The Global Social and Emotional Security State: The Transformation of Education to Embed Sexual Rights and a Progressive Universal Ethic

By | February 27, 2023

INTRODUCTION

The politicization of education systems in the United States and abroad has become greatly pronounced in the past decade, with debate over controversial curricula including critical race theory, comprehensive sexuality education, and affirmation of gender ideologies. These contentious topics have also been embedded across education systems internationally, from individual institutions to school boards and federal bureaus. In September 2022, the United Nations hosted the “Transforming Education Summit” in New York, seeking to establish a “transformative” global education agenda and framework for every UN member state. The summit spoke for all UN agencies, each in accordance with a mutual agenda enforced through their specific means and channels. The established agenda would remove decision-making from local and national levels to a globalized, “progressive universalism in education.” In recent years, UN agencies have become increasingly unmoored from international consensus on controversial social issues and bolder in the promotion of progressive social mores in their education, refugee, and relief programs. The summit was a concretization of these efforts, proposing a reinvention of the purpose of education and aiming to establish curriculum guides with a primary focus on culturally engineering social justice, climate activism, and sexual ideology through “social and emotional learning,” beginning with the most malleable population—children.

The UN’s Vision for a New Education

The vision statement for the summit by the Secretary-General of the UN proposes that the long-standing disparities in education between wealthier and developing countries, exacerbated by COVID-19, are related to “income, race and gender, [that] frequently reinforce privilege and poverty from generation to generation,” obstacles which require complete international cooperation to remove. The vision foresees a global structure of education, outlined by UN bureaucrats, with its own values, agenda, and goals for humanity at large. The summit did not feature any negotiations by UN member states, nor allow room for objection to the event; the new “vision” for education was not reached collaboratively or with any official consensus. Rather, the summit was a convening of state and non-state actors already of like mind—an increasingly common UN tactic—expressing their goals under the banner of the UN. For UN agencies, the content and purpose of education is not for countries, regions, or parents to decide. With constant emphasis on globalism and a universal established ethic, the Secretary-General described it as “not a technical, but a political summit.” It is part of “Our Common Agenda,” a UN initiative for global cooperation through “inclusive, networked, and effective multilateralism.” In layman’s terms, it is a synonym for a new global order, to be enforced by world leaders for all societies. This “transformation” of education is not a value-neutral enterprise, but an “ethical, political, and economic imperative” calling for a “new social contract for education.” Education must reorient its goals to “prepare all learners…to advance human rights, social justice, solidarity and respect for diversity.” 

The Secretary-General said that existing education systems and objectives must “move beyond a narrow and outdated set of metrics of achievement for learners,” and to the “holistic development of the learner throughout their lives,” The noun “student” is now replaced with “learner,” to emphasize an envisioned “lifelong learning” process, informed by institutional standards and the formation of individual and social identities. 

The transformation of education is ultimately a philosophical and ethical re-engineering of the understanding of the human person, a re-definition of means and ends. The global agenda to universally reorient education from the equipment of fundamental skills and understanding needed to flourish in one’s own determined career and societal path becomes positioned for an explicit set of goals and “collective futures:” climate change, inclusion, and anti-bias. It is important to acknowledge the hubris of the UN bureaucracy, which purports to lay claim to the objectives of humanity, the whole of human rights and what one learns and why. The end of education is shifted from forming individual skill and virtue to an ambiguous human collective, disavowing cultural and ideological variation as a threat to humanity’s development and new global commitments. 

The Three Objectives for a Transformed Education

According to the summit, education is oriented toward “learning to learn, learning to live together, learning to do and learning to be.” On first blush, this language appears innocuous and even agreeable, yet the UN’s definition of social cohesion is far more insidious than it appears.

In “learning to live together,” education becomes a means of instilling an ethical pluralism and subjectivism devoid of diversity of thought or personal convictions. This is achieved through equity, inclusion, and nondiscrimination education as well as “gender transformative curricula that include comprehensive sexuality education and helps to address gender-based prejudice, norms or stereotypes.” Comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) describes the institutional and social formation of “cognitive, emotional, physical, and social aspects of sexuality” beginning from early child development through adulthood. CSE curricula introduces homosexuality, transgenderism, masturbation, sexual experimentation, and fluid gender identity beginning from ages 0-4 years. In order to eliminate mores contrary to subjective views on human sexuality from parental and cultural influence, a requirement for pre-primary education is emphasized, requiring children to be taken from parent into schools and placed in an institutional environment as early as possible. 

