Conservatives Are Right to Be Skeptical of SEL

A year ago, I predicted that Social Emotional Learning (SEL) would be the next acronym to instigate a societal quarrel after the CRT argument ran its course. Well, a year out and the Washington Post has called SEL the new target of the Right, and Salon has insinuated that it’s the next moral panic. How did we get here? Who could oppose teaching children the basics of emotional regulation?

The media, of course, blame fearmongering, right-wing “culture warriors.” In reality, SEL was once a questionably effective — albeit rather benign — educational fad, a sort of secular character education, but it has since become another means of injecting progressive politics into the classroom. And as always, it’s conservatives’ fault for noticing.

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) is perhaps the foremost organization advancing SEL practices in school. The group recently made an organizational shift, moving toward “Transformative SEL,” which it announced last year in the American Educator, a magazine of the American Federation of Teachers.

In this article, it claimed that this new approach to SEL centers on “transforming inequitable settings and systems, and promoting justice-oriented civic engagement.” One guide expands upon this:

Ultimately, transformative SEL is concerned with not just the analysis of disparate experiences of social and emotional well-being, but with encouraging youth to engage in collective projects and activities that aim to contribute to community well-being and justice.

In short, this new iteration of SEL extends beyond mere emotional regulation into encouraging activism in the classroom. “Action research,” wherein students research social issues and advocate for change, is one recommended practical approach.

All of this talk of community change and collective projects hearkens to a radical theory of education called critical pedagogy, first proposed by Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire. Within this theory, schools become not institutions of academic learning but of advocacy. And lest you think “action research” just means building a community garden, a set of webinar slides confirms that an “antiracist” mindset in both teachers and students is essential. Everything from mathematics to SEL becomes another means to leverage collective progressive social action.

Of course, these discussions remain in the realm of abstractions and ideals. Reality is worse.

Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, notes that, in practice, SEL is usually just a justification for “doing away with traditional grading, eliminating advanced math, subjecting students and staff to ‘privilege walks,’ or teaching 1st graders about gender identity.” In other words, SEL becomes a feel-good term that applies a stamp of approval to a host of progressive wish-list items.

Beyond its quasi-indoctrination aspects, proponents of SEL have increasingly incorporated lots of other fads and instructional approaches under its umbrella. For example, they tie SEL to restorative justice, a soft-on-consequences approach to school discipline. Similarly, the AFT articles intertwine SEL and project-based learning. Finally, CASEL advocates for the use of community circles in the classroom, an ethically dubious practice that would have teachers effectively lead group therapy during class time.

I bring these up not to criticize them (if you’re looking for that, feel free to read here, here, and here) but simply to demonstrate how SEL has now come to encompass far more than its banal title of “social emotional learning” implies.

In short, SEL has become something of a motte-and-bailey argument. The bailey position encourages a mix of practices ranging from the questionably effective to the outright unethical, and the motte leans upon its original definition of just fostering emotional-regulation techniques such as deep breathing.

And I return to my original question: How did SEL become controversial? Progressives made it so.