Making a prima facie case for home education is becoming easier with each passing day. Theodore Brameld’s reconstructionism has left the public schools desperate to restore some self-worth to its teachers and students. This restoration is often attempted by glomming on to the latest fad pushed by educationalists. During the past few years, a new trend has surfaced as Social-Emotional Learning, or SEL for short.
The mover and shaker for SEL is Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) based out of Chicago, Illinois. The goal of CASEL is simple enough: “We are driven by a vision of all children and adults as self-aware, caring, responsible, engaged, and lifelong learners who work together to achieve their goals.” According to CASEL, “an education that promotes SEL has a positive impact on a wide range of outcomes, including academic performance, healthy relationships, mental wellness, and more.” Of course it is common sense to know that being emotionally well-adjusted will have the above outcomes. With such lofty and noble motives, who can possibly object to this instruction being used in the classrooms across the country?
But what so often begins as a benign experiment or trendy pipe dream in education ends up being co-opted by reconstructionists and Marxists. While SEL began as a help for individual students who were struggling with social and emotional adjustments, the program has morphed into a strategy to transform the collective. Unfortunately, wherever it is implemented, SEL slithers through the school to push for “social justice,” a Woke Alphabet newspeak for “there are oppressors, and there are victims.”
After reading several articles—pro and con—about SEL, I see a recurring theme. Liberal supporters of SEL whine about conservatives preventing and blocking a good thing because of their political bias. But the truth of the matter is that it is always the progressives who start the fight by injecting their pernicious and anti-cultural ideas into what began as politically neutral materials and instruction. Neutral is unacceptable for progressives. According to Paulo Freire, a Marxist who made “critical pedagogy (teaching)” fashionable, the public classroom is to be used for social action and involvement, not for academics, pushing towards transforming society. Of course, Brameld said the same thing nearly sixty years ago. In his Education as Power, Brameld stresses the duty of schools is to train students to be citizens of a one-world democracy. There is nothing new under the sun.
While defending SEL, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela with CNN opined that children need to “engage each other on the thornier curricular questions of race and sex that adults keep failing to figure out.” Ah, straight from Plato who believed moms and dads made poor parents, because they pass down to their children bad habits and thinking. Plato’s solution was to abolish the family unit and allow the State to raise the children in common. To the State, parents are always the problem. The Marxists and reconstructionists who hijacked SEL for their sorry agenda represent more examples of the long train of abuses found in the public schools that have been foisted upon all Americans, young and old.
THE DUNCE'S CORNER 