Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) | James Lindsay
The Marxification of Education Workshop, Session 4 of 4
The hottest buzzword in education today is Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), but it's not just a buzzword. It's a huge program with almost universal installation (thanks to the Every Student Succeeds Act, ESSA, of 2015) and billions upon billions of dollars behind it. What is it? Where did it come from? Should we trust it? To the last of these questions, there are excellent reasons to believe that we shouldn't. In fact, we shouldn't want it anywhere near our children and should fight vigorously to protect them from it. We should also see there's a huge scam operating within the installation of it and that some very questionable actors are strongly behind it, but for what reasons? Here, New Discourses Founder James Lindsay gives a deep, concerning, and thorough (but mere) introduction to the topic of Social-Emotional Learning in this last of four presentations on the Marxification of Education delivered in late July 2022 in Arlington, Virginia, on location in the now-famous Loudoun County, ground zero for the fight for America's schools.
As a result of the research that produced this lecture series, Lindsay has written a detailed and accessible book on the issue titled The Marxification of Education, which is available for preorder now.
The "Limits-to-growth" studies weren't wrong. They didn't "predict" the future but laid out different scenarios base on different assumptions (about resource growth, population growth, food growth, industrial growth, pollution growth). Their original "business as usual" scenario forecast a global collapse by now because, not surprisingly, some its assumptions were a little off. With updated assumptions based on the last 50 years of data, this scenario appears to becoming true. That is, we are actually hitting the world limits-to-growth right now. In fact, an increasing # people, like Jem Bendell, have studied the data and concluded we are already in the early stages of civilization collapse (accelerating climate and ecosystem damage, slowing economic growth, increasing economic fragility, increasing social and political conflict, etc.). Many have concluded that it is very unlikely that new technology will come to the rescuue - that it will be too little, too late - that it require something like nuclear fusion to become very economical on a massive, global scale, within a generation.
I've been binge listening to your podcasts for the last 2 months. Eye opening and disturbing stuff.
Thank you!