Written by Sarah Winters

Is social-emotional learning (SEL) being deliberately used in our public schools to promote the World Economic Forum (WEF) agenda? The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) was instrumental in initiating the SEL movement that has quickly spread across the globe. The connections of CASEL’s founders and those associated with the WEF are astounding. Some of CASEL’s creators, founding organizations, and board members are connected to the Rockefellers, the Klaus Schwab Family, and the Club of Rome/WEF.

The transition to SEL places more of an emphasis on emotional rather than academic development. This new style of education is heavily entrenched in the public schools and is the main method of promoting equity-based education. As with many of the policies affecting this generation of children, CASEL embraces activism on their website by “promoting justice-oriented school and civic engagement.” The SEL movement also acquaints children with the idea that collective rights usurp their individual rights. CASEL says little about helping an individual child reach their individual potential. The framework of self-management, responsible decision making, relationship skills, social awareness, and self-awareness creates a particular political mold and lens through which children are taught to view the world. Individual creative/out-of-box thinking has been integral to the success of the United States. What effect the SEL movement will have on this type of innovative thinking and how it will hamper the ability of children to grow and develop their individual strengths remains to be seen.

CASEL partners with many global elites including The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Fetzer Institute, the NoVo Foundation, and the Patrick McGovern Foundation as well as others. Both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Patrick McGovern Foundation have financially supported the WEF.

The WEF was established in 1971 by Klaus Schwab. It is notorious for its yearly meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Speaking in the 50^th Anniversary video of the Club of Rome, Gunter Pauli states, “the first meeting of the World Economic Forum, the European Forum, was the Club of Rome.” In the same video, the statement is made that Klaus Schwab is a member of the Club of Rome. Aurelio Peccei’s, “Phd was about the first five-year plan of Lenin,” Gunter Pauli informs earlier in the video.  Peccei was one of the creators of the Club of Rome.

The Club of Rome’s The First Global Revolution, published in 1991,makes a similar statement to CASEL’s mission (Alexander King, Bertrand Schneider, 1991):

“Educators of today and tomorrow will be in a better position to discover the immensity and the nobility of their task: to lead the way to an evolution of the mind and behavior and thus to give birth to the new—one and manifold—civilization.”

“But that which is cerebral and intellectual in him cannot approach so mysterious a truth as reality unless it equally resorts to the apparently irrational, the intuitive and the emotional, which are, to a great extent, the foundation of human relationships.”

On their website, the Club of Rome claims their “goal is to actively advocate for paradigm and systems shifts which will enable society to emerge from our current crises, by promoting a new way of being human, within a more resilient biosphere.”

The Rockefeller Foundation was involved at the start of the Club of Rome. “Only half a year after the founding meeting of the Club of Rome, the OECD in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, held a ‘Working Symposium on Long-Range Forecasting and Planning’ in Bellagio, Italy.” (Schmelzer, 2017)

The Club of Rome has interest in youth programs which seek to transform children. Michael Dorsey, member of the Club of Rome, is a founder of the Sunrise Movement, a program that creates radical child activists who proclaim on their website that they, “are the climate revolution.” Similarly, on their website, the Club of Rome discusses a youth “Psychological Mastery Training Program” in order to “build emotional self-awareness” in future “community leaders” so that they will be able to deal with “the distress of climate trauma and vicarious trauma exposure.”

Likewise, CASEL engages in initiatives that seek to transform, categorizing these initiatives on their website as Transformative SEL. They state that this type of SEL helps students “critically examine root causes of inequity,” “[redistribute] power,” and “emphasizes development of identity…within the CASEL framework.”

According to Edutopia.org, Social and Emotional Learning: A Short History, CASEL originated at a meeting at the Fetzer Institute in 1994. It was created as a result of the Comer Project, which, according to Encylcopedia.com, began in 1968 in the New Haven, CT schools. The Comer Project achieved success by focusing on student’s “social skills and self-esteem.” In 1990, the project received $15 million from the Rockefeller Foundation “to [introduce] the program in schools throughout the United States.” David Rockefeller’s daughter, Eileen Rockefeller Growald, NY Times author and Fetzer Institute fellow, Daniel Goleman, and the son of Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Tim Shriver, were among some of the original creators.

