Schools are awash in social and emotional learning (SEL). Google the phrase and you’ll get more than 400 million hits. It’s captured the imagination of educational leaders, professional developers, and philanthropists. SEL seeks to ensure that students feel valued and safe and to help cultivate traits like empathy, impulse control, and diligence. This is all quite promising. Indeed, SEL is a healthy corrective for schools that got test-obsessed in recent decades, short-changing the human side of learning.
In its efforts, Team SEL, led by cosmopolitan funders and advocates, education professors, and public educators, has tended to approach SEL as a matter of science, programming, and technical acumen. Yet, a compelling pair of recent AEI essays by professor Jay Greene and educator Marilyn Rhames, make the case that a failure to explicitly confront the moral and faith-based implications of SEL is misleading, short-sighted, and problematic for efforts to cultivate the social and emotional well-being of students.
For its most prominent sponsors and supporters, SEL is imbued with a distinctly technical, academic, and secular cast. As Marilyn Rhames, veteran educator and founder of Teachers Who Pray, points out, 80% of adult Americans (or about 196 million people) identify as adherents of a faith, and many (if not most) of these “link their faith to their values, which inform how they set goals, form relationships, make decisions, and express empathy.” And yet, Rhames adds, “But nobody would know this from looking at the SEL landscape. Despite the centrality of faith to millions of American children and families, faith is conspicuously absent from the SEL scene. It’s the ‘f-word.’”
Greene briefly surveys the history of social and emotional learning and argues that precisely because teaching these skills inevitably involves setting forth a moral compass, morality and faith have always been integral components of social and emotional learning. Indeed, for SEL “to amount to anything more than empty phrases,” Greene suggests that SEL requires concrete examples, and that:
Those concrete examples inevitably raise moral and religious issues. For example, if diligence or grit is part of self-management (or temperance), it would only be desirable to promote it if students were diligent in pursuit of a valuable end. Being gritty in one’s ruthless ambition to dominate others would not generally be seen as praiseworthy. This trait is only good as part of a greater moral whole.”
Greene goes further, however. After all, morality is not only how educators give shape to the abstractions of SEL but also have they’ve traditionally motivated students to take social and emotional learning seriously. As Greene writes, it’s religion that has historically been charged with helping students to “understand why they should be concerned with others, why they should exert effort, and why they should be honest, punctual, and diligent.” That kind of faith-based motivation may be uncomfortable for many school reformers, but for many students, it may be more compelling than appeals to good citizenship or promises that all this will eventually pay off, one day, in a good job.
The inevitable question is whether the toolkit favored by SEL advocates, with its panoply of therapeutic practices, emotional inventories, disciplinary reforms, and such, is up to the challenge they’ve set forth. Rhames, who spent 15 years teaching in Chicago’s public schools, thinks not. As she puts it,
Robust social and emotional development requires much more than engaging puppet shows, deep breathing, yoga poses, and feel-good mantras for students to sing along. Compelling people to change the way they think or their perspective on life is profoundly spiritual; it’s a time-consuming process, and it can get messy—fast. For those reasons, and because educators must prioritize quality academic instruction in their limited school schedule, SEL works best in collaboration with an external faith community.”
For instance, when SEL materials catalog potential community partners, there are a lot of suggestions—but not many suggesting the value of partnering with churches or faith-based youth groups, even though these entities have long worked precisely this turf. In my experience, the discomfort with such partnerships is more reflexive and cultural than constitutional—especially since working with such groups as one of many community partners is clearly (as Rhames explains) in accord with Supreme Court doctrine regarding the First Amendment’s establishment clause.
And there appear to be some double-standards at work, as well. Rhames recounts, for instance, teaching at a Chicago school that successfully centered its SEL instruction on yoga. She muses that yoga was accepted as a secular activity even though “a local Hindu group filed a formal complaint with the school district that the public school was co-opting their sacred religious customs.” Of course, to raise the issue of yoga’s religiosity in the polite company of SEL advocates is to get bemused glances—after all, to school reformers yoga tends to feel normal, secular, and, well, safe.
Ultimately, as Greene and Rhames observe, many millions of Americans will view the stuff of social and emotional learning through the lens of faith. It’s a vast understatement, of course, to note that the leaders of the SEL push see things very differently. The coastal funders, education professors, and cosmopolitan advocates leading the SEL push are far more attuned to research and classroom practice than to thorny questions of morality and faith. And yet, in many communities and states, it is the moral face of the issue that may determine the success of the SEL push.
