Social Emotional Learning Brings Progressive Politics

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.

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Daniel Buck

Daniel Buck is a research fellow and the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute.

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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.