Social Emotional Learning

Well folks, we have already talked about Critical Race Theory in our schools. Looks like the pushback has put it on the back burner for now. However, the latest buzz in the education world has now shifted to something called Social Emotional Learning.

So, I decided to do a little research on the topic.

From the National University Web site:

“Today, in an ever-diversifying world, the classroom is the place where students are often first exposed to people who hail from a range of different backgrounds, hold differing beliefs, and have unique capabilities. To account for these differences and help put all students on an equal footing to succeed, social and emotional learning (SEL) aims to help students — both children and adults — better understand their thoughts and emotions, to become more self-aware, and to develop more empathy for others within their community and the world around them. 

By developing these qualities in the classroom, it can help students become better, more productive, self-aware, and socially-aware citizens outside of the classroom in the years ahead. “

Folks, I am a firm believer that Parents should teach kids how to live. Teachers should teach kids how to learn.

For this reason, I am totally opposed to this latest approach to teaching our kids. Now don’t get me wrong. I love our teachers. It is a noble profession and has been for over 2000 years.

What is happening in our schools is not the teacher’s fault. It falls on the Federal Department of Education and their ability to hold our state Departments of Education hostage by threatening to withdraw federal funding.

Bear in mind that no where in the US Constitution does it mention education. They simply do not have the authority to do what they are doing to our schools.

I know a lot of the teachers here in our schools. They are excellent at what they do. Many were my students. They chose to be teachers and specialized in disciplines like mathematics, science, social studies, and English.

Like I said, they are excellent in their fields of study. Unfortunately, the government has now stepped in and forced them to now focus elsewhere.

I feel sorry for the teachers. They are stuck in the middle of a bureaucratic mess and that is why many are leaving the teaching profession.  

So, what is SEL in Education?

According to the website, Social emotional learning (SEL) is a methodology that helps students of all ages to better comprehend their emotions, to feel those emotions fully, and demonstrate empathy for others. These learned behaviors are then used to help students make positive, responsible decisions; create frameworks to achieve their goals, and build positive relationships with others.

I must ask. Should this be the responsibility of the parents or the teacher?


Here are the Five Social Emotional Learning Core Competencies.

  • Self-awareness – To recognize your emotions and how they impact your behavior; acknowledging your strengths and weaknesses to better gain confidence in your abilities.
  • Self-management – To take control and ownership of your thoughts, emotions, and actions in various situations, as well as setting and working toward goals. 
  • Social awareness – The ability to put yourself in the shoes of another person who may be from a different background or culture from the one you grew up with. To act with empathy and in an ethical manner within your home, school, and community. 
  • Relationship skills – The ability to build and maintain healthy relationships with people from a diverse range of backgrounds. This competency focuses on listening to and being able to communicate with others, peacefully resolving conflict, and knowing when to ask for or offer help.
  • Making responsible decisions – Choosing how to act or respond to a situation based on learned behaviors such as ethics, safety, weighing consequences and the well-being of others, as well as yourself.

Behavior, diversity, ethics? Are these things that you want someone else teaching your children? What happens if their position on these topics is different than those of you and your family?

Who is better at evaluating your child’s strengths and weaknesses? Parent or teacher?

Who is better equipped to guide a child in their reaction to certain situations? Stand up for yourself or be submissive? Parent or teacher?

Who is better equipped to explain ethnicity, poverty, cultural differences to your child? Parent or teacher?

Who is better to explain right from wrong to your child? Parent or teacher?

These questions lead us to ask, “Does Social And Emotional Learning Belong In The Classroom?”

Are these core competencies what we sent our kids to school to learn?

Again folks, this is not what our teachers signed up for, it is what they are being forced to do.

EMOTIONAL LEARNING WILL BE THE DOWNFALL OF SOCIETY

MARCH 21, 2018

By Teresa Mull The Heartland institute

Critics of the public school system, myself included, often blame public schools for failing to teach kids.

