Social and Emotional Learning

A History Lesson

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has been floating in the secular education waters for a while now, and all 50 states have SEL mandated standards.1 The term itself originated in 1994 in a meeting of teachers, psychologists, and philanthropists, who formed the organization Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) at the same time.2 One of the founders was Dr. David J. Sluyter, a man who at various times served as vice president, president, and CEO of a nonprofit called the Fetzer Institute.3 The Fetzer Institute proceeded to help fund the first book on SEL, published in 1997.4 It also hosted the meeting where the term was coined and CASEL was founded.5 Before diving into SEL, it’s important to quickly take a look at the Fetzer Institute and its founder, John Fetzer.

John Fetzer was a successful radio entrepreneur in Michigan who had a range of business and philanthropic interests. He owned a major league baseball team for a while and expanded his media holdings into television before selling everything off and using the funds to establish the Fetzer Institute.6 Fetzer came from a Christian background, raised largely as a Methodist and later a Seventh-day Adventist. However, like many others before and since, he went to college, found evolution, had no answers, and left the faith.7 He spent most of the rest of his life as a nominal Presbyterian, but exploring all manner of spiritualist ideas, including seances and speaking with the dead. He had a habit of making decisions using a Ouija board.8 Fetzer was a devotee of New Age theosophist Alice Bailey.9 Bailey, who Fetzer never met, was an occult mystic who believed she interacted with beings she called “ascended masters,” with one particular “master” being a supposed Tibetan spirit. According to Bailey’s10 autobiography, the Tibetan wrote the following: “[F]or all are disciples from the humblest aspirant up to and beyond the Christ Himself.”11 Fetzer thought so highly of Bailey that he would close and open meetings with her “Great Invocation,” which explicitly mentions the “masters.”12^, 13

Bailey was also a globalist, writing “Mankind is not ready for some super-government, nor can it yet provide the unselfish and trained statesmen that such a government would require. As yet, there are more seeds of danger in this concept than there are of helpfulness. Nevertheless, it is a dream which will some day materialize.”14 In other words, Bailey saw that the world could not unite in her lifetime, but dreamed of a day when it would. She further wrote:

The unification to which the forward looking people aspire does not involve the neglect of any part, but it does involve the care and nurture of each part in order that it may contribute to the well being of the entire organism. It involves, for instance, the right government and proper development of every national unit so that it can adequately perform its international duties and thus form part of a world brotherhood of nations. This concept does not even involve the formation of a world state, but it does involve the development of a universal public consciousness which realises [sic] the unity of the whole, and thus produces the determination that each must be for all and all for each as it has been said.15

While Bailey does not call for a single world government directly, she envisions a single global mind, with everyone having the same ideas about how society should work. That is the point of a universal public consciousness: pure public conformity to whatever the goal of the state is. It should surprise no one that many of Bailey’s acolytes have found a home in the United Nations, which, coincidentally, is also where her publishing house is located.16 Fetzer wanted the exact same thing as Bailey, using almost identical language. According to a Wilson, Fetzer’s goal was a complete spiritual transformation of the world.17 However, to Fetzer this involved the “evolution of global consciousness.”18 In other words, Fetzer, following Bailey, was trying to achieve the same thing that Marxists want: a global hive mind. The goal is complete thought conformity to the objectives of the collective, as determined by the few elite. This background is highly relevant given the influence the Fetzer Institute wields. Since 2015 alone, the Fetzer Institute has given over 8.6 million dollars to SEL based projects.19 This is all important to keep in mind when we discuss what SEL is.20

SEL: The Good (little), the Bad (much), and the Ugly (all)

According to CASEL, “SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.”21 Most of that sounds very good. We all want kids to control their emotions, have healthy relationships, and achieve goals. However, on the very same page, just a few lines down, CASEL says this about SEL: “SEL advances educational equity.”22 The use of “equity” here should send up giant red flags, because equity means equality of outcomes. In other words, if student A gets a good grade, so must student B. It does not matter if student A studied very hard and student B slept through every class, they both must get the same grade. Of course, this is biblically unjust, but there is more.

CASEL offers webinars in “equity and social justice”23 along with multiple other, similar webinars. Social justice itself is antithetical to the Scriptures, and it gets far worse than mere equity. One of the key concepts students are meant to learn in SEL is global interdependence, aka globalism.24 A division of UNESCO, a United Nations subdivision, has developed a whole curriculum based on SEL to create global citizens.25 Given that there is no (formal) global government—yet—there can be no such thing as a global citizen, but Marxists and occultists love trying to manifest things they want into reality.

