regardless of whether this is done in the name of ‘accountability’ or effecting social change.” “Changes, big changes, are needed,” wrote Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers. “Public school choice, by itself, is not the big change we need. But it may be that we can’t get the big changes we need without choice.” (Footnotes included from Brave New Schools will be added here)
WALDORF SCHOOLS: Provides holistic education with an emphasis on arts, feelings, and earth-centered spirituality. Founded by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) who shared Alice Bailey’s occult roots in Theosophy, but broke away to start his own cult, Anthroposophy, which he described as “knowledge produced by the higher self in man.” Like the Robert Muller schools, Waldorf schools have long used the strategies now implemented through Goals 2000: whole language instead of phonics, stories and “literature” instead of factual history, and a strong emphasis on myth, imagination, guided imagery, creativity, movement (eurythmy), and spiritual oneness with nature. One of its headquarters is located at the Presidio, the old San Francisco army base that also houses the United Religions and the Star Wars empire. (See Eurythmy)
WHOLE CHILD: Pertaining to every aspect of the child, including health, nutrition, values, attitudes, beliefs and resulting behaviors.
WHOLE LANGUAGE: A reading and learning method which trains students to focus on words, sentences and paragraphs as a whole rather than letters. Sometimes called the “look-say” method, it ignores the proven success of phonics, and tells children to find meaning by guessing, by recognizing whole words they have memorized, by looking at the pictures, and by creating a context based on surrounding words. It emphasizes “rich content” (multicultural stories that fit the global paradigm) and encourages students to “construct their own meaning” (with guidance from peers and facilitator of consensus process). Retrieving or comprehending the traditional or intended meaning of the author is no longer important — that is, unless the author teaches the global worldview. It serves to introduce children to the global worldview and context for learning before children are set free to explore more traditional and possibly contrary sources of information and values.
WORK-BASED LEARNING: Programs designed to teach older students (grades 7 and up) work skills on the job site, thereby assuring that the student can perform the task needed by local employers when he graduates from public school. It replaces traditional academics with work skills for a particular job.
WORKLINK: A computer-based student record system that “enables students to assess their skills… make work-related decisions and transmit data to [potential] employers.” According to its own brochure, it “encourages cooperation among high schools, the business community, and students.” Sounds good, but could replace individual choice with computerized and politicized placement of future workers.
WORKPLACE SKILLS STANDARD: The broadly defined “essential” skills for competency in various occupations.
WORLD VIEW: A learned perception of reality, a mental framework for thinking, believing, and understanding reality. (See paradigm)
WORLD-CLASS EDUCATION: Non-competitive system based on national standards and benchmarks that match international standards. Students must embrace a common set of universal beliefs and values in preparation for the 21st Century global workforce. (See global education)
WORLD-CLASS STANDARDS: Standards for citizens in the new global economy. Planned by international leaders, they include attitudes, values and beliefs that reject or minimize national sovereignty and emphasize collectivism rather than individualism.
World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA): International organization working with the United Nations, countless non-governmental organizations (NGO), and individual nations to plan and promote OBE and Mastery Learning for all. (See systemic change)
YOUTH SERVICE: Programs designed to help students meet the national goal of “responsible citizenship” by instilling an attitude of service to the community or collective.
Reference: http://www.crossroad.to/glossary/education.html
Note: The idea behind this blog is to give General tips, updates and inputs to all our students irrespective of his/her level, whether its coaching for B.Com (Honors/Program) Semester system, 1st Year, 2nd year or 3rd Year or coaching for Professional Entrance exams like CA-CPT, CS Foundation, CWA Foundation or IPCC, Inter or Main… or class XI or XII students. We believe that the basics don’t change, most of the exam battles are won here, in the head, and hence we encourage everyone to stay focused and positive … Your time and life is precious, feel free to speak to exam counselor at iQuest Commerce Academy or write to us at info@iquestcommerceacademy.com in case you have any anxiety/apprehensions.
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