Ch.37 Boot camp curriculum for interns

In Chapter 37 New College interns undergo a three week bootcamp to Awaken the Inner Teacher.

Serializing Awakening the Inner Teacher: Insight Experiential Colleges. How Women In Congress re-invented liberal arts colleges.

Intern Boot Camp was three weeks of facilitated exercises, discussion and writing prompts to orient interns to New Colleges Best Practices and work skills. Topics War and Writers rooms had found most insightful were recycled to orient interns:

- What is “a heartfelt look and feel?” How we we conceive of this? What does it look like in practice? Preview how this will be a part of all Town Halls,

- Milling > dyad > then > jigsaw exercise sequence: What kind of graduates do we want Insight Colleges to produce?

- Milling exercise: How could New College graduates make the world more wonderful?

- Triad exercise: What are my fears for the Insight Colleges project? How could it go wrong?

Lecturette with slides on Waldorf model of how healthy Thinking evolves (imitation > taking truth on authority > independent critical thinking), and

- Lots of open mic debriefing.

Homework assignment, writing prompt ~ “Why are Cultural Creatives, the Leading Edge of Cultural Change?” This and a few other shorter written assignments were used as data for assigning interns to various tasks involving either writing or calligraphy.

SIDEBAR ~ College textbooks replaced by small, agile learning teams

As college enrollment plummeted in the 2020s, investment in updating college textbooks declined. As well, a bigger cultural paradigm emerged. Since about 2005, in all workplaces, the emphasis shifted more and more to effective, creative teamwork. Innovation was the “X factor” businesses were most interested in. Innovation, comes from small teams. Successful small teams unite primarily around healthy group process — only secondarily around technology or information. Linear, especially paper, textbook education was less and less relevant to corporations, faculty and students. Many better courses were already available on video.

What is healthy group process built upon? Values. Healthy values are the first and last thing bringing people together. Food is only second. Everyone wants to socialize with people with whom they are like-minded.

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Major topic: Education as “the great equalizer”

“Class differences” as education differences

Boot Camp topic: The few intermissions from monopoly capitalism

Historians in 2120 teach their college students, “Between 1870–2021, the Old Boys Club, socialism for the rich, the First and second Gilded Ages, flourished unabated in the USA until 2025. Only a few brief, shining intermissions occurred:

- The New Deal (1933–1939),

- Henry Wallace’s 1944 candidacy,

- JFK’s, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country,”

- the original Peace Corps, and

- Johnson’s Great Society Civil Rights successes,

- Martin Luther King’s speeches,

- Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, now Rainbow/PUSH: https://rainbowpush.org/brief-history,

- Bernie Sanders 2016–2020.

New-Deal-friendly politicians demonstrating solidarity with the working class (the 99%), were weeded out by monied interests.

What common denominator did all these intermissions have? More young people with more higher education.

“Class differences” as education differences

Every ten years the US Census Bureau takes a national census. They produces many maps of the US showing the various distributions of various factors in the population (demographics).

Some variables coincide strongly, others do not. Two factors which coincide strongly — and have since census-taking began — are wealth and education.

Wealth and consuming higher education shape each other. The more money available, the more resources available — the more higher education you can consume. Yet, this surprises many. In the 1930s, early socialists believed “class warfare” was a reality to be fought against. While “class warfare” remains a useful phrase in the topic of our political economy — what the Fed Gov is; and is not doing, to benefit the 99% equally, not just the 1% — the most solution-focussed variable is higher education. If too few of the 99% receive higher education, tax credits and government handouts will never pull them out fo poverty.

Education as “the great equalizer”

Philosophers and college-level educators have long known education, especially higher education, Grade Eight thru PhD, is the great equalizer, creating equality across race, class, gender and religion. How? Education is the key reducing poverty and unlocking the doors of economic opportunity. Education promotes social mobility. Education reduces inequality of opportunity across, race, income, religions differences.