As part of the SEL package, CASEL offers something called transformative SEL (tSEL), which functions like a natural extension of SEL’s focus on equity. One of the core practices of tSEL includes “examining current and historical events; social norms; prejudices and biases; and how issues of race, class, and culture impact our society.”26 If that sounds suspiciously like critical race theory (aka Marxism), that’s because it is. One of the major points of critical race theory is that there are systemic biases in society that impact social norms and make it much harder for oppressed minorities to succeed.27 This is precisely what SEL expects students to believe.28 Some teachers are even open about using SEL to teach children to recognize their “whiteness” and how they are complicit in racism.29

Another important goal of the SEL package is something called emotional intelligence. Sometimes abbreviated EQ—Harvard defines it as “the ability to identify and regulate our own emotions, to recognize the emotions of other people and feel empathy toward them, and to use these abilities to communicate effectively and build healthy, productive relationships with others” (emphasis added).30 There is very little difference between EQ and SEL, except SEL is taught in schools while EQ is meant more for adults. Unsurprisingly, the primary promoter of EQ, Daniel Goleman, is also a founder of CASEL.31 Goleman is also influenced significantly by Tibetan Buddhism and spiritualism, showing great partiality toward the Dalai Lama.32

A common denominator here is the use of the term “empathy.” According to Merriam-Webster, empathy means “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.”33 The emphasis is on feelings, both of an individual’s own and those around him. In making this appeal to feelings, SEL and EQ both violate the scriptural admonition not to follow one’s heart, because the heart is wicked (Jeremiah 17:9). Much of what is wrong with SEL is its focus on the emotional state of the child. Feeling sorry for person X because of their situation should not greatly influence any decisions in responding to person X. Suppose a judge were to exonerate a murder suspect, not because the man was innocent, but because the man said he had been depressed and needed to let his feelings out. Such a judge would obviously be unjust. Yet an appeal to such a ludicrous form of empathy for the depressed man would ask us to do just as the hypothetical judge did. And this is not purely hypothetical. The Edmonton police were forced to publicly apologize for posting a composite sketch of a suspect, not because they had the wrong man, but because they made people feel bad.34 A prosecutor in LA was suspended not for ethical violations but for using a so-called trans person’s “deadname” when discussing the murder charges against said “trans” person.35 Apparently, the feelings of “trans” people trump the truth, even when said “trans” person is a convicted child molester, with a lengthy rap sheet, who is charged with beating a man to death with a rock.

Worse still than the appeals to empathy and Marxism is SEL’s use as a data mining tool on your children. Proponents of SEL openly call for educators to monitor students’ online activity, at school and at home, to “enhance SEL.”36 Among the proposed items to monitor are email, social media, web searches, and web-based applications. It is unclear if the technology allows teachers to read social media posts, messages, and emails. Even if the technology does not allow reading of students’ messages, being able to track students’ social interactions is a massive invasion of privacy and goes hand in hand with SEL. SEL advocates encourage surveying students for various supposed competencies. One company aligned with CASEL to provide a list of free questions to ask the students and track changes over time, using their proprietary software.37 As part of this tracking, the program suggests periodic one-on-one meetings with the student to discuss changes. Some of the recommended questions for the survey include:

• How well do people at your school understand you as a person?
• How much do you matter to others at this school?
• How often did you keep your temper in check?
• How carefully did you listen to other people’s points of view?
• How much did you care about other people’s feelings?
• To what extent were you able to disagree with others without starting an argument?
• During class, how hard do you try to understand what your teachers are feeling?
• When your teachers seem to be in a worse mood than usual, how hard do you try to understand the reasons why?38

Notice that the focus is on feelings and other points of view. The assumption here is everyone’s feelings and all points of view are valid at all times. Considering a few scenarios, we can see that this sounds nice but is incorrect. If a girl with an eating disorder, who is literally starving herself to death, believes she needs to lose weight, is her point of view valid? Of course not! If we accept her point of view as valid and do not medically intervene, she will probably starve herself to death and anyone who encouraged her actions would be complicit in her death. Yet these questions assume that we must respect her point of view and allow her to starve herself to death. And these questions and others like them will be asked to your children regularly, every year, throughout their school career. Then, in the one-on-one meetings, even more data will be collected and reported.