In November 2022, UNESCO held the World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Development in Uzbekistan. The conference upheld that learning begins at birth and reaffirmed “the right of every young child to quality care and education from birth,” urging UNESCO member states to promote policies for greater institutional enrollment in pre-primary education under the moralistic language of human rights. Citing malnutrition, stress, abuse, and neglect by impoverished or underprepared parents as a threat to the rights of their children, UNESCO seeks to increase dependency on institutionalized child-care as the ultimate provider of physical, social, and emotional wellbeing. An increase in enrollment in child-care centers is framed as improving resources for parents, replacing medical and nutritional resources for at-home care and formation. In addition to supplanting domestic formation, pre-primary enrollment is also the primary means of “gender-transformative education,” which “empowers learners to examine, challenge and change harmful gender norms and masculinities, gender-based violence and power imbalances” learned in the home. 

To combat the “harmful” cultural norms first taught directly or indirectly by parents, the summit, in conjunction with UNESCO, claims anti-bias education “must start from pre-primary education, as children internalize gender norms, stereotypes and identities early, limiting their understanding of their abilities and opportunities.” The agenda to create a global anti-bias education seeks to counteract naturally-occurring domestic education and replace it with a state education; the application of a transformed education is ultimately a competing value-structure contra parents during those critical formational years. Across agencies, the UN claims the male and female binary, illustrated by most parents, along with traditional cultural family values are “harmful,” and that proper values, divorced from any religious cultural roots, must be established outside of the home. It is important to acknowledge that not every home environment for children is safe, healthy, and formative, yet the summit’s broad claims assume a prior right of the State to educate children, in direct opposition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states, “parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”

“Learning to do” and “learning to be” calls for a re-definition of economic, social, and communal aspects of society, focusing on digital literacy and social and emotional learning, while teaching “learners” to live a healthy life, “to live it fully and well,” according to their standards. The UN urges employers and higher-education institutions to integrate a new set of qualification policies to “recognize the skills, work experiences and knowledge between systems, throughout life and outside of formal education systems,” and seeks to combine “digital literacy” for teachers and students with increased data sets to track its new educational objectives. This goal requires a method of social data collection through education, turning qualitative skills into quantitative data-sets, mutating qualifications for higher education and employment to a standardized ethical merit-based system. What digital and educational infrastructure is required for this new social currency? 

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) and the Standardization of Behavior

To implement the UN summit’s new proposed value system, localized and mandated curriculums are needed. This is what is known as the “social and emotional learning” (SEL) approach. CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning is at the forefront of this methodology, particularly in the United States. CASEL defines SEL as, 

“The process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.”

The emotional learning curricula has been taken up by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which promotes SEL as a primary means of achieving its education agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN’s global development schema, by 2030. The United Nations International Child Emergency Fund (UNICEF), and the World Health Organization (WHO) also promote the integration of SEL, publishing SEL teacher guides for various UN member states. The UN’s reinvention of education proposes changing educational institutions from specialized sources of knowledge for human flourishing—complementary to other sources such as the family and religious and cultural institutions—to the engineering of the entire human person—one’s sense of identity, values, meaning, and direction in life. In its 2021 education handbook, Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education, UNESCO echoes the CASEL social and emotional learning mission, claiming that the best approach to SEL encompasses social, emotional, and ethical domains of students’ identities for the purposes of “broader social cohesion” and addressing prejudice in “every society.” UNESCO’s previous conference on Early Childhood Care and Education also hosted an event promoting social and emotional learning. SEL is a means to teach students progressive social and ethical imperatives disguised as emotional self-awareness in the service of UN goals. 

In 2020, CASEL amended its SEL curricula to add “transformative” SEL, whose objectives match those of the United Nations expressed in the Transforming Education Summit. Twenty-nine US states have codified SEL standards of implementation and achievement, beginning from pre-kindergarten education through secondary school—including the revised transformative SEL—curricula and provide a salient example of the UN’s desired global outcome. Conservative parental backlash against SEL curricula has drawn attention to its position in the academic culture war, framing SEL as a trojan horse for critical race, gender, and sexuality theory.  SEL also has critics on political left, who criticize the invasion of students’ privacy in its data-gathering requirements. Both claims are well-founded and are explicit in CASEL’s materials and guides.

