Social-Emotional Learning – Nathaniel Pullmann, 9/11/26 (2542)

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1:01There is an approach to education that is today so pervasive many people just consider it the air we breathe. Has its roots in some really bad educational ideas from the early 20th century took root and now usually flies under the flag called social emotional learning. Welcome back to issuesetc.org. Joining us to talk about social emotional learning. Nathaniel Pullman, headmaster and teacher at Redeemer Classical School in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He made a presentation at this summer's consortium for classical Lutheran education conference. Titled the unredeemable moral relativism of social emotional learning. Nathaniel, welcome. Thank you. I'm glad to be on. How would someone, one of our listeners, be able to detect if a teacher, a book, a course,

2:02school is either dabbling in or is promoting social emotional learning? That's a great question. The problem with the social emotional learning is that the people who have written the books and the curricula on it, many of them are deliberately trying to hide what they're actually doing. So sometimes it's hard to tell what it is. So just to say what it is to begin with, social emotional learning is this. It's a broad range of curricula and teaching methods that wants to make students more docile and cooperative by attempting to psychologically train them to trust their passions, to believe that all emotions are good, to believe that the only sin really is hurting someone else's feelings, which removes the ideas of rebuke and correction from our vocabulary. And then they use techniques of Eastern mysticism to control our reactions to suffering and adversity. So that's a really sort of a big thing. The way that you can typically tell is either by listening for particular keywords

3:07or listening for words that are not there is actually more common. So as I said, words about instruction, correction, rebuke, create these biblical words are absent even from the Christian curricula promoting the social emotional learning. The words to look for that are there or the ideas to look for that are there are things like there are no bad emotions or you should look inside and trust your emotions or having emotion check-ins for some of the worst curricula there's other things like cultural Marxism being brought in. But those things are the sort of some easy tags to look for if they're doing emotional check-ins or emotional evaluations or these sorts of things. That's usually a sign that this is a SEAL curriculum. You say that while it is the wrong solution it is addressing a real problem. What is that problem? Yeah, we have a real problem in our culture of broken families just a shattered culture,

4:13a godless culture in many ways and kids come out of that and into schools and they don't have any background or any support to help them to deal with other people well. They haven't been trained in that they haven't been disciplined they haven't been instructed and so they don't have the capacity often to even behave very well in school without strict control from the teachers let alone actually learn anything while they're at school. And so especially in schools these teachers are trying to figure out what do they do with these classrooms full of kids that are throwing chairs that are screaming at each other that are screaming at the teacher that are threatening people in class. They're sort of desperate for solution. Now not every class is that extreme but I think there's in that range from well raised child to that extreme. There's a lot of kids in there who just they're struggling and they're suffering and they haven't been given the biblical way of dealing with suffering

5:14and stress in their lives. You wanted to begin our analysis here with Psalm 141. What do you find there? So, Psalm 141 has a lot of the pieces that social emotional learning takes out. So it asks for instruction from God and from other righteous men. It asks that we would be rebuked for our sins and our errors and then also helped in our righteousness. It prays against our enemies that they would be destroyed and overthrown so that we could continue in the righteousness that God is giving to us. And so all these things are completely antithetical to the problems of social emotional learning and also give us a beginning of a direction for how can we actually deal with the adversities in our lives. Give us some context for how social emotional learning has really taken off in progressive education.

6:16What was the state of things and kind of the void into which it eventually flew? The history of social emotional learning and just the progressive education generally is quite a long history. It goes back several hundred years. It begins, I would say mostly with John Jacques Rousseau and his educational ideas and a lot of those get picked up and then expanded in the 1800s. By the beginning of the 1900s we get into what is, I guess, technically progressive education with people like John Dewey and Horace Mann. And these educators and educational philosophers, they thought that the child was not created in the image of God from Rousseau on. They are specifically and directly against God and God's word and God's order. And so when they look at the child, they don't see a immortal being for whom they will be held responsible on the last day.

