Catholic Candle note: The article below is a “companion” article to an earlier Catholic Candle article about the leftists’ use of an excessively-emotional and unreasonable counterfeit empathy.

That earlier article contrasts false empathy with true empathy and is entitled Empathy – a Tool for Good or for Evil.  The article can be found here: https://catholiccandle.org/2021/04/02/empathy-a-tool-for-good-or-for-evil/

The leftists have concocted an additional tool to ruin the minds of students.  It is called social-emotional learning (“SEL”).  It is currently one of the main programs that the leftists are pushing for the schools, especially the public schools.

SEL combines the leftists’ longstanding aim to dumb-down the education of the population and their aim to make the people more emotional and less able (as well as less ready) to use their reason.

Let us start our look at this evil trend (viz., social-emotional learning), by recalling some truths about reason:

  Reason is our highest faculty.  It is what makes us (our souls) immortal.

  Reason makes us capable of virtue.  Reason makes every human action either good or bad.  Every action which is not from reason is not a properly human action but stems from instinct and is on the level of the actions and impulses of beasts.

  The object and the perfection of the mind is truth.  Truth is the mind’s conformity with reality and our reason allows us to know the truth.  In other words, through our intellects, we know reality.

  Reason makes it possible for us to know universal, eternal truth.  (In other words, our reason makes us capable of knowing what is always and everywhere true.)
   

  Reason makes us capable of knowing the highest Truth – that is, God – Who is Truth Itself.  Reason is what makes the blessed capable of “seeing” and enjoying the Beatific Vision – which is an intellectual understanding of God’s Essence, that makes the blessed perfectly happy.

  Reason causes us to have free will, since our will is the rational appetite.  That is, our will is the power of desire regarding all things known by the mind.

  Reason makes us capable of receiving sanctifying grace and actual grace. 

  Reason makes us able to gain supernatural merit.
 

  Reason is a cause of all human achievements in the history of the world and is necessary for any deeds of honor, valor, or glory which were ever undertaken and attained.

  Reason is an essential foundation of true culture.  Reason is the well-spring of all of the arts and sciences.

  Reason is an essential cause of knowledge and wisdom. 

  Reason underpins happiness, and man cannot be happy except by following his reason.

  Reason is the basis for all justice, harmony, and peace in society.

  True education perfects the mind by facilitating the mind’s development in the truth.

Now let’s contrast these truths (above) with the leftist’ program for the schools which is called “social-emotional learning” (“SEL”).  As even the name indicates, “social-emotional learning” emphasizes:

➢  social conformity-training – so that the student parrots the same leftist (politically correct) conclusions as everyone else in the class, and

 

➢  emotional conditioning – so that the student is habituated to “feel” emotionally, instead of to think logically.

Proponents of “social-emotional learning” openly focus on feelings and downplay reasoning.  Here is the (fuzzy) way in which one prominent SEL website stated this:

Emotion is more important than understanding because, in lieu of all of our willful rationality and effortful pursuit of universal truths, we are ‘wired’ for emotion and it drives us forward – up, away, and back again in countless and quiet little cycles of life.  In the human brain, the neocortex facilitates ‘reason’ but is often encouraged to do so through feedback loops and dopamine rewards.[1]

Of course, the SEL jargon – like the phrase “emotional intelligence” – is really an oxymoron.  Emotions are not at all intelligent except to the extent that they are habituated to conform to the higher principle – viz., reason – through being trained like a dog.

Likewise, the phrase “social-emotional learning” makes no sense because emotions do not learn.  Learning occurs in the intellect.

The perfection of the mind is the truth, and truth is attained by reasoning, debating, discussing, by evidence, syllogizing, and careful analysis.  These are habits of mind that the leftists abhor and which the leftists blame for creating the injustice and oppression in the world.

Instead, the leftists use storytelling and counter-storytelling to appeal to the passion of fear and to other emotions.  They also use subjectively-interpreted “lived experience”.  These are the basis for their declaring their victimhood, e.g., on issues such as their promoting deviant, unnatural vice or attacking the strong virtue of purity. 

The leftists are unequipped and would never debate whether unnatural impurity is objectively evil.  Instead, they would insist on how much those (perverted) people feel “hurt” to be “marginalized” and not “seen” and “respected”.  They would demand that people of that ilk be given a “voice” which is “heard” and that they see in the public forum celebrities that are “like themselves”.

These leftist-trained dupes cannot think-through, discuss, and debate ideas with those who disagree with them.  They are entirely unequipped to evaluate rational discourse.  Such people are conditioned to simply demand the “cancelling” of those who disagree with them.

Thus, society has come to the chaotic condition in which emotionalism dominates debates and discussions throughout the U.S., especially on college campuses.  A claim that someone’s words are “triggering” or  “offensive” is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of being offended.  It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong.  It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing a (supposed) offense. 

In our society, the “greatest sin” is to saying something which is labeled “offensive”.  By contrast, there is little mention of whether a person’s position is objectively false or true.  Instead, there is fuzzy reference to “your truth” and “my truth” as if the truth is not one (and as if the truth were not a transcendental concept which is convertible with being).

Truth is a “transcendental” concept – meaning that it is present in all categories of “what is” and not only some categories.  The truth is mind’s conformity with reality and so, however much a person’s mind knows being, (i.e., knows reality) to that extent he possesses the truth.  For this reason, we say that “truth is convertible with being” – viz., the more a mind is conformed with objective reality, the more truth the mind has.  Truth is objective because reality is objective.  There is no “your truth” and “my truth” because there is no “your reality” and “my reality”.