In 1995, Goleman, published the best-selling book Emotional Intelligence. It proposed that emotional skills should be incorporated into school curriculum based on the premise that emotional skills are as important as IQ for success. Techniques such as mindfulness were integrated into the public schools. This led to a shift in education, converting it to a holistic or “whole child” style of education. Through these programs, teachers transitioned from educators into child developers. Developmental psychology began to be used throughout the school day often without the parent’s awareness or inclusion. Goleman has links to the World Economic Forum. He spoke at the WEF Annual Meeting in 2011, and he is listed on the WEF agenda webpage.

Current Board Chair, Tim Shriver, was a founder of CASEL. He is a member of the David Rockefeller connected Council on Foreign Relations. He is also “a regular participant in the World Economic Forum,” stated in the WPP.com article, titled WPP Appoints Timothy Shriver, Chairman of Special Olympics, as non-exec director. According to their 2019 tax filings, Shriver received $400,671 from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. In 2012, he wrote an article for the HuffPost titled, Reflections from Davos. He wrote another article for the HuffPost in 2017 titled,  What Davos Taught Us: Moving from Information to Inspiration. In the article, he declares,

“we will be on our way to that ‘new collective and moral consciousness’ the world so desperately needs and which so many of us want to choose.” In 2018, he was the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) Leadership Institute for Legislative Advocacy (LILA) Keynote Speaker. Although context was not given for his presentation, the bottom of one slide in his presentation says to educators “you are trying to lead a cultural revolution.”

Another slide in the presentation lists the WEF skills that “involve social and emotional intelligence,” which include people management, judgement and decision making, and negotiation.

The 2022 Wisdom 2.0 Conference is a global mindfulness summit sponsored in part by a CASEL founding organization and supporter, the Fetzer Institute. Another board member of CASEL, Marc Brackett, lists Wisdom 2.0 as one of his consultation projects on his website. Furthermore, Brackett has a company, Oji Life Lab to help improve emotional intelligence and decision skills. A top investor in his company was Bo Shao of Matrix Partner China. Shao is a WEF Young Global Leader and founder of Evolve Ventures. He will be a speaker at the 2022 Wisdom 2.0 Conference. Dr. Richard Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, was a past speaker at the Wisdom 2.0 Conference. The Wisdom Leadership 2.0 webpage says that he has “[led] conversations on well-being on international stages such as the World Economic Forum.” Davidson has a WEF page and is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Mental Health. He also co-authored a book with CASEL co-founder Daniel Goleman titled Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body.

An Esalen.org article titled Wellbeing Project Reveals Changemakers’ Need for Personal Support informs that the Fetzer Institute is in a joint project along with the Esalen Institute called the Wellbeing Project. As indicated on their website, The Tavistock Institute, the World Economic Forum Cultural Leaders, the Schwab Foundation (Klaus Schwab Family), and the Center for Healthy Minds are also involved with this project. They describe the Wellbeing Project impact as “[serving] the needs for social changemakers.” A subset of the Wellbeing Project is aimed at teachers and caregivers. In the  Inaugural Teacher Wellbeing Research Report Launch Video, Marc Brackett is listed as a resource.

Increasingly, many are waking up to realize the impact that the WEF has on our everyday lives. The connections of the WEF and those involved with the origination of the SEL movement run deep. The Rockefellers, the Schwab Family, the Club of Rome, and the WEF are all connected to the elites and organizations involved with the formation of CASEL. They created an educational movement that focuses on the emotional and social over the logical and rational. CASEL’s framework, which utilizes the categories of self-management, responsible decision making, relationship skills, social awareness, and self-awareness, is subjective. Who gets to decide what is and what is not being socially aware? Because that person or group of people has a tremendous amount of power in our schools today.

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King Alexander, Schneider Bertrand. The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome, New York, NY: Pantheon Books; 1991.