7:19They see something that's more like a dog that needs to be trained. And so they move more towards psychological methods of training and manipulation. There's a whole bunch more to progressive education. I'm just picking up this one thread of it that they don't want to correct the child and they get this from Rousseau. That the child is to be not corrected in a moral way, but simply psychologically adjusted to become more cooperative. And so that starts in the early 20th century and continues through the century with a number of different reforms because it turns out if you have a false anthropology, if you don't understand what children are and then you try to educate them, it doesn't work. And so the 20th century and the early 21st century is a history of repeated failures of these methods to work and then trying to fix them by doubling down on the very principles that failed in the first place. So at the end of the 20th century, in the early 21st century,

8:23there's a whole bunch of reforms that are made probably listeners will remember things like Common Core or no child left behind. Even before that, there were some things akin to social emotional learning like the self-esteem movement that some of us grew up with. And so SEL is sort of the newest attempt in that space to try to address the moral component without God. So SEL tries to address how do we teach a child to act morally, but they've stripped out the basis for morality. And so all they can do is don't hurt other people's feelings and comply and don't make trouble. I remember from my high school and then the few education courses that I took when I still thought I would be an educator at Concordia, Suord and Nebraska, a concept of

9:23I think the term of art was unconditional positive regard. There was really no kind of a no judgment framework around education. Is that part of this as well? Yeah, many of the same ideas just repackaged unconditional positive self-regard. That's about right. This comes from Rousseau that the child in his natural state is actually the ideal that it is society, especially Christian society and the church that corrupts him. And so what we need to do is stop trying to correct and instruct the child because that we're actually just corrupting him. Instead he should look inside himself and what he sees there he should have regard for, he should be positive about. How does moral relativism kind of fuel what would eventually become social emotional learning?

10:23Yeah, the moral relativism is necessary for this because again if there is a morality, if there's a noable external morality, then we can tell people that they need to abide by it. If there isn't noable external morality, if morality is just whatever happens to make me feel good, then the only thing we can tell people is to not make other people feel bad. So there's no way to have instruction, review correction, training and righteousness if there is no morality. And so in the early 20th century again when we jettisoned any idea of objective external morality that leaves us void that you have to try to fill because you can't just tell kids you can behave however you want. That doesn't work and everybody knows it. And so you have to tell them how to behave while still saying that there is no objective right way to behave. How was SEL formerly developed?

11:26Well, it starts in the 80s and 90s in its earliest forms. And it's developed originally by Dan Goldman and the Fetzer Institute and they together come up with this collaborative for advancement of social and emotional learning. And that does work, I mean he starts in the 70s doing work on this. Castle is founded in the 90s. That's the collaborative, their acronym is Castle. And that's founded in the 90s. And then in the 90s and into the early 2000s they manage to get in front of a lot of government people and get a lot of grants and get a lot of funding. And there's an enormous, I mean there's billions and billions of dollars pushing this into schools starting in the late 90s and into the 2000s. Can you give us some examples of what we're hearing from SEL and the proponents? Yeah, sure absolutely. It might be helpful to start with their definition of SEL. So I gave you how I think it's accurately described what they're doing. But

12:32SEL is defined by Castle. So they say SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply knowledge skills and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, make responsible and caring decisions. Now most of those sound like either pretty good ideas or sort of just jargon and pabblem. And so it seems somewhat harmless. And so you have to start pulling apart what they actually mean by these words to get at the actual intent behind them. So things like develop healthy identities is that what I forget you said the completely 100% positive view of yourself. That's what they mean by healthy identity is never think that you did anything wrong. We could go through all those goals of it and just talk about what each one means. But we could also look at some of the other things they say on their website about SEL. They say that SEL is designed to fully support all

13:39students social emotional learning. So adults need to understand their own biases and expectations, develop awareness of students cultures and backgrounds and acknowledge and challenge any inequitable practices and or policies that can limit or harm the development of children. So we get out of this. The child is good. The adult is corrupt. We have to find our own biases and stop pushing them onto the children. And biases here would include things like believing the Bible is true, a biblical morality, those sorts of things. And there's a number of those throughout their website. Were you interested in examples from curricula or would you like to hear more from their website? Oh no, sure. Give us some of some of the things that the teachers are actually seeing there. Yeah, so I see this as sort of three categories of things. One is the except everyone in category, right? Everyone is good. So except everyone. One is the sort of moral relativism and Eastern mysticism category. And one falls under the category of changing the child to being psychological rather than a moral being. So under the first one, we have

