Ch.30 — New Colleges story-to-date (re-cap)
Serializing Awakening the Inner Teacher, how Women In Congress re-invented liberal arts college curriculum and teaching methods to produce graduates capable of redeeming-restoring SpaceShip Earth
In Chapter 30, we take a break and recap developments from the beginning thru the Insight Seminar inspired 2033 Summer Conference.
In 2010, Atlantic magazine ran an article, “The End of Men.” “For every two men who get a college degree this year, three women do the same.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/
2011: When did women overtake men in college? “Census figures released Tuesday highlight the latest education milestone for women, who began to exceed men in college enrollment in the early 1980s. The findings come amid record shares of women in the workplace and a steady decline in stay-at-home mothers” — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/in-a-first-women-surpass-men-in-college-degrees/
“In 2017 More Women Than Men Enrolled in U.S. Medical Schools” — https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/press-releases/more-women-men-enrolled-us-medical-schools-2017#:~:text=Females%20represented%2050.7%25%20of%20the,male%20matriculants%20declined%20by%200.3%25
2021: According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), just over 40% of men who enrolled in a four-year college in 2014 graduated after four years compared to nearly 50% of women. The completion gap between men and women who graduated within six years was narrower, though women still took the lead
Male Gender Collapse
Jan. 2023: New York Times #1 bestseller, Homo-Self-Destructivus. Building on economist Michael Hudson’s research; and, David Graeber’s Debt, the First 5,000 Years, DiAngelo Red Hawk, in her New York Times #1 bestseller, laid out the values of failed males, their top values:
QUOTE indent
- Material wealth measured exclusively by profit, by their asset portfolios,
- Disaster Capitalism (The Shock Doctrine (2007), smash and grab; take the money and run,
- Might-makes-right,
- Winner-take-all, King of the Hill competition, only one can win; all others are losers,
- Win~lose (social Darwinism), socialism for the rich, dog-eat-dog for the 99%.
Red Hawk continues, “SpaceShip Earth has been run by a failed species. I’m naming this failed species ‘Homo-self-destructivus.’
End Q
The two iconic images she pointed to were:
dg-three monkeys
dg-homo-s-d
In October 2023, “Male Gender Collapse” was announced in full page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall street Journal, The Guardian and The Economist.
At first some males laughed — just as they laughed at climate change. However…
2020: CDC estimate on autism prevalence increases by nearly 10 percent, to 1 in 54 children in the U.S.
dg-US autism rise chart
By 2023 the decline of the male gender was so pronounced, PubMed had 55 papers on “Male Gender Collapse.” Fewer and fewer healthy male birth outcomes. Rising incidence of male births on the autism spectrum by age five. Declining numbers of male high school graduates. Numbers of male four year college graduates at historically low rates — and falling.
In this way, women rapidly began replacing males in leadership positions in fields where they previously had been minorities: politics, corporation executives, and college education.
Women rising
By 2024 Ranked Choice Voting, a less exclusionary form of voting, pioneered in Alaska, became the norm in 50% of states and cities in the US. RCV results take up to a month to count and verify.
The lack of “instant results,” the more drawn-out procedure changed public conception about politics. Up to 2024, mass media and social media had trained people to conceive of politics like a sport. Sports are popular, horse races are dramatic. The media used both metaphors, “game” and “horse race” so often since the 1800s, because this was how to frame political coverage to make it seem more exciting and boost audience interest.
Starting around 2020, politics and elections were gradually reframed as “exercises in civic responsibility,” “exercises in inclusion” and “fairness.” Yes it’s beneficial for candidates for office to compete — but not at an exaggerated emotional level fans go to competitive “horse races” for. Threats of physical violence over winners and losers wasn’t helpful.
Ranked Choice Voting in turn “lowered the temperature” of exaggerated emotional outbursts on television and on social media. The more states and cities who adopted RCV, the more US political culture was fundamentally changed.
More broadly, RCV “lowered the temperature” of us-vs-them disagreements, conflicts and culture-war mud-slinging. Research conduced in 2035 concluded RCV reduced the stress and potential for physical violence around voting and political issues, in the US, by 42%.
What replaced the old stress? A renewed focus on the civic issues at stake, on personal accountability; and, on personal integrity, showing up to vote. This freed up a lot of mental-emotional energy which then went into efforts to form consensus, on which benefits to prioritize, for the highest good of the 99% of voters.
In this way, campaign donors and corporations were gradually moved OUT the driver’s seat of US politics to the back seat. More voters, led by League of Women Voters chapters, were taking back control of local, regional and national civic destiny. Males had been completely unable to initiate or accomplish this.
2025 ~ BluePrint of WE
For each partner in a marriage; or, each team member, BofWE asks 30 mins of paper and pen journaling:
- Why I want to be part of this partnership or team,
- What I look like when I feel stressed or triggered,
- How I want to be approached when you see me stressed or triggered.
BofWE was brought into Senate and House staff offices. It assumes interpersonal conflict is not an “IF” but a “WHEN.” So, we may as well create and put in place procedures for “calming the safety brain” (Sarah Peyton) when conflict does arise. Other BofWE topics encourage coherent team spirit among a work group.