Schmelzer, Matthias. Born in the corridors of the OECD: the forgotten origins of the Club of Rome, transnational networks, and the 1970s in global history, Journal of Global History. March 2017:34.

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This article was originally published by The Liberty Sentinel.

Academics are fast becoming a thing of the past in public schools.

In their place are behavioral psychology and “social and emotional learning” (SEL) designed not to educate but to transform children’s core values, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.

Once upon a time, education meant learning how to read, write, do math, and think. It meant learning history and science as well.

That is barely happening now, as government data show.

Perhaps more importantly, once upon a time, school children all over the nation also learned the Ten Commandments—do not murder, do not lie, do not steal, and so on.

They learned the Golden Rule, too: Treat others as you want to be treated.

But those “good old days” are largely gone.

Today, government schools use advanced methods including SEL to instill in children a radical new and oftentimes contradictory “politically correct” value system: radical environmentalism, radical feminism, critical theory, Marxism, social justice, LGBTQ-plus, population control, socialism, hyper-racialism, class struggle, and more.

There’s also an occult connection to it all that would shock most secular observers—not to mention Christians, Muslims, Jews, and adherents of other traditional faiths.

SEL: The Mechanism for Transformation

In public schools across the United States today, from pre-K through 12th grade and beyond, children are being subjected to what is seemingly just the latest educational fad—silly, perhaps, but no more harmful than anything else—at least on the surface.

The education establishment refers to it as “social and emotional learning,” “social-emotional learning,” or just SEL for short. Generally they speak only in vague generalities using soothing language while dealing with the public.

And it’s true, some of what falls under the SEL umbrella is fairly harmless.

But then again, the food pellets that contain rat poison are fairly harmless, too—at least until the poison, which is just a trace component in the pellets, is digested by the intended victim.

Similarly, SEL all seems innocent enough at first glance.

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions,” explains the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), one of the leading outfits promoting SEL.

The way proponents explain it, SEL is simply aimed to help children do well emotionally and succeed.

What could be wrong with that?

Well, CASEL’s website, a review of SEL programs, and educators themselves reveal a great deal more about the agenda. And it’s not pretty.

Political Extremism and Radical Values

Behind the nice public facade lurk swarms of psychologists, psychiatrists, “educators,” and radical leftists hoping to exploit a century of psychological research for the purpose of molding children’s beliefs and “deconstructing” the values parents seek to instill.

“With a growing number of partners, CASEL is creating a more comprehensive approach to education, one that will lead to a more equitable, just, and productive society,” the organization’s website boasts under the headline “SEL as a Lever for Equity,” hitting multiple key buzzwords associated with the far-left “social justice” movement.

In other words, one of the purposes of SEL—as its leading promoters admit—is to reform society.

Among the webinars offered there are “SEL as a Lever for Equity and Social Justice,” and also a lecture on how to use SEL to “support antiracist practices.” Another webinar outlines how to use policy to “dismantle inequities.”

Again, the leftist buzzwords are everywhere. And that isn’t an accident.

Under SEL Competencies, CASEL drops multiple bombshells acknowledging the far-left globalist indoctrination taking place under the guise of “social” and “emotional” learning.

“SEL competencies can be leveraged to develop justice-oriented, global citizens, and nurture inclusive school and district communities,” it states, adding that the programs will involve getting children to “assess power dynamics” and confront “issues of race and class across different settings.”

The children are also expected to “develop an understanding of systemic or structural explanations for different treatment and outcomes.”

In short, they are expected to believe the highly controversial hypothesis that America is awash in “systemic” and “structural” racism, and that only massive government-led social engineering can fix it.

The children are also expected to accept and agree with the artificial divisions being fomented along “race” and “class” lines as part of the now-obvious effort to “divide and conquer” America.

Put simply, this is all blatantly Marxist “critical theory” rhetoric masquerading as “education.”

It’s extremely dangerous.

In Practice, Educators Shine the Light

A review by The Epoch Times of a wide range of SEL programs used across the United States found that all contain similar extremism, along with highly controversial teachings on sex, sexuality, gender, race, racism, class, economic liberty, family, marriage, and more.

