Social Emotional Learning is known as “progressive education’s greatest victory.” SEL focuses less on academic content and more on student values and behaviors. The goals of SEL are not properly defined and raise significant questions about what is really being promoted in our schools. It was popularized in the early 90’s by George Lucas, best known for creating such classics as Star Wars and Indiana Jones and founding Lucas Films and Industrial Light & Magic. The problem is that SEL focuses on EMPATHY rather than CRITICAL THINKING; and CONFLICT RESOLUTION rather than COMPUTER CODING. Empathy is a euphemism for surrender your principles at the door and be submissive to others feelings even if they conflict with your core beliefs.
In 1991, The George Lucas Educational Foundation was established as a nonprofit to “encourage innovation in schools.” The Foundation’s content is available under the brand Edutopia.
https://www.edutopia.org/video/exploring-perceptions-about-identity-through-self-portraits
“The most powerful person in your life, is the person who tells you who you are.” – line from “Good Will Hunting” Identity politics is very powerful and exploitive behavioral conditioning. It is like a computer hacker getting root level access to a server. Historically, it was family and religion that helped form identity. Progressives want to end both of those, and usurp the creation of “identity”. But … it will be “group identity” … and they will be legion.
Culturally Responsive Social Emotional LearningReality: CRT is a pedagogy that empowers all students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Most important is the fact that CRT is about the intellectual, social, and emotional foundations of learning.
Nationally, in 2018, federal, state, and local governments invested more than $30 billion annually to implement SEL in K-12 public schools. The level of expenditure is surprising considering tight public school budgets and the lack of any reliable, objective, researched-based method to measure or assess a student’s personality, values, and mindsets as SEL proponents admit. Proponents of SEL call for focusing less on academic content and knowledge in schools, and more on student attributes, mindsets, values, and behaviors. Not only are the goals of SEL ill-defined, but they also raise significant, unanswered questions about what attitudes should be promoted. In the example below, notice how “brain breaks, recess, daydreaming, sleep, and meditation (religion)” are all good for learning. It seems to imply the less time you spend learning, the more you learn.
SEL is insulting to parents. Most parents teach their children well when it comes to behavior. Children come to school curious and eager to learn and they have good behavior. Why are schools boards and politicians making it seem otherwise? One study by the BBC found that, “misplaced empathy can be bad, leading to exhaustion and apathy, and preventing you from helping the very people you need to. Worse, people’s empathetic tendencies can even be harnessed to manipulate them into aggression and cruelty.” Here’s the thing: the emotions of others are contagious. If our empathetic “immune system” isn’t robust, then the boundaries between ourselves and those we serve may become very blurry. And at some point, we may not be able to feel the difference between what someone else is experiencing and what is happening in our own bodies. We feel it all.