Gerardo Gonzalez (2001) echoes the same sentiment by saying, “Education is the great equalizer in a democratic society. If people are not given access to a quality education, then what we are doing is creating an underclass of people who will challenge our very way of life.” He further declares the “civil rights question of our nation today is of access to quality higher education (Gonzalez, 2001, p. 2) — https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ842412.pdf

Yet, these insights rarely finds their way into politics, state and national legislation. Why? Well, class warfare is real. Educated male elites understood higher education was the gateway to the middle and upper income brackets. If your mindset is King of the Hill, you game the system to keep others from reaching your position of Top Dog. To keep others down and away you MUST LIMIT public education. If you can’t limit it, you must make education so onerous, complex and expensive, few will be able to cross the finish line with a diploma of any value.

As long as the Oligarch agenda was to suppress and repress the working class, to keep wages down, to make their products more competitive internally, funding quality effective education was a negative for Oligarchs.

Given this situation, education as a “football” in class warfare between rich and poor, wealth-plus-Education became the better predictor of class differences, not just wealth alone.

Wealth-plus-Education explains many phenomena

Wealth-plus-Education explains a large number of voter patterns. For example, it explains why college teaching adjunct professors, with PhD in comparative literature, don’t have same politics as truck drivers, electricians, or the owners of tire stores.

It explains why there are a few highly educated truckers, electricians, and tire-store owners.

As well, it explains why so many credentialed PhDs exist who are barely educated in anything else, outside their narrow field of application (from Joel Engel on Twitter).

More broadly, wealth-plus-Education — how high or how low — predicts why people have the observable biases, weaknesses and limitations they do:

- Lesser educated people are more susceptible to anti-science & anti-government demagoguery.

- People UNable to think for themselves are more susceptible to identity politics, wokeism and making all problems black and white, heroes and villains.

More educated people are:

- More likely to vote consistently, and

- Less likely to be persuaded by TV ad and social media propaganda and nonsense.

As an educated citizen, you learned the significance of platforms and policies. You learned even tho in themselves these are boring and technical, their real-world consequences are potent. You also learned almost no alternative ways exist to make positive change except thru new laws, policies and regulations.

For the less-educated, boring platform policies are replaced with politics as sports: “Is this my team? Are they like me? Does this candidate get me?” Who’s running in the horse race” “Who’s winning in this horse race?”

Hearing this, Women realized the widest split in voters is always going to be between two very large demographics:

- People who make, or grow, or fix things, for a living; and

- People who work with abstractions and thinking for a living, not making anything of tangible value.

Women were astounded. Where males wished NOT to see, Women had their eyes opened to how investing in public education was a public good for the 99%. As well, how upgrading “vocational arts” education including farming, was one of very few ways to raise awareness of the 99%, the people who make, or grow, or fix things, for a living.

Boot Camp topic: How to flatten social hierarchy

When in the 2020s, Women In Congress became the dominant political caucus on Capital Hill, they were appalled at how rigidly hierarchical males had made politics at all levels. Women wished to flatten old, unnecessary male hierarchies, reduce division, increase connectivity and increase synergy. After 2030 circumstances arose giving Women opportunity to flatten hierarchy at liberal arts colleges; which then, produced graduates who then worked to flatten hierarchy in their workplace.

Monday Lunch with Experts speakers explained how, as education levels rise, hierarchy flattens. As many teachers know, the more exposure students have to higher education, above grade six (pre-algebra, essay writing and longer papers), learners practice thinking for themselves and practice making good decisions about what to say and how to say it.

By the time they graduate high school, if a student enjoys thinking for him or herself, they can claim this as a lifelong habit. They can improve their skill in college.

This dynamic has a big impact on whether adult voters are educated about current issues, or not. When more voters educate themselves about local issues and candidates, election results are more likely to benefit the needs of the 99% instead of the wants of the 1%.

Without a quorum of educated independent voters, politics and campaigns are treated in terms of the lowest common denominator of the un-educated: politics as sports, as game betting, as horse race winners and losers.

