Parents, have you drunk the Kool-Aid? Probably yes! While we’ve been working, paying down our mortgages, and dealing with crazy Uncle Joe, many of us have unknowingly accepted something harmful to our children believing it to be beneficial.
“Drinking the Kool-Aid” comes from a tragic historical event where people were misled into blindly following what ultimately destroyed them. These unassuming sycophants were coaxed into drinking poisoned Kool-Aid without questioning why.
Today’s Kool-Aid is more subtle but just as destructive. Incredibly, it’s being administered by our school officials in the form of “educating the whole child.” The Kool-Aid is buried within our children’s school curriculum as social-emotional learning (SEL). Since the Obama administration, we’ve been duped into supporting SEL in our public schools without fully understanding the consequences.
At first glance, SEL sounds harmless, even beneficial. Who wouldn’t want children to develop emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and interpersonal skills? However, beneath the surface, SEL is a Trojan Horse for socialistic ideology, overreach, and psychological manipulation that is interfering with our children’s development rather than strengthening it.
Alabama public school superintendent Eric Mackey wants Alabama schools to educate the "whole child." Yet, look at students' poor achievement scores: upon graduation, our students are 32% proficient in math, 39% proficient in science, and 52% proficient in language arts according to recent data. So much for educating the whole child academically.
How's the "whole child" doing physically? According to the Alabama Department of Public Health, approximately 17% of Alabama's youth aged 10 to 17 are classified as obese, placing the state among the highest in the nation for youth obesity rates. Among high school students, 17% are considered obese, which is higher than the national average. Just what are our physical education teachers doing all day?
So, why the emphasis on social-emotional learning? Will we continue to allow SEL in our schools when we know:
- Parental Influence is Undermined: SEL programs often push values and worldviews that may conflict with home values, supplanting parental authority to shape their children's beliefs. In short, schools want to be the new Nanny State.
- Mental Health Consequences: In 2020, the American Institutes for Research indicated that SEL programs may not always work; despite SEL development in schools, some schools students' anxiety and stress increased during the pandemic. Rather than facing life's challenges, SEL encourages over-analysis of emotions.
- Ideological Indoctrination: SEL is being used to interject woke, divisive concepts into the curriculum including Critical Race Theory, identity politics, and social justice activism.
- Lower Academic Standards: With its emphasis on feelings, SEL takes away valuable time from academic subjects such as science, reading, math, and social studies. According to research, elementary school teachers spend about 3.5 hours per week, middle school teachers spend about 3.7 hours per week, and high school teachers spend 5.5 hours per week (20% of the time) on social-emotional learning!
- Privacy and Data Concerns: SEL programs often require psychological surveys and emotional assessments. Sometimes this information is shared with third party educational contractors without parental knowledge. This is against the law. In 2019, the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy found that many of these third party, for-profit SEL programs collect and share data violating a student's privacy. Alabama received a grade of F.
So, parents, ask your school's principal or guidance counselor what SEL program is in your school. Will we demand Alabama public schools return to prioritizing knowledge and critical thinking? Or will we continue to drink the Kool-Aid while our schools pump out fragile, illiterate "snowflakes" who overanalyze their emotion? It's in your hands.
Barry Nowlin is a retired English professor from the University of South Alabama. He presently works as an Uber driver for his two grandkids.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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