The Right Is Passing Bills That Ban the Teaching of Empathy and Care in Schools
The Right Is Passing Bills That Ban the Teaching of Empathy and Care in Schools
Opponents of social and emotional learning liken increasing emotional intelligence to a left-wing Trojan Horse.
Mom's for Liberty (AKA Klanned Karenhood) has made banning social emotional learning one of their goals:
https://www.themarysue.com/moms-for-liberty-group-comes-out-as-anti-empathy/
https://momsforlibertywc.org/resources/sel/
https://portal.momsforliberty.org/news/epoch-times-m4l-fights-remove-sel-from-classrooms/
https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/11stnnb/moms_for_liberty_is_against_children_learning/
Fuck these feckless fundie Nazis.
I'm kind of mixed on the issue, but probably because I haven't seen what actual, tangible changes banning or implementing SEL looks like. The Wikipedia page looks great and essentially mimics what I try to teach at home:
CASEL defines the five main components of SEL as:
- Self-awareness: The skill of having knowledge of one's own emotions and developing a positive self-concept.
- Self-management: The ability to regulate one's own emotions and monitor one's own behaviors. This also pertains to intrinsic motivation and setting personal goals.
- Social awareness: The ability to have awareness of the emotions and social situations of others.
- Relationship skills: The skill to foster relationships and communicate within them.
- Responsible decision-making: The ability to solve problems and hold one's self accountable.
I assumed teachers are already covering the above as part of their teaching style. Perhaps SEL is a formalization of what teachers are already doing, along with some small curriculum changes to highlight it. IDK.
So my conclusion is that Republicans are trying to turn it into some kind of dog whistle they can use in the next election. Their base already doesn't like CRT (and for good reason imo, but it's not being taught anyway), so they're trying to broaden that to stuff teachers actually do so they can rile up their base. It's stupid and I hope it goes poorly for them; policies should be based on solutions to actual problems, not manufactured problems.
When you see some apparently ridiculous move like this by Republicans to cripple something the government is actually doing well, the answer is almost always profit. More specifically, they have rich donors that want to get richer by privatizing something the people currently get at no/low cost.
Schooling, healthcare, transportation, communications, these are all things people can't really choose to go without. That means if you can eliminate the public option and corner the market, you can set your own price. That's why there's so much demonization of socialized healthcare, public schooling, USPS, etc. They see the potential for a captive market that they can exploit.
Republicans aren't the only ones doing that. Public-Private partnerships are the exact same thing, and Obama, both Clintons, and Harris are all fully on-board that train. You know the documentary "waiting for superman" about privatizing schools in New York City, you know what Obama was before he was a senator? he was a community organizer, being paid by a non-profit to privatize social services. I don't know what the latest front of the culture wars is, but blaming republicans for privatizing is wantonly ignorant.
How does restricting what teachers can teach benefit privatization of education?
I don't think that's the end game here, I think they want to manipulate schools to produce adults more sympathetic to conservative ideals, and apparently emotional intelligence is antithetical to that. Maybe it's not that organized and they just want to rile up their base with something CRT-like to get a better chance in the elections. I just don't see a lot of profit in demonizing the school system. I guess maybe they're trying to sell textbooks to charter and private schools? I personally think short term and long term elections are the more likely drivers here.
I can see that strategy for healthcare (i.e. pharma) and communications (ISPs, mobile networks, etc). Those can easily be monopolies, and monopolies are good for profit.
And outlets like this happily trot out flame bait, promoting less and less actual listening to the “other side.”
This is how you hand the election to psychofascists who cynically play on fear.
Exactly. The media's role should be to inform in order to dispel that fear, not fan the flames.