SEEKING CAMPUS-UNIVERSAL DIDACTIC DOMINANCE AND GETTING IT by various means other than scientific 2016 by Dr. Kai Soerfjord (Sørfjord) © The author, Dr. Kai Soerfjord (Sørfjord), asserts his right to be identified as the author of this work. Introduction The Secretary of the Norwegian 'National Association of Schools' (Skolenes Landsforbund, SL), Chris Gøran Holstad, warned us recently, in the newspaper Dagbladet ('Daily Paper') of the obvious potential for pending disaster: "In Mary Shelley's debut novel from 1818 we can read about the scientist Dr. Victor Frankenstein, who wanted to create a new and better human being, but, who instead creates a monster that leads to disaster." (my transl. from Norw.) https://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/doktor-roe-isaksen-skaper-laerermonstre/60143244 The Association Secretary writes his article under a heading that says Norway's Minister of Education, Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, with his politics, is currently "creating teachermonsters", which is an allegory, a partial likeness metaphor that refers to 'sideeffects' of unknown dimensions and detrimental character. The allegory "teacher-monsters" refers to a similar degree of mis-match between aim (or stated aim) and actual outcome, in other words the 'oops'-factor. It does not refer to teachers becoming 'evil' or 'scary' or 'angry' or even 'obviously harmful' but merely becoming 'something else', something unintended, something with a definite potential for great harm, though; 'monsters' in the sense of acquiring traits that are 'collateral damage'. Such traits would be 'the cost of reaching some higher goal' – a goal that is 'higher' on the priority-list of the individuals who seek the goal but not higher on everyone else's priority-list, or even on the official priority-list of education itself; in the last instance a goal that is not even necessarily consistent with official policy, nor with the official imperative as stated in the national 'law for education', the so-called "Law for teaching" (Opplaeringsloven), the set of paragraphs that hold for all public schools in Norway (https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/1998-07-1761#KAPITTEL_1). In 2011 some universities abroad introduced a 'mandatory teacher training course' for all research students (PhD-candidates), regardless of domain. One of these universities was the University of Hong Kong (HKU), where students pay fairly high semester-fees and education thereby is a capitalist commody of huge dimensions. This is worth taking notice of, inasmuch as a teacher candidate who pays a fairly high fee each semester is of direct monetary value to the college itself, whereby the teacher candidate, every candidate, would have protection. In such a sphere the debater against an alliance is safe, and as a consequence free debate takes place. I have seen it. In such a sphere each candidate sees himand herself shielded from the potential threat of aggressive alliances within the 'team', the 'group'. None of these students can be excluded by the 'team', cannot be censured by a socially aggressive alliance in implicitly or even explicitly threatening ways, cannot be bullied into silence by one's 'team', then officially removed when persisting,* 1 in reality unlawfully bullied away from the 'obligatory team work', the vehicle towards exam. This very detail is crucial in a surprising way. It marks the weak joint in the set of methods that have been joined together in the 'free higher education' sphere of all Norwegian, and, I suspect, all Nordic, teacher training. Wherever the fees payable by teacher candidates is kept low, the university sees little monetary loss involved with what I call 'the peer-exclusion-threatmethod' of Norwegian, even Nordic, obligatory 'team-work' style teacher training, a method I say is obviously and patently unlawful in any western democracy, necessarily so, by the logic inherent in any democratically derived set of laws. * 1 Interestingly, the 'team-work' method developed by the most successful of business corporations, Apple, by the late Steve Jobs, depended fully on a strong top leadership that guaranteed for the safety of each team-member. It was when that top leadership failed, and a power-vacuum formed, that a dominant individual in the 'team' that Steve Jobs worked within moved to exclude an individual member of the team, namely Steve Jobs, to the detriment of the entire corporation. In Steve Jobs' notion of 'team-work' ideas rub against ideas, and the top leadership keeps all the members contained which is a key notion so that no contributor of ideas can be excluded by the team, thereby the best idea being allowed to prevail in spite of fierce debate within the team. Social power is irrelevant in such a 'protected and contained team-work' sphere. THAT is where true 'team-work' can happen. The other way of doing it is the fake that must be rooted out before 'team-work' can