Bad Therapy Review: Social-Emotional Learning

In praise of indoctrinating children

Are dumb infographics destroying America?

I.

In addition to teaching facts and skills, all schools teach social norms, ways of behaving, and values.

This has been true since at least the beginnings of mass education. Handwriting practice from Colonial America (courtesy of John Woolman, quoted in The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition):

If anger burns, stand still. Meekness is a pleasant garden. Kindness in the heart feels pleasant. The wounds of a friend need no plaster. A lamb took by fraud is an ill sacrifice. Religion without righteousness profits not. A rose in the spring smells sweet. Let the dainty man try abstinence. An easy life, a delicious cook, and the doctor.

Today, everyone agrees that schools ought to be teaching social norms alongside academic subjects. American children say the Pledge of Allegiance and learn about George Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., and respecting the flag. Children learn about the importance of eating their vegetables, exercising regularly, and not taking drugs. Abstinence-only sex education teaches that you should save sex for marriage; comprehensive sex education teaches that you should use condoms. English teachers want children to love reading. Humanities professors defend their field by saying that it’s education for citizenship which teaches you how to think, not just what to think. Glurgey books say that everything you really need to know you learned in kindergarten. Everyone wants children to learn critical thinking.

More than that, I think teaching about social norms is unavoidable. A few friends and I started a small school, which currently has students aged between four and seven. One thing I’ve learned—in running my own classes and talking about curriculum plans with the full-time teacher—is that children in that age range mostly don’t learn facts and skills. Some facts and skills are important, of course: we teach phonics and math and fine motor skills, and ideally the children would retain some information about economics or the ocean. But when thinking about the curriculum, I find myself returning again and again to norms and behaviors:

• You should sit down and raise your hand during class, instead of running around the room yelling “poop!”

• You shouldn’t hit people.

• Some actions will make people more likely to want to be your friend, and other actions will make them less likely to. This is one reason you shouldn’t hit people.

• We trust you to make your own choices about what you want to learn.

• The world is an interesting place and we should be curious about it.

• Reading is fun. Math is fun.

• The world makes sense. It is possible to do experiments and reason about the world, and come to an answer.

• People in the past lived differently than how we do, and their lives were often worse. We should be grateful we live in the present.

• People in different countries live differently from how we do, and that’s really cool.

• You should not nuke Russia. (Yes, this came up spontaneously.)

What’s more, kids love this stuff. The children’s favorite class is reliably civics, which is a sort of introductory moral philosophy class. They debate Should I Say Sorry? dilemmas—Am I The Asshole? questions for children—and write their own. They write rules for imaginary schools and talk about which rules they’d like the school to have. They write constitutions for their preferred governments. In the process they learn not only “the grownups want you not to insult other kids” but to reason out for themselves the underlying principles behind the norm and to apply it to other common childhood moral dilemmas, like making annoying noises near other kids in order to upset them.

It makes sense that we need to teach (and small children love to learn) about social norms. Children aren’t born understanding etiquette, social skills, self-control, or morality. Perhaps the most important thing for any human being to learn is how to live around other humans, and preschool and early elementary education are substantially devoted to it.

II.

One set of social norms that people want to teach goes under the name “social-emotional learning,” and Abigail Shrier—author of Bad Therapy— hates it.

Social-emotional learning has five basic components:

• Self-awareness (understanding yourself)

• Self-management (emotional regulation)

• Social awareness (understanding the perspectives of other people)

• Relationship skills (communication, cooperation, conflict resolution)

• Responsible decision-making making good choices)

Typical social-emotional learning activities include mindfulness meditation, reading books about feelings, hosting class discussions of dilemmas children face like whether to work on homework or go to the movies, encouraging children to set personal goals, and coaching upset students to take deep breaths or do positive self-talk. So far, so innocuous.

But Abigail Shrier hates it. For example, she criticizes an activity in which high school students discuss typical adult/teen conflicts, who is in the right, and how the teen could resolve the situation. Shrier is upset because these discussions open the possibility that the parent is wrong and the teen is right:

Never do the materials seem to consider that undermining a child’s relationship even with imperfect parents creates psychological damage all its own. How is a child supposed to feel secure after you’ve undermined her faith that her parents know what’s best or have her best interests at heart?

Because… teens don’t come to the conclusion that their parents don’t know what’s best on their own?

I actually did a bunch of those exercises in theology class in my Catholic high school. It was pretty common for us to decide that the adult was right and the teenager was behaving unreasonably. Teenagers usually agree that some rules—like curfews and set-aside times for doing homework—are reasonable in general, even if they hate those rules in their specific case.

