Get your kids out of government schools - yet this morning

It's being introduced in the New York City curriculum, but don't think for a moment that you won't be seeing it seep into your local school system's indoctrination methods soon.

"Social and Emotional Learning". Take a good whiff of the odor wafting off that term.

Shortly after launching his candidacy for president, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced a landmark new initiative to promote “Social and Emotional Learning” (SEL) in New York City schools.

SEL is America’s latest education-policy fad — the Common Core of the latter half of this decade. As with the Common Core, proponents declare that everyone simply must be for it. The refrain “Who could be against higher standards?” has become “Who could be against SEL?” But, as with the Common Core, there’s ample reason for parents to be concerned.

These are those reasons:

. . . why not simply assign students William J. Bennet’s The Book of Virtues? Because, as SEL advocates will privately admit, progressive pedagogues can’t abide the word “virtue.” Too conservative, too wrapped up in the idea of human nature and teleological ends.

SEL is an effort to promote means shorn of ends, to stress value-neutral methodological “competencies” while remaining outwardly agnostic about the particular or universal good toward which those competencies are directed. Because promoting a value-neutral notion of human conduct is itself a value-laden enterprise, the confused result is a technique-driven approach to social and emotional engineering that teeters between ideologies of relativism and progressivism.

The NYC Department of Education has adopted the SEL curriculum of Sanford Harmony, the fastest growing SEL curriculum provider in America, serving 8 million students in 18,000 schools. In the Sanford curriculum, the norm-setting process that has traditionally been implicit and internal becomes explicit and external. Students learn to behave and relate to each other through games such as “Emotions Bingo,” to map out “think-feel-do” chains,” to role-play “communications boosters” and “communications bloopers,” and to engage in “whole-body-listening.”

As the name implies, it's designed to legitimize an all-about-me focus on the part of the little tabula rasas seated on the classroom floor:

An SEL advocate once gushed to me about a classroom he observed in which every student made a “mood thermometer” to communicate and regulate their internal states. It is, however, far from clear that gamifying human relations and encouraging students to understand and project themselves through a pop–mental-health prism is a positive development. There is reason to fear that SEL will bring the “coddling of the American mind” — with its counterproductive emphasis on viewing everyday human problems as issues of mental health and “safety” — from college campuses down to the elementary level.

Sanford trains teachers to understand themselves through a lens of intersectional “awareness”: categorizing themselves by age, ability, race, ethnicity, indigenous membership, social class, sexual orientation, and gender identity; to commit to “self-care”; to recognize and set aside “biases”; and be on careful guard against “micro-aggressions.”

The ideology behind these exhortations will likely fill the outwardly value-neutral “competencies” encouraged by the curriculum. The top priority of Sanford Harmony is “diversity and inclusion,” a notion that goes beyond simply respecting one’s peers.

Teachers are told to “reduce the saliency of gender in the classroom,” and press students to “critically evaluate gendered information.”

Teachers will also “increase students’ awareness of how the media influences their thoughts and behaviors,” and train students to “critically evaluate and change stereotyped messages.”

There is, of course, nothing wrong with encouraging students to critically evaluate stereotypes. But parents ought to be wary about what that will mean in practice when it’s implemented by teachers reporting to bureaucrats who are trained to fight “toxic whiteness” and abhor a “sense of urgency” and “objectivity” as manifestations of “white supremacy culture.”

I've really had it up to here with the state of education in post-America. The public school system in the small city where I live has hired a "multicultural diversity director." It has been putting on "implicit bias" workshops for some time.

I also think about the strong law enforcement presence in the local institutions. The public K-12 system has school resource officers supplied by the county sheriff's department, and the small university campus where I am adjunct faculty has its own police department.

Did you have uniformed and armed officers in your school when you were a kid or a college student?

"But the entire social climate is different now. Mass shootings have become so much more common that you just can't take a chance anymore."

And why is that? This is exactly why: Our society has become exponentially nuttier in the last 50 years. Entertainment has become an infantile exercise in celebrating animal impulses. Heroin is as cheap and plentiful as marijuana. No one studies actual history anymore. Per a Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, religion has dropped 12 percent, having children 16 percent, and patriotism 9 percent as values deemed important by post-Americans.

I don't care what the GDP does, or how manufacturing output is doing, or how much more safe and convenient technology is making our lives. Post-America is rotting from within and the prospects for reversing the trend are not good.

If you have school-age children, you have a place where you can take a stand, do something to reverse it. Pull your kids out of government schools today.