The Human Condition: S.E.L.

By Daniel Schnee on April 27, 2022.

Though I have been an educator for decades, it is only now that I am seeing Social – Emotional Learning (SEL) really coming into the public’s awareness, due to various public school controversies in the United States.

SEL is a form of education that seeks to build various interpersonal skills within students as they learn traditional subjects such as math and social studies. In doing so the students are meant to develop a positive self-image, regulate emotions and behaviour, develop compassion for others and so on. Through this the students are meant to have a better foundation overall for academic and personal achievement.

In theory this is an excellent idea: educating students on the benefits of improved social and emotional intelligence … if this was the actual intention (or result). But as it currently stands, SEL is deeply flawed, for a number of reasons.

The Collaborative For Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), the organization that began formulating and promoting SEL, is actively engaged in helping “address various forms of inequity” (as stated on their website). In 2020 they redefined SEL objectives in order to “offer clarity around what is necessary to achieve the vision for SEL … particularly for those who have historically been marginalized.”

This is an open declaration of a core social justice philosophy that assumes historically marginalized people require social-emotional education. Plains Cree people, for example, value interconnectivity with nature and each other, with happiness found in the balance. CASEL assumes Cree children enter school lacking an understanding of these values; that their parents have not taught them such values.

As schools are federally regulated, governmental norms for education would, by necessity, end up creating a standardized set of “correct” attitudes and values to measure the students with, though it is illegal to promote theology in schools. As such a young Sikh girl for example would be required to endure a progressive values education; violating her right to freedom of conscience in the classroom. And if good values are equal in all their manifestations and applications, then why is CASEL’s curriculum necessary? If some values are better than others, then who chooses them? CASEL… elite progressive educators. This is active politicking.

As one who has taught anywhere from elementary school presentations to full-on university classes I have yet to meet a group of students that required a uniform values education, especially from me. It is not my job to give a student a C- because they demonstrated mild narcissism in my Japanese grammar tutorial. I am an anthropologist, not a clergyman.

Maybe Claire Lampen said it best in her THE CUT article, “What Is the Conservative Beef With ‘Social-Emotional Learning’?” when she wrote: “the encouragement of emotional processing seems valuable-to-crucial if the goal is to avoid raising a generation of little sociopaths.” Sociopathy is an antisocial personality disorder, treatable with medication. Thus Lampen is suggesting that, without SEL, your children will literally be mentally ill, thanks to you the parents.

Classrooms are places where all should indeed feel safe to learn and be themselves. But as such SEL feels more like a social engineering initiative based on government-approved progressive politics. Math class is not meant to be activism. Parents, beware.

Dr. Daniel Schnee is a cultural anthropologist and jazz drummer

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