The 'New' Fad Corrupting Our Schoolchildren Is Not So New

By Carole Hornsby Haynes   November 11, 2021   Published by American Thinker  

As they learn more about social and emotional learning (SEL) with its data mining, parents are in an uproar. They’re demanding an opt out and deletion of all stored data. Some believe that if we can stop the leftward lurch of America, we can “turn our schools around” and use SEL as it was “initially intended.”

But was the initial purpose of SEL really to teach appropriate social behavior and support “mental wellness” and “management of emotions” or is there a sinister underside?

SEL’s Occult Connections

The term "social and emotional learning was coined in 1994 at a meeting hosted by the Fetzer Institute, founded by New Age guru John Fetzer. Fetzer was obsessed with Alice Bailey, the controversial occultist and organizer of the Lucis Trust. Robert Muller, former assistant secretary-general of the U.N., authored the World Core Curriculum that introduces students worldwide to occult thought. A member of the Lucis Trust, his underlying philosophy was based on the teachings of Alice Bailey.

The Origins of SEL

The public assumes SEL is just the latest education fad. However, psychologists in the early 20^th century were tinkering around with children’s minds, trying to figure out how to condition them for specific behaviors. Colleges of education are especially fond of teaching about Pavlov’s dogs to show how children can be “trained” like animals to obey commands.

John Dewey, dean of American progressive education, believed the classroom should be used for social and political change at the expense of academic learning. A fan of Soviet education, Dewey introduced similar techniques in American education to train students for the workforce instead of providing a broad academic foundation.

SEL was key in Marc Tucker’s German-based plan to centralize education and change it from academic to workforce training for a nationally managed economy. His master plan, laid out in the 1992 infamous “Dear Hillary letter,” was implemented by Goals 2000, School-to-Work Act, and Workforce Investment Act.

After decades of this socialist-style education and psychological conditioning, the American workforce has gone from being the best educated in the industrialized world to the worst.

SEL / Mental Health In Federal and State Programs

SEL first gained a foothold in federal law with Clinton’s Goals 2000 designed to change student attitudes, values, and beliefs. States had to adopt the statute’s National Education Goals to get federal funding through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The ESEA’s reauthorization as Goals 2000 mandated state curriculum standards and standardized tests, circumventing local control.

This led to more federalized control with No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top/Common Core, and Every Student Succeeds Act. SEL was key in all of these.

Goals 2000 was reauthorized under Bush as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) with heavy handed federal intrusion and mental health grants for young children. The Obama administration allocated more than $150 million in mental health grants to test and collect personal data of K-12 students. Under Texas’ Governor Abbott, mental health clinics have been added to public school campuses. Now we’re seeing government taking more control with vaccination clinics on campuses.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced No Child Left Behind, provides many opportunities for SEL funding through Titles I, II, IV, VI, and VIII.

State pre-K standards are frequently aligned to Head Start and the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s that uses Critical Race Theory terminology. Through these, SEL with Critical Race Theory is key in most American early childhood programs.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is now testing for social-emotional characteristics, a violation of federal law and the Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

Common Core Déjà Vu

Despite a public firestorm when student academic performance spiraled downward with Common Core, the curriculum standards were not abolished at the local or state level. Instead, they were codified at the federal level in ESSA. Instead of ending NCLB and returning educational control to the states, ESSA actually cemented federal control.

Not only did ESSA codify Common Core, it changed the primary purpose of education from academic to social and emotional learning (SEL).

Vehicle for CRT

Various provisions of ESSA either encourage or even require the inclusion of SEL in schools. All SEL programs include sexuality, gender, race, racism, class, and the nuclear family.

The teacher union’s NEA Global Learning Fellow and teacher, Wendy Turner, is quoted, “SEL is the foundation, the heartbeat of the classroom.” Does this indicate that CRT is the “foundation, the heartbeat of the classroom?”

The federal government is pushing SEL and Critical Race Theory into public schools through the American Rescue Plan 2021. To receive federal grants, the school is required to spend at least 20% on SEL and “free, antiracist therapy for White educators” to get the grant.

The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), a leading SEL provider, lists several Critical Race Theory terms in its five core “Competencies with Equity Focus,” including cultural competency, diversity, inequity, equity, racial equity, and inclusive. Psychological manipulation is found in the “Self Awareness” core competency -- “awareness of beliefs, mindsets, and biases” and “how they influence one’s behavior.”

More Billions for Billionaires

CASEL is funded by the usual left wing billionaires: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Robert Wood Johnson.

For vendors, CRT programs mean new sales. At the district and school levels, these programs are supported by a top heavy staff earning six-figure salaries. For investors, SEL is a golden goose.

Can Parents Opt Out of SEL Assignments?

Opting one’s child out of SEL assignments sounds simple enough. In reality, it’s virtually impossible. The U.S. Education Department’s handbook, “Roadmap to Reopening Safely and Meeting All Students’ Needs,” states that not only is SEL taught explicitly but “social and emotional skills, habits, and mindsets” are “integrated” broadly within the learning process.

With the vast entanglement of SEL at all levels, how can parents access, much less get deleted, all of the data collected in numerous settings over the years?

Conclusion

School boards and educators -- even parents -- have naively bought the Marxist bill of goods that SEL is vital to deal with student mental problems. The fact is that public education has created the mental health crisis through its radical sex curriculum. Youth have become violent, murderers, sociopaths, sex predators, and God-haters.

