Cognitive-Behavioral Workforce Conditioning Through Online Adaptive-Learning Technetronics

Virtual School in a Computerized Box (Part 1)
Seven years before he was appointed as US National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski published Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era.
In this 1970 futurist treatise on American political science, Brzezinski forecasts how “[t]he post-industrial society is becoming a ‘technetronic’ society: a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics—particularly in the area of computers and communications” (9). Almost fifty years later in 2018, President Donald Trump is ushering in Brzezinski’s technetronic new age by accelerating President Barack Obama’s 2009 Educate to Innovate initiative[1].

According to the Obama White House archives, the technetronic Educate to Innovate program financed “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)” education programs that were bankrolled with “over $700 million in public-private partnerships” between the federal government and “leading companies, foundations, non-profits, and science and engineering societies.” During Obama’s presidency, which was counseled by Brzezinski[2], the corporate-fascist Educate to Innovate project orchestrated public-private political-economic planning with “leaders such as Ursula Burns (Xerox), Sally Ride, Craig Barrett (formerly of Intel), and Glenn Britt (Time Warner Cable) to leverage the business community interest in improving STEM education. Together, they recruited over a 100 other CEOs.”Additionally, Obama’s neoliberal regime pushed Brzezinski’s technetronic agenda even further by “help[ing] [to] launch Change the Equation, a new [2010] non-profit with full-time staff dedicated to mobilizing the business community to improve the quality of STEM education in the United States.”

On September 25th of 2017, the technetronic policies underlying Obama’s Educate to Innovate were ramped up by Trump’s signature of a $200 million Presidential Memorandum on Creating Pathways to Jobs by Increasing Access to Jobs by Increasing Access to High-Quality Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education. According to a report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, “[t]his Presidential Memorandum (PM) directs the U.S. Secretary of Education to make promoting high-quality STEM and computer science education one of the Department of Education’s top priorities, and beginning in fiscal year 2018, to take this priority into account when awarding competitive grant funds.” The Trump Administration also launched other STEM education initiatives such as Executive Order 13801 “Expanding Apprenticeships in America,” which allocates federal resources for public-private “career-pathways” partnerships between schools and corporations that train students in hi-tech skills needed “to prepare workers for the jobs of the future.”

To condition students for these computerized jobs of the technetronic future, Secretary Betsy DeVos (image on the right) is advocating “virtual education” through public-private partnerships between public schools and for-profit ed-tech corporations that implement “adaptive-learning” computer modules in online courses or “blended-learning” classes that hybridize computerized instruction mixed with traditional human teaching.

Moreover, to fascistically plan the technocratic economy of the future, these technetronic edu-corporations will data-mine each student’s cognitive-behavioral learning algorithm(s) in order to predetermine his or her “career pathway” into a future-tech job under the “competency-based education” (CBE) stipulations of the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

In retrospect, Brzezinski, who was a prominent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, presciently forecasted this future in which the schooling system is managed by private corporations that utilize computerized technologies to psycho-behaviorally condition students for workforce placement in a technocratically planned economy[3]. Of course, hi-tech cognitive-behavioral conditioning of the student body through stimulus-response learning algorithms for the purposes of techno-fascist workforce planning is exploitative enough. Yet there is a more sinister ulterior motive behind technetronic workforce conditioning through adaptive-learning CBE software: the replacement of human instructors with automated teaching bots to perfect the scientific management of hi-tech psychosocial engineering through public-private techno-fascism.

“Individualized”/“Personalized” Education = Computerized Edu-Conditioning:

If you think that these dystopic predictions sound far-fetched, then consider the following statement given in 1984 by Dustin Heustin, a member of Utah’s World Institute for Computer-Assisted Teaching:

“[w]e’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 . . . 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 curriculum?” (qtd. in Iserbyt 8).

Πλήρες άρθρο

https://www.activistpost.com/2018/05/cognitive-behavioral-workforce-conditioning-through-online-adaptive-learning-technetronics.html