reliably serve its just purpose, which it must before it can be justifiably used at all. (cf. "Steve Jobs, The Lost Interview", 1995, a documentary showing the full interview that Bob Cringeley did with Steve Jobs in 1995. The interview was thought to be lost forever after the master tape went missing in a shipment, until a vhs copy of it was found in 2012.) A newly formed inter-domain opinion-based voiceand method-police Currently there is a development towards increased domain-external interference in the so-called "didactic practices" of all domains in the university sphere, in all of its faculties and all of its institutes and colleges. It is marketed by the term "didactics", applied in compounds where it attaches itself to whatever science is being taught in the classrooms and lecture halls. Experienced Lecturers must now 'learn' how to teach the way another field in the humanities wants them to teach. They must now teach according to the opinion of an aggressively expanding domain that is now being given police authority over the way other fields teach their fields of science on campus; thereby becoming the interdomain opinion-based voiceand method-police I have sampled within their own courses (UiA, 2008-200; UiO, 2015); a police that, until lately, has been restricted to 'its own' students, but is now aggressively expanding into other fields throughout campus, at the same time as it insulates itself from influence. And here's the thing: It is the same phenomenon of hostile expansion we see in the mandatory so-called 'update-courses' shoved down the throat of Norwegian schoolteachers universally in the last few years, all orchestrated from within the chambers where as the evidence has now proved* 2 learning-theory has been falsified through the falsification of essential quotes* 3 that are being used systematically in the introduction phase and other critical phases of all courses in Pedagogy. The intra-campus expansion of the aggressive humanistic domain has not been decided upon in a democratic manner, only ratified 'in chambers', away from the light of open democratic scrutiny. This is the type of activities that our Minister of Education, Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, allows by not interfering but merely deferring to the aggressive domain itself, allowing 'it' to 'self-regulate' as it wishes. (* 2 Soerfjord 2015, evidence that has not been contradictied, and cannot be opposed by 'other versions' of these essential quotes and paraphrases; * 3 mainly of Jean Piaget) A systemic 'replacement-trick' A charade is taking place throughout Norwegian (even Nordic) teacher education, a charade that lately has raised its stakes, inasmuch as 'Pedagogy' has now 'taken responsibility for' (stolen the responsibility for) the "didactics" of all other scientific domains, or is in the process of doing it. And armed with the word "didactics", which merely means "instruction", they pretend as if only that particular domain knows how to do the thing called "instruction" within higher education, as if all the other domains of the humanities need to be instructed by them, need to align their "didactic practice" according to what THEY want. In spite of the fact that any 'Leturer' by definition is an 'instructor', which is 'one who performs didactics', this particular domain, that of "Pedagogy", has grabbed the power that allows them to control the 'instruction' performed in all the other domains; and they have done it with a false rhetoric supported by a set of falsified quotes which they use consistently in the lecture halls to rationalize themselves. Informing the politicians about this does not seem to help. I did so in 2009, in 2013 and in 2014. They keep collecting the opinions of the consensing majority that the evidence has now convicted, as I have demonstrated. And they keep deferring ("delegating") all matters to the local domains that orchestrate the abuses complained about. They say about themselves that they are "responsible" for all, and the way they see themselves 'responsible' is by way of 'delegating the responsibility of overseeing all' to the very perpetrators of the abuses – cowardice institutionalized and perpetualized, a cowardice that perpetuates the abuses and all the things the rhetoric is designed to hide. Politicians collect complaints against an abusive majority but wait for a vocal majority coalition to form against that majority, absurdly enough, while they keep working for their higher goal: reelection by the votes of the current majority. It is within the CAMPUS, in the campus-activity called "instruction", that the domain of teacher training has gone rampant, developed its unbridled power; performed a campus take-over by demanding that they, the domain that knows 'how to instruct teachercandidates', should have the opportunity to instruct 'higher-education instructors', all of them, in whichever domain on the university campus; so that all other domains now must