Interviews with educators and a review of their writings on the subject were also very revealing.

In short, the real goals of SEL go far beyond “helping” children socially and emotionally. And it isn’t difficult to find that out.

In fact, in practice, SEL is frequently and explicitly used in public schools to instill certain attitudes and values in children that many parents, if not most, would find controversial at the very least.

For example, public-school teachers in Florida, to comply with SEL mandates, were ordered to show a number of videos to their middle school students.

These included propaganda videos promoting homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, “diversity,” “inclusion,” and more.

Regardless of one’s views on these subjects, countless parents—especially those from faith traditions including Christianity, Islam, or Judaism—would find the effort to obliterate traditional sexual morality and even biological sex in children’s minds to be objectionable.

Numerous other highly controversial political, religious, economic, and worldview positions are treated as “correct” by the forces behind SEL.

More than a few self-styled SEL educators are very open about how they intend to use SEL to brainwash children.

Open Circle Director Kamilah Drummond-Forrester, who supports “social and emotional development for children,” wrote openly at EdSurge.com about weaponizing SEL to indoctrinate children with her hyper-racialist views.

“Teaching [white children] to be aware of their racial identity would allow them to better understand the privileges that accompany that identity,” she wrote, adding that this would help them dismantle the “concept of ‘whiteness.’”

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) has an important role to play in that education.

“One of the core competencies we focus on, as a necessary foundation for the others, is self-awareness. That self-awareness must include race,” she continued, without acknowledging that many parents probably don’t want their children obsessing about “race” or being propagandized by a far-left activist posing as an educator.

In an article for EdTech Magazine on peddling SEL to students amid coronavirus-inspired online learning, writer Adam Stone touts “SEL-oriented teaching materials from the Zinn Education Project.”

Howard Zinn, of course, is the far-left pseudo-historian whose dishonest and politically motivated narratives were most recently debunked by historian Mary Grabar in the book “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America.”

Zinn described himself as “something of a Marxist,” his biographer recounted.

According to EdTech, though, the “SEL-oriented” propaganda from Zinn is supposedly “aimed at nurturing empathy and compassion.”

In the real world, Marxism has everywhere and always nurtured hatred, death, slavery, torture, starvation, shortages, political repression, religious persecution, and other evils.

And yet under the guise of SEL programs and “nurturing empathy and compassion,” millions of children are having their minds poisoned by being force-fed actual Marxist propaganda and fake history.

And perhaps even more alarming, Stone urges educators to use surveillance tools that give “insight into students’ online behaviors—both inside and outside the virtual classroom—to enhance SEL.”

One of the recommended total surveillance tools offers educators “a holistic view of online activity across search engines, social media, email and web apps,” Stone said, adding that an artificial-intelligence engine would perform “real-time assessments” to “flag online behaviors that indicate emotional distress.”

As explained in an earlier segment of this series, Orwellian technology is used to monitor and track “progress” on adjusting children’s attitudes, too. That data is being compiled and saved forever under the label of “emotional intelligence.”

The Big Brother technology is also used to determine whether further “interventions” are needed to coerce the child into holding the desired attitudes, values, and beliefs about the issue in question.

And, as U.S. Department of Education documents make clear, it will also be used to predict “future behavior and interests” of the children.

Educators Speak Out

Of course, educators who have seen through the agenda reject SEL as a massive threat to America’s children.

One of those who spoke out against the SEL abuses taking place in her school, Jennifer McWilliams of Indiana, was even fired for being too vocal about it.

“The thing I find to be the most disturbing about social emotional learning is how well it disguises its true sinister motives,” she told The Epoch Times. “Parents do not understand that SEL psychologically manipulates children to question (and eventually rebuke) any Christian or conservative beliefs that may be taught in the home.”

While parents are led to believe that SEL is like teaching children The Golden Rule, “it is quite the opposite,” McWilliams said.

