Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, who has taught English and history for 30 years, writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Poor Elijah’s mother long harbored the vain hope that he’d grow up to be a doctor, which is why she encouraged him to sign up for Latin in ninth grade. Conventional wisdom back then held that diplomats negotiated in French, scientists conversed in German, and doctors wrote prescriptions in Caesar’s mother tongue.
Poor Elijah has yet to write a prescription, but Latin did teach him where lots of English words come from. For example, “incognito,” meaning “disguised,” derives from cognitus, which means “known,” and in, which in Latin boasts a variety of translations including “not.” “Recognize” takes the root word for “know” and tacks on the prefix that means “again.” I recognize you because I’m knowing you again.
At school the word “cognitive” pertains to things students can know. When experts and school officials talk about cognitive learning, they mean the acquisition of academic knowledge and skills, which is why many people think we have schools.
While Latin might equip you to parse that “noncognitive” has to do with not knowing, it won’t clarify exactly what that means or explain, let alone justify, reformers’ persistent crusade on behalf of noncognitive education. I’ve spent 30-odd years teaching adolescents in a classroom, and I still can’t make sense of it.
You can’t teach humans of any age for long without noticing that we’re social creatures with feelings. You can’t effectively run a classroom or a carpentry gang without making reasonable allowances for individuals’ social and emotional needs and without drawing on their social and emotional strengths. Teachers themselves are part of that social-emotional classroom mix.
That part I understand. If that’s all experts meant by “social-emotional learning,” aka SEL, and “educating the whole child,” I’d be all for it.
Unfortunately, that’s not all that SEL proponents have in mind.
Consider a recent report from the National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, yet another “blue-ribbon” collection of “leaders from education, science, government, and the private sector.” Sympathetic reformers applaud the admonition to reject “the cramped view that schools’ only job is to develop [students’] cognitive faculties.” SEL boosters favor a “shift” away from what they regard as “narrowly defined student achievement” and contend that schools shouldn’t have to “choose between [lessons in] chemistry and character.” Like-minded advocates regard social and emotional development as “a higher form of thinking” and “at least as important” as “how well students recall information about the year in which the Civil War began or how to factor a polynomial.”
First of all, knowing when the Civil War began definitely isn’t nearly as important as understanding why it began, but it comes in handy when you’re trying to lay out a sequence of American history. The fact that SEL practitioners choose to trivialize history instruction by reducing it to memorizing a date provides clear evidence of reformers’ disdain for content knowledge, which in turn explains why they’ve purged it from American classrooms, and why too many students know too little about our government and the events, personalities, issues, and principles that comprise our history.
Second, 21st century reformers like to rave about STEM education – science, technology, engineering, and math – but you can’t master STEM subjects without pesky skills like knowing how to factor polynomials.
Third, social and emotional learning may be more central to overall success in life than polynomials, but schools were established to deal with the academic side of the whole child. In the same way, we build and staff hospitals to deal with children’s medical needs, not to teach them to read.
SEL proponents counter that children with social and emotional problems and deficits might not learn as much academically as they otherwise could, that noncognitive SEL is a “precondition” for cognitive learning.
Classrooms should be safe, civil, decent places for children to spend their days and learn the academic knowledge and skills schools were created to impart. There’s a difference, though, between modeling character in your classroom, for example, and appropriating time out of the school day for explicit curricular lessons in character.
Advocates allow that “teachers and schools can’t do this alone,” that social-emotional development is also a community responsibility dependent on “out-of-school activities, agencies and influences.” I’d argue that the prime influence is and ought to be the student’s family. I’d also note that the most common contribution other agencies typically make is to detail how schools are supposed to meet the responsibility.
Specific SEL objectives and activities range from initiatives that “incorporate character curriculum or social skills into math class” and the installation of “full-time life coaches” alongside classroom teachers, to instructing students in “overcoming frustration” and “developing, managing, and perceiving their sense of self-efficacy.” Other favorites include lessons to help students “regulate their emotions,” “build relationships,” and “take care of their brain by sleeping and eating appropriately,” as well as opportunities to “open up” to the teacher and class about “what’s going on at home.”
Even “dental care” makes one school’s SEL list.
Some districts employ a new “4Rs” curriculum – “Reading, Writing, Respect, and Resolution.” In one classroom exercise fifth grade students draw a self-portrait. Then they listen to a story. As they listen, every time they hear a “put-down” in the story, they tear a piece off their self-portrait. At the story’s end, students are directed to give each other supportive “put-ups.”
Participating students reported that the put-downs made them “sad” and “depressed.” SEL sponsors acknowledged that tearing the portraits “brought much of the class to tears,” but advocates insist that SEL “is not about therapy.”
Sounds a lot like therapy to me.
Again, like most teachers I believe that classrooms should be decent, humane places. I’m fine with doing my part to prepare my students to become “good people in life.” I just think my part, aside from being decent and humane myself, is teaching them English and history.
Advocates maintain that choosing between SEL and academics is a “false choice” schools don’t have to make. The fact is, though, that school time and resources are finite.
The only false choice is choosing to pretend that schools can and should do it all.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: Character lessons in the classroom.