teach in the manner that only 'teachers of teacher-candidates' supposedly know. THIS is where the whole misery begins. And from the staging of that intra-campus charade, the road is open towards the other rhetorical trap: All experienced schoolteachers (1 st -10 th grade and beyond) must now learn the latest WHIM, must learn "the ways only the teachers of teacher candidates know", at the UiO organized under the 'faculty of educational science' in other words, they must all teach their science in a manner that aligns with the latest WHIM of that domain, rather than with the latest parliament-ratified and -mandated set of principles. The parliament-authored principles, thus, have been hijacked by a MEDIAN ORGAN, a Mediator between the Parliament and the humanistic population. It is a Mediator no one agreed upon democratically, one that therefore has no valid authority it can validly use on campus. Not only dose it not have any scientific authority over experienced teachers. It has absolutely none over the 'instruction' performed in other fields, humanistic or naturalistic, only the false authority it has stolen, which is why it must lie to protect that authority. And lie it therefore does, as I have proven (Sørfjord 2015). This is the Mediator-of Parliamentauthored principles that the Minister of Education nonetheless wants to use as a methodpolice against all experienced teachers of children, all of whom must return for 'reprogramming', if they want to keep their job. Even scientifically it is a mistake. The problems that arise from this all have their provenience in the domain-politics of an "educational science" domain that manipulates both the lecture hall and the quotes presented therein (cf. Sørfjord 2015). These factual relations represent the political opposite of the political view officially ratified in the Norwegian parliament; blatant civil disobedience against core principles that our Parliament has decided upon, announced and formulated as paragraphs of the law. IN OPEN SESSION I openly faced the Minister – who openly evaded I confronted the Minister of Education (Torbjørn Røe Isaksen) personally with this in the evening of March 17, face to face from a seat in the audience of an Oslo symposium on education, called 'Magasinet Live', arranged and internet-tv-recorded by the mentioned newspaper called Dagbladet (Daily Paper). I was the first to be handed the microphone in the 30 minute Q&A session that took place towards the end. I said:* 4 "I am a researcher of teacher education, and my research has uncovered a systematic laying of the grounds for abuse among teacher candidates that necessarily affects the ability of teacher candidates to recognize bullying and understand what bullying is, and therefore necessarily affects the problem of bullying among children in our primaryand secondary schools. What they are doing in all obligatory group-work (teamwork) is they let each individual team member's continued membership in 'the team' depend on the benevolence of 'the team', 4-5 classmates. In obligatory teamwork this is necessarily unlawful. One does the exact same thing in the practical training venue schools (which the teacher candidates are being sent to during these courses). It constitutes an enormous pressure towards (in the direction of) uniform thinking ('equal-thinking') that is the opposite of the official, politically ratified policy. It constitutes civil disobedience against what Parliament and national Government has decided. This is a hornet's (wasp's) nest that Røe Isaksen (the Minister) ought to stick both hands into, and ought to have done long ago. I sent a report on this to his office a year ago and received a nice letter from him in return." Minister Røe Isaksen's non-reply was merely "I don't remember you", and he then derailed rhetorically into some generalisation, as if to fill the vocal void he was expected to fill with sound, and almost any sound would do. I then added, on top of my voice since the microphone had been collected: "This is a dimension in the debate that has been missing all along.!" – implicitly: "Can we not put it in?" Every single contribution by that audience of academics (teachers from kindergarten and up) was a similar comment, each one a concrete example of my principleand notionoriented comment, all implicitly the same rhetorical question: What do we do about the institutionalized pressure to THINK ALIKE ? *4 My translation of: "Jeg er forsker på laererutdanning, og min forskning har avdekket en metodisk og systematisk tilrettelegging for maktmisbruk blant laererkandidater som nødvendigvis påvirker laererkandidatenes evne til å gjenkjenne mobbing og forstå hva mobbing er, og derfor nødvendigvis påvirker mobbeproblemene blant barn i grunnskolen. Det man gjør er at man i alt obligatorisk gruppearbeid lar hvert enkeltindivids fortsatte medlemsskap i 'gruppen' hele tiden avhenge av 'gruppens', 4-5 klassekameraters, velvije. I obligatorisk gruppearbeid er dette nødvendigvis ulovlig. Det samme gjør man i praksisskolene. Det utgjør et enormt trykk mot (i retning av) like-tenking som er det motsatte av offisiell politikk. Det utgjør sivil ulydighet mot det storting og regjering har vedtatt. Dette er et vepsebol som Røe Isaksen burde stikke begge hendene inn i, og burte ha gjort for lenge siden. Jeg sendte rapport til hans departement for over ett år siden om dette, og fikk et fint brev tilbake." Det implisitte spørsmålet her er bl.a.: 'Kan vi få denne dimensjonen inn i debatten?'