These lessons tend to encourage children to negotiate and find a mutually acceptable compromise. Shrier thinks that the lessons should teach teenagers that, if they have a conflict or disagreement with an adult, they should just obey the adult without question. But sometimes adults are wrong: if nothing else, think about how vulnerable “you must obey all adults” makes teenagers to abuse. And in a few short years these teenagers will be adults. In adult life, you shouldn’t unquestioningly obey authority figures: you should know how to choose the issues that really matter, politely push back, make your case with facts, and accept outcomes you don’t like. People don’t have these skills downloaded into their brains the moment they turn eighteen. “Dad, I think my curfew should be 9:30” at sixteen is practice for “ma’am, I think I deserve a raise” at twenty-six.

Shrier further clutches her pearls:

In a Second Step exercise titled “Homework: I Spy . . .” seventh graders are encouraged to play a game that might as well be called Hero of the Soviet Union...

The exercise continues: “Start with one person. Write down what you observe about his or her facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and what he or she says. Then guess based on these clues what he or she might have been feeling. Then try the same activity with another family member.”

But the writers of Second Step were not born yesterday. Think they’d just leave this smoking gun lying around for any skeptical journalist to expose? The exercise concludes, rather coyly: “When you’ve completed the sheet, show it to an adult in your family and see if he or she can guess who you were spying on.”

Like any seventh grader is dumb enough to tell mom he was spying on her, writing down her private comments for the benefit of the school counselor.

The activity is clearly intended to provide practice in a basic social skill, the ability to figure out what other people are feeling. Exercises like this one are common in therapy for autistic people, even autistic adults: explicit, focused practice in observing other people’s emotional tells. The activity been framed as spying in a misguided attempt to be “fun”, but there’s nothing dark or suspicious about it.

I can’t help but feel like I’m gaining insight into the home lives Abigail Shrier expects children to have. If my child observed me at a randomly selected time, he wouldn’t find anything especially private or objectionable: maybe I’m focusing on writing, frustratedly complaining about bad takes to my husband, or happily reading a book. But Abigail Shrier seems to expect that a randomly sampled moment usually contains something that you’d rather a school counsellor not know: a marital argument, an emotional breakdown, a harsh punishment of the child’s sibling. It’s a disturbing vision of what Shrier thinks is normal.

In criticizing Shrier, I don’t mean to imply that I think all social-emotional learning is great. A lot of teaching practices that go under the banner of social-emotional learning are bad: condescending, unpleasant for students, or unnecessarily invasive. Perhaps most commonly, they’re just a dumb waste of instructional time.

I actually don’t like the I Spy activity for its age group. The “fun” frame story of being a spy is appropriate for third graders, but it’s too childish for a seventh-grader. Most seventh-graders know how to read emotions from body language, so making this exercise part of the curriculum makes as much sense as making all seventh-graders do subtraction problems. But these criticisms are completely different from Shrier’s takes.

In one activity Shrier complains about, middle-school students answer a series of questions (like “have you ever lost a championship game or important competition?” or “have you ever stayed overnight in the hospital?”) and then share their answers with each other in order to build empathy. This activity sucks. Students shouldn’t be obligated to share information about their lives with other students, who may very well gossip about them or bully them. Even preteens have a right to privacy.

That’s not why Shrier disapproves of the questions activity, though! Shrier disapproves of it because she’s afraid that the teachers will read the information their students provide and call Child Protective Services. I… don’t know how to respond to this. If you’re worried that your child’s answer to “have you ever been really embarrassed” or “have you ever been teased?” might get the teacher to call CPS on you, isn’t that a sign you need to seriously reconsider your parenting?¹

Some elementary-school teachers begin the day with a checkin about whether today is “a daisy day or a ladybug day” (i.e. a good-mood day or a bad-mood day). People who are in favor of social-emotional learning say that emotional checkins cause children to be more in touch with their emotions, more self-aware, and better able to predict and prevent bad moods. Shrier says that emotional checkins cause children to ruminate constantly about their feelings and how terrible they feel, until they flunk out of school and have major depressive disorder.

I think… it doesn’t do either of those?

I don’t think emotional checkins have any long-term effect at all, certainly not any predictable long-term effect. By all means, check in with children’s feelings in the morning if you want to and it makes classroom management easier, and don’t if you don’t want to and it takes up too much time. But emotional checkins don’t seem like the sort of thing that matters in twenty years.

Again, we see Shrier’s remarkable belief in the fragility of children. Emotional checkins are perhaps “a waste of time” or “somewhat annoying.” But they won’t give your neurotypical child major depressive disorder. They just won’t. Children are more resilient than that.

III.

A social-emotional learning presenter says that mathematics is the single content area that needs the most social-emotional learning. Shrier criticizes this idea:

The presenters showed us a series of kindergarten-level “math problems” that prompted us to look at a bunch of shapes and asked: “Which one doesn’t belong?” At the end, they revealed the correct answer: They all belong. No wrong answers! Everyone wins! See, that wasn’t hard.

