Progressive educators have dressed up nonacademic social training in different outfits for decades. Still, the goal remains: to use public education to dictate the next generation’s norms and behaviors. This may seem innocent enough, but it’s not.
Early 20th-century education reformers like Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College and John Dewey, the father of American progressive education, set out to refashion public education to diminish individuality and family influence in children. They aimed to replace these influences with a collectivist mindset prepared for the workforce. By doing so, they could capture the minds and hearts of children in the classroom and substitute “the state for the home and faith.”
Their socialist behaviorist model was effectively the first version of what we now know as social-emotional learning (SEL), which was most recently repackaged as the Whole Child educational framework.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In the 1960s, Dr. James Comer of the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center set out to prove the effectiveness of behavior versus academic focus for student success. He tested his theory in 650 low-income schools, admitting thirty years later that it was a failure. Still, his method served as the foundation for today’s SEL in schools.
In the 1980s, Psychology Professor Roger Weissberg aimed to help students “develop positive self-concepts” and hone skills in “self-monitoring” and “values such as personal responsibility and respect for self and others.” These seem like loaded phrases subject to interpretation, but his approach was acceptable enough to keep the behaviorist model train running on its tracks.
By the 1990s, National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE) president Marc Tucker helped pass the Goals 2000 Educate America Act during the Clinton administration, echoing Thorndike’s goals to advance a socialist workforce development mindset in K-12 education. This was followed by the controversial Outcomes Based Education (OBE) model, which debuted when my kids were school age.
Thankfully, parental backlash in the 1990s squashed OBE, yet it morphed and reappeared through CASEL, the Collaborative to Advance Social and Emotional Learning. CASEL took time to stake its claim by hosting conferences and sponsoring research, presumably to build a support base. CASEL’s champion, Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford Graduate School of Education, was a known progressive who advocated for educational equity. The push for so-called equity, versus the much-respected American concept of equal opportunity, hit schools long before COVID.
CASEL’s goals for students include providing “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.” This sounds innocuous until you realize their specific definitions for each element may be a far cry from what you might think.
For example, CASEL definitively overplays the role of schools in a child’s life when it asserts that “schools have an important role to play in raising healthy children by fostering not only their cognitive development but also their social and emotional development.” (Emphasis is mine.) This is a tremendous assumption of power over your children in the classroom and is tantamount to brainwashing, not promoting basic good behavior.
CASEL defends its emphasis on social and emotional learning via research that leaves something to be desired. First, there are no recent U.S.-based studies; instead, they cite a 2006 study that asked a national sample of 148,189 sixth through twelfth-grade students if they thought they had social competencies such as empathy, decision-making, and conflict-resolution skills. The results? Only 29% indicated that their school provided a caring, encouraging environment. And how accurate are the results when parents were not consulted on the answers, given the relative immaturity of kids to answer these questions competently?
The latest version of SEL, dubbed Whole Child, stems from The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It includes expansive elements in its list of critical areas for schools to deliver to students: mental health, cognitive development, social-emotional development, identity development, academic development, and physical health. This resembles a giant leap toward Thorndike and Dewey’s early progressive education agenda.
According to research from the Massachusetts-based think tank Pioneer, Thorndike equated “learning with training” and believed in learning by conditioning. Like Pavlov’s dogs, children could be conditioned to exhibit the desired behaviors by a system of positive or negative consequences linked to actions. John Dewey, the dean of American progressive education, was equally enthusiastic about manipulating the psychological aspects of learning to manipulate the child.
Remember, Dewey favored the “educational potential of social behaviorism used in totalitarian societies” since those societies “required a collective and cooperative mentality.”
Pioneer’s conclusion? “Carried to its logical conclusion, SEL can replace parental influence with the ultimate nanny state.” Progressives have dressed up the nonacademic paradigm of social-emotional style learning in different outfits for decades. They have planned to substitute “the state for the home and faith” and replace individual liberty with a collectivist mindset readied for the “workforce.”
Social Emotional Learning, in its “transformative” form, promotes “justice-oriented civic engagement” to make your kids into activists or “social justice warriors.” Black Lives Matter has often invited schools over the last few years to engage in that process.