. Og da Røe Isaksen svarte med å si at han ikke husker meg, la jeg til, uten mikrofon, men hørbart i hele salen: "Dette er en dimensjon i debatten som er utelatt og har vaert det hele tida." Implisitt: "Kan vi få denne dimensjonen inn i debatten?" Letter from an angry Danish lecturer: A rather aggressive email from a Danish university Lecturer, recently, forced me to think through and verbalize a chain of thought that until now has been lurking behind a veil, mainly for fear of being cast into the deep category-well called 'conspiracy-theories'. It was the late Gore Vidal* 5 who freed reason from the noise of slogans also in this matter when he, in the matter of politicians being bound to the expectations of their sponsors among the extremely rich, most of them members of financial corporations, the tiny fraction of people who have harvested most of the wealth available in the world, says this about "the ruling class": "They do not have to conspire, (since) they all think alike". The underlying issue in this case is how the members of the 'ruling campus-group' all come to 'think alike'. I will of course respect the assumption of privacy that even hostile emailers harbor in their heart, but I must quote the most essential part of the Lecturer's response to my broadcast elicitation for potential interest in the matters of quote-falsification and the unlawful nature of the methods used in Norwegian teacher training.* 6 (* 5 cf. the documentary film Gore Vidal, The United States of Amnesia, 2013; * 6 methods that are more than likely to be a pattern shared by all the Nordic nations Norway , Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Iceland and possibly a world-wide pattern, shared by many, most or all nations where the fees payable by students in higher education is low enough for higher education to be referred to as 'free of charge' or virtually so.) The Danish lecturer's response (his email was in English) to my broadcast claim that this compound matter indeed is relevant even to lecturers in a humanistic science field other than 'the Learning Sciences', is as follows: "I properly don't care if ...(somebody) make fake or fraud citations since we are obviously not in the same field." What follows is my answer. It is important because this is the compound context that anyone who wishes to improve any of this must deal with, any one who wishes to deal with any one of the particle issues within that context, whether it be the quoteand citation fraud, the unlawful methods, which are also human-rights-abuses, or the issue of teachingstrategies and -methods in public schools running askew laboratory-style-wise, in a rather hopeless manner which the Secretary of the 'National Association of Schools' (Skolenes Lands-forbund, SL), Chris Gøran Holstad, refers to allegorically as a Frankensteinian-style manner, pseudolaboratoric by the standard of the learning-sciences: The chain of thought: Unless you are outside of the 'field' of science as such, this matter is highly relevant even to the 'minding-my-own-business' kind, the ones who do not worry about the suffering of all the victims of the false quotes used for private purposes related to power and the securing of monopoly for one's own ideas, thereby corrupting an entire industry. This is an issue that detrimentally affects the younger generation, everyone that anyone may know in that generation, and everyone that anyone ought to care for among the young. And it affects you the Lecturer in another domain in another and more direct way too, because that domain, the domain whose consensing operators daily and systematically falsify the Piaget quotes is now entering all other university domains, and is forcing its opinions* 7 about 'didactics' on them; and all experienced school-teachers now have to go through re-training programs just to keep their jobs, pass courses supported by false quotes, courses that disseminate a mere opinion about teaching that has no more learningscientific value than most other opinions on teaching – a set of prominent characteristics being the 'forced consensus'-gospel and the 'simultaneous-chatter-style' didactics, where the teacher every 5 or 10 minutes tells the class to 'discuss with the person sitting next to you for 2 minutes', and in each collaborate endeavor commands the 'discussion-partners' to always 'seek agreement' (or even 'reach agreement') with respect to whatever is being discussed, and where