I began to wonder whether this wasn’t some sort of ploy by the Chinese Communist Party to obliterate American mathematical competence. I turned to the high school math teacher next to me and asked her how she could possibly incorporate this sort of approach into Algebra II. She stared back at me, a frozen rictus pinned to the corners of her mouth. She seemed to think Big Brother was watching us.

The only feeling apparently never affirmed in social-emotional learning is mistrust of emotional conversation in place of learning. A decent number of kids actually show up hoping to learn some geometry and not burn their limited instructional time on conversations about their mental health with the math teacher. But from every angle, such children could only be made to feel errant and alone.

I agree that people shouldn’t be spending math class talking about whether today is a daisy day or a ladybug day.

But social-emotional learning is absolutely at the core of mathematics education. Every good math teacher I know agrees about this. Average math students—to say nothing of below-average students—have paralyzing anxiety and learned helplessness around mathematics. They choose numbers from problems at random, execute whatever technique they’ve most recently learned, and stare at you in incomprehension when you ask them whether the answer makes sense. Mathematics? Make sense? Math is the subject in which you memorize a huge number of meaningless facts, all completely disconnected from each other, and desperately hope you can recall the right facts for the test. Math never makes sense.

Almost no children who undergo a normal mathematics education learn any real math: they can’t model a real-life situation mathematically, they have no number sense, and they’ve never experienced the joy of proofs or problem-solving. The primary thing most teens taking Algebra II need is to replace their dread and fear about numbers with confidence and a sense of the beauty and elegance of mathematics. If they don’t have that, we might as well let them hang out in the lunchroom chatting for all the use they’ll get out of their knowledge of algebra.

I suspect that Shrier was a normal math student—that is, a student who learned no actual math—because she thinks the every-shape-belongs math problems for kindergarteners are bullshit. Her math education taught her that math problems are supposed to have a single concrete right answer, which you get by executing complicated procedures by rote. Math problems that don’t have a right answer are like science classes that accept classifying cats as a kind of frog.

First, of course, “there's an equally simple criterion that singles out each of these shapes" sometimes is the objectively correct answer. The point is not "all of these polygons are equal in the eyes of the law and you should be nice to all of them and invite them all to your birthday party.”² Shrier is confused about what “the right answer to a math problem” even is.

What’s more, to someone who actually knows anything about math, these problems are training the skills of creative and lateral thinking about mathematics, looking at problems from multiple angles, and noticing all the properties of a shape instead of getting stuck on the first thing you see. In a well-taught Algebra II class, those skills are also important. Shrier doesn’t think so because she’s been denied of any knowledge of what math is.

…do we think the teacher’s rictus grin was not because of anything about Big Brother but instead because she didn’t expect to be given a random pop quiz on curriculum planning?

IV.

Abigail Shrier talks a lot about how schools should stick to math and reading instead of wasting time on feelings and social skills. But she doesn’t really believe schools should avoid teaching about social norms: she explicitly praises “morality tales”, “character education”, and encouraging “kids to get a grip.” Nor would it make sense to do so: elementary schools have to have some opinions on social norms, if only “don’t hit other kids.” Her problem is with the specific social norms being taught.

Social-emotional learning tries (sometimes ineffectually) to teach norms like:

1. It’s good to notice what you’re feeling and try to make yourself feel better.

2. All teenagers disagree with adults sometimes. If you disagree, you should try to find a solution that works for everyone.

3. It’s normal to talk about things that happen in your family with people other than your family members.

4. Math isn’t just about finding the right answer, but about how you approach the problem.

Abigail Shrier wants schools to instead teach emotional repression, unquestioning obedience, hiding the family’s dirty laundry at all costs, and the bulimia approach to mathematics.³ As skeptical as I am of much social-emotional learning, I think Shrier’s preferred norms are profoundly harmful. Genuine mathmatical knowledge is important for understanding the world and a source of great pleasure. Obsessive concern for family privacy provides cover for abuse. Conflict resolution and emotional regulation skills are essential for adult life. And free citizens in a democratic society must be able to question authority.

Social-emotional learning often does a bad job at teaching these norms. But at least they’re trying.

1. Many good parents do have something to worry about from CPS. The vast majority of CPS cases are “neglect”, which normally means a loving, nonabusive parent who is too poor to provide their child the necessities of life. Those parents might legitimately worry that having their poverty revealed to teachers will get their children taken away from them. Further, parents who make stigmatized parenting decisions—such as polyamorous families or parents of free-range children—are sometimes threatened with CPS. CPS is also sometimes called in situations of family conflict, such as a messy divorce or a grandparental estrangement. But if your child was gently raised in Park Slope and you’re worried about CPS… well, at best, you have anxiety.

2. Thanks to NormalAnomaly for this joke.

3. Cram as much as you can in and vomit it up on the test.