Forget the Pledge of Allegiance. Today’s teachers are more likely to start the school day with an ‘emotions check-in.’ Abigail Shrier on the rise of ‘trauma-informed’ education.
As a lifelong teacher, I firmly believe that, in addition to everything else, what’s driving this approach is that it’s much easier to chat about feelings than to do the hard work of teaching, for instance, math, or history. And, you get to feel like a hero every day. Doing ‘real’ teaching is an arduous task, often thankless in the short run but profoundly rewarding in the long run.
I am a psychiatrist and the stuff Abigial Shrier is bringing to light has been making me nuts for years. But it's not just baked into the school system, it's rampant in the mental health community and of course, it is fueled by social media. I would make this book, and her one on the 'gender-affirming' phenomena required reading in every graduate program, even and especially the on-line ones, cranking out mental health workers.
Our daughter had an IEP up until middle school. A learning support teacher wanted her to drop Spanish so that she could have a free period to spend in learning support room to get help with homework and test prep. Our daughter loved Spanish and it was her favorite subject. We had her attend the annual IEP meeting to self advocate for continuing Spanish and stopping the learning support. The teacher in the meeting said, “I’m concerned it will be too much for you and if you don’t succeed it will harm your self esteem.” Our daughter said “My self esteem will be harmed by not trying. If it doesn’t work out I can handle it.” One of our proudest moments. The teachers and school psychologist didn’t know what to say. It did work out. She’s a junior at university, just made the deans list and will be studying abroad this spring in Spain.
Maybe instead of this mental health check garbage it would be better and more life affirming to use yesterday’s essay on fentanyl as the morning check in and do a one minute just say no to drugs exercise
BTW were there any demographics mentioned on who is taking the Ritalin or adderall ? I bet it’s white boys this is pushed on
My son was very social in first or second grade. He was a very smart kid and was always helping others with their work. So the teacher said he should take Ritalin. I said are you nuts? Separate his desk so he isn’t so close. She did and it worked
SEL is designed to create anxiety out of thin air. It is designed to create, not healthy individuals, but activists ready to dismantle systems of oppression. It is designed to recenter the abnormal and push normal to the fringes. It is designed to make an underclass of dependent people.
“It explained that the brain is like a hand, with the thumb folded into the palm. “Our amygdala is really important in serious situations,” said the voice-over. This sounded right. We felt like neuroscientists.”
——————————————————————-
OR YOU COULD JUST TEACH THEM TO READ AND DO BASIC MATH.
Reminds me of the so called innovative teachers who invented a new way to learn how to read. It didn’t work. Now we have lots of kids who can’t read.
It seems like every day I read stories of how the “smart people” do something, it fails horribly, but there are no consequences for them. Just lots of victims scattered all over.
“Advocates of social-emotional learning claim that nearly all kids today have suffered serious traumatic experiences that leave them unable to learn.”
——————————————————-
Well yeah okay this is technically true since going to a government school where you are trained by communists to be an annoying jackass is probably pretty traumatic.
The economic incentives that take root, once these therapies are built into “medicine”, are impossible to tear out. They grow and envelop the society, and an entire class of medical practitioners’ livelihoods depend on its support and further growth. That means more “patients” will be pulled into the maw. If your career depends on growing your practice to feed your family, you WILL find more people to diagnose, treat, put on medication, and further entrench in the therapy mindset that will overwhelm our society.
Hopefully President Trump will eliminate the Department of Education, the ultimate funding source for this dangerous nonsense. Third-world countries educate their children better, for a few pennies on the dollar.
Freedom is bad for kids. They need to stop giving kids the power to make "decisions" in their life until late teens. Let them hate their parents for putting a lot of restrictions. And for jesus sake - take away their phone and tell your congress person to restrict this non-porn pornography of social media.
They introduced “mood meters” in our school district where every day elementary kids enter class and put their name on an emotion. I asked my kids (high school) if they have something similar and sure enough they do. But the older kids game it “I alternate between yellow(neutral) and green (happy). If it’s always green they think you’re not taking it seriously” 🤦🏻♀️ Well credit teachers to know at least that much. If the end goal is to build confident, well adjusted kids, let kids learn how to read, write and do math; these are actual skills that will enable them to be productive contributing members of society and THAT is what will give them confidence. And I don’t believe kids should be happy 100% of the time; they need to fail a test, get cut from a team and have fights with friend groups; this is when they acquire some resilience and once they get through it, they will recognize how to navigate through life’s hiccups and that is what will make them truly happy and confident adults.
“Good therapists are trained specifically to avoid encouraging rumination, a thought process typified by dwelling on past pain and negative emotions. Rumination is a well-established risk factor for depression.”
————————————————————
Hey, this reminds me, did you guys know that we used to have slavery??
We have absolutely lost the way. I read about refugees from brutal totalitarian regimes who dragged themselves to school through bombings, risk of arrest and other horrors because they understand how important education is. Then here in some of the most affluent districts in America we are talking about our feelings rather than learning basic math skills? This is creating a generation of navel gazers.
I do think part of the job of a parent is to help your child understand that “big feelings” are a normal part of life and that they will always eventually pass, not by suppressing them or, at the other extreme, talking about them endlessly, but by simply allowing yourself to feel what you feel until the feeling moves. This is what builds emotional resilience. Feeling despair or anger, letting yourself ride that wave and then coming out the other side. But this is something to work on in the family, not the job of a teacher.
