The Dangers of a Sentimental Education – Tablet Magazine
Today, SEL is emerging as a lightning rod in the culture wars over school curriculum. Progressives uphold it as an unobjectionable method for building emotional self-regulation in students, something not just benign but potentially lifesaving in the face of rising teen suicide rates. But conservatives reject those claims and argue that SEL smuggles ideological indoctrination into classrooms, serving as a gateway to critical race theory or boutique gender ideology.
Conservatives are right to distrust SEL. However, SEL is not indoctrination, but something worse: the nihilism of managerial logic, which finds therapeutic platitudes more convenient and lucrative than ideological fervor. Under the guise of empathy and well-being, SEL enables the endless expansion of a bureaucracy of mental health and big data specialists, who profit off of America s schoolchildren. Paralleling the recent trend toward the mindful corporate workplace, SEL is the public school equivalent of Amazon s data management of its warehouse employees, who are offered meditation booths to offset the stress of being increasingly monitored and monetized.
SEL s immediate aim is not to politicize classrooms. While ideologically loaded terms like equity and social justice flit in on occasion, most curricula don t focus on race or gender. To be sure, as far as its actual educational content, SEL doesn t focus much on anything. Programs span a panoply of buzzword-rich subjects: safety, teamwork, identity, self-esteem, anti-bullying, anti-harassment, kindness. One curriculum s video module encourages students to inhabit a growth mindset by drawing angry lines. A set of digital lessons is both trauma-informed and music-based ; another app claims an innovative way to teach children about appropriate levels of touch. If teachers are feeling left out, there s even Adult SEL for educators to practice self-care.