Far more women than men considered: If all the money, for all useless wars, fought by the US between 1964 and 2022, had been invested in worldwide K-12 and college education, especially for women, probably none of those wars would have been fought. Why? Educated voters see thru and vote out candidates funded by war-profiteers and corporate oligarchs. More women would have held elected public office and put their foot down about frivolous wars. More voters would know about Disaster Capitalism, how elites use natural disasters and wars to buy as many resources as they can at “fire sale” prices.

dg-shock doctrine

Monday Lunch with Experts hosted historians who evidenced for Women how wars are mostly fought for only two reasons:

- Various male-led corporations, run like mafias, will benefit, rake in windfall profits,

- Males are ignorant and disinterested in Best Practices in Diplomacy and interpersonal relationships. For males, it’s less psychic effort, much easier, to compete, fight, kill and destroy, than to learn and practice the skills of healthy negotiation and Interpersonal Competency.

In these ways, interns learned how higher education was the great equalizer.

College freshmen demographic shifts

The advent of a year of Paid National Service in Green Earth Steward jobs in service-oriented occupations, took a large amount of pressure off college seniors to go directly to college. Paid National Service jobs did not require a college education.

High school seniors applying to college (85% female in 2032) increasingly had the personality preferences of NTs and NFs. This is the demographic realm of the Cultural Creatives, those who are iNtuitive and feel connected with truly human values. Academics were finding “all other MBTI personality type groups were less interested in attending and graduating from college.”

More women identifying as CCs

Women’s Summer Conference 2033 gave hundreds if not a few thousand women, locally and online, a tangible reference point for:

- who Cultural Creatives are,

- Cultural Creative values,

- Cultural Creative aspirations, and

- Cultural Creative-friendly workplaces.

Elected Women In Congress already knew CCs were their ideal voter and donors. Women began expanding their conceiving of CCs. CCs weren’t all white collar; they wen’t all one color.

As on Sesame Street, CCs could be all colors, working class, immigrants, no restrictions. CC was a healthy mind set you chose into and aspired to more than any rigid ideology. Subtly, without any overt leadership, elected Women In Congress began to conceive of themselves more and more as CCs.

Much of this change occurred unconsciously, by women listening to each other’s speech and body language A relaxed, heartfelt quality in each other’s speech and gestures was experienced as tapping into a previously unknown underground river. It had always been there as a source of strength; yet, women did not know how to connect with it until WSC-2033.

Since WSC-2033, women also began to compliment each other on the pleasant quality of conversations. Those with a more serious interest, studied the HEXACO personality preferences. From this they learned how honesty and humility were crucial factors and Best Practices in personal integrity.

The Cultural Creatives within the War and Writers Rooms understood New Colleges was the project they had been waiting for, a project they had been born for. Now this waking up was spreading more widely, wherever public town halls were completed.

Some writers quit, join facilitating team

Intern trainers were drawn from the Writers Room. Some Writers found they preferred the more social, live facilitating, over the more solo composing of interactive lessons. A handful of writers applied to be facilitators and pilot program classroom teachers. Most were hired. New Writers were found from interns and by pooling existing personal professional contacts.

From the Intern training script:

[Lecturette:] Paraphrasing Mark Twain, in terms of cultural progress, what causes the most problems, is the 50% of what people were taught as children, and from parents, which by the time they are adults, proves to be false; or, was superceded with clearer understanding based on evidence.

This is the problem you are likely to face daily interfacing with the public on Experiential Insight Colleges. Students will have no other idea of colleges than the old corrupted corporate colleges. With parents it will be different. Because they went to college 18–30 years ago, they think they know everything there is to know about colleges.

Your job will be to gently dis-abuse them how New Colleges are NOT LIKE old corporate colleges. We are convinced being gentle with people is the best policy as they re-orient to the new paradigm NCs operate in.

Any questions? [Take responses]

Say: As we said already, we won’t be explaining the new paradigm to you much. Instead we will attempt to engage you in safe, supportive partner exercises, where you experience for yourself what a New College education is and does to Awaken the Inner Teacher.