so-called 'didactics-specialists' now, in teacher training, say "whole class reading exercise...We no longer do that"* 8 , 'specialists' who naturally see no solution to the wide-spread problems of 1)'a generally worsened attention disorder' in the classroom, 2)'a seemingly contageous student shyness in the exercise of individuals performing classroom presentations' and 3)increasingly 'poor reading-skills' among students. All three problems, naturally, are directly caused by the allegorically referred to Frankensteinian-style pseudolaboratoric manner of "de-licencing" - 'announcing as invalid' the teaching-qualifications of any school-teacher, experienced or not, if he or she declines the 'opportunity' to be 're-trained' by the agents of whims not ratified democratically, in Parliament, whims like chatter-pedagogy, consensus-pedagogy, 'anti-whole-class-readingexcercises pedagogy' and 'anti-whole-class-debate pedagogy', all of which are either contrary to §1 in 'the Law for Teaching' (https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/1998-07-1761#KAPITTEL_1) or the opposite of officially proclaimed political aims, or both. But who says there is a causal relation between the 'modern' set of methods I mention and the three problems, numbered 1-3? I say so. I, a PhD in Pedagogy (that is, in the international science called 'the Learning-Sciences'), say so. Students who don't practice reading together in whole class are not really learning together, not the way Vygotsky, the great authority on 'learning together', meant. Lisbeth M. Brevik at the UiO Institute for Teacher training and School research (ILS) says the reason why "we don't do whole class reading exercise anymore" is that "it causes bullying". But I say that, on the contrary, grades and test-results are even more humiliating for the low-performing individuals, and the lack of whole class reading excercise will guaranteed cause a lowering of reading-skills universally in the whole class, save for, perhaps, among the best of the readers, and that exception is not even certain. These are the WHIMS that DOMINATE universally wherever the holders of such are made into a scientifically illegitimate didactic authority figure. It is a 'voiceand methodpolice' that is now in full operation in Norway, and, I suspect, in all of the Nordic nations. Secondly, who says there is a causal connection between an unhealthy learning environment for teacher-candidates and school bullying? I say so. The former produces the blindness that necessarily allows the latter (Sørfjord 2015). The issue of scientific fraud within the Norwegian faculties of teacher education and research affects our generations in a profound and lasting manner. Lastly, but most seriously, the didactics in the teacher training is affected. It is now allowing, even encouraging, bullying and unconctrolled social competition between Norway's teacher candidates, environments that are now saturated with bullying, sampled by myself. And that bullying, which teacher candidates are forced to accept, makes the same teacher candidates blind to bullying among children. This veritably poisons an entire generation of teachers, more than one generation; it has been doing it for perhaps 30 years or more. The compound context I have described explains HOW we came to be a culture of schoolbullying. Every individual engaged in education and that includes you, a lecturer in whatever field has a duty to plug in and become aware of this, then react to it, one key notion being: 'Bullying among teacher candidates makes teacher candidates blind to bullying' even to the bullying among children. That is one huge collateral damage, one I say is unacceptable. This whole thing needs to be stopped; if not by reasoning, then by some form of revolution. * 7 Lisbeth M. Brevik (http://www.uv.uio.no/ils/personer/vit/lisbbr/index.html) in the Institute for Teacher training and School research (Institutt for Laererutdanning og Skoleforskning ILS ) at the UiO faculty of educational science (undervisningsvitenskapelig fakultet, uv) is one of these agents of 'ruling opinion', enforcers of whims that rest on falsified quotes, conjecture and consensus under the pending threat of exclusion by one's peers, the evidence for which I have sampled myself, empirically. * 8 Direct quote from Lisbeth M. Brevik in her oral evaluation of myself at a practicevenue school, following an English lesson in which I had arranged for lots of whole class reading excercise. Lisbeth M. Brevik had been called upon by the ILS-administration at the UiO after the previous 'specialist' they sent to aka 'overhear' my teaching-'excercise' (Mr. Øystein Gilje http://www.uv.uio.no/ils/personer/vit/oystegi/index.html) failed to find much wrong with my teaching only few days before. I, it so happened, was the only individual among the 12 teacher candidates at this particular teaching-practice venue school (Flåtestad Skole, just beyond the city limit south of Oslo) that