Pervasive social-emotional learning brings Big Brother to the classroom

Here’s the dystopian scene: Students nationwide can’t read or do math at basic levels and don’t know elementary science or history facts, but there’s a big program to rewire their brains, massage their feelings and fix a smile on their faces.

Sound familiar?

If you’ve even heard of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” it should.

Just swap Big Brother for big program, the telescreen for the iPad and the Ministry of Truth for the SEL dashboard.

It’s the brave new world of social-emotional learning, with mood controls, omnipresent surveillance, masterful manipulation and a Thought Police checking your privilege, thoughts, emotions and pronouns.

SEL is a growing industrial complex in education, nearing $10 billion this year, with powerful organizations like CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), Panorama Education, Committee for Children and Imagine Learning creating “solutions,” from curricula and programs to analytics.

“Social,” “emotional,” “learning” are empathetic, comforting — irresistible — words, so with 49 states backing it and 83% of American schools using it, SEL is in a school near you. Yet most parents have no idea what it really means.

SEL slips into classrooms with confusing tools and routines like “circle-time confessions,” “resilience circles,” “feelings check-ins” and goal-setting sessions that sound warm and wholesome but are more therapy than education.

It’s the classroom version of Orwell’s groupthink — cancel culture for beginners.

This generation’s children, perhaps the most coddled and privileged ever, are now told they are “dysregulated” and beset by mental-health problems, so schools keep asking: Are you feeling OK? Stressed? Anxious? Emotionally fragile?

As the famous Dartmouth Scar Experiment showed, when people are told they’re scarred, they begin to act like victims. Keep asking well-adjusted kids if they feel bad; they’ll soon say yes. And just as happened to the experiment’s participants, expectations will create invisible limits on the kids.

After destabilizing students’ emotions in every class, even math and science, with “trauma-informed education,” SEL fills the void it created — with ideology.

Orwell’s Newspeak might have inspired the ever-shifting language of the woke — terms like diversity, equity and inclusion, critical race theory and now SEL all sound great but invert meaning to conceal ideological control. When CRT and DEI were exposed and opposed by parents showing up at school boards and lawmakers drafting bans, the ideologues rebranded.

SEL stepped in, before it may be rebranded too, to take over the power- and identity-driven curriculum, and groups like Defending Education and the Massachusetts Family Institute warned that SEL is indoctrination masquerading as empathy, a Trojan horse for controversial ideologies.

“Transformative SEL” is openly equity and identity-driven.

Where students were once told “Be kind and respectful,” now it’s “Interrogate your complicity in systemic oppression”; “Share your toys” is now “Reflect on your power and privilege.”

Kids are primed not for individual agency but “collective agency” and “justice-oriented” activism.

Even the nation’s largest school district, New York City, touts SEL helping “schools[sic] . . . think critically about power, social justice, and oppression.”

Critics have sounded the alarm, such as Abigail Shrier denouncing SEL as a “shell game” with “bad therapy” “potentially sabotaging kids’ abilities.”

In her just-released book, “The New Face of Woke Education,” Priscilla West charges that SEL, backed by large money interests, both profit and nonprofit, manipulates children as it “weaponize[s] empathy, using emotional appeals to smuggle radical ideology into classrooms under colorful banners of compassion” and “normalize the behavioral conditioning and psychological profiling of children and embed it into everything they do,” destabilizing all kids, even kindergarteners, on race, class and gender identity.

Most teachers can’t get their students to grade level and aren’t trained to do therapy, yet SEL has them play unlicensed psychotherapists. What could go wrong with untrained teachers assessing anxiety levels, gauging “bias awareness” or teaching “emotional regulation”?

And how would they do it? With technology of course.

EdTech giants like Google Classroom and Second Step platforms collect the emotional data and open them to security and privacy concerns.

Kids chart emotions and upload their thoughts with “growth mindset” apps, teachers log assessments of the students’ “social competencies” into digital dashboards — the students’ actions, thoughts and emotions are monitored, stored and analyzed, possibly forever.

That data trove can be used for predictive profiling, behavioral nudges, ranking students by “social-emotional-fitness” and maybe even can be monetized, weaponized or accessed by third parties, including future employers, so a 5-year old’s meltdown and a teenager’s “privilege reflection” could resurface later and be misused.

As for privacy reassurances — ever heard of data breaches?

Priscilla West’s comment in her new book is spot on — “SEL measures and tracks today’s children with a precision that would impress George Orwell himself” — yet just the tip of the iceberg.

SEL is sold as the current must-have fix but actually weakens kids.

It replaces the rigor, academics, truth and critical thinking needed for learning and decision making with bad therapists assessing and programming kids ideologically for compliance and collecting massive, intrusive data that can be misused.

Everyone wants kids to succeed socially, emotionally and academically. But above school bells, alarm bells should be ringing.

Parents need to act. Carefully question and watch Big SEL — because Big SEL is watching your kids.

Wai Wah Chin is the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York founding president and a Manhattan Institute adjunct fellow.