Michael D. Breen: Social emotional learning’s stubborn facts force scrutiny

To The Daily Sun,

As the 1980-1990s anti-intellectual frontier of critical race theory’s endless “oppressed” groups emerged, I noted as a political scientist that SEL soon facilitated secret child surveys, seemingly to confirm them. The scapegoated “oppressor group” emerged: the morally inferior “privileged and systemically racist” whites, especially white males. Worth mentioning: CRT founders, in their own words, are ardent Marxists, openly oppose science, equality among individuals, enlightenment values, and instances of neutral legal reasoning, especially as in our Constitution.

Clarifications emerged.  Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning CEO Karen Niemi revised SEL’s “definition of and framework for socio-emotional learning to highlight the value of SEL as a weapon for social justice.” Coincidently, “social justice” seeks remedies for “inequities” among oppressed and oppressor groups.

Niemi added: SEL “helps students move from anger to agency and then to action primarily in the cause of anti-racism.” The antiracism concept, coined by Ibram X. Kendi, resurrects Nuremberg law rational. It asserts that every white individual, now deemed unavoidably racists from infancy, are to be persecuted by a “Federal Bureau of Anti Racism” charged with overseeing every law, regulation, and rule of every jurisdiction, ensuring each are sufficiently “anti-racist.”

The “SEL Children’s Pledge” purposed for “feeling confident,” evades academics altogether, stresses loyalty to “elders,” (notably not parents), and disparages individual critical thinking by accentuating the “collective voice” and the importance of the “collective wellbeing.” Sound familiar?

The Rand public policy think tank calls SEL “The bland, pseudoscientific, and somewhat inscrutable term ... grafted onto the academic effort of schooling, masking its nature, which heralds a reimagining of schools’ and teachers’ roles.”

Facts — stubborn things, force scrutiny regarding this pseudoscientific scheme whose origins promote child anger, reject individualism, science, our national values, and the significance of our academic performance, once first, now 25th, worldwide.

Michael D. Breen

Moultonborough