was subject to this form of perpetual non -ratified by, logically contrary to, the law as a whole ad hoc extra-examination aka 'overhearing', which is how these faculties and institutes of Pedagogy, in cooperation with the employer's sphere at the practice venues, bully out anyone who disagrees with them, especially those who disagree with the perpetually systematic rendition of falsified quotes (Mr. Gilje's only comment to me immediately after I taught the lession was "Vel blåst", which means something like "Well done", which I have on audio tape). The scientifically rogue self-regulating regulator of opinions, in this case the UiO Institute for Teacher-training and School-research (Institutt for Laererutdanning og Skoleforskning, ILS) could not live with that, naturally, and had to send someone to finish me off. That was Miss Lisbeth M. Brevik, who still performs her special form of 'specialist' treatment within the UiO, where consensus-servants operating with mindand voice-policing authority are currently shaping Norwegian so-called "didactics" according to goals that were never agreed upon in Parliament. (Lisbeth M. Brevik's non-scientific slandering of my teaching practice was audio-taped for research purposes.) It is a university leadership, faculty leadership and institute leadership that itself eludes democratic influence, who practices the principle of 'exclusion' where parliament has mandated they teach teacher candidates in a manner that enables them to teach to children the principles of 'inclusion', 'tolerance', 'democracy', 'equal rights', 'solidarity', 'ethics', 'multiplicity of ideas' (intellectual liberty) and "a scientific perspective" (§1in the 'Law for teaching', Norw: 'Lov om grunnskolen og den videregående opplaeringen', abbreviated to "Opplaeringsloven": 'The Law for teaching'). The UiO institute for teacher training and school research (ILS) even profess the idea that this particular Norwegian set of 'laws for teaching' (Opplaeringsloven) "isn't valid in teacher training" (a claim sampled by myself in the UiO lecture hall), as if that law does not explicitly dictate the very principles that are to be practiced during teacher training. In other words: the paragraph on the teaching of "a scientific perspective" to children dictates the imperative of systematic teaching ofand practice of that very 'scientific perspective' to and among teacher candidates, in the entire sphere of teacher training, in every part of it; as well as the systematic practice of all the other principles commanded by that same law: tolerance, et cetera, in all phases of all teacher training. In my attendance at the mentioned practice venue (Flåtestad), partially undercover, I engaged the whole class (7 th -9 th grade) in whole class discussion on principles that include 'tolerance' and 'democracy' whenever mentioned explicitly or implicitly in the textbook, a practice which the 'responsible' teacher herself observed and denounced, before filing a special report claiming 'doubt in the candidate', which triggers the ad-hoc perpetual extra-examination-procedure until enough 'mistakes' have been collected and filed, all of which of course is pure bullying, totalitarian abuse of institutional power over scientific facts, ethics and law. Specifically, it is the trading of rights-removing services between the institutions of teacher training and the work environment represented by the practical training venues, from kindergarten to 10 th grade and beyond. This particular female teacher aka practice guide's established practice was strictly two-fold: 'debate with one's learning partner' ('the student sitting next to you') and, literally, the 'google'and wikipedia-based vacuuming for answers to specific research tasks. Having a PhD among the teacher candidates when she herself is a non-PhD with 'established' practical methods proved to be a task to which she was not equipped, not professionally and not ethically. She, incidentally, is among the individuals who dominate the work-environment at that 7 th to 10 th grade school, dominate by strictly social means that always include a pending threat of rumor-fabrication and the loss of one's job. This specific undercover mission of mine was not performed to prove a point, it was performed as a part of my empirical research within Meta-Pedagogy. The mission was simply the same as in 2008: to collect samples of the experience of attending these courses of pedagogy while behaving with scientific, ethical and personal integrity, and in accordance with the principles dictated for this particular sphere by law. My conclusion, as a learning-environment design expert, educated internationally, is that these Norwegian courses in pedagogy constitute pedagogically and socially unhealthy meta-pedagogical learning environment designs. I suspect the illness is a Nordic one. Dr. Kai Soerfjord (Sørfjord) (PhD of Ed.Sci and of Logic) Oslo, Norway ksorfjord@gmail.com ksorfjord@yahoo.com