Plan of Action
For many, attendance in early schooling means twelve or more consecutive years of formal instruction beginning in early childhood at four or five years of age and continuing until the late teenage years. Attendance occurs each day, five days a week for forty weeks, for twelve consecutive years, minus breaks occurring during the summer months and during the celebration of holidays.
Surely, this experience has had a significant hand in shaping and maintaining for better or worse the attitudes, beliefs, values, and personal orientations of individual students, their parents, grandparents, and significant others before them who have attended conventional schools. These personal characteristics found to be troublesome today are linked to what happens to individuals connected to formal processes of schooling outlined in the book entitled: Fraud - In the Shadows Of Our Society – What is unknown about schooling is hurting us all, authored by Robert L. Arnold, Professor Emeritus of Education. Recipient of the St. Lawrence Academy Medal for outstanding contributions in the field of education.
The primary message of this book is simply stated: Opposing groups of our citizens have emerged in this country composed of the hand wringers who keep asking what happened and violent activists who have taken matters into their own hands.
These groups have this in common. They are dissatisfied with their personal lives. They do not understand their behavior is driven by unrecognized unconscious motivation that results from their past experiences, many years of which were spent in conventional schooling, and these motivations will not change until individuals achieve a higher level of self-understanding that will reveal the roots of their problems.
They have not acquired civil approaches to problem solving through their educational experiences, so they often demonstrate uncivil behavior that expresses their frustration in their inability to create a more satisfying life. This situation is directly related to the conventions of educating that have been maintained and controlled by ignorant or traditionally biased decision-makers within the conventional education systems, those charged with responsibilities for early education and the remaining years of formal instruction.
Most families have passed through the activities of public schools, now including charter schools, and they perpetuate the troublesome results, beginning with parents along with their offspring who are conditioned to carry on the traditions of the conventional system. This will not change until self-knowledge and self-understanding becomes the focus of their educational experiences, accepting the fact that current unconscious motivations will remain in place, warding off change, and believing life’s tasks carry with them a sense of doom.
Psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie MD wrote this seldom understood description of a basic societal problem: Our thinking apparatus is continually being braked and driven off source by the play of unconscious forces. Educational procedures which fail to recognize this end up by increasing the interference from latent and unrecognized neurotic (rigid) forces.
The work of numerous scholars add clarity to Kubie’s formulations including these scholars: Jean Piaget, Viktor Lowenfeld, Lev Vygotski, Lawrence Kohlberg, Benjamin Bloom, Robert Gagne, Leland Bradford, Warren Bennis, Philip Phenix, and Bela Banathy among others. Each contribution is presented in the Fraud book revealing explanations for what has happened and is happening or not happening in conventional schools, exposing root causes of today’s social unrest.
Through experimentations and demonstrations this author has formulated a newly designed assessment and evaluation system that offers numerous descriptions of experiences designed to convince the public of the critical need for systemic changes in the way we educate our youth.
In 2020, despite twenty years of standardization and standardized testing, 75% of this country’s student body in public schools was determined through testing to be deficient in mathematics and English. The record is even worse in history and geography.
The remaining 25% includes those who have been showered with the rewards of the system while the other seventy-five percent patiently or not so patiently watch and learn to live with the humiliating aftereffects of awards ceremonies, occurring several times each year. During these ceremonies those in the majority are promised a share of the rewards if only they pay attention and work harder.
This effect doesn't just involve the seventy-five percenters. There is a compulsory work drive promoted by business interests instilled in everyone through conventional education, especially important for those who reap the financial rewards for hard work. This imposed work drive is being rejected by the seventy-five percenters who view it as an encroachment on their personal freedom.
These Blogs on this website are designed to provide the background for understanding the unknown elements of schooling revealed through the work of reputable scholars from different parts of the world and different times throughout the centuries. Their concepts, models, and theories will be revealed that can be validated in everyone’s personal experiences and in the experiences of selective scholars that describe what’s involved within each of the four categories listed below:
1) Individual intellectual development, and the processes of mentation that involve learning and mental health.
2) Communication within and between individuals and the processes of group dynamics and group development that result in improved communication, learning, and mental health.
3) The nature of knowledge and what it means to know by engaging the disciplines of general education viewed as ways of constructing and communicating personal meaning.
4) Systems thinking that treats systems design as a process of learning and systems analysis as an effective strategy for achieving authentic assessment and evaluation of learning outcomes.
These four categories contain the ingredients for understanding the origins and solutions regarding current antisocial behaviors related to the practices and structures of conventional schools.
While this analysis may be viewed as severe criticism regarding the longstanding conduct of educating our youth, the policies and mandates from its hierarchical leadership do not emanate from teachers. There are many teachers who labor daily to meet the needs of their charges. These are among the heroes of our age.
Responsibilities for educating in conventional schools rest with the directors of the existing authoritarian systems that frequently base decisions on outdated traditions and unexamined assumptions. Their decisions are routinely clothed in a so-called validation process composed of “Blue Ribbon” panels that are chosen by them to give the impression of legitimacy in their policies.
Teachers do not make policy, but they are obliged to carry out their mandates even when they run contrary to what is needed to meet the needs of their individual students. Their livelihood depends upon maintaining conformity. Administrative structures have been established to ensure that reality.
Teacher education, in its present form, is limited to a brief exposure to existing practices that border absurdity when compared with the requirements for implementation of the foundation knowledge base indicated through the messages of these studies. Successful systemic changes require a new system that demands fundamental changes in the commitment to educate teachers as facilitators of learning in this twenty-first century.
In the book FRAUD In the shadows of our society – What is unknown about educating is hurting us all there are analyses of relatively unknown studies drawn from numerous scholars that will aid in demonstrating the serious deleterious results of conventional schooling due mainly to violations of the principles of development. These are found in developmentally inappropriate instruction routinely perpetuated in conventional schooling.
While teachers have limited authority to change the foundations for quality education that guide decision making, they nevertheless have the potential to reshape education if only they have a clear understanding of what is involved.
The Fraud book is available in eBook and printed on demand found at:
Product page access link: https://store.bookbaby.com/book/fraud-in-the-shadows-of-our-society