14:40things like one of the curricula says, everything discussed in this class is to remain confidential. We have a what's what we say here stays here policy, which is emphasized in the original book. Now, that's a little scary to parents often, especially since this is a middle school curriculum. But the reason that that makes sense to them is because they have this idea that there's the child is correct and is pure and it's the adults that would not want them to say things or not want to believe things that are the problem. In the chapter on identity, in the same curriculum, this is resilient minds. The teacher is instructed to treat all students as though they were all Christian, all children of God. There's never any judgment or hint of warning for the unbeliever. And this is against supposed to be a Christian curriculum. Under sort of the moral relativism, they they have the goal of the chapter on identity is increasing your own self-esteem as the explicit

15:40goal of the chapter, not to recognize your identity as a child of God or something like that. They spend more time in the curriculum on breathing exercises and balanced breathing than they do on prayer as a way to deal with crosses and sorrows. They use the World Health Organization's definition of mental health. They say explicitly that's what they're doing. So that's one of the examples of a middle school curriculum. The younger the kids get, it gets a little sillier. So in a curriculum called Christian Character Connection, I think this is for third graders, it says, cold prickly words do not please God. They cause us to get angry and upset with each other. Cold prickly words wreck our friendships. Cold prickly words are sinful. Jesus died to make it possible for us to be friends with one another. Let's make our classrooms a teddy bear classroom. And so you can see there that the real ideas of sin and guilt and absolution and redemption are reduced to not saying prickly things to one another. And so the only sin is hurting people.

16:46So there's no addressing of sin, there's no rebuking, there's no confessing because that would hurt somebody's feelings. The only thing that we can rebuke or correct is somebody being mean, which you know, students shouldn't be mean to each other, but there are other sins that might need to be addressed in a classroom. The annual Pullman is our guest. We're talking about social emotional learning. How widespread is this view and approach to education even in say, a conservative church body like my own, the Lutheran Church Missouri Senate? Why does Luke emphasize prayer more than any other gospel writer? How did the early Christians navigate wealth in an empire without a safety net? And what made Jesus treatment of women so revolutionary? The issues that set her a book of the month for September is dinner with the doctor, Luke's gospel for the hungry. Learn more about this new Bible commentary and daily devotional

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21:02the Lutheran Witness Magazine. We're talking about social emotional learning with Nathaniel Paulman. He's headmastering teacher of the Democlassical School in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He made a presentation at this summer's Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education Conference titled the Unredeemable Moral Relativism of Social Emotional Learning. Nathaniel, how widespread is social emotional learning, even in say a conservative church body like our own, the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod? It is pretty near everywhere. It's required by several dozen states. I think every other number is now last I looked. I thought it was 26 states, require this as part of their state requirements. So if your state certified in those states, you have to do it. It is required by the largest school accrediting bodies, including Cognia, which works together with the NLSA for a number of schools accreditation and middle states. It's sold in several curriculums that

22:03CPH publishes. I know that it's taught in some of our colleges, in some classes. And the people that are promoting and pushing this in the LCMS again, I don't want to come across as though I'm saying these people understand what this is and they're trying to undermine Christianity by pushing SEL. I think that they are misunderstanding what social emotional learning is and they think that they can fix it. They know that the most of the curriculum that's out there for purchase by like the public schools is wicked. And we haven't even got to. There's a whole bunch of stuff in the standard SEL curriculum that's much worse than what I read to you. That's stuff about racism and trying to make white people feel bad for the color of their skin, stuff about sexual identity. And so there's much worse stuff out there. And these educators and teachers of teachers think that they can pull all that stuff out and that they can produce a product that will help teachers to help their students deal with their emotions in the classroom. And so it's a lot of places because as I said, there's

23:08a lot of problem with students not being able to deal with their emotions in the classroom. And so it's in just about every level of our schools, obviously not every school, but many, many schools. It creeps into other curricula. So it's not just if it's a plain SEL curricula. But many history, I guess their social studies curricula have SEL components, any ELA, English language arts curricula. So you have to watch out for it in all sorts of places. And it's in Sunday school curriculum and in youth group activities. So it's kind of it's everywhere. Given its pervasive nature, even in Senator, like the Lutheran Church of Missouri, how do we learn to, as you say, to market and to avoid it? Yeah, so I think it's important to spend some time reading what they say about themselves, but actually thinking about what they actually mean by those words, to understand what SEL is,

24:10to understand how they are using words like kindness and empathy to really mean a moral relativism. And then to be able to speak clearly about that to our principles of our schools, to our pastors, so that we can start getting rid of this stuff when we find it. I mean, we've had to do this for for years and decades with things like evolutionary theory and old earth creationism and all this stuff that creeps into our science textbooks. And so we have this habit of we'll look at the stuff and we'll decide, can we address this as it is in the book? Do we need to get a different book? And I think we're going to have to start doing the same with SEL because it is in so many places. We just need to start being able to see it for what it is. We need to see when the assumptions of SEL are there and then to either say, well, we can deal with it here, but more likely, we just have to get rid of this and try something else. What should take its place then, in particular in the Christian classroom?

