The Great Reset, Part 6: Social and Emotional Learning

Training the next generation of Marxist revolutionaries

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

By now you should recognize how the various leftist movements in our country today seek to create a new civilization that inverts the moral and social order that has sustained Christendom for two thousand years. What was an academic insurrection in the 1970s is now the establishment. The revolutionaries of yesterday are the professors, pundits, and politicians of today. Now that they are in power, they are doubling down on their efforts to shape the next generation.

Of all the damage that Marxism has done to our culture, its control of education is by far the worst. In a recent podcast, Dr. James Lindsay said, “If we could cure every bit of the woke problem in our country right now except education, we'd be back in the same problems within five to ten years. It's that bad.” The latest tactic for inculcating our children in a Marxist worldview is something called Social and Emotional Learning.

SEL was originally conceived as a process to intervene with children who were at risk of learning issues, mental illness, or other maladies. Even if we assume good intentions, we must keep in mind that the entire educational system has been perverted from one that produces good citizens to one that creates Marxist revolutionaries. That means that even if we accept the premise that SEL was initially created for good reasons, should we trust the people in the current system to use it for good?

One of the biggest problems with the education system today is how it has been controlled by the Marxist left for three generations now. The first generation of Marxists were consciously fighting against the existing system which was based on a classical Christian foundation. Today’s activist teachers have no idea what education was like before the 1970s. Today’s public school teachers and administrators have been entirely immersed in a wholly Marxist system from kindergarten through post-graduate studies. Even those with conservative worldviews still marinated in this system for so long that they find it hard to conceive of what it was like before Marxism took over.

SEL is another tool for indoctrination, no matter what it was meant to do at the beginning. Dr. Lindsay calls SEL a hypodermic needle that injects Marxism into our children. Proponents describe SEL as a means of intervention to help children’s social and emotional development, but consider what they intend for our children to develop into. If you asked a regular parent about what social and emotional issues should be addressed, they might say aggression, disobedience, distraction, or dishonesty. However, the people who run our education system believe that being white, being straight, believing your gender matches your sex, being male, being conservative, and being a traditional Christian are pathologies that must be eliminated.

Those of us who attended public school even just a single generation ago might easily underestimate how bad it really has become. We have to understand that the entire educational system in this country has been hijacked by Marxist activists and reoriented toward producing foot soldiers for their revolution. An English translation of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in the United States in 1970 and by the 1990s it was the foundational textbook for teacher training in most colleges and universities. Whereas classical education sought to give children the tools of learning to succeed in adulthood and think critically about important issues, Marxist pedagogy seeks to train children to overthrow the existing system.

Mr. Freire argued that teaching literacy was not enough, because children were only being made literate within the existing oppressive system. The same with math, history, and science. Freire argued that the job of educators was to create activists who would overthrow systems of oppression. Remember that to Cultural Marxists, everything we take for granted in Western Civilization is a system of oppression that must be torn down.

Defenders of SEL say that it is an important and necessary function to deal with the mental and emotional health of students. However, spend a few minutes looking into the organizations that promote SEL and the materials they use and you will see that it is infused with Marxism. At the very least, as Dr. Lindsay points out, using SEL in the classroom is tantamount to practicing psychology without a license. It is much worse than that though, as it has become a way to normalize a Cultural Marxist worldview starting in kindergarten.

One of the most popular SEL programs is called Second Step. On its website, Second Step defines its mission as “A holistic approach to building supportive communities for every child through social-emotional learning.” The website links to a white paper called The Case For a Holistic Approach to Social-Emotional Learning which contains phrases such as “the key role that positive adult-child relationships have in advancing equity through SEL” and links to anti-racism resources. (Recall that anti-racism is a core tenet of Critical Race Theory which holds that all white people are inherently racist, and that fighting racism means dismantling all of Western Civilization.)

Parents’ rights group Courage is a Habit crafted a PDF contrasting what SEL proponents say versus what they actually mean. They write:

Equity implies that an individual may need to experience or receive something different (not equal) in order to maintain fairness and access. SEL is based on the belief that invisible systems of power and privilege hold some people back in often invisible ways because of their race, gender, sexuality, or other marginalized identity factors. Therefore, “equity” requires giving some identity groups privileges in order to redress (redistribute resources) the perceived systemic imbalance.

courageisahabit.org

In another PDF they look at the CASEL Wheel, a teacher training device created by a group called Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. According to Courage is a Habit, the CASEL perspective “forces children to assume a personal & social identity through the equity lens. They are exposed to narratives that label their identity as privileged or oppressed.” Remember that the core of Marxism is in dividing every part of our culture into either oppressors or oppressed.

Note how “Families” are secondary to “Schools”.

Proponents of SEL are correct in one regard, in that there is a crisis of mental health and behavorial issues in today’s youth. However, rather than admitting how pernicious ideologies like Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and the complete eradication of traditional Western Christian values have contributed to that crisis, they instead double down on Marxism to fix the very problem they have caused. In their eyes this is a feature, not a bug. The more instability, the more division in society, the easier it is for them to convince people that they can fix it all.

The purpose of SEL, like everything else in our school system today, is to create a generation of Marxist revolutionaries who are passionately devoted to tearing down the society we take for granted. It happened in China less than a century ago - the Cultural Revolution saw young people whipped into revolutionary fervor as they tore down the symbols of China’s pre-communist history and sent their parents and teachers to gulags, or worse. The same process is happening here. Capturing the minds of the next generation is essential for their long-planned reset of our society.

I know I sound like a broken record, but get your children out of public schools while you still can. Their future, and that of our civilization depends on it.