She argues that young people did
better when the expectation was that, as messy as home life might be, expec- tations for appropriate behavior and eff ort toward schoolwork were main- tained at school. SEL sabotages the parent-child rela-
tionship, largely by undermining the moral authority a parent has — and should have — over values in the home. Teachers gain power over student
thinking, and so do the often very pro- gressive counselors that most schools have brought in. “SEL isn’t just a curriculum trend;
it was built into education decades ago and gets renamed each time people catch on,” said Priscilla West, author of The New Face of Woke Education, which outlines the harms SEL poses to students. “SEL treats children as agents of
social change, rather than as individu- als to be educated,” she said. “Think of SEL as an app, wired into everything — math, history, language. These kids were not born activists. They’ve been programmed to believe that activism is a virtue. It’s just guilt: You’re white, you’ve got privilege, you’re destroying the climate.” West, a former chair of Moms for Liberty in Leon County, Florida, one of a few organizations that have mobi- lized to fi ght against SEL in schools, argues that it has become a total indoctrination system.
“In 2019-2020, SEL changed from emotional regulation to activism. Kids were sent home to learn, and social ideology was the main thing they were learning.”
In her book, she writes, “In 2021, CASEL President
Karen Niemi
affi rmed ‘SEL as a Lever for Equity and Social Justice,’ that SEL helps people ‘move from anger, to agency, and then to action.’
“Notably absent was any discus-
sion of how school children might be guided toward such anger in the fi rst place — or who might benefi t from put- ting them there. “Online e-learning is not just anoth-
$9 BILLION MARKET Everfi
Second Step
Panorama Education
MILLION Students
45 26 15
MILLION Students
MILLION Students
“This is worse than ideological indoctrination. We are creating a permission structure to make it OK to fail at your job.”
— Robert Pondiscio, senior education fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
er way to deliver content,” she said. “It borders on behavioral conditioning. It knows how a child thinks, and is used to change how that child thinks.” Which is to say that schools signifi -
cantly replace the family as the place where kids learn values and principles. Parents did not agree to this. West asks: “Who has control?
Do you want this managing your child’s emotions? “Charlie Kirk talked about univer-
sities brainwashing kids. The truth is that by the time they get to university, they’ve already had K-12
How Big Is the Market?
T
he global SEL market is estimated at $9 billion, with the
largest online SEL platforms handling the personal information of tens of millions of children. Among the most widely used are Everfi (45 million students), Second Step (26 million), and Panorama Education (15 million). Nearly all of them, and the metrics they track, are “CASEL aligned.”
indoctrination.” Major textbook companies build
SEL into everything they teach. So do software fi rms that provide educa- tional tools. SEL has spread around the world these days, with UNESCO pushing it. The software packages that engage
children in dealing with their men- tal health are especially dangerous because they retain information about individual children and create records, and they are not transparent to parents. Robert Pondiscio, senior educa- tion fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, explains that with SEL, “We are putting something on teachers’ plates that they are not equipped to do. They should be teaching reading and writing.
“This is worse than ideological indoctrination. We are creating a per- mission structure to make it OK to fail at your job.
“A teacher can say, ‘Reading and math are important, but I teach the “whole child,”’ giving herself permis- sion to fail at reading and writing.” Pondiscio thinks it will eventually fade out. “Education is very fad-driv- en. SEL is one of those things.”
Still, in the interim, he notes, “There is a mental health crisis among students, but asking an institution that fails at its basic task to fi x it is a recipe for failure.
“The problem with SEL is not indoc- trination, but the permission structure to fail at our basic responsibilities.” As the NAEP scores
indicate,
schools are failing. And only a small number of people and groups are look- ing at the role SEL plays in that. Time to homeschool.
JANUARY 2026 | NEWSMAX 21
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108