Each member’s writing is then shared and discussed with all immediate stakeholders.
The result? BofWE made office and team meetings less boring, less frustrating, less irritating.
BofWE increased emotional transparency between office colleagues. BofWE brought better, deeper richer communication to Capitol Hill. After Oprah “made it a thing,” it spread to NGOs, non-profits and to orgs around the world.
June 2027 ~ At Women’s Summer Conference #1, for Women in Congress, staff and supporters, teaching and sharing BluePrint of WE was the content so it could benefit more groups, orgs and partnerships.
Deploying BofWE more and more widely, Women inadvertently re-made all three branches of US government. They replaced exaggerated male ego-competition with healthy feminine values of self-connection, connecting with others, cooperation and collaboration.
This had a sea-change effect on how business was done on Capital Hill. Increasingly the goal became this question: How to uncover and support the best consensus available among all stakeholders?
Monday Lunch with Experts
To uncover more up-to-now-unknown, Best Practices like BofWE, Women in Congress (WinC) began Monday Lunch with Experts. This was open to all elected members of Congress, their staff; and, anyone else who wished to learn Best Practices in various fields, male leadership had ignored, neglected and downplayed.
These meeting were soon televised on C-SPAN; and then, internationally on YouTube. Inadvertently, these sessions competed with TED Talks. Monday Lunch with Experts out-competed TED talks by being more interactive. Without fixed seating, using non-fixed seating, this permitted partner exercises, dyads and triads, which became a staple feature in many presentations. In this way Women learned how to apply topics and themes talked about to their own life and own issues. The last new public TED Talk was held in 2028. Monday Lunch with Experts eventually became a college-level course granting a certificate equal in many ways to a two-year college degree.
Cultural Creatives go mainstream
Out of these meetings, Women were led to understand the significance of Cultural Creatives. Experts informed women how CCs had been around since 1965 not only since Paul Ray’s 2001 marketing book. WinC came to understand CCs were their ideal voter and ideal office employee.
By Fall, 2027 Women In Congress became the largest progressive caucus in both House and Senate. Inclusiveness and healthy Democratic Socialism characterized this group. Old-school 1930s-style Marxist-Socialism, simply faded away. Arguments over what Marx meant or did not mean, dried up completely. Inadvertently, without really intending this, Women created an updated version of healthy socialism, attractive to younger generations of voters.
The Heads-down Generation
Women’s Summer Conference #2 was “hijacked” by Mothers against Suicide who demanded to address the “heads-down generations,” the iGen — Generation Internet (Jean Twenge, 2017), those born 1995–2012. “Social media” is not social at all. Virtual interaction “calms the safety brain” by permitting the young to avoid interpersonal conflict. This is the greatest fear the young have. The result? Declining rates of health, wellness and marriage. Mothers asked each other, “How can we redeem healthy face-to-face relating?”
The male response had been, “What problem? What, me worry?” Unable to stand for their own children, males credibility as a gender continued to decline.
Q: Did old Patriarchal culture flip over to a totally female, matriarchal society?
A: No. It was more women were the only gender capable of evolving from one sidedness to two-sidedness, the only gender capable of putting Iain McGilChrist’s insights (2009, 2022) into practice.
Iain McGilChrist’s reframe of brain lateralization
If Iain is brand new to you, in a nutshell…
QUOTE
Everyone should read Iain McGilchrist’s wonderful book called The Master and his Emissary (2009). His basic thesis is we live in a divided world; this is mirrored in our brain. Our two brain hemispheres present asymmetrical, often conflicting versions of the world around us.
When the left hemisphere (the lesser emissary) usurps the right hemisphere (the greater Master), society becomes rigid, machine-like and pathological. Women, children and nature are discounted.
However when a mainstream culture has these two hemispheres in proper integration with each other, we have collective surges of high culture, like the Italian Renaissance (Andrew Sweeny on Medium.com (2017)
end Q
Iain says, L-hemisphere wants no limits, total freedom, no restrictions, no limits. However, R-hemisphere wants to comprehend, to understand. L-hemisphere only want to extract something from life, out of life — and discard the rest as waste (right here is why male-led SpaceShip Earth was so burdened with discarded trash).
Males had proved almost utterly incapable of integrating BOTH brain functions:
- Our capacity for perceiving the whole of things, with all our senses (Right hemisphere), and
- Our capacity to analyze what we perceive, down into language symbols, or even math, to be arranged in liner-sequential order, so we can manipulate the outer world more effectively (left hemisphere).
Males remained one-sided, left-brain-only, the trend they had been following since healthy Patriarchy deteriorated into mere Scholasticism in Europe’s eleven-hundreds (12th century).
2030 ~ In Summer Conference 2029, a Paid Year of National Service was proposed, sketched out and discussed. The draft proposal was made into legislation in Fall, 2029, submitted, and became law in 2030. Thousands of Green Stewardship jobs were created — and filled by eager young men and women. This took a lot pressure off high school graduates.
Paid Year of National Service
A Paid Year of National Service addressed uncertainty about colleges, both the rapidly declining number of liberal arts colleges; and, the rapidly declining quality and value of a four-year liberal arts education.
