Learning about ‘Feelings 101’

Like most Great Ideas in Education, the self-esteem movement was one part common sense, one part nonsense, and one part irrelevancy. And like most it laid waste to a generation.

The California professor who invented self-esteem studied children who didn’t feel good about themselves. He concluded that genuine achievement, clear expectations, and “firm and consistent discipline” tend to make students more self-confident, while excessive “freedom” tends to lower a child’s self-image, yielding students who achieve less and are less responsible.

Firm discipline and genuine academic achievement don’t exactly characterize most contemporary “transformed” classrooms. That’s because experts spent decades promoting self-esteem by ignoring and perverting its fundamental ideas.

Welcome to the absurdity teachers experience daily.

Welcome, too, to a nation of children who often aren’t as awesome as we’ve told them they are. Good job! Over the decades self-esteem became a pernicious distraction from schools’ academic focus. Our latest “feelings” distraction is “socialemotional learning.”

SEL addresses the “management of emotions, relationships, and decision-making.” In a 2014 Education Week survey of five hundred educators, half rated SEL a “very important” factor in “student achievement.” Just one year later the survey proportion endorsing SEL had risen to two-thirds. Like selfesteem in its day, SEL is on the march in schools.

According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, SEL classroom instruction addresses specific “competencies,” often billed as “transferable skills,” under five headings: self-awareness, social awareness, responsible decision-making, self-management, and relationship skills. The collaborative’s program predictably features the usual expert-hatched gimmicks and jargon. For example, SEL instruction should be SAFE – Sequenced, Active, Focused, and Explicit. Schools deliver SEL instruction through “free-standing lessons,” explicit “schoolwide initiatives,” “teaching practices” like “project-based learning,” and the “integration of SEL” into a school’s “academic curriculum.”

“Self-confidence” and “selfmotivation” in proper measure are useful and good. “Empathy” is a virtue. “Selfdiscipline” and “impulse control” are strengths, and schools have valued “identifying,” “analyzing,” and “solving problems” as a vital learning competency since Socrates.

There’s nothing new about suggesting that “students can learn cooperation and teamwork through participation in team sports and games.” There’s likewise no revolution in proposing that “students can deepen their understanding of a current or historical event by analyzing it through a series of questions.” Assigning projects and coining terms like “reflective listening,” where one student repeats what another just said, don’t make a particular method new or newly effective. Decades of convening ever more class meetings where students purportedly “practice group decision-making” certainly hasn’t made schools safer or more conducive to learning.

While children growing up should learn to “recognize how they feel” and how others “might be feeling,” is that why we have schools? I want to and try to demonstrate empathy in my dealings with my students, but my classroom and I don’t exist to teach them empathy. I’m there to teach them our nation’s history and how to read, write, and think.

Since dusk began descending on the twentieth century, experts have declared that students need a new species of education for the twentyfirst. SEL boosters claim that American children suddenly need to graduate “college, career, and contribution ready.” Students allegedly must now be prepared to “encounter a larger number of unfamiliar words,” “connect present reading to past reading and other knowledge,” and “believe in the value of hard work.” For the first time supposedly they must learn to “persevere and cope with stress and challenging classroom assignments.” Schools must also equip them to “wrestle with failure.”

Excuse me while I watch the irony drip. When have we not intended that graduates contribute “in their workplace and their family”? My old teachers expected me to connect ideas and facts gleaned from different sources at different times. And far from becoming more rigorous, I can show you with books in my classroom how vocabulary and sentence structure have been watered down over the decades of school reform.

We can’t expect students to value hard work when officials and policies chronically make excuses for those who refuse to produce work of any kind. Students classed as “traumatized” and “challenging,” or simply obnoxious, are granted license to disrupt and terrorize classrooms and corridors while experts mouth platitudes about how all the other students must learn to cope with the resulting stress that afflicts their days. In a final deceit schools must prepare students to deal with failure. Except find me a school that actually retains students when they fail. In fact, the latest grading fad, standards-based assessment, actually eliminates the possibility of failing, and even the word “failure.”

Like many education reform crusades, social-emotional learning represents yet another abdication of societal and home responsibilities. Reassigning those responsibilities to schools weakens the families to whom the responsibility for raising children rightly belongs. It also weakens schools by compelling them to divert resources and time from their academic mission.

That diversion isn’t likely to slow on its own. Advocates contend that SEL “needs to occur in all the classes.” Even if you favor “integrating” SEL into existing lessons, the additional time has to come from somewhere. Roughly half the participants in Education Week’s survey complained that “schools pay too little attention” to SEL. One third “lamented that other things took priority, leaving limited time for social and emotional learning.”

Those “other things” are academic learning.

Those other things are why we have schools.

At least they’re why we used to.

Welcome to the absurdity teachers experience daily.