A hallmark of SEL’s manipulative approach is the use of student surveys. The surveys are sent to kids’ email inboxes, often asking questions of students that require parental consent according to federal law. SEL puts teachers in a mindset to pry into the lives of students and families. Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said social and emotional learning programs shift “the role of teachers from educators to therapists.”
SEL is also big business. According to Education Week, nationwide sales of social and emotional learning materials shot up 45% in a year and a half to $765 million in 2021. Soon after, Attorney General Merrick Garland asked the FBI to investigate parents protesting social and emotional learning issues at SB meetings. It just so happens that Garland’s son-in-law co-founded Panorama Education, a company raking in millions selling social and emotional learning materials to school districts.
Don’t be fooled by social-emotional learning as your child’s education framework. It is not founded on academics and pushes your kids toward an activist mindset that may not align with your family’s values. The Scottsdale Unified School District’s governing board recently approved a new social-emotional learning curriculum called Second Step. For help discovering SEL’s impact on your kids at school, contact education@azwomenofaction.com for information and steps you can take.
Tamra Farah has a twenty-year career in public policy and politics. Her role as director and senior advisor at Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and Arizona Women of Action and her expertise in PR and communications demonstrate her ability to create engagement and transformation in her efforts. Tamra has appeared on Fox News, America’s Voice, Newsmax, and Victory Channel and quoted in major publications like The New York Times and Washington Post.
Who thinks it is a good idea to let voters decide which candidates appear on the general election ballot? Probably everyone. How about letting just one politician decide instead? You would hope that question is rhetorical, and the answer is no one. But right now, out-of-state special interests are spending millions of dollars to put their so-called “Make Elections Fair” measure on the ballot that would do just that.
The groups pushing these ideas are trying to trick voters into signing their petitions and supporting their poorly written constitutional amendment, arguing it will lead to less partisanship and more centrist candidates on the general election ballot. But hidden in the measure is a provision that lets just one politician, the Secretary of State, decide how many candidates move from the primary to the general election…
A new report by the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a nonprofit dedicated to the study of the impact of government regulation on global energy resources, finds that U.S. inventories of oil and natural gas have experienced stunning growth since 2011.
The same report, the North American Energy Inventory 2024, finds the United States also leading the world in coal resources, with total proven resources that are more than 53% bigger than China’s.
Despite years of record production levels and almost a decade of curtailed investment in the finding and development of new reserves forced by government regulation and discrimination by ESG-focused investment houses, America’s technically recoverable resource in oil grew by 15% from 2011 to 2024. Now standing at 1.66 trillion barrels, the U.S. resource is 5.6 times the proved reserves held by Saudi Arabia.
The story for natural gas is even more amazing: IER finds the technically recoverable resource for gas expanded by 47% in just 13 years, to a total of 4.03 quadrillion cubic feet. At current US consumption rates, that’s enough gas to supply the country’s needs for 130 years.
“The 2024 North American Energy Inventory makes it clear that we have ample reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal that will sustain us for generations,” Tom Pyle, President at IER, said in a release. “Technological advancements in the production process, along with our unique system of private ownership, have propelled the U.S. to global leadership in oil and natural gas production, fostering economic benefits like lower energy prices, job growth, enhanced national security, and an improved environment.”
It is key to understand here that the “technically recoverable” resource measure used in financial reporting is designed solely to create a point-in-time estimate of the amount of oil and gas in place underground that can be produced with current technology. Because technology advances in the oil and gas business every day, just as it does in society at large, this measure almost always is a vast understatement of the amount of resource that will ultimately be produced.
The Permian Basin has provided a great example of this phenomenon. Just over the past decade, the deployment of steadily advancing drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies has enabled producers in that vast resource play to more than double expected recoveries from each new well drilled. Similar advances have been experienced in the other major shale plays throughout North America. As a result, the U.S. industry has been able to consistently raise record overall production levels of both oil and gas despite an active rig count that has fallen by over 30% since January 2023.
In its report, IER notes this aspect of the industry by pointing out that, while the technically recoverable resource for U.S. natural gas sits at an impressive 4.03 quads, the total gas resource in place underground is currently estimated at an overwhelming 65 quads. If just half of that resource in place eventually becomes recoverable thanks to advancing technology over the coming decades, that would mean the United States will enjoy more than 1,000 years of gas supply at current consumption levels. That is not a typo.
