Social, Psychological, and Behavioral Conditioning is the first category of public education pedagogies, programs, and policies in our Tsunami of Systems that are overwhelming students, families, and schools.
1. Social, Psychological & behavioral Conditioning
Social Emotional Learning (SEL)
How much personal info about your kids should outsiders have access to?
Forcing children to continually expose and question their values, beliefs, and dispositions makes them overly self-conscious and vulnerable to emotional manipulation and experimentation at the expense of their academic instruction, violating their rights of conscience and family privacy.
Social Emotional Learning techniques behaviorally condition children toward value systems and mindsets that embrace and promote transformational social change agendas over traditional, family-based social norms. SEL approaches are embedded in every aspect of the learning process.
Examples of these social agendas are:
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
- Sexual Orientation and Gender Identiy/Expression
- Mental Health & Whole Child
In an SEL framework, children are taught that schools, not families, are the main authorities, definers, and transmitters of personal and social values.
Schools have redefined the demonstration of SEL behaviors, feelings, and beliefs as “competencies,” which the Federal Elementary and Secondary School Act (ESSA) incentivizes schools to measure and score through technology, via PCBL.
The national standard setter for Social Emotional Learning competencies is the Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). CASEL has a 30-year track record of trying to transform education so that “all learning is social emotional.”
Examples of some SEL competencies are:
- Social Awareness
- Self Awareness
- Social Perspective Taking
- Relationship Building
- Empathy
- Self Efficacy
- Sense of Belonging
- Emotion Regulation
- Engagement
- Cultural Responsiveness
- Academic mindset
Every facet, every department of your mind, is to be programmed by you. And unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you.
SEL in practice favors collectivism over individualism, gender non-conformity over gender norms, race essentialism over cultural commonalities, groupthink over independent thought, and subjectivity over objectivity.
Children’s social-emotional learning competencies are shaped and scored by outsiders through multiple modalities — sharing circles, surveys, emotional health journals, self-reporting, teacher observation, and other methods.
This socioemotional data then becomes a part of a student’s academic transcript, resulting in a type of “social credit” profile that’s framed by programs like Portrait of a Graduate and demonstrated in a competency-based record like that produced by the Mastery Transcript Consortium.
Having teachers, counselors, and school personnel practice amateur armchair psychology on children in place of teaching foundational academics will only end badly for families. The primary role in guiding the emotional development of our children is being, slowly and surely, ceded to the schools.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI)
Are our society’s foundations so flawed they need forced reengineering?
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion approaches invariably, ironically, and intentionally lead to thought conformity, discrimination, and exclusion, proving exceptionally divisive and damaging to familial and friend relationships.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity are euphemisms for the racial, cultural, and sexual politicization of learning and working environments. DEI promotes discriminatory and divisive ideas and practices in the name of “social justice,” and is founded on the Critical Race Theories developed and purveyed by higher education academics.
Examples of DEI-related concepts are advanced through:
- Critical Race Theory (CRT)
- Transformational SEL
- Social Justice
- Intersectionality
- Ethnic Studies
- Culturally Responsive Teaching
- Culturally Relevant Language
- Cultural Marxism
- Cultural Competency
- Restorative Justice
In a DEI framework, children are taught that society is systemically discriminatory, that people are either victims or victimizers, and that culture, color, race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status are inseparable from a person’s ability to learn. Diversity has been selectively defined to exclude “privilege,” meaning anything White, heteronormative, culturally traditional, or religiously orthodox.
We must stop this incessant victimhood mentality. Somebody else will not fix things. Somebody else will not make me healthy. Somebody else will not make me happy. These things are my responsibility. Not the neighbor’s, not the government’s, not the church or the civic club.
DEI as implemented in schools includes:
- Educational Equity departments
- Books, curriculum, and symbols promoting gender identity, sexual orientation, and racialized agendas
- “Racially-diverse” hiring quotas
- Implicit bias training/self-evaluations
- Clubs, scholarships, and activities segregated by race, ethnicity, and sexuality
- Restorative Justice disciplinary processes that provide leniency based on racial/ethnic/sexual identity
- Relaxed student dress and conduct code standards.
The achievement of equitable outcomes is frequently stated as a primary goal of Social Emotional Learning, Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity and Expression, College & Career Readiness, Portrait of a Graduate, and PCBL programs and initiatives.
Mental Health & Whole Child
Is an obsessive compulsive approach to mental health healthy for kids?
Schools are pathologizing normalcy and normalizing pathologies, making children feel like something's wrong with them because nothing is wrong with them and leading to practices that resemble a psychological form of Munchausens-by-proxy.
Schools are being transformed from academics and activity-based institutions into mental & behavioral health centers, in which children are receiving a continuum of clinical services—including counseling, screenings, interventions, and treatments—by both unlicensed and licensed practitioners, including teachers.
Examples of mental health approaches and practices are:
- Multi-tiered Systems of Support (MTSS)
- Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports (PBIS)
- Team Initiated Problem Solving (TIPS)
- Talk/Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Mindfulness & Breathing exercises
- Prevention services
- Counseling & Social Work programs
In a “Trauma Informed Practices” framework, school officials assume “toxic stress” from Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) in students as a given, preventing students from learning unless this trauma is addressed first. Home-life adversity and race-based inequities are regarded the primary causes of trauma.
The National Association of School Psychologists proposes a holistic model for the integration of psychology services in the schools, meaning that psychological assessment of children is embedded in every aspect of the school, including school climate, personnel, pedagogy, discipline, and curriculum.
Much of this psychosocial monitoring is done without parents’ knowledge or explicit, informed consent.
The parent-child connection is the most powerful mental health intervention known to mankind.
Closely tied to the mental health interventions are the physical health services that schools are positioning themselves to provide under the name of community wellness “wrap-around” services, most egregiously manifested in the CDC’s Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) framework.
We are seeing genuine mental health issues often being addressed through medicalized responses (e.g., gender dysphoria affirmed treated through surgery), and genuine physiological issues being addressed through psychologized methods (e.g., yoga & mindfulness for obesity).
State-funded, state-driven efforts to assume responsibility for the “whole child” (physical, spiritual, mental, social, sexual, emotional) inevitably lead to parents surrendering their stewardship and responsibilities for their children to the state and its agents.