Posted on 03/10/2018 6:20:50 AM PST by Kaslin
Critics of the public school system, myself included, often disparage government schools for failing to teach kids. Yes, it’s alarming U.S. students continue to lag academically behind their international peers (only about one-third of high school graduates are prepared for college), and it’s pathetic most students test very poorly in geography, civics, reading, and math. As bad as it is that schools aren’t teaching our kids important areas of learning, it’s what they are teaching that should really frighten us.
Increasingly, more schools are adopting an aggressively progressive curriculum. In Minnesota, “School leaders adopted the ‘All for All’ strategic plan—a sweeping initiative that reordered the district’s mission from academic excellence for all students to ‘racial equity,’” The Weekly Standard reported in February. Children in kindergarten are expected to become “racially conscious” and examine their “white privilege.” And leftists’ radical agenda is taking hold in a less blatant but no less toxic way in the rise of social and emotional learning (SEL), which presents just as much danger to parents, kids, and the education system as Common Core.
SEL is “a coordinating framework for how educators, families, and communities partner to promote students’ social, emotional, and academic learning,” the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) states on its website. CASEL is one of the masterminds behind the SEL movement. “A growing number of schools and districts” are “imbedding” SEL into “English Language Arts, Math, Social Studies, and general teaching approaches,” CASEL reports.
The way children “feel” about their skin color is likely a product of SEL making its way into Minnesota schools’ social studies curricula. But how do emotions come into play in a straight-forward subject such as math? For me, I suppose I could talk about how just thinking about math makes me sad, because I’m terrible at it and it’s difficult, but how is such a thing profitable, let alone appropriate, in the public school setting?
SEL teaches kids to feel and not to think. Of course, feelings themselves are not bad or dangerous, but they can be when they aren’t tempered with a sense of right and wrong. Traditional public schools, apparently determined not to teach kids history, how to read, spell, add, subtract, multiply, or anything useful, instead take on a role of psychotherapist (and not a good one).
The problem is not that children have emotions, but that government schools can’t acknowledge that absolute truth and right and wrong exist, let alone what truth, right, and wrong are. So, we have a bunch of kids trained to embrace their feelings—and since feelings can’t be right or wrong, society devolves into chaos. As Brian Eno, an English musician and composer, once stated so eloquently, “Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.”
As we’ve seen over and over, the eruption of feelings at colleges, such as recently at the University of California at Berkeley and University of Virginia, has become all too common. Many Americans, especially younger Americans, are products of a nihilistic society. They now feel emboldened to express their disagreement, even to the point of violence, because they have no sense of morality, and they’ve been told since kindergarten that their feelings are always valid.
It’s not the kids’ fault, but if society continues to erode into a soulless, violent nation full of mob-like citizens who only feel and react like barbarians and don’t think like civilized folk, we are all to blame. Traditional public schools, it’s been decreed, don’t have a place in teaching religion, morals, or anything that makes a strong, decent society, so we must ask ourselves: Do they have a place in analyzing the feelings and emotions of students—or even in society at all?
“[A constitutional republic] cannot for ever withstand continual carnival in the streets of its cities and the campuses of the nation. Unless sage debate replaces the belligerent strutting now used so extensively, reason will be consumed and the death of logic will surely follow.”
Spiro Agnew —May 3, 1969.
It’s far past time for us to eliminate the NEA from our schools. Their degrees are worthless. If you want science taught in your school, get someone with a real degree in science. Same for math, history, the arts, etc.
Indeed.
The left and everything they touch is the downfall of society.
“Where is my logic? I’m betrayed by... desires. Oh, I want to feel, I want to feel... everything.”
Jean-Luc Picard in a mind meld with Sarek in the TNG episode “Sarek”.
“As bad as it is that schools aren’t teaching our kids important areas of learning, it’s what they are teaching that should really frighten us.”
That otherwise decent people keep sending their kids into these crap holes is even more disturbing to me. I know, I know... They can’t afford to homeschool. And most of the single mothers don’t give a dann anyway.
CASEL - more standard-shifting socialism
Thanks for the great Agnew quote. Sometimes it takes several decades for such predictions to mature and materialize. Will be using that going forward.
And, as much as psychologist Qx supports Emotional IQ training, he deplores this pile of fermented horse biscuits--as do I.
As askew from high integrity as Agnew was, he did have some very astute observations of our culture.
SEL is half an education. The easier we can be enslaved.
With hearts oligarchy engineered to be full of:
--unbridled selfishness,
--raging rebellion,
--intensified ignorance,
--wailing wantonness,
--despotic greed,
--2-year old mentality entitlement,
--licentious lawlessness,
--multiplied & enhanced existential angst,
--Cavernous emotional need,
--empty 'relationships,'
--super cheap & shallow thrills,
--media induced thrills over glorified violence,
--hostility toward any hint of God & Godliness,
...
...
How could it be otherwise?
Ahhh yes, the treasonous National Communist Education Association. Barf.
The term SEL is nothing more than the educational establishment’s latest attempt to secure their jobs - much like the medieval guild system.
I ran into and fought this attitude for 7 years as my children made their way through the local education system. One twin received a diploma, in spite of the system, his twin sister received a certificate of attendance.
BY the 1990’s the first line of defense for the Educational Guilds was the average parent couldn’t understand what it meant to be a teacher. They, the educators and administrators chairing the various parent-teacher conferences gave up that line of BS with me. Something about me having my own Florida Teacher’s Certificate; older than theirs but the same form with the same information on it.
Their second line of defense for the Educational Guilds was since they had a degree in education they could teach anything. My response was to bring any of my technical text books and ask a teacher (victim?) of my choice to start teaching me on that subject next week. I never encountered a teacher with a degree in education that wanted to teach me “Thermal Dynamics of a Breeder Reactor” for some silly reason.
We never got to their third line of defense for the Educational Guilds - the guilds had frozen out all competition. My small, new, liberal arts college was lauded by a national weekly news magazine in 1966 as having one of the best teacher education program in the nation. You had to have your BA in the subject(s) you were going to teach - the educational courses were a minor area of emphasis. How can you truly teach a subject if you lack in depth knowledge of it? Yet 7 years later my college had disbanded their education program - the Education Guilds had added so many requirements there was not enough academic hours available for have dual, unrelated, majors for undergraduates.
When you get down to the root of things teaching, even with all the BS the Educational Guilds have added is the easiest job out there. You need no more than four sets of teaching guides for any and all courses you teach and you are set for life. How many students are going to repeat a class that they failed the first time much less do it three more times?
Sorry for the length of this post; but, it is extremely important to the Republic.
Not sure it qualifies as a bona fide ‘education’ in any constructive sense. More an indoctrination in disruptive and destructive themes, strategies, hogwash.
Yeah. Qx always agreeingly chuckled at that one.
This is Bill Auer’s ultimate goal
Commies suck
Thanks for a very insightful and sad post.
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