“The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” - Abraham Lincoln

It is often said that when something controversial is being pounded into the public via media headlines, there is something else that is going on behind the scenes that the public is being distracted from.  This is certainly the case with America’s education system.  While the public has been hammered with a full-frontal assault by activists pushing Critical Race Theory and gender ideology in the schools overtly, there has also been a covert assault from the flank called Social-Emotional Learning or SEL.

Social-Emotional Learning supposedly arose out of the COVID-19 pandemic and a need to attend to the emotional psyches of fragile youth. It is a shift in the role of a teacher from an educator to a therapist and places a high value on a child’s emotional competency over academic performance.  After locking kids in their homes, isolating them from their peers, muzzling them with ineffective face diapers, and pounding them with fear and doom for 2 years, activists have swooped in to provide emotional support in the classroom once they were permitted to return.  In typical government fashion, it seems like a solution looking for a problem. They didn’t create SEL to mend the fragile psyches of youth, they damaged the fragile psyches of youth to push SEL.

Social-Emotional Learning is a backdoor for CRT and gender ideology.  After returning to school, some students have complained that rather than work to get them caught up on missing a year of quality instruction, they were instead presented with pseudo-therapeutic questions about their emotional competency.  Some examples of SEL questions that students have been presented with include “How do you feel when you see two men kissing?”, or “If you didn’t have a diverse makeup of friends in your friend group, is it racist to seek out another race to fill your friend group?” This has resulted in even some lifetime Democratic voters raising red flags.

We’d be remiss to believe that Idaho has escaped the nonsense.  In a recent undercover journalism operation by the organization Accuracy in Media, several Idaho educators were secretly filmed admitting that though SEL was banned in Idaho under the CRT ban, they simply teach the same concepts and call it mental health or behavior adaptations. 

YouTube screengrab

They call it a brilliant ploy to change the name but keep the concepts deployed.  These activists know that what they are teaching is barred in Idaho and secretly celebrate flaunting state law to continue to push their activism on your children.  This stands in direct contradiction to what leftists proclaim when they say, “CRT is not taught in our classrooms.”  CRT and SEL aren’t curricula, but rather a worldview that is imparted to your children by activists.

In a recent Twitter thread by podcaster Josh Daws of the Great Awokening Podcast, Daws lays out in 23 tweets how CRT and gender ideology have been deployed sequentially and their effect on the minds of America’s youth.  Based on the work of postmodern critic James Lindsey, Daws suggests that the opening salvo of CRT was to tear down approved identity in the youth.  It imparts guilt, shame, and social rejection of majority identities like whiteness, maleness, a binary gender paradigm, or even heterosexuality.  Once a person has been made to reject their own race, gender, or sexuality, it is followed up with an approved list of identities from which they can choose in order to be socially accepted.

This activist attack on traditionalism begins to explain the sharp increase in the percentage of the population that identifies as LGBTQ.  In 2012, 5.8 percent of millennials identified as LGBTQ.  Today, that number stands at 9.1 percent amongst the same millennials.  Move a generation forward and 15.9 percent of Generation Z identify as LGBTQ and growing.

As we have seen in the case of Florida’s anti-Grooming legislation, the pushback against indoctrinating our youth has been vociferous.  Attempts to ban sexuality and gender ideology from k-3 classrooms were intentionally misrepresented as banning the word gay from classrooms.  This raises the question: why are activists so hellbent on pushing their ideas of gender and sexuality on the kids?

The purpose of all of this miseducation is a direct attack on the family itself.  Neo-Marxists promote the same end goals as the old Marxists, including the abolition of the nuclear family, which they view as a structure of the hegemony.  When the young are made to believe that their inherent sex or race is a cause for social rejection, they infer that they were set up for this status by their own parents.  This creates resentment and a schism in the nuclear family.  Many parents can attest to children returning home from school and castigating their parents for raising them with a bigoted worldview.  Many relationships are irreparably severed as a result.

Despite legislation to ban certain ideologies in the classroom in many states, activists continue to rebrand their tired ideas with new labels and fill the malleable minds of the youth with divisive and subjective ideologies.  It is for this reason that parents must continue to stay engaged in their children’s education and challenge educators, administrators, and school boards when they veer from the mandate they’ve been entrusted with.

Photo by Max Harlynking on Unsplash

Brian Parsons is a paleoconservative columnist in Idaho, a proud husband and father, and saved by Grace.  You can follow him at WithdrawConsent.org or find his weekly opinion column in the Idaho State Journal.  Gab, email.