SEL - The Gateway Drug to CRT and Worse
Under the friendly guise of Social Emotional Learning, our children are being used as guinea pigs to achieve cultural Marxism, and everyone’s in on it.
From this past week’s news cycle, you’d think the tide has started to turn. Netflix defended Dave Chappelle over woke protestors. A Loudoun County School Board member resigned after backlash over the Board’s cover up of an alleged rape of a girl (confirmed by a rape kit) in her school’s girls’ bathroom by a boy in a skirt. But just like all things derived from the DEI industrial complex – like Natasha Henstridge in Species, all things woke quickly disguise themselves in the most enticing form. Hold our masks while we explain. Just kidding, we don’t wear masks.
What is SEL – Really?
If you recall from a prior Substack, SEL is the intersection of: (1) self-awareness; (2) self-management; (3) social awareness; (4) relationship skills; and (5) responsible decision making. Author James Lindsay explains that SEL was originally meant for children struggling with social emotional aspects getting in the way of their learning achievements. SEL has since been taken out of its original context about a child’s social awareness of her circumstances and transformed into how our children fit and feel in oppressed/oppressor power dynamics.
The DEI industrial complex argues that the way our children feel and have experienced their oppression/dominance affects and interrupts their learning such that educational programs need to be remade from the ground up to enact “equity.” “Equity” is not equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome. SEL in its new reimagined scope is language coding meant to create deep insecurity in young children so they are more receptive to indoctrination. It destroys their innocence by exposing them to mature and developmentally inappropriate concepts like victim/oppressor dynamics, gender ideology, and explicit, constant sexuality. Just look at these examples provided for elementary children:
Does your ten-year old, who still believes in the tooth fairy, need to be sexualized and bombarded with terms like bisexual and pansexual?
Make no mistake about it – SEL is being used to target even our youngest children. If you are using cartoons and cute whales to make a point about sexy-time, your audience is too young.
Transformative SEL
This new SEL virus – “Transformative SEL,” is “a process whereby young people and adults build strong, respectful, and lasting relationships that facilitate co-learning to critically examine root causes of inequity, and to develop collaborative solutions that lead to personal, community and societal well-being.” Split infinitive aside, this means SEL invades every avenue of our schools to further “social justice” aka racial retribution according to the Woke Bible.
(Figure courtesy of Parents Defending Education)
For example, in Transformative SEL, responsible decision-making (the fifth element of SEL) no longer refers to the individual but to the collective with “ethical responsibility, distributive justice, collective well-being.” Distributive justice is the equal allocation of resources with the intent to produce equal outcomes – just more coded language to describe Marxism.
Dangerous Coordination
Is our assessment too strong? Consider for a moment the extent of the DEI industrial complex spanning from our schools to search firms, DEI consultants, and NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools). It turns out this coordination stretches even further to Big Tech with talons directly in the United States Department of Justice.
The main cog of the DEI industrial complex for SEL is CASEL, whose mission is to illuminate and dismantle “inequity” and push “intentional outcomes” with SEL as a lever for…did you guess? “Equity.” CASEL uses data taken from our children to shape strategies and policies to “cultivate anti-racist mindsets” and achieve “equitable” outcomes. The data comes in countless forms, including but not limited to, diversity surveys, mental health questionnaires, and implicit bias tests.
The data used by CASEL comes from our schools who collect it from our children and give or sell data mining contracts to organizations like for-profit Panorama Education, DEI consultants like The Glasgow Group, and “research” co-opts like SPARC (School Participatory Action Research Collaborative), a research consortium of private schools, including Collegiate, Columbus Academy, Lawrenceville, Miss Porter’s, Exeter, and St. Alban’s, that “collaborates” with the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education “to improve school culture, policy and practice.” It sounds benign and wildly vague, but we know what’s really happening – these organizations are using the data to infect our children with CRT, gender theories, sexuality, and everything in between. UPenn professors involved with SPARC, including Charlotte E. Jacobs, Peter J. Kuriloff, and Sharon M. Ravitch, focus their publications on gender dynamics, intersectionality (gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality), and students being “agents of change” aka social justice activists. This isn’t our conjecture – these organizations lay it all out themselves and Forbes has reported on it.
Not to be out-woked, the ever-lurking cartel of NAIS uses CASEL for their Annual Conference SEL presentations and dictates to our “independent” schools seeking accreditation that pedagogical practices for Transformative SEL should be activated in all classes, sports, service learning, and even trips. NAIS explains: “For the Whole Community Approach to SEL to be authentic and equity-focused, administrators and teachers need to focus on ensuring that SEL works to actively dismantle systemic racism and oppression.” (https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-teacher/spring-2021/beyond-morning-meeting-and-advisory-taking-a-whole-community-approach-to-eq/) If this isn’t the definition of CRT, we don’t know what is. NAIS also conducts its own data collection with AIM surveys (Assessment of Inclusivity and Multiculturalism) to provide schools with “strategic equity goals.”
Unfortunately, it is becoming harder and harder to find this information because organizations are taking down pages from their websites. NAIS even took down the webpage listing its Officers and Executive Board sometime this summer and is scrubbing its AIM data this coming week. Which brings us to our next group – Big Tech – Capital B, Capital T.
These data mining, “research,” and strategy organizations, are being funded by progressive education entities like Emerson Collective, XQ Institute, and Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative that are the agents of tech titans like Laurene Powell Jobs and the Zuck. These groups are using our innocent children as unwilling test subjects in their hubristic attempt at enacting cultural Marxism, and they are wielding their power to make the United States Attorney General Merrick Garland deem dissenting parents as domestic terrorists.
The Effect On Our Children
The time dedicated to SEL by teachers who are unprepared or underprepared in understanding these complex theoretical and psychological issues dramatically reduces the time and energy spent on teaching real academic skills in favor of time spent in group projects and “grading for equity.” It’s not about grit and resilience — SEL’s ultimate goal is to create activists oriented toward collectivism (Marxism), which intentionally is making our children mentally, emotionally, academically, and probably even physically weaker. Just look at Naomi Osaka’s refusal to talk to the press or people wailing pathetically in the streets when someone they don’t like is elected.
Take Action
Our schools want activists? Let’s give them activists. Here’s what you can start to do to protect your children from this abuse:
1. Stop donating. There’s only so much our school trustees can cover in annual giving shortfalls before they start grumbling.
2. Do not consent to your school giving any information or data from your child to a third party. Period.
3. Ask your children if they are being given surveys and make copies. These surveys are specifically designed to root out our children’s susceptibility and which children do not subscribe to the woke narrative and need additional reeducation.
4. Ask your school what they do with the surveys. Force them to be specific. Do they give it to any outside source – NAIS? Panorama Education? A “research” organization?
5. Do not let your children have sessions with school SEL administrators, which schools can do without notifying you. They will groom your children against you. Schools can even help your children transition to a different gender identity without notifying you.
Don’t let Terry McAuliffe dictate our children’s future. We are parents. We are the primary stakeholders in our own children’s education.