Green Stewardship jobs gave the young another option outside of the military. Many took this option. By the year 2040, new enrollments in all military branches were down 54%.
2029 ~ Around this same time, Regenerative Agriculture College Campuses were begun in response to resistance from conventional Ag colleges to teach and promote Best Practices in building healthy soils.
2029, The Year Colleges Died
Fall, 2029: liberal arts colleges teetering on collapse as a social institution; as in, virtually no liberal arts college campuses at all outside old, endowed Ivy League rich-kid campuses. This was paralleled by a sharply rising suicide rate and drop-out rate among both teens and college students.
Earlier Chapters of this text detail a list of college weaknesses:
- Colleges too much like glorified high school, not challenging youth in beneficial ways,
- Colleges not keeping up with the changing needs of younger generations,
- Colleges not keeping up with best practices in psychology, sociology or economics. Colleges as mere trend followers, outside of tech, rarely if ever breaking new ground,
- The majority of college students feeling unsafe holding unpopular ideas, “More Students See a Climate of Self-Censorship” (2020),
- How the “ego diseases” of Cancel Culture and toxic Wokeism replaced healthy critical thinking; and, learning to think for yourself,
- Colleges since the 1980s too corporatized, merely packaging a liberal arts education and college lifestyle; instead of, teaching how to think for yourself in order to have a healthy positive voice for your generation’s own future.
These points and more were covered in the Nov 17, 2029, TIME magazine cover story, “The Year Colleges Died.”
Dare we remake colleges?
Privately, thru the whole creation process, women staff and their supporters feared re-making college could be their Waterloo. Was WinC reaching too far, too high? Go Slow members wondered if any set of professionals in Washington DC was knowledgeable enuf about college curriculums to remake colleges wholesale. Women used their self-doubts to inform them where they needed more expert input, more study and more pilot experiments.From New Colleges project…
It took a while to find a workable format, group process and principal employees to govern the process of:
- writing new curriculum and teacher texts,
- re-training teachers and admin, then
- opening five pilot campuses in five different states.
The project was eventually overseen by two bodies, The War Room and the Writers Room. The Writers Room reported to the War Room. The War Room reported to Women In Congress. Earlier Chapters summarize the surprising evolution of group process occurring around all this.
… to “Insight Experiential Colleges”
Women’s Summer Conference 2033 became a pilot program to:
- test-drive curriculum similar to New College curriculum, and
- try out the heartfelt look, feel and methods of Insight Seminars, how they worked for large group learning, how they might apply to classroom instruction
The seminar was attended by 25,000 in person (five tents of 500 each) and 75,000 online. The five days event was so successful, it inspired New College principals to change its name to Insight Experiential Colleges with the tagline, “Awakening the inner teacher.” This indeed encapsulated what Women In Congress believed a four year liberal arts college education ought to do.
Looking forward
The phase of our story we are going into next is the hiring or 100 interns to work on selling the idea of Ne Colleges, Insights Experiential Colleges to the public at large; and, t prospective communities, in five states, identified as potential sites for pilot campuses.
This story is short and easy to tell. then comes telling the story of transformed curriculum for:
- Games (Sports made into cooperative-collaborative games),
- Communication (Psychology-Sociology converged and made to focus on conveying methods and practice in interpersonal competency),
- History (using Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the US (1980, 2003) as a basis for presenting questions students ask each other in classroom sessions. History was transformed from dry facts to living questions students use to explore and build their own character, based on exploring their own deepest, innermost values; and, from learning how to listen to other diverse opinions.
- Goethean Holistic Science (Philosophy of Science transformed for Cultural Creatives and future parents)
Please imagine EACH AND EVERY topic above presented PRIMARILY as interactive, social partner exercises, followed up by journal writing, group discussion and assigned double-spaced essay topics of 1000 words or more.
In this way, women in charge planned to re-conceive of the four year, liberal arts, college experience as a journey into Awakening the Inner Teacher.
How things look from the year 2120
In the 2020s, you live in a time, where SpaceShip Earth is on fire, crashing and burning. After 1750 or 1850, as mainstream male-led, Western Patriarchy corrupted into abject, one-sided materialism, Earth was brought to a precipice, a planet-wide Choice Point.
In 2120, SpaceShip Earth is not in crisis; it’s on a sustainable course, with a sustainable mission, to make best use of the talents of each individual of the 99%, for the upkeep and maintenance of Earth; and, for good quality of life for the 99%.
A smaller population helped a lot. The best and simplest birth control turned out to be higher education for girls worldwide.
Much of the sustainable economy of 2120 is organized around regenerating the soil microbiome so food grows, preserving drinkable water, re-purposing corporate buildings; and, thanks to Insight Colleges, renewed interest among learners of all ages, in identifying and learning Best Practices in each field.
These MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS suggest the magnitude of change since your 2020s. Historians in 2120 attribute Women In Congress as the major moving force behind all these innovations. This was perhaps the biggest cultural project anyone, had attempted since WW II’s Berlin Airlift, or the Civil Rights Movement.
