[audio recording below]
I had to get my act together and buy classes for my kids this week. Our online school offers a nice early coupon code for returning families, but you have to use it fast—the classes fill up and then it’s hard to make a decent schedule with whatever is left. I’m only going to have two kids “home-schooling” full-time next year. I have one headed to some kind of college situation in September, and probably the fourth one in January, which leaves the two “babies” (who are 13 and 14) to carry on the torch. In honor of this fact, I decided to make the very last one start high school a year early—to treat myself really. She doesn’t need to do eighth grade. What would be the point of dragging this whole thing out another year—don’t answer that.
Our favorite online school runs as a university model—classes meeting at most twice a week, usually only once for an hour and a half. You have the rest of the week to study and take whatever quizzes and tests are assigned. You lead a quiet, mostly self-directed academic life, concentrating on the material and trying to stay off Discord until all your work is done. My two college kids, upon going off into the “real world” of “real school” were surprised to find so many of their classes meeting more often, for shorter amounts of time. It was an exasperating discovery, costing them more gas and the hassle of having to go back and forth, plus heaps of instruction about how to study and when, how to feed themselves, and other lost mythical customs caught for all young people under the label “adulting.”
But overlaid against the diminishing standards of public universities, they have encountered another trend that is annoying in the extreme. I’m pretty sure I wrote about it last year, but my oldest child, now finishing up her junior year, after four years of high school Latin, blithely sallied forth into college-level Latin, thinking that everything would be peaches and roses. But instead of just learning more Latin, every class—and every assignment—came with a side of feelings check-in. She had to fill out a form for every single class meeting and every assignment, about how she felt while she was doing it. As you can imagine, by the end of the semester, she was a basket case. She struggled to keep up with the material for the simple and useless reason that every time she started to hit her stride, she had to stop and examine how she was feeling about it.
This, apparently, isn’t the invention of one strange college professor. It is part of something called “social-emotional learning”. Abigail Shrier writes about it in her new book, an excerpt of which is available at The Free Press. The article is called “How Bad Therapy Hijacked Our Nation’s Schools.” Shrier explains:
When I first heard the term social-emotional learning, I assumed a hokey but necessary call for kids to get a grip. Or maybe it was the new name for what they used to call character education: treat people kindly, disagree respectfully, don’t be a jackass. Proponents insist it arrives at those things, albeit through the somewhat circuitous route of mental health. Sometimes described by enthusiasts as “a way of life,” social-emotional learning is the curricular juggernaut that devours billions in education spending each year and more than eight percent of teacher time. (Many teachers say they try to ensure that social-emotional learning happens all day long.) Through a series of prompts and exercises, SEL pushes kids toward a series of personal reflections, aimed at teaching them “self-awareness,” “social awareness,” “relationship skills,” “self-management,” and “responsible decision-making.”
Here is an example of an ordinary, certainly well-meaning elementary school teacher trying to do the right thing:
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