by Adam De Gree
Social-emotional learning (SEL) has been in vogue in education circles for decades. Following its precepts, teachers, counselors, and administrators encourage students to look inward and focus on their feelings. The result?
A generation of young people who can’t stop thinking about their emotions, leaving them incredibly fragile. But that’s not what many of the experts will tell you.
As the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning explains:
SEL advances educational equity and excellence through authentic school-family-community partnerships to establish learning environments and experiences that feature trusting and collaborative relationships, rigorous and meaningful curriculum and instruction, and ongoing evaluation. SEL can help address various forms of inequity and empower young people and adults to co-create thriving schools and contribute to safe, healthy, and just communities.
That’s quite the mouthful. Yet an observant reader will note that many of the selling points of SEL have nothing to do with learning. Instead, SEL is aimed at political goals like “equity.” No wonder that American students perform so poorly when it comes to apolitical skills like reading and mathematics!
But the problem with SEL isn’t just that it prioritizes ideological goals over educational objectives. It’s that it encourages students to become pathologically self-involved.
For example, consider an SEL technique that is recommended to teachers by the Social Emotional Workshop: the Feelings Thermometer. Experts claim that Feelings Thermometer exercises can help students build self-awareness.
Teachers start by drawing a thermometer and labeling it with emotions. At the bottom, they write “calm.” At the top, they write “very upset.” Then, they have students select the right “emotional temperature” and think about “triggers.”
In addition to students’ focusing on their emotions instead of learning academic subjects, SEL places a huge emphasis on self-esteem. According to the experts, self-esteem is essential for student success. But in these experts’ estimation, self-esteem is not the result of excellence—it is the cause of excellence.
As a result of this fundamental error, SEL does not encourage students to build self-esteem by becoming more disciplined and accomplishing difficult tasks; instead, it teaches them to replace “negative self-talk” with “positive self-talk.”
There are those who claim that SEL is not all bad. They argue that many of the programs parading around as SEL are just doing it wrong and that an evidence-based SEL program can help students learn to manage their emotions and perform well in academic disciplines.
It may certainly be true that teachers can help students manage their emotions. But by embracing anything under the title of SEL, schools are opening the door to a broad range of unproven methods, many of which have serious negative consequences for young people.
For example, author Abigail Shrier points out that the main symptom of depression is rumination. When people ruminate, they dwell on negative feelings and try to identify what went wrong. Sadly, this is exactly what SEL techniques like the Emotional Thermometer train children to do.
And as for activities that encourage kids to practice positive self-talk and develop high self-esteem without reference to personal achievement? We all know what it’s like to meet someone who thinks the world of themselves despite having done nothing of value. The word for such a person is “narcissist.”
Rather than intervening in the mental health of their students in an attempt to “reduce inequity,” schools should focus on educating them. As students engage with the great books, timeless ideas, and enduring art of humanity, they will develop a more profound self-knowledge than any hour-long emotional exercise can give them. After all, that’s the very point of studying the humanities. They might also learn how to read, write, and do arithmetic.
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Adam De Gree is a classical educator and freelance writer. He teaches online history, literature, and government & economics courses for homeschoolers with Classical Historian. His writing has been published in venues including The Culture Crush, The Imaginative Conservative, and Partially Examined Life.