 

The updated SEL includes education on the “interrelated legacies of racial and class oppression in the U.S. and globally,” and uses its own moral framework to condemn “dominant U.S. cultural norms [which] promote materialism or acquisitive individualism, an orientation associated with…unethical behavior.” CASEL also collaborates with abortion giant Planned Parenthood on comprehensive sexuality education programming, training teachers and encouraging students to become “sexual rights” activists in and out of schools. In the SEL program Second Step, eighth-grade students (aged 13-14) are taught to become social justice activists, to “choose a disruption strategy…challenging and changing attitudes, beliefs, traditions, or practices that make bullying and harassment socially acceptable.” Bullying and harassment are under no circumstances acceptable, but the implication is that differing cultural viewpoints which challenge the progressive position are villainized as harassment. Students in Second Step are taught that acceptance of ideological stances are the means to eliminate bullying, rather than encouraging a charitable disposition to all individuals despite contrary beliefs. This language, as seen in the UN education summit, is used across UN agencies in educational and health contexts, particularly to defend and instill in youth controversial sexual ideologies and the acceptance and promotion of abortion as a human right. 

Concerns on the UN’s Vision for a Global SEL Education

The data-collection in SEL protocols is invasive and all-encompassing, cooperating with the UN agencies’ goal to quantify learned behaviors in databases for broader use outside of an educational setting. Outlined in CASEL’s 2019 guide for schoolwide SEL, the implementation of SEL across school districts and states requires school-based teams and outside third-party “observers” to gather data on SEL indicators and progress, and observers are to encourage schools in involving “a broad range of stakeholders,” from within and without the school system, to enforce protocol. 

For sit-in classroom monitoring, observers are tasked with ranking classroom SEL integration on a scale of 1 to 4, measuring the degree to which social and emotional curricula are “seamlessly integrated” schoolwide. Observers are also required to identify common school areas: “you will want to visit areas where students and adults are interacting, such as the main office, cafeteria, library, gymnasium, and outdoor spaces” to note which individuals and common spaces lack SEL standards of behavior. 

Once students and schools have been tracked, data on the social and emotional intelligence of students is collected and integrated in the P-20 Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems, which gathers information from pre-primary ages to 20 years old, containing personally identifiable information, demographic traits, participation in SEL and other programs, and college readiness factors, as well as the level of SEL implementation in schools. 

Depending on the level of tracking in U.S. states, this can be shared with universities, corporations, and employers in the workforce to determine ideal hiring candidates or university applicants, marking a shift from hard skills and satisfactory grades to quantified and scored social skills for further educational or career prospects. The Gates Foundation Data Quality Campaign and the Bush’s Chiefs for Change organizations are pressuring lawmakers to link student-level data between education and workforce agencies through the P-20 longitudinal system,  asking Congress to rescind the ban on a federal student database with the College Transparency Act. This form of quantified compliance with progressive dogma mirrors the controversial Environmental Corporate and Social Governance Scores (ESG), a corporate accountability model demanding compliance at the risk of losing capital in the name of environmentalism and achieving UN SDG’s. Action Track 1 of the Transformation of Education Summit lists “immediate needs” for educational progress, claiming that “the essential package for transformation includes…quality data production, dissemination, and use. This requires the strengthening of national data systems.” If the UN’s global vision of SEL implementation is reached, this poses grave concerns for the protection of religious liberties, privacy, and citizen autonomy. The combination of SEL programs and digitization efforts renders education an optimization tool to transform students into compliant human capital.

It is important to note that the scoring of students and institutions operates on the principle that SEL is effective and necessary—low scores merely reflect the rigor of SEL curricula, rather than the feasibility of the approach itself; it excludes the possibility that SEL could be ineffective or harmful. To claim that SEL produces better employment and educational outcomes is self-fulfilling; businesses and institutions determine the standards of SEL in education as stakeholders, modifying their standards, and subsequently curricula, to produce a desired outcome. 

Consequences of Transformed Education on Teachers and Students

Framing social and emotional learning as a primary means of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals—particularly SDG4 on education—alters the role of the teacher from a pedagogue to “something more closely resembling a therapist, social worker, or member of the clergy—no less concerned with a child’s beliefs, attitudes, and values” than students’ families, faith, or culture. In its document on the teaching profession, the UN Transforming Education summit claims:

The role of the teachers has also expanded from knowledge providers to knowledge producers and sense-makers of complex realities. Today, teachers are called to facilitate learning but also to help students develop a sense of belonging and responsibility for the world. Thus, teacher professional development needs to include topics such as health, gender transformative pedagogies and teaching for climate action, sustainability, global citizenship and ‘21st century skills.’