Where coal is concerned, IER finds the US is home to a world-leading 470 billion short tons of the most energy-dense fossil fuel in place. That equates to 912 years of supply at current consumption rates.
No other country on Earth can come close to rivaling the U.S. for this level of wealth in energy mineral resources, and few countries’ governments would dream of squandering them in pursuit of a political agenda driven by climate fearmongering. “And yet, many politicians, government agents, and activists seek to constrain North America’s energy potential,” Pyle says, adding, “We must resist these efforts and commit ourselves to unlocking these resources so that American families can continue to enjoy the real and meaningful benefits our energy production offers.”
With President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump staking out polar opposite positions on this crucial question, America’s energy future is truly on the ballot this November.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Illegal immigration is the number one issue heading into November’s election, and Democrats have no one to thank but themselves. Over the past three years, the left has single-handedly created an open-border disaster under the neglectful policies of a Biden administration that has completely abandoned its constitutional duty to protect each state from invasion. As ground zero for the current border crisis, the people of Arizona know this all too well.
A surge in illegal immigrants in the Tucson Border Sector along with a dramatic rise in the number of “gotaways” has left our state on edge. Meanwhile, cartel violence has increased near southern Arizona communities, and we’ve even seen a report revealing that thousands of “special interest aliens” from mostly Middle Eastern countries have been apprehended while crossing the border illegally in the past two years. And that’s just barely scratching the surface of the catastrophe that has become our border.
You would think that the governor of a state facing a daily invasion would do something, but Katie Hobbs has proven time and time again that she would rather ignore the problem and hope it goes away. So, after Hobbs vetoed the Arizona Border Invasion Act (SB 1231), which would have significantly enhanced our state’s border security, Republican legislators decided it was time to allow voters to take matters into their own hands through the Secure the Border Act (HCR 2060). And the response from Democrats has been telling…
The purveyors of climate doom will not tolerate the good news of our planet thriving because of modest warming and increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, a recent scientific paper concludes that an optimistic vision for Earth and its inhabitants is nonetheless justified.
Widely accepted data show an overall greening of Earth resulting from a cycle of natural warming that began more than 300 years ago and from industrialization’s additions of CO2 that started in the 19th century and accelerated with vigorous economic activity following World War II.
Also attributed to these and other factors is record crop production, which now sustains 8 billion people—ten times the population prior to the Industrial Revolution. The boost in atmospheric CO2 since 1940 alone is linked to yield increases for corn, soybeans and wheat of 10%, 30% and 40%, respectively.
The positive contribution of carbon dioxide to the human condition should be cause for celebration, but this is more than demonizers of the gas can abide. Right on cue, narrators of a planet supposedly overheating from carbon dioxide began sensationalizing research findings that increased plant volume results in lower concentrations of nutrients in food.
“The potential health consequences are large, given that there are already billions of people around the world who don’t get enough protein, vitamins or other nutrients in their daily diet,” concluded the The New York Times, a reliable promoter of apocalypse forever. Among others chiming in have been The Lancet, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the National Institutes of Health.
Of course, such yellow journalism lacks context and countervailing facts —elements provided in “Nutritive Value of Plants Growing in Enhanced CO2 Concentrations” published by the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia.
Any deficiency of nutrients from the enhancement of plant growth by elevated carbon dioxide “are small, compared to the nutrient shortages that agriculture and livestock routinely face because of natural phenomena, such as severe soil fertility differences, nutrient dilution in plants due to rainfall or irrigation and even aging of crops,” says the paper.
And while there is evidence of marginal decreases in some nutrients, data also show that higher levels of CO2 “may enhance certain groups of health-promoting phytochemicals in food crops” that serve as antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds, says the paper, which lists seven authors and more than 100 references. The lead author is Albrecht Glatzle, a member of the Rural Association of Paraguay and a former international researcher of plant and animal nutrition.
Among other points made by the paper are the following: Throughout a majority of geological history, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been several times higher than today’s, which are less than optimum for most plants; atmospheric warming from even a quadrupling of CO2 concentrations would be small compared to natural temperature fluctuations since the last glacial advance more than 10,000 years ago.
