A generation seemingly untethered to objective reality, demanding litter boxes in the classroom because they identify as a “furry,” or access to opposite-sex restrooms because they’re feeling transgender, or committing political violence because they’re feeling oppressed, has led many to ask: What has happened to these young people?
The problems begin not in college but in the K-12 schooling that is infested with a mind-altering system of control. It is called “social emotional learning” (SEL), and a new book by Priscilla West warns that it will take decades to undo the damage it has done to childhood education.
“The New Face of Woke Education” traces the origin of SEL to about thirty years ago. The education discipline is dominated by progressives, particularly at the graduate school level, who have created and expanded SEL, couching it in terms like “soft skills,” “safety,” or by applying mental health jargon, with the intention to validate a student’s momentary feelings as “truth.”
Through surveys conducted on the students in public schools asking leading questions to generate responses such as “I feel> unsafe,” or “I feel excluded,” SEL creates data on the children, which are then factored into “school climate” scores — thus quantifying students’ transitory emotional responses into purported evidence to judge the safety of their school or the morality of its students.
Priscilla West, the book’s author, is a Government Accountability Institute (GAI) researcher and for many years has also been locally active in educational issues. She joins Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers on the Drill Down podcast to discuss the book’s findings and how our schools became a factory of emotional fragility.
“It started out as a way to teach students things like empathy and self-awareness,” West explains. “Whenever you have a focus on emotions and subjective concepts, there’s a lot of room for injecting radical ideology, frankly. So, you get activist teachers who have also been steeped in this type of learning in their education programs. And you have a lot of kindling there, ready to ignite.”
Schweizer poses a question that, until recently, would have been unthinkable: “How did we get to the point where we now have litter boxes in some schools because of the so-called furries?” He and Eggers wonder whether SEL was a political project of the left from the beginning or was merely co-opted by them.
“It’s a mix of people really wanting to improve the world or create their vision of a kinder, more tolerant world and people who know how to press the kids’ buttons and get them really switched on to this way of thinking,” she replies.
Schweizer asks about the connection between SEL-based school curricula and the spread of extremist rhetoric.
If you think of how many times you have heard young people on college campuses parrot the phrase “words are violence,” two things become apparent: disagreement is considered aggression and, for some emotionally unstable segment of students, the connection of words and violence can be reversed.
West continues, “Any type of disagreement is viewed as intolerant. If words can be violence, then violence can become speech.”
This describes the story of Tyler Robinson, a Utah college student charged with assassinating political debater Charlie Kirk with a sniper rifle, and Luigi Mangione, charged with assassinating Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, on a Manhattan street.
Eggers observes that despite schools spending so much time on students’ social and emotional awareness, American kids seem to be less well emotionally, with rising anxiety, and nihilism being seen in colleges. He notes that many schools have, for example, indulged students who claim to be “furries.”
SEL programs, as West details in the book, are found in 83 percent of schools nationally, which reach 90 percent of American students. Parents who wish to research this need to know that it often hides under other terms, including jargon-y phrases like “multi-tiered systems of support,” “resilience,” or “21st Century skills.”
Eggers notes that some believe the election of Donald Trump means that “woke education” has been rejected, but West’s research disputes that is really happening.
“It is really metastasizing,” she responds. “There are a million different terms that this stuff comes under in the education literature. When we were combing through school board meeting minutes and education research, even venture capital annual reports, the number of headings under which (SEL) falls is absolutely mind-boggling.”
“We’ve seen DEI offices all over the country rename themselves things like the ‘Office of Culture and Belonging.’ You can fit a lot under these headings,” she says.
The education system, infested with SEL programming, is producing “a culture of fragility, not to kids becoming more resilient,” West’s research shows.
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