It’s alarming that 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 geographycivicsreading, 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?

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 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 radical 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?

THE SANDSTORM: IT’S TIME TO END GOVERNMENT-RUN SCHOOLING

SEPTEMBER 28, 2021

By Larry Sand The Heartland Institute

The National Center for Education Statistics recently published K-12 enrollment data for the 2020–21 school year, and it showed a 3% drop – about 1.5 million kids from the previous year.

With a total k–12 enrollment of about 51 million students in the U.S., that equates to a loss of 1.5 million children. The largest segment of the leavers and no-shows were kindergarteners and pre-k kids, whose enrollment dropped by 13% last year.

As the American Enterprise Institute points out, “Such figures are unprecedented; public school enrollment has grown almost every year during the 21st century, with any declines coming in well under 1%.”

While the main reason for the exit is Covid-related, there are other reasons to bail. The latest NAEP – also known as the nation’s report card – reveals that just 37 percent of U.S. 12th-grade students are proficient in reading and a pitiful 24 percent are proficient in math.

It’s important to note that these results are from 2019, before the teacher union orchestrated Covid hysteria forced schools across the country to shut down. 

So where are the escapees going? Some parents are availing themselves of the new private school options throughout the country. According to the latest available data, 18 states have created seven new choice programs and expanded 21 existing ones this year.

Charter schools also have experienced more growth in 2020-21 than they have in the past six years, according to data released last week from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

While traditional public schools were losing students, independently-run charter schools in 39 states saw an influx of 240,000 new students, a 7% increase over last year, more than double the rate of growth from the prior year.

Additionally, homeschooling has been booming. The Census Bureau reports that between 2012 and 2020, the number of homeschooling families remained steady at around 3.3%. But by May 2020, about 5.4% of U.S. households with school-aged children reported they were homeschooling. And by October 2020, the number jumped to 11.1%.

If government-run schools are not meeting their customers’ expectations, perhaps it’s time to think about doing away with them. As a country we did quite well before the government stuck its large bureaucratic nose into our lives, and we can do so again.

The push for a governmental role in schooling began in the 1830s, when a group of reformers declared that state involvement was needed to ensure that all children receive a better, more unified education.

Leading the charge was Horace Mann who, with like-minded souls, campaigned for a greater state role in the process.

They argued that a centrally planned system of tax-funded schools would be superior to the independent and home schools that existed at the time.

As the late Cato Institute scholar Andrew Coulson noted, “Shifting the reins of educational power from private to public hands would, they promised, yield better teaching methods and materials, greater efficiency, superior service to the poor, and a stronger, more cohesive nation.

Mann even ventured to predict that if public schooling were widely adopted and given enough time to work, ‘nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete,’ and ‘the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged.’”

This kind of thinking is what has gotten us to the concept of social emotional learning today.

Think about this. In 1840, before compulsory public schools existed, literacy rates were about 90 percent. But today?

According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old – about 130 million people – lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

In California, they spent about $79 billion on education in 2019, yet only half of all California students performed at grade level in reading on the most recent state-administered test.

Also, just 34% of California 4th-graders scored proficient in math on the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

So what changed?

Again, the problem isn’t the teachers, it is what is being taught.

What is taught is out of the teachers’ hands and is now mandated by a bureaucratic system that has totally lost the vision of what a public education should be.

The simple answer here is to compare education to food. To feed your family do you go to the government-run supermarket near your home? Of course not. You find a local, privately-run store that has the food you want at the best price.

Just imagine if the government forced you to buy food from that crappy government market down the street that sold rancid meat, overripe fruit, and month-old bread.

Folks, that is where we are today. Why are we feeding our kids spoiled meat, over ripe fruit, and stale bread? Simply because the government says that is all you can have or you get nothing?

Obviously, our parents and grandparents saw the difference between what should be taught in our schools and what should be taught at home. 

Remember, parents should teach kids how to live. Teachers should teach kids how to learn.