The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 69
Critical Education Theory Series, Part 6
Possibly the most important topic happening in education, at least if you care about the well-being, health, and safety of children and the future of this country, is “Social-Emotional Learning (SEL).” Social-Emotional Learning is the psychologizing of schooling, and, as one might expect, it comes in a variety of forms. The most contemporary and relevant form is the most Marxist form because the Marxist educators have completely hijacked any legitimacy the program ever had and turned it into a Maoist nightmare to ruin your kids so they can achieve their revolution. In this long, detailed episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay helps you understand the most Marxist version of SEL, Transformative SEL, by reading a full academic paper describing it and the (complete lack of) evidence for its implementation. The paper appeared in Educational Psychologist in 2019, bearing the title ” Transformative Social and Emotional Learning (SEL): Toward SEL in Service of Educational Equity and Excellence,” and is by Robert J. Jagers, Deborah Rivas-Drake, and Brittney Williams. If you want to save our schools, you have to understand what Transformative SEL is (and the CASEL model it has colonized), and you can do that by joining James for this informative episode!
Critical Education Theory Series:
Part 1: Education’s New Marxist Commitments
Part 2: How Education Turned Critical
Part 3: Paulo Freire’s Politics of Education and a New Hope
Part 4: Paulo Freire’s Prophetic Vision for Education
Part 5: Critical Education: What Is Culturally Relevant Pedagogy?
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Previous episodes of the New Discourses Podcast are available here.
11 comments
http://scsmh.education.uiowa.edu/
Would like your thoughts on this free required training. The training is going from public school old to public school training teachers in Para. I had the training and left in the middle of it. We were told to go around in a circle and talk about our mental feel from the blob tree.
And apparently, after I left, they were teaching psychology stuff about how to spot someone in crisis mode for suicide prevention .
If I could look back, I’m curious, and all the wording they were telling us but I honestly can’t remember because I was so overwhelmed
And uncomfortable.
The download link for the paper does not work. Is there a working link somewhere?
Though I am only part way through your reading of this “paper,” the pattern is already appearing fairly clearly. It continues to support my approach to this problem as an attempt by criminal minds to take over the world.
Though you describe the products of this “learning” approach as “woke Marxists,” when you describe how they think and act, they sound like criminals or the minions of criminals. I see the ultimate goal of all this is to establish criminals as the ultimate suppressed class and thus direly in need of liberation! It will then be “racist” or “white” to advocate for the arrest of people who commit crimes, or to pass laws prohibiting or punishing criminal behavior, no matter how popular such laws might be.
Oddly, criminals believe in punishing people when they misbehave. So the Woke will have to establish some new measure for “badness,” as they are currently trying to do. In the criminal world, the rules are often “understood” but not written down. So they may not advocate for a legal system as we have now, but rather some form of mob justice. This seems to be their favorite approach at this point.
The only acceptable world for the criminal is a criminal world. This seems to be what criminals who have achieved power are working towards. Hopefully we will find a way to avoid this.
Very hard hitting , James . Im one third through and i love your no bs , calling it what it is , style of flushing this evil out , that is deeply , parasiticly embedded in our systems for decades now .
I hope you are making some money out here for your yeoman efforts having to read this horrible ideology . Talk about vomit ridden semantical dogma , but we badly need what you have done out here , breaking down how disgusting they are just reading their words .
A retired New Zealand journalist of the old school seems fully onboard with your take on the Marxist origins of Critical Theory, James, in his discussion of several issues currently embroiling two NZ universities.
He writes:
That word “critical” is the giveaway. “Critical studies” and “critical theory” are broad umbrella terms for an essentially Marxist analysis that sees the world in terms of oppressive power structures.
Critical studies flourish in academia despite being wildly at odds with mainstream ideological beliefs. The University of Otago in particular seems to function as a breeding ground for leftist finger-waggers on a mission to lay bare the supposedly egregious failings of democratic capitalism and replace it with something better.
See https://karldufresne.blogspot.com/2022/03/otago-university-pioneers-new-approach.html
Social Emotional Learning is so last year. My county, the far left Montgomery County, MD), is now subjecting students in grades 4 -8 to “psychoeducational” lessons in race. “Psychoeducation” has been defined as ““education or training of a person with a psychiatric disorder in various areas which helps to reach treatment and rehabilitation goals. ” Thus, the Montgomery County Public School system must consider all students in those grades as having a psychiatric disorder and is using untrained classroom teachers to given them “treatment and rehabilitation.” This is the Brave New World we have entered. And parents here either don’t know or don’t care that this is being done to their children. Fortunately, my own son is well out of the MCPS system.
You are saying that this approach assumes everyone has a mental disorder because they live is a racist society?
(in not is!)
This topic reminds me of the “Learning Styles” hoax curricula of the 1980s and 90s. I encountered it in adult literacy when it was proclaimed axiomatic truth and anyone who questioned the theory was denounced as a right wing reactionary. I found the concept of “Learning Styles” the most preposterous idiocy I’d ever encountered. I never used it and most of the adult students I taught learned to read using phonics while all the students taught by “learning style” methods did not seem to progress whatsoever. This ideologically motivated theory of teaching was designed solely to counter and oppose “conservative” teaching methods (whatever they were) and it apparently still exists with its acolytes fanatical about it to this day.
I don’t have children and I only ever taught adults and I’m also old so I know nothing about educating children. But I am constantly shocked by parents who send their kids to schools but seem to have no knowledge of or interest in what is being done to their own offspring. Some parents, I presume, ignorantly trust that K-12 education is the same 3-Rs as in the past so don’t pay attention; or perhaps some parents are so busy with their internet porn addictions and social media status obsessions that they don’t care what happens to their kids as long as the brats don’t interfere with their crazy parent’s selfish lives. But most parents, I think, are themselves lackeys and apparatchiks of the urban elite ruling class and not merely support but demand that their children be indoctrinated with SEL so that their kids can be programmed to become the same Managerial Clerisy Quisling class as their parents. This SEL brainwashing sounds like yet another of the new bourgeoisie’s initiation rites into the nomenklatura class. Robot Red Guard Children of a Lesser Corn. I fear them and dread being old around them.
https://www.educationnext.org/stubborn-myth-learning-styles-state-teacher-license-prep-materials-debunked-theory/
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.pdf
“Learning styles” is a euphemism relating to low IQ students.
You need to appear on Bill Maher’s show.
He’d be pleased to know how the plot of “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death” (1989) happened in the real world!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVjGAxuijeY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f-IYQbMPuI
As Mark Twain once wrote, “Truth is stranger than fiction”