CURMUDGUCATION: Social and Emotional Learning Is Drawing Fire

CURMUDGUCATION: Social and Emotional Learning Is Drawing Fire

Social and Emotional Learning Is Drawing Fire

I told you so.

If you are of a Certain Age, you remember Outcome Based Education, the Next Big Education Thing of the 1990s. Its basic idea was to reduce education to observable behaviors-- all those lesson plans with "The Student Will Be Able To...," are artifacts of OBE. The architects were intent on reducing all learning to something cold, hard and observable instead of fuzzy objectives like "After we've covered this unit, the students will kn ow stuff."

This was not necessarily a terrible thing. But the architects made one crucial mistake. They decided that they would include non-cognitive objectives-- having self-esteem, making sound decisions, tolerance, all that good soft skill squishy stuff.

Social conservatives freaked out. Phyllis Schafly, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and a host of others sounded the alarm about government indoctrination, and ultimately, OBE was stomped into the dirt.

This stuff-- what we now call social and emotional learning-- is a really hard needle to thread in education policy. Almost like someone took a third rail and bent it into an eye-of-a-needle shape.

On the one hand, it's absolutely necessary stuff. Young humans have to learn how to interact with other humans, and many of them, for reasons ranging from family of origin to simple biology, aren't very good at it. This becomes a problem in life that overwhelms other issues (I once had a student CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Social and Emotional Learning Is Drawing Fire