Social-emotional learning does not aim at teaching a student how to think.  It aims at teaching him what to think – that is, politically-correct conclusions.

The ultimate goal of SEL is to erode traditional morals, beliefs, attitudes, and worldviews of students.  The goal is to manipulate students into accepting the latest leftist ideology.  This is one of the evils of SEL.

When one becomes attuned to listen for such emotion being substituted in the place of reason, then one begins to hear this occurring all around him.  It is everywhere in the media, too.  For example, in a mainstream radio “news” story on the day this article was begun, this is what one person said:

When I heard that [a particular event] occurred, I was so angry.  Then when I realized it could happen again, I was so scared.

As we wrote above, SEL uses social conformity and emotion-based reactions to erode traditional morals, beliefs, attitudes, culture, and practices of students.  The goal is to manipulate students into accepting the latest leftist indoctrination.

The promoters of SEL declare this goal themselves.  For example, the main promoters of SEL explain that SEL is very helpful as a way to inculcate into the students an “anti-racist” agenda.[2]  Such an “anti-racist” program attempts to convince blacks that they have been victimized and are owed monetary and/or non-monetary entitlements (freebies) because other persons in history with the same color skin were mistreated (and, in some cases, only allegedly mistreated) by people who are now dead but who had a different skin color.

The blacks are told that they don’t need to live disciplined, orderly lives because that is “for white people”.  Here is how the government inculcated this message in a poster[3] financed by the Smithsonian’s National Museum for African American History and Culture:

Thus, SEL’s so-called “anti-racist” training seeks to convince blacks that they are victims and that whites are the oppressors.  In other words, the SEL program seeks to do what Marx sought to do, viz., to stir up dissatisfaction and promote a feeling of victimhood in one part of society, by promoting (as he put it) a “ruthless criticism of all that exists”.[4]

This “anti-racist” training also seeks to make white people ashamed that they are white, including conditioning them “to try to be less white” as one (so-called) Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program phrased it.[5] 

Such a message foments division and disharmony between groups (blacks and whites).  The Marxists’ chief strategy is to create such division in order to gain control of society.   As Pope Pius XI warned, the “preachers of Communism are proficient in exploiting racial antagonisms, political divisions, and oppositions.”[6]

SEL is also designed and promoted to serve other Marxist goals.  For example, SEL is promoted as a “lever for equity”.  So-called “equity” is one of the leftists’ core aims in order to re-make society according to “diversity, equity, and inclusion”.[7]

Let us examine a “case study” of SEL showing its results in practice.  The Chicago public school system is the nation’s leader in implementing “social-emotional learning”.  Let us see the effect of SEL on the Chicago Public School System (CPS).

Chicago’s school system has been committed to social-emotional learning since 2012 and has become a national leader in SEL.[8]  Chicago was aided in implementing SEL by the State of Illinois having created a statewide SEL curriculum; Illinois is the first state in the nation to pass standards for social emotional learning.[9]

But the Chicago Public Schools are among the worst in the nation.  The city’s own accountability report card demonstrates that huge majorities of students in the city’s worst schools – 75% in elementary and 95% in high school – failed to meet Illinois’ very low, dumbed-down state standards.[10]

Moreover, only 30% of Black students meet or exceed reading standards in the third grade, and only 14% of 11th graders do so, according the Illinois State Board of Education’s own data.[11]

Because it is so shameful that the Chicago Public Schools are failing so badly, Chicago’s leftist mayor (Brandon Johnson) decided that Chicago would no longer “grade” its school system by how well it teaches the students but would instead begin to “grade” the schools only by the total amount of money per student that Chicago spends on its schools.  As Johnson declared in a public interview:

“My responsibility is not simply to just grade the system, but to fund the system ….  That’s how I’m ultimately going to grade whether or not our public school system is working: based upon the investments that we make to the people who rely on it.”[12]

So, the Chicago Board of Education followed Mayor Johnson’s lead and scrapped its school rating policy, which had been designed to rate schools according to how well students learned.[13]

According to the Illinois State Board of Education’s own data, not even one student in the 22 schools analyzed in a widely read report can read at grade level.[14]  In 18 of those schools, there wasn’t a single student who demonstrated proficiency in math or reading.  Despite this, some of these same schools were given the rating “commendable.”[15]

Despite the Chicago Public Schools being such obvious failures, it is not because of a lack of funding.  CPS spends almost $30,000 per student!  (The exact number is $29,400 according to NPR.)[16]  That is more than double the national average ($14,347) of per student public school spending.[17]

So, by Mayor Brandon Johnson rating Chicago’s public schools according to spending rather than according to performance, (i.e., learning), Chicago’s schools with their heavy use of SEL, thereby go from one of the worst school systems in the country to one of the best! 

However, no thinking person would rate schools that way if he truly cared about education or about truth.  But Johnson and the leftists don’t care about real education or about the truth.  They care only about leftist indoctrination of the students.  That is the whole reason they use SEL, because it is an effective tool for their goal, which is to develop foot soldiers for their leftist revolution.

This is a good reminder about the lies continually told by the leftist politicians and teachers’ unions.  The problem is not a lack of funding but a failure to pursue the mission of education of the students, with discipline, common sense, and the methods that work well in private schools which only spend a tiny fraction of the excessive spending of the public schools.