At this year’s Agency Based Education (ABE) conference, one speaker, Jakell Sullivan, presented the following remarkable research. Please watch and share.
Oak Norton, founder of ABE, shared this insight in his introduction to Jakell’s video:
“In the Old Testament we read of a curious story where “Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel” (1 Chron. 21:1). David’s temptation caused him to look upon his people as human capital and as a result he brought a severe curse upon Israel. As a result, God took away a portion of David’s “capacity” to build or make war by offering him one of three curses. David chose the shortest curse, pestilence, which brought upon his kingdom a three day plague and killed 70,000 men.
Statewide longitudinal database systems and digital badging are the designated “numbering” systems used by the education system in America today. When Secretary Arne Duncan and others speak about human capital, they are literally engaging in an effort to control and direct the economic future of our nation. Instead of independent thinkers, we have “common” education standards nationwide, with national assessment, tracking, and a host of other programs to bring all children into a standardization to fit them to the economic desires of those in power.
In this presentation, JaKell Sullivan enlightens and exposes what is happening in the White House and departments of education across the nation and how they are dramatically overstepping their bounds. Please watch and share this presentation, and become a member of Agency Based Education today to help support our mission.”
(You might want to tweet it to @OrrinHatch or other D.C. senators who are about to vote about ESEA/ESSA. Ask them to vote no because the bill hurts Jakell’s cause, the cause of freedom and putting family and individuals first as it entrenches standardization, gives the feds veto power over anything a state wants to do, enriches ed corporations rather than children, accepts as normal the ongoing, unconstitutional federal encroachment into education, and cements the power of student-data mining.)
Agency Based Education (ABE) is an important organization started by Oak Norton, the same man who is the webmaster for Utahns Against Common Core.
ABE holds yearly conferences attended by parents, teachers and legislators who want educational freedom. (Agency here means free agency— not a government agency.) It teaches the average person what should be widely known, but isn’t, about individual agency in education.
ABE’s site states:
Mission Statement
Our mission is to provide an opportunity for the parents and children of the state of Utah to choose an Agency-Based Education.
Principles of an Agency-Based Education
Must be based in choice and not compulsion
Helps develop an internal moral compass as one fosters a recognition and love of truth
Recognizes that truth best inspires when sought from original source materials
Should be individualized to allow children to identify and develop their gifts and talents and discover their life’s missions
Must recognize that parents have the sovereign stewardship to guide their children’s educational journey
Our Organization’s Purpose
This is an educational organization that teaches parents:
ABE’s asking friends of the cause for help. I am a friend of ABE and I signed up. It cost me nothing and it helps ABE. You can help, too.
Rather than holding a traditional fundraiser, ABE is asking people to simply sign up for a free account here, so that ABE can receive points (and money) from the retailers who have agreed to pay ABE for the referral. For details on how it works, just click here.
For more information about why ABE’s educational mission is so important, click here.
Here’s a portion of and ABE article that defines the term “agency based education.”
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Defining “Agency-Based” Education
By Rebecca Bocchino
What is “agency-based” education as opposed to constructivism and behaviorism, and is there any scientific research supporting these methods? Addressing these questions requires that we consider the various underlying assumptions of the nature of man, upon which are based the intellectual, moral, and cultural foundations for our differing views of the nature and purpose of education. It might also help to put the issue of “scientific research”, with its emphasis on measurable, quantifiable, observable, and replicable behaviors, into a more Judeo-Christian perspective.
Behaviorism, as articulated by John Watson and B. F. Skinner, sees man as an object that is only capable of responding to external stimuli. It claims that man acquired sense organs through evolution, not Divine design, and these sensory organs receive and transfer the environmental stimuli which then act upon the human “object”, causing a response. Thus, choice and action are determined by the process of controlling and manipulating stimuli, which can be reduced to a science in a laboratory.
In his book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B. F. Skinner dismisses any belief in the free will or agency of man, claiming instead that
man does not act upon the world, the world acts upon him. … Freedom and dignity…are the possessions of the autonomous man of traditional theory, and they are essential to practices in which a person is held responsible for his conduct and given credit for his achievements. A SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS [BEHAVIORISM] SHIFTS BOTH THE RESPONSIBILITY AND THE ACHIEVEMENT TO THE ENVIRONMENT. (emphasis added)
It is upon this humanist moral foundation that behavioral methods using operant conditioning are based.
Constructivism or progressivism takes the concept of free will to the other extreme by operating on the assumption that man is not only a “self”, but that he possesses within himself all the wisdom and individual determination needed to progress. InSummerhill, the British educator A. S. Neill counters the behaviorist assumption by suggesting that…
we should allow children to be themselves…renounce all discipline, all direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious instruction…a child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing.
From this extreme springs methods such as “whole language” and “fuzzy math”.
Many are united in their rejection of constructivism and progressivism as one extreme, but controversy still exists between the humanist underpinnings of behaviorism and the Judeo-Christian belief in redemption and the nature of man. Differences arise in how we define the capacity and nature of man: whether he is a moral agent accountable to a higher, divine law, or a non-redemptive organism to be manipulated, controlled, shaped, and used by an external environment….
This five-minute video is worth our time. Oak Norton explains why ending compulsory education benefits us all. It makes so much sense that I am left wondering why we didn’t do this, long ago.
For those who were not able to attend the Conference on “Agency-Based Education” I’ve provided a link to the speeches (videos) and website of the Agency Based Education group.
COMMON CORE 