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A $10 billion educational juggernaut promising to soothe young minds amid rising anxiety rates has taken America’s classrooms hostage. It’s called Social and Emotional Learning (SEL).
SEL’s origins are difficult to pin down, but a useful starting point is 1994, when a gathering of educators, psychologists, and thought leaders at the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan, crystallized the concept. Among the attendees was Daniel Goleman, then a New York Times science reporter and co-founder of CASEL (the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), who popularized “emotional intelligence” as a cure-all for both classroom disruptions and broader social problems. CASEL quickly championed the idea that emotional intelligence training could double as moral and social reform, embedding them in schools with funding from the Gates, Kellogg, and Chan Zuckerberg foundations. By the early 2000s, SEL had spread nationwide, emphasizing five core competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.
Early programs focused on individual growth, drawing from Goleman’s work and, in some cases, from Tibetan Buddhist influences. Among these was the controversial Chögyam Trungpa, a spiritual teacher whose severe alcoholism and sexual affairs with students exposed early on the moral contradictions within this supposedly “mindful” lineage of emotional education.
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With this, SEL evolved into a collectivist and activist-oriented framework. By the 2010s, CASEL and allied organizations were no longer emphasizing emotional intelligence as a personal skill set but as a collective and political project.
CASEL’s July 2019 pivot to “Transformative SEL” made this shift explicit, embedding “collective goals,” “justice-oriented civic engagement,” and “identity-based equity” into its core competencies. As Suzannah Alexander noted in her Minding the Campus review of Priscilla West’s The New Face of Woke Education, a book that exposes how modern SEL and related educational programs use emotional manipulation, identity politics, and data-driven oversight to advance ideological agendas in schools, SEL’s ideological turn has had concrete results. In one Illinois case, a 13-year-old student credited SEL for inspiring his Black Lives Matter activism, declaring, “Our generation has to take a stand—and if we unite now, we will be unstoppable.”
Today’s SEL programs, backed by corporate and nonprofit heavyweights like CASEL, Panorama Education, and Committee for Children and Imagine Learning, have evolved to include “resilience circles,” “feelings check-ins,” and digital dashboards that log students’ moods, social interactions, and self-assessments—often without parental consent. As Wai Wah Chin of the Manhattan Institute notes, SEL tools function less as supports than as instruments of behavioral monitoring. Resilience circles, marketed as safe spaces for sharing and coping, pressure students to label and internalize emotions, while digital dashboards collect a continuous stream of psychological data that can be stored indefinitely.” Chin compares this to George Orwell’s 1984, where emotional tracking becomes a form of social conditioning. Through mood charts and “growth mindset” analytics, students’ thoughts and feelings are quantified, analyzed, and potentially used to rank or profile them for “social-emotional fitness.”
Still, what remains underexplored, seemingly even by SEL’s sharpest critics, is how it intersects with the self-esteem movement and the rise of gender ideology in schools.
Waterford.org, for example, claims that CASEL’s core competencies inherently foster high self-esteem. But self-esteem is a social hazard. Prioritizing high self-esteem encourages students to value feelings of worth over actual competence. When emotional validation becomes the goal, students struggle to tolerate critique, avoid challenges that might expose weaknesses, and interpret failure as a personal threat rather than an opportunity to grow. (For a glimpse of how inflated and simplistic modern self-esteem advice can be, see this guide suggesting kids “write down all the things they like about themselves,” as if the exercise could build resilience.)
The connection between SEL and gender ideology is one I’ve seen few others make, but to me, there are clear parallels worth exploring. Proponents of SEL—particularly Transformative SEL—appear to share a philosophical approach similar to that behind affirmative care for gender dysphoria. As Brandie Waid, “The Queer Mathematics Teacher” at the Radical Pedagogy Institute, lays bare in “Transformative SEL Mathematical Liberation for 2SLGBTQIA+ Students,” these programs integrate queer culture and identity into subjects like mathematics, framing affirmation of students’ gender and sexual identities as a central educational objective. SEL’s focus on validating “lived experiences” and centering identity mirrors gender-affirming education models—both place self-expression and emotional validation above evidence-based reasoning and developmental stability.
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Despite its clear use as a tool of social coercion by activists seeking to radicalize children, mainstream outlets such as NPR continue to portray SEL as a neutral method for helping students manage stress and improve test scores. Anyone relying on such sources would be obscured from the fact that beneath SEL’s therapeutic surface lies a complex system of data collection, ideological conditioning, and emotional manipulation. Americans should turn away from these outlets and turn instead to reporters who are exposing what this pedagogy truly entails.
Parents should insist on audits, opt-outs, and outright bans on SEL. Policymakers should redirect billions toward phonics, factual instruction, and robust teacher development. School districts must retire these programs before they reshape a generation, reclaiming classrooms as spaces for mastery, independence, and critical thinking, not ideological indoctrination.
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Image by Muhammad on Adobe (Asset ID#: 1700858523). Selected because Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) often uses smiley faces and similar emoticons as simple visual tools to help students recognize and express their emotions.