“Social emotional learning is rooted in progressive, social justice ideology that divides anyone who questions the radical groupthink agenda,” she said. “From my personal experience, not only do parents not understand it but teachers and administrators don’t either.”

SEL also represents the “brainwashing of our children,” McWilliams continued, noting that it trains children to “compromise on everything” with no consideration of what is taught in the home.

“These programs rely on a bombardment of propaganda, conditioning, and role playing to separate children from God and the nuclear family,” she said, saying SEL was the vehicle used to get children to accept as truth the narratives behind Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) and Black Lives Matter (BLM).

The popular SEL program used in McWilliams’s school, Leader in Me, was designed to “shift the culture of the school to influence children’s morals and values based on progressive social justice standards,” she said, adding that it became ubiquitous on campus.

When she began publicly speaking out about it on social media, she was fired for supposedly making the school look bad.

“Parents must speak up and take back control of the influence in their children’s lives. If not, the kids will pay with their freedom,” McWilliams said.

The Occult Origins of SEL

The story behind SEL is even more troubling.

According to a history of SEL by CASEL, the term “social and emotional” originated in a meeting at the Fetzer Institute, a shadowy New Age powerhouse created by wealthy New Age guru and late media baron John Fetzer.

One of the founders of the SEL movement, David Sluyter, served as president and CEO of the organization.

“Our mission is to help build the spiritual foundation for a loving world,” the group states on its website, adding that it is working toward a “transformative sacred story for humanity in the 21st century.”

According to Brian Wilson’s book “John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age,” Fetzer was, among other things, a public and fervent devotee of Alice Bailey, the controversial occultist who founded the Lucifer Publishing Company (now known as the Lucis Trust).

So obsessed was Fetzer with Bailey that he and his people would regularly recite her “Great Invocation,” which she claimed was given to her by spiritual beings known as “ascended masters,” Wilson documents in his book.

The Fetzer Institute didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. CASEL initially suggested it would make somebody available for an interview, but didn’t follow up despite multiple requests.

More than a few other prominent names in education were similarly enamored with Bailey’s bizarre teachings from supposed spiritual entities.

United Nations World Core Curriculum author Robert Muller, for instance, who served as assistant secretary-general of the U.N., said in the teachers’ manual that his U.N.-backed global school curriculum was based on the teachings of Bailey and one of her “ascended masters.”

The values being taught to children under Fetzer-inspired SEL programs feature remarkable similarities to those taught by John Dewey, a man almost universally known among educators as the founding father of America’s “progressive” education system.

Dewey, who was inspired by the Soviet educational system, was a co-author and signer of the Humanist Manifesto, a religious document rejecting God and prescribing collectivism as the cure for society’s ills.

For at least 12 years—more if they go to college—American children are indoctrinated into the collectivist values of Dewey’s religion, which was essentially just warmed-over communism and atheism hiding behind a religious facade.

Interestingly, as early as 1898, Dewey himself expressed an understanding of the need to utilize psychology, a discipline then still in its infancy, if the plan to re-shape Americans through “education” was going to succeed.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is the fact that Bailey, citing her ascended masters, recognized the importance of Dewey’s educational schemes in achieving her goal of a one-world order with a global religion.

“Our problem is to attain the kind of overall synthesis that Marxism and neo-Scholasticism provide for their followers, but to get this by the freely chosen cooperative methods that Dewey advocated,” Bailey wrote in her book “Education in the New Age.”

Funding and People

Even a brief review of the funding and individuals behind SEL also reveals a great deal about the agenda.

On its website, CASEL lists, among other financiers, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Gates, who has a friendly relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, put almost $300 million behind the Obama-backed Common Core standards, which formally nationalized and helped globalize America’s education system.

Before that, Gates signed a deal with UNESCO, the subject of part nine in this series, to work on globalizing the world’s education systems.

Also listed among the financiers of CASEL is Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which CASEL said “provides generous funding to CASEL to support school districts and their capacity to promote social and emotional learning.”

For some background, the recently deceased patriarch of the family, David Rockefeller, wrote in The New York Times in 1973 that “the social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.”