SEL is doing what it was initially intended to do – instill a new value system including socialism, population control, radical environmentalism, and LBGTQ+. With socialist workforce training and radical sex instead of academic learning, America now has a crazed youth and the dumbest workforce in the industrialized world. This is a catastrophic threat to our national economy.

Unless SEL is abolished entirely, it will continue as has Common Core and create irreversible damage. Since the purpose of public education is to educate youth for a Marxist society, abolishing SEL is merely a pipe dream. The only solution is mass exodus of public education before it’s too late.

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War On Parents Backfires As They Abandon Sinking Titanic

By Carole Hornsby Haynes                                  

The War On Parents

The controversies over face mask edicts, vaccine mandates, Critical Race Theory, Marxist indoctrination, radical “sex education” are merely symptoms of a major transformation of government schools being implemented by the White House, National School Boards Association (NSBA) and others.

Statements by Terry McAuliffe, the Virginia Democrat gubernatorial candidate and actions by Attorney General Merrick Garland following a letter from the NSBA clearly signal a vicious war to determine who will rear children.

The goal is to replace parents with government bureaucrats and so-called experts who will control what children learn and think. The ongoing “cancel parents” culture within the classroom is evidence of the battle to push parents out of the way.

This indoctrination will be federally enforced against any parent who objects. Garland, in response to the NSBA letter, which labeled concerned parents as domestic terrorists, sicced the FBI on parents. His rationale? Parents had “harassed” and “intimidated” school boards over their children being brainwashed with Critical Race Theory, Marxism, gender confusion, and more. No examples of legitimate threats.

However, conservative news sources show clips of board meetings where trustees viciously try to shut down parent concerns over what their children are being taught.

One mother, irate that her five-year-old was being taught about masturbation and anal sex, was berated by her school board for using vulgar language. They didn’t have a problem with the radical sex curriculum being taught to her child.

In Loudon County in Virginia, Scott Smith was arrested and dragged -- with bloody lip and torn clothing -- from the board meeting because he spoke out about his daughter being sodomized by a transgender in a skirt in the girls’ restroom. The school board tried to conceal it, despite there being medical tests as proof. Nearly two months after his arrest, the school board voted to approve its transgender rights policy.

Smith was one of the examples cited by the NSBA as being a dangerous domestic terrorist. They justified this characterization because he was arrested for “disorderly conduct” for speaking out about a rape that occurred under federally supported “transgender” dictates on bathrooms.

In the Dallas Independent School district a brother and sister, who flouted the district’s mask mandate because of their doctor’s order, were segregated for weeks in a suffocating plastic box in the school library. During my interview with their mother, Lauren Davis, she alleged her daughter had received a death threat from another student. The daughter claims this student repeatedly told her “put on a mask” and “you deserve to die.”

After the parents fought for an exemption, the district reluctantly gave them permission to return to class without a segregated learning environment. There they were subjected daily to teacher condoned bullying and taunting by other students because they don’t wear masks.

Finally, their parents decided that enough was enough and withdrew them from the public school system. The children are now being homeschooled.

Homeschooling Explodes

Parents have had enough. They are abandoning the rat infested government schools in droves.

This trend away from state schools has been growing quietly for years but, since the COVID-related shutdown, it’s now on steroids. “Homeschooling in Uncertain Times,” published by the Pioneer Institute, reports that homeschooling has tripled over the past two years.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of households with homeschooled children doubled as it soared from 5.4 percent in pre-pandemic levels to 11 percent in 2020. In black families, the percentage increased five fold, from 3.3 percent to 16.1 percent, in just one year.

Critics of School Flight

People on both sides of the political spectrum are upset over the flight from public education. Conservatives who are public education advocates, but obviously don’t understand the origins and purpose of public education, believe the system should be reformed, not destroyed. They battle against conservative parents who want control over how and what their children learn. Leftists, who want young children removed from “toxic” parental influence, are charging that Republicans don’t want to reform education, they want to destroy it.

So here’s the dilemma. How can we possibly reform public information -- as conservatives like to believe -- when it’s doing exactly what Karl Marx intended? Since public education is a key Marxist tool to destroy a nation, why do conservatives think it can be reformed?

Why do parents allow their children to be subjected to Critical Race Theory and radical sex? Why do they allow their children to be psychologically abused with the pornographic instructional? Why do parents allow their children to be subjected to the Marxist psychological conditioning of social and emotional lessons now integrated throughout the school day?

Are parents not concerned that their children are being dumbed down and manipulated to be stupid, unquestioning adults who will have no chance to have a successful career and life? If they doubt this, they need only to see the report by Marc Tucker, father of workforce learning, that shows Americans have gone from being the most literate in the world to the dumbest workforce in the industrialized world.

Are parents not concerned that public schools are training their children for a Marxist army? A stupid people cannot be a free people.

Is “School Choice” the Solution?

Talk show hosts, podcasters, grassroots Americans, and Republican lawmakers tout school choice with money following the child as the “only solution.” What many don’t understand is that school choice, with its modern day characterization, is simply government funding for homeschooling and private schools with strings attached. Federal money is money that we the people are forced to hand over to the government without any strings. Yet they “give” it back to us riddled with their mandates and restrictions. School choice with government money following the child is how socialists intend to kill homeschooling and private schools. In time, these will become public schools with the same problems that we have today.

Conclusion

If America is to survive as a free nation, we cannot ever again allow government to control education. The solution is a return to the non-government education system that existed in our early history for nearly 250 years – education that made America the most literate -- and the most free – nation in the world.

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