Underneath the sophomoric metaphysical and ethical jargon is the presumed obligation for teachers to become parents, health advisors, unlicensed therapists, and activists in a profession which is neither equipped nor appropriate, to do so. Parents and teachers in school systems implementing SEL programs face fierce backlash, criticism, and, in the case of teachers, unemployment if they object to the curricula. With a principal emphasis on emotions, identity and relationships, archetypal academic subjects recede into the background, positioned as intellectual means for whatever humanitarian ideals bureaucrats determine to be paramount. While parents may seek additional resources to support their children’s mental and physical health, some of which may be provided through schools, such services should be prioritized to complement the role of education, not to redefine it. 

Robert Pondiscio, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, observes that SEL proponents are attempting to transform or restore the character-forming role of education estranged from its religious and moral roots, which “inevitably pushes the field toward therapeutic education.” Explicit progressive ideological motivations aside, efforts to transform education into a remedial “whole person” enterprise without adherence to its traditional foundations on faith and right-reason is not likely to yield the same result, indeed, it is not designed to. Pondiscio cites the work, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education by educators Dennis Hayes and Kathryn Ecclestone, who warn against the insertion of pop-psychology in classroom settings, describing SEL as a “therapeutic ethos” in the aggressive extension of counseling, psychoanalysis and psychology in policy, social and personal lives, and professional settings. The central focus on “global citizenship,” inclusivity, relationships, and global justice contributes and reinforces the worldview of “the diminished self” despite its “curriculum of the self” which they denounce as profoundly “anti-educational.”  Ecclestone and Hayes write: 

This anti-educational trend has two effects. The first is that, in the name of inclusion, tolerance and empathy, a curriculum of the self introduces activities that encourage people to reveal their vulnerable selves to professionals and a growing array of peer mentors… Far from being empowering, this invites people to lower their expectations of themselves and others and to see others as similarly flawed, [biased], and vulnerable…therapeutic education is profoundly dangerous because a diminished image of human potential opens up people’s emotions to assessment by the state and encourages dependence on ritualized forms of emotional support offered by state agencies. Therapeutic education replaces education with the social engineering of emotionally literate citizens who are also coached to experience emotional well-being.

Activism is Only the Beginning

The UN’s need for progressive cultural reform through activism is merely a gateway for more sinister objectives. The “disruption plans” taught in schools for social justice and the implementation of SEL learning are not out of care for each child’s emotional needs nor the achievement of some ideal of justice, but rather to prepare children for the “dissonance” of the SDG’s, which are, in UNESCO’s publication SEL for SDGs, “a series of potentially conflicting goals”:

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are not necessarily a set of consistent objectives but rather a series of potentially conflicting goals. From the perspective of the development agent, these conflicting objectives entail inconsistencies in actions—and antecedents–needed to attain the SDGs. For example, eradicating poverty—a societal objective—might entail (at least in the short term) working the self to the point of compromising personal well-being, another SDG. Another clear example of such conflicts is the slow progress or even resistance to climate change policies because of the relationship across work choice, economic growth, and climate change. Thus, attainment of these goals may necessitate a balancing act—development agents may consider multiple options and make tradeoffs.

In UNESCO’s publication SEL for SDGs, individuals are not called persons or people, but rather “development agents,” in insidious contrast to the ostensible person-centered language of students and young people in SEL materials and UN educational documents. The UN’s ultimate drive to teach social and emotional tactics and “emotional resilience” is framed as a means of achieving the SDGs. The UN desires to deprive society for the “short-term” to achieve their dystopian ends and requires that individuals be conditioned through SEL education to cooperate with the UN’s vision for the future.

The UN’s vision for global development seeks to use education to incorporate young people into a vast global collective, including by sacrificing their individual aspirations or comforts, in the name of sustainability and concern about the climate.  At the same time, the SDG framework is used to promote a radical individualism and autonomy, particularly with regard to women’s reproductive capacity and ability to engage in the formal economy and children’s access to information and services—especially services related to “sexual and reproductive health”—without parental knowledge or consent.  The institution of the family, which predates any form of broader government including multilateral institutions and is referred to in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the “natural and fundamental group unit of society,” is the greatest obstacle to both radical individualism and radical collectivism.  It is, therefore, no surprise that UN policies continually seek to attack and undermine the ties of family as a way to advance its social agenda.

Conclusion

Education has always existed as a means to an end. The UN, however, seeks to revolutionize the means and the ends, establishing a globalized education rid of cultural norms, parental oversight, and local determination and sovereignty for its concocted vision of global progress. The greatest risks posed by this agenda jeopardize children and their parents. However, the most endangered societal foundation, the family, is also the greatest force of resistance to the UN’s plans. Emphasizing and protecting parental rights to educate their children and instill noble emotional skills and values, alongside local community efforts, are the most effective and safest means to establish free societies and express human rights and responsibilities the UN has lost sight of. 

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