Rockefeller also boasted in his autobiography “Memoirs” of “conspiring” with a “secret cabal” of globalists, “against the best interests of the United States,” to build a “One World” political and economic system.

Aside from its financiers, CASEL’s leading super-stars also suggest something is amiss, to put it mildly.

Consider the involvement of radical Stanford educator Linda Darling-Hammond, a board member emeritus of CASEL and known associate of communist terrorist turned educator William Ayers.

Ayers’s Weather Underground group set off bombs across America in cooperation with communist Cuban intelligence. The FBI operative who infiltrated the group’s leadership, Larry Grathwohl, revealed that the organization’s leadership was plotting to exterminate millions of Americans in camps.

Interestingly, Darling-Hammond had an opportunity to test out her educational quackery unimpeded in the Stanford New Schools. The results are now in: In 2010, Stanford New Schools placed in the lowest-achieving 5 percent of schools in California, according to multiple reports.

More than a few other colleagues of Ayers are or were also involved with CASEL and SEL, with his University of Illinois at Chicago being central to the scheme. At least 3 of 13 members listed on CASEL’s website came from that university’s Department of Education and Psychology.

SEL was formally unveiled in the late 1990s. However, the real history behind it goes way back to Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist who studied how to effectively brainwash children to become good communists.

Vygotsky’s contributions in laying the foundations for SEL are widely acknowledged among practitioners and even in the academic literature (pdf).

Interestingly, Vygotsky was a close colleague of Ivan Pavlov, the Soviet psychologist famous for his behavioral-conditioning experiments on dogs.

Vygotsky had been inspired, in part, by American psychologist and educational researcher E.L. Thorndike, a student of close Dewey-ally and associate James McKeen Cattell of Columbia University.

In fact, Vygotsky wrote the foreword to the Russian translation of Thorndike’s “Principles of Learning Based Upon Psychology” published in Moscow in the mid-1920s.

Thorndike didn’t bother to conceal his views on education: Children should be educated like circus animals, and it should be so arranged that the child will be incapable of not doing what the trainer wants.

Vygotsky, too, had grandiose ideas about how Soviet “education” and “psychology” would be used to fundamentally transform the individual, and ultimately, mankind.

“It is education which should play the central role in the transformation of man this road of conscious social formation of new generations, the basic form to alter the historical human type,” Vygotsky wrote in 1930 in the journal of the All-Union Association of Workers in Science and Technics for the Furthering of the Socialist Edification in the USSR.

“New generations and new forms of their education represent the main route which history will follow whilst creating the new type of man,” he added.

SEL is simply the latest tool of the collectivist education establishment in its fiendish drive to create this “new type of man”—a collectivist man who will mindlessly submit to the tyranny of his overlords, without the intellectual ability to effectively resist.

Conclusion

Today, while most educators and parents have little understanding of what is going on, SEL has become ubiquitous in government schools across the nation.

National Education Association (NEA) Foundation Global Learning Fellow Wendy Turner, a second-grade teacher and self-styled “SEL warrior” quoted in an article on the NEA’s website, explained that SEL is now the top priority for schools.

“SEL is the foundation, the heartbeat of the classroom,” she said. “It’s about connecting everybody and making them feel safe and secure before you get to the academics.”

In a U.S. Department of Education report, a “review” of existing studies called for subjecting “the entire student body” to constant SEL programming “in order to reinforce social and emotional learning not only in the classroom but also on the playground, in the cafeteria, and in hallways.” Parents should also “reinforce” it at home.

But the facts are now clear: The SEL craze is an extreme threat to America’s youth—and to individual liberty.

The scheme isn’t about helping children at all. Instead, it’s about manipulating and conditioning America’s youth to hold the values and beliefs that the education establishment wants to instill.

Unfortunately, those values and beliefs are incompatible with individual liberty, Western civilization, the U.S. Constitution, the nuclear family, religious liberty, and other key values that underpin the United States.

Parents and policymakers must urgently protect the nation’s children from this dangerous threat.

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This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.