Imagine an era where Big Tech, billionaire foundations, and government bureaucrats feast on your child’s innermost thoughts from kindergarten right through college. Now read The New Face of Woke Education by Priscilla West, and discover the chilling surveillance state masquerading as Social Emotional Learning (SEL) already deeply embedded in schools near you.
While innocuous sounding, SEL has garnered a reputation not only for robbing students of valuable time that should be spent on core subjects like reading and math, but also for smuggling ideological agendas into the classroom under the guise of emotional development.
In this concise but unsettling entry in Encounter Books’s Broadside series, West traces the evolution of SEL from Daniel Goleman’s early “emotional intelligence” movement to the sprawling social-emotional industrial complex that now dominates American education.
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West’s begins with the unlikely prescience of controversial Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa and the mingling of Asian religions and Western psychology. While genuine helpful insights sprang from that union, including two different models of therapy, much like how Trungpa was corrupted by severe alcoholism and affairs with students, Western psychology took on a collectivist bent, failing to separate therapeutically useful tools from underlying Eastern worldviews.
From there, the book tracks how the Fetzer Institute, a New Age spiritualist organization with the goal of “helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world,” bankrolled Goleman’s work and became enmeshed in the development of his theories. Once, paired with Goleman’s status as a science reporter at the New York Times, this new union was in the perfect position to make a major splash. So when they formed the Collaborative for Advancement of Social Emotional Learning (CASEL) at the Yale Child Study Center in 1994, it took off like San Francisco during the gold rush.
West details how SEL was sold as a way to teach students how to manage their emotions and develop the social acumen of Machiavell, with lawmakers quickly buying into how the school system could address deeper societal woes while also training kids to do long division.
This development became the impetus for tech companies to develop software for tracking student behavior, relationships, and psychological safety. High-powered groups like the Gates Foundation, Kellogg, Allstate, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and others turbocharged the production of SEL resources and curriculum with a firehose of funding.
The book lays out how, once established in the educational system, CASEL changed the rules on SEL. The scope expanded to include concepts like “collective goals” and “just communities.” Already deeply integrated into the educational system, shifting the focus to teaching kids about activism was as effortless as flipping a switch. West relates:
In Illinois, 13-year-old Rashad Evans credited SEL for his participation in a Black Lives Matter protest, telling CASEL summit attendees, ‘Our generation has to take a stand—and if we unite now, we will be unstoppable.’
Thoroughly linking in the thread of Common Core, West hits her stride in showing the connections, familial, fraternal, and occupational, between the growth of SEL and the involvement of wealthy elites interested in having a social influence with their investments.
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West takes the concern further, revealing SEL’s Orwellian tech apparatus—data-mining software that monitors students’ moods, friendships, and values, then assigns psychological “growth” targets. As she points out, this is often done without consent, accountability, or exit ramps. That alone should hit parents like a freight train.
Returning to the collectivist underpinnings that were embedded even in early versions of SEL, West concludes with a concise selection of suggestions to restore the purpose of education from activist programming, through a combination of parent involvement and policy reform.
Despite the narrative thread occasionally getting lost in the weeds of the educational system’s various moving parts, Priscilla West’s forthcoming book is more than a critique; it’s a call to reclaim schooling from digital surveillance and ideological manipulation before the next generation’s minds are fully mapped. With the courts already pondering the limits of parental authority, there is no time to waste.
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Cover designed by Jared Gould, incorporating artwork by Stasys (Adobe Asset ID 370157316) and the book cover courtesy of Encounter Books.