Let’s take a quick hypothetical here to show you just how easily this can be abused. Suppose a particularly well-read teenage boy objects to his female teacher pushing the LGBTQ agenda onto the class. He argues, correctly, that boys and girls are not interchangeable and cannot become one another. His teacher marks this down as starting an argument. In his next one-on-one meeting, his teacher browbeats him in an attempt to change his mind. When he does not change his mind, he is marked down for failing to listen to other’s points of view or care about their feelings, or both. When he justifiably loses his temper at this, that too goes on his record. All his other teachers hear that he has a temper issue, and they pile on. The student gets frustrated with school and stops caring. This too is recorded. When he graduates, if he doesn’t drop out, his SEL record could potentially even follow him into the workplace.

Educators are already advocating for SEL being critical to career success.39 And the Department of Education is tracking this data to predict the child’s “future behavior and interest.”40 Put those two things together and you get the Soviet Orgburo, which picked placement for all party officials. It is easy to see SEL scores and competencies being used by a central planning commission to decide that your son who loves music should go into a factory instead of a conservatory because he refused to bow to the LGBTQ agenda.

There are also some teacher reflection questions included in the data, which are loaded with problematic DEI ideas. They include:

• How easy do you find interacting with students at your school who are from a different cultural background than your own?
• How easy would it be for you to teach a class with groups of students from very different religions from each other?
• When a sensitive issue of diversity arises in class, how easily can you think of strategies to address the situation?41

Apparently indoctrinating students is not enough. The teachers must be indoctrinated too. But then this follows the Marxist theme of SEL. There must be a universal hive mind for Marxism to work; there must be a universal hive mind for SEL to work. It is for this reason that the World Economic Forum wants to take SEL beyond schools and introduce it to parents and children’s extracurricular activities.42 This desire is in-line with Bailey, who wanted indoctrinating education to be from womb to tomb.43

Just imagine how ridiculous introducing feelings and empathy into extracurriculars will be. After every goal, run, or touchdown, are both teams expected to pause and talk about how each side feels when they score a point or, at the end, when they win or lose? Do we take a break between songs at recitals to discuss how LGBTQ composer X must have felt when he/she/they/it composed the piece? If parents decide (as they should) to reject SEL, will the school/nurse/doctor decide that they are a threat to the child’s welfare and try to get their kids taken away? These are scenarios that need to be discussed, not only because they show how ridiculous SEL is, but because they might happen. Some teachers have already been fired for daring to question SEL, even in traditionally conservative states.44

SEL takes valuable classroom time away from important subjects, like math and science, to hand it over to what amounts to amateur psychology. A sample lesson given in Promoting Social and Emotional Learning suggests telling the story of a boy separated from his parents at a mall. It asked students to evaluate the boy’s feelings as well as potential consequences. Students also were prompted to share their own experiences of being separated from their parents.45 Again, notice the heavy emphasis on feelings and experiences, not logic and reason. Also, note that students are encouraged to share information that would probably be best kept between themselves and their parents. It begs the question of what public education is for, as this has nothing to do with any important classroom subject and usurps parental responsibility for the child’s emotional health.

Even if SEL is granted every benefit of the doubt and assumed just to want to help children learn proper social behavior, that is not the business of the school. Again, that is the business of the parents. Even in a fallen world, parental abdication does not justify the government through schools inserting themselves where they do not belong. The state does not own your child. God gave children to their parents to raise in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and most have way more vested interest in their child than a disembodied curriculum and government program.

American public education is almost universally acknowledged to be abysmal. Statistics show that 65% of fourth-grade students can’t read proficiently, and these statistics don’t improve. In eighth grade, 66% of students can’t read proficiently.46 In the US, 48 million adults can’t function above a third-grade level in any subject!47 In a nation that struggles to read, can barely do math, and writes abysmally, taking classroom time away from these subjects to do data mining and armchair psychology is ludicrous, particularly when there is a need for people to fill STEM jobs.

Verdict: Evil

SEL sounds benign on the surface but, lurking just out of sight, is perhaps one of the most dangerous ideologies ever to permeate American education. The goal is to cultivate values in your children that are not representative of your values. John Fetzer wanted to spiritually transform the world. Through SEL, he might do just that. If you control education, you can control the values of students. That means you can manipulate their values to match the values necessary for a new world order, or in Fetzer’s terms, a new age. Christians must oppose this infiltration of occult Marxism into the curriculum. It is a malignantly evil tumor that turns children into lab rats for globalist interests and at best is a distracting curriculum that fills their minds with the thought that an institution cares for them perhaps more than their parents. But ultimately, it is a godless occult propaganda to usher in a spiritualist New Age.