Having virtually no scientific basis, the “green” movement’s hostility to carbon dioxide seemingly ignores the gas’s critical role as a plant food. As the paper notes, “CO2 is the only source of the chemical element carbon for all life on Earth, be it for plants, animals or fungi and bacteria — through photosynthesis and food chains.”
The so-called greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide— perversely exaggerated to support climate fearmongering— is a life-saving temperature moderator that keeps Earth from freezing over.
The obvious benefits of CO2 is “an embarrassment to the large and profitable movement to ‘save the planet’ from ‘carbon pollution,’” write the authors. “If CO2 greatly benefits agriculture and forestry and has a small, benign effect on climate, it is not a pollutant at all.
Mass protests have become popular with the radical Left because they work. They can achieve results unattainable through the political process or the courts by producing chaos and intimidating the cowardly leaders of our universities and government.
When the antisemitic, pro-Islamist demonstrations broke out on multiple university campuses this spring, most Americans assumed it was just naïve, ill-educated kids doing their thing. Why wouldn’t they? Protesting is a hoot. You’re showered with attention. You may even see yourself on the evening news. The gold star goes for being arrested and thrown in jail, where you are sure to be released the next morning.
The modern political protest movement began in 1968 with draft resisters who successfully opposed the Vietnam war. Another victory for the mob came from the assault on the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 1999. Those riots are credited with establishing the international anti-globalization movement and influencing the Clinton administration to issue an executive order requiring environmental reviews for trade deals.
In 2011, the “Occupy” Wall Street type movements were focused on income inequality. Again, victory was achieved when cowed Democrats subsequently backed higher taxes and more government handouts.
The George Floyd riots of 2020 were possibly the most successful of all. A single incident of bad policing by a rogue cop touched off riots in many American cities and even internationally. The “mostly peaceful protests” included vandalism, theft, and property destruction for up to 100 days in cities like Portland, Oregon.
The consequences were light, the rewards abundant. Kamala Harris supported a bail fund for criminal protesters, few of whom faced jail time anyway. The Democrat convention of 2020 decline to condemn the rioting.
Meanwhile, Democrat cities around the country slashed police funding, eliminated cash bail, and stopped making criminal arrests in response to the rioters’ demands. The predictable result was a spike in urban crime which is still raging, driving out businesses and further decimating once proud cities.
The image of well-meaning but ignorant students out on a lark was partly true. Many riot participants were in fact useful dupes, curiously uninformed about the activities of Hamas or other Islamist groups. They seemed unaware that their chant “from the river to the sea” was a call for eradicating Jews. The orderly rows of similar tents also suggested the protests were not entirely “organic.”
The Wall Street Journal uncovered the mystery by discovering an influential activist website directing affairs for anarchists like Antifa and other career radicals. Their mission is to create chaos and eventually overturn the social order.
Thus, “organizers should not concern themselves with de-escalation or remaining peaceful” they advise. “In order for this crisis to develop further, student occupations should take buildings wherever possible” to further the goal of “making it more expensive” for administrations to refuse their demands. Putting up tents is highly recommended because it defies school policy and elicits a response, which is the point of the exercise.
This is a crisis with enormous implications. President Biden is terrified of losing left-wing political support. In spite of the fact that a clear majority of Americans do not support Hamas or the campus protesters, he took a powder again, condemning the campus protestors but also “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”
The clueless president of Columbia did the exact wrong thing by agreeing to negotiate with the campus terrorists on their demands. Despite the outpouring of hate and antisemitism on her campus, she praised them for fighting for the “rights of Palestinians” and against the “humanitarian tragedy in Gaza.”
The protesters’ demands are ambitious. They include the divestiture of funds from Israel which would have the effect of financially ostracizing Israelis and a cease-fire in the Gaza war, which would hand a critical victory to Hamas and condemn Israel to a future of perpetual Islamist attacks.
Psychologists and common sense tell you the behavior that is rewarded gets repeated. America’s enemies win again.
We are a constitutional republic with a structure artfully designed to make policies and resolve disputes based on majority rule, while respecting minority rights. Conceding to the Islamist- inspired mob the right to set American public policy is a grave mistake.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