As a millennial, we’re seeing that a lot of us have a hard time with reality due to the shortcomings we learned from schooling —hence the term “extended adolescence”
As a lifelong teacher, I firmly believe that, in addition to everything else, what’s driving this approach is that it’s much easier to chat about feelings than to do the hard work of teaching, for instance, math, or history. And, you get to feel like a hero every day. Doing ‘real’ teaching is an arduous task, often thankless in the short run but profoundly rewarding in the long run.
I am a psychiatrist and the stuff Abigial Shrier is bringing to light has been making me nuts for years. But it's not just baked into the school system, it's rampant in the mental health community and of course, it is fueled by social media. I would make this book, and her one on the 'gender-affirming' phenomena required reading in every graduate program, even and especially the on-line ones, cranking out mental health workers.
Our daughter had an IEP up until middle school. A learning support teacher wanted her to drop Spanish so that she could have a free period to spend in learning support room to get help with homework and test prep. Our daughter loved Spanish and it was her favorite subject. We had her attend the annual IEP meeting to self advocate for continuing Spanish and stopping the learning support. The teacher in the meeting said, “I’m concerned it will be too much for you and if you don’t succeed it will harm your self esteem.” Our daughter said “My self esteem will be harmed by not trying. If it doesn’t work out I can handle it.” One of our proudest moments. The teachers and school psychologist didn’t know what to say. It did work out. She’s a junior at university, just made the deans list and will be studying abroad this spring in Spain.
Maybe instead of this mental health check garbage it would be better and more life affirming to use yesterday’s essay on fentanyl as the morning check in and do a one minute just say no to drugs exercise
BTW were there any demographics mentioned on who is taking the Ritalin or adderall ? I bet it’s white boys this is pushed on
My son was very social in first or second grade. He was a very smart kid and was always helping others with their work. So the teacher said he should take Ritalin. I said are you nuts? Separate his desk so he isn’t so close. She did and it worked
Parents need to say no to those drugs.
SEL is designed to create anxiety out of thin air. It is designed to create, not healthy individuals, but activists ready to dismantle systems of oppression. It is designed to recenter the abnormal and push normal to the fringes. It is designed to make an underclass of dependent people.
It is intentional and it is 100% deliberate.
“It explained that the brain is like a hand, with the thumb folded into the palm. “Our amygdala is really important in serious situations,” said the voice-over. This sounded right. We felt like neuroscientists.”
——————————————————————-
OR YOU COULD JUST TEACH THEM TO READ AND DO BASIC MATH.
Reminds me of the so called innovative teachers who invented a new way to learn how to read. It didn’t work. Now we have lots of kids who can’t read.
It seems like every day I read stories of how the “smart people” do something, it fails horribly, but there are no consequences for them. Just lots of victims scattered all over.
“Advocates of social-emotional learning claim that nearly all kids today have suffered serious traumatic experiences that leave them unable to learn.”
——————————————————-
Well yeah okay this is technically true since going to a government school where you are trained by communists to be an annoying jackass is probably pretty traumatic.
I was a public school kid. School was the one place I could escape from the stress and worries I had at home. This is a travesty.
The economic incentives that take root, once these therapies are built into “medicine”, are impossible to tear out. They grow and envelop the society, and an entire class of medical practitioners’ livelihoods depend on its support and further growth. That means more “patients” will be pulled into the maw. If your career depends on growing your practice to feed your family, you WILL find more people to diagnose, treat, put on medication, and further entrench in the therapy mindset that will overwhelm our society.
Hopefully President Trump will eliminate the Department of Education, the ultimate funding source for this dangerous nonsense. Third-world countries educate their children better, for a few pennies on the dollar.
Freedom is bad for kids. They need to stop giving kids the power to make "decisions" in their life until late teens. Let them hate their parents for putting a lot of restrictions. And for jesus sake - take away their phone and tell your congress person to restrict this non-porn pornography of social media.
They introduced “mood meters” in our school district where every day elementary kids enter class and put their name on an emotion. I asked my kids (high school) if they have something similar and sure enough they do. But the older kids game it “I alternate between yellow(neutral) and green (happy). If it’s always green they think you’re not taking it seriously” 🤦🏻♀️ Well credit teachers to know at least that much. If the end goal is to build confident, well adjusted kids, let kids learn how to read, write and do math; these are actual skills that will enable them to be productive contributing members of society and THAT is what will give them confidence. And I don’t believe kids should be happy 100% of the time; they need to fail a test, get cut from a team and have fights with friend groups; this is when they acquire some resilience and once they get through it, they will recognize how to navigate through life’s hiccups and that is what will make them truly happy and confident adults.
“Good therapists are trained specifically to avoid encouraging rumination, a thought process typified by dwelling on past pain and negative emotions. Rumination is a well-established risk factor for depression.”
————————————————————
Hey, this reminds me, did you guys know that we used to have slavery??
We have absolutely lost the way. I read about refugees from brutal totalitarian regimes who dragged themselves to school through bombings, risk of arrest and other horrors because they understand how important education is. Then here in some of the most affluent districts in America we are talking about our feelings rather than learning basic math skills? This is creating a generation of navel gazers.
I do think part of the job of a parent is to help your child understand that “big feelings” are a normal part of life and that they will always eventually pass, not by suppressing them or, at the other extreme, talking about them endlessly, but by simply allowing yourself to feel what you feel until the feeling moves. This is what builds emotional resilience. Feeling despair or anger, letting yourself ride that wave and then coming out the other side. But this is something to work on in the family, not the job of a teacher.
John Taylor Gatto, who won NY Teacher of the year multiple times has long spoke out against public education due to the traumatizing effects it has on children: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/origins-of-modern-education
As a millennial, we’re seeing that a lot of us have a hard time with reality due to the shortcomings we learned from schooling —hence the term “extended adolescence”
https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-millennials-hate-adulting