25:10Yeah, and this is my favorite part actually because I think the Christian church and the Christian school have a long history of doing this really well. I think that we have all of the tools that we need to help a child to deal with his emotional problems with his pain, with his suffering, and with his grief in a godly way. And so this starts with instruction and discipline, these biblical words all over the Bible instruction and discipline very often tied together. So we should tell the students that it's not okay to feel envy, disrespect, lust, these other emotions and don't excuse real sins, but also don't add sins that aren't sins, like not being friends with your classmate isn't a sin. So we need to show him the way of righteousness and encourage him and show him the way of destruction and warn him away from it. We also should discipline him when he goes wrong, call him to repentance, absolve him, encourage him to go to confession. And then we also have just such a wealth of resources in our, I mean, obviously in the Bible,

26:13in our hymns, in our catechism. There are some amazing hymns of comfort. Garehart wrote a whole bunch of them, but you can go through the hymnal and find hymns of comfort, hymns to help when you are troubled, when you are being attacked, when you are sad. And so to teach the kids those have them memorized them so that they can sing them, to confess against their own emotions, to confess what God says instead of what they feel. And then I think also we have a long history in the Western tradition of forming our moral imaginations. This goes back certainly all the way to at least Plutarch. And before that, but Plutarch has a really great quote that I read in my presentation and I won't hear for the sake of time, but that reading Plutarch's lives, he says, teach us to love the things that they are and to try to be like them. Great men of virtue can inspire us to love virtue. And this might not lead us to actually to be truly righteous, of course, right? That comes from

27:16Christ, but if we are worried about emotions and desires and his heart, we can feed those things. And then teach him what it is truly to love his neighbor, teach him that he should do no injustice, that he should be righteous and that he should love his neighbor as himself. So, Nathaniel, can we reform or baptize social emotional learning to make it Lutheran? Yeah, this is a big problem. I think a lot of people think we can. We can just take out the bad and keep the good and have a program that will help kids. But the problem is that even the part that is ostensibly good, the central part of social emotional learning has a couple of big problems. And one of them is a false view of morality. We've talked about the idea that there is no noble reality that the biblical morality cannot be applied to people in a prescriptive way. And also, it has a false anthropology that is to say a false view of what the child is.

28:18It takes away the moral agency from the child. It says that our emotions are not something that we should judge or condemn or correct. And it says instead that we should just accept and deal with those emotions instead of saying we should confess against them. This is not the biblical way of looking at a person, right, that our emotions and that our spirit should be brought into conformity with God's word. It's not that they should be accepted and then we should just try not to hurt other people. And so, it's the central conceit of social emotional learning that is the problem. It's not just the bad stuff that's added on top. So we can't baptize it. We can't just take the bad stuff off because what you're left with is still bad. And so you would have to actually completely upend and uproot everything about social emotional learning in order to make it Christian. And in which case, why would we use it at all? Why don't we just use the Bible? Nathaniel Pullman is headmaster and teacher at Redeemer Classical School of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Made a presentation at this summer's consortium for classical Lutheran education conference.

29:23Taddle the unredeemable moral relativism of social emotional learning. You'll find a link to Redeemer Classical School at issueztc.org. Click, talk on demand archives. Nathaniel thanks. Thank you. We will talk about it in a new confessional Lutheran church body in Australia with its president, Dr. Matt Anker next. This week on the Word of the Lord Indoor's Forever, we work through Proverbs 25 to 27 with a word fitly spoken, burning calls to answer or not to answer, only joking and do not boast. Join me. Pastor Will Whedon for the Word of the Lord Indoor's Forever, your daily 15-minute verse by both study on demand. Listen at the word indoors.org or your favorite podcast provider.

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