By Gretchen Garrity
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, commonly known as DESE, is accepting public comment until September 15, 2023 on the proposed adoption of "K-12 Learning Standards, Glossary, and Student Indicators for Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) developed by the SEL work team."
SEL is being sold as a way to help students with self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness. While these skills can seem beneficial and benign, they are really a model of indoctrination with the ultimate goal of directing and controlling the thoughts and behaviors of students.
Moms for Liberty has a helpful packet on SEL that sums it up: "The ultimate goal of SEL is to shift the values, beliefs, attitudes, and worldviews of students. The goal is to psychologically manipulate students to accept the progressive ideology that supports gender fluidity, sexual preference exploration, and systemic oppression."
Go here for a quick quiz that gets parents up to speed on SEL.
The site Courage is a Habit also has helpful information to explain via graphics what SEL is. The graphic below is an example of how student surveys--data collection--is the process method of indoctrinating students through categorizing them by race and gender. Go here to download the full 3-page infographic.
How did Missouri get to the point of adopting SEL into schools statewide? According to Local Control Missouri, on "Tuesday, August 15th, Missouri State Board of Education approved to start the process of the Rule-Making change to add SEL (Social Emotional Learning) for K-12 mental health training."
And further, "It was snuck into the Ed Omnibus Bill of 2022 (SB 681/662) carried by the team of Senator Cindy O’Laughlin (R) and Senator Lauren Arthur (D). That progressive 2022 Ed Omnibus Bill had a lot snuck into it. And now they are coming after our kids with SEL with their new authority given to them under RSMo 170.307."
Missouri Republicans strike again to implement radical agendas along with their Democrat counterparts.
Below is a video class on "SEL101" that is very informative and eye-opening. The first speaker, Jennifer McWilliams, was fired for refusing to teach SEL in her small, rural Indiana school. Go here for more videos from McWilliams that expose SEL. And go here for SEL information from another speaker, James Lindsay.
When educators use the language of Social-Emotional Learning, they mean something else than what most people understand the words to mean. In the tweet below, a teachers' union representative says the quiet parts out loud:
And now it’s on a new mechanism to enter the school through SEL.
— Local Control MO (@LocalControl_MO) September 7, 2023
Just listen to an AFT union presentation.
“…liberation is a collective goal…we share the common goal of standing up for justice and standing up against systems of oppression.” https://t.co/gtADCpPlDj pic.twitter.com/756ufEibcj
The public comment page on the DESE website is several pages and somewhat tedious. It is important, however, that citizens speak against SEL by commenting. There is a lot of verbiage and edu-speak, but once you see the purpose behind SEL, the language of indoctrination becomes simple to decipher. Again, the comment period ends Sept. 15.
