WTF is "Wellbeing?"

SEL's latest offering may be its most toxic.

Probably against my better judgement — since my “wellbeing” depends upon reducing stress in my life — I subscribe to the AFT’s “Share My Lesson” newsletter. Each week, I find new union-approved nuggets of nonsense masquerading as worthwhile “lessons” for public school teachers, parents, and paraprofessionals to use with the children in their care.

Actually, calling them “nuggets of nonsense” makes them sound silly, but benign, when in fact most of the time, they are anything but either. They are nonsense only in the strictest definition of the term, which is to say they do not make sense to anyone who hasn’t already committed to ignoring reality, or perhaps “imagining what can be, unburdened by what has been.”

Such was the case this week when I found this lesson. Please note it is positioned as SEL and Special Education, at least in part aimed at students with Autism.

As I always do, I clicked through to learn more. What I found horrified me because to the casual observer, it likely sounds good: harmless at worst, beneficial at best, and certainly nothing to worry about. However, to people more fluent in the Neo-Marxist word salad of Critical Pedagogy (what some call “Woke” Education), it is obviously toxic.

Social emotional learning (SEL) programs have come under fire in recent years because parents started questioning whether it was wise, or even appropriate, for every child to be surveyed about their emotions by their academic teachers. These same parents wanted to know why students who had neither demonstrated nor expressed emotional distress, were being forced to participate in mental health screenings and lessons. They also wanted to know why the data was being collected digitally, who would have access to it, and what would they do with it, now or in the future?

Parents’ concerns were warranted. After conducting my own research, I published this video in which I called SEL "brainwashing." I also exposed in subsequent videos how the data was likely being used for everything from large language AI training to building a “digital twin” for each and every child, which will likely feed their eventual social credit score.

The Collaborative for Social Emotional Learning (CASEL) blocked me on social media for questioning their intentions, leaving me (and others, who were also blocked, after expressing similar concerns) wondering what they’re trying to hide?

Why hide if they’re proud of their work?

Almost as if they’d anticipated parental resistance, CASEL came out with their Guide to Schoolwide SEL, complete with strategies and tips for embedding SEL into all academic subjects, making them effectively opt-out-proof. Now, parents who wanted to know how schools were data-mining and brainwashing their kids would have to look at every class, and every lesson. Since teachers no longer use syllabi and textbooks, relying instead on one-to-one devices, and cloud-based work completed in class, this is an impossible task.

As of today, per the federal government itself, every student in America starts off as classified Tier 1, which — as you can see — means they are presumed to need SEL. What began in special education is now mainstream, or, if you prefer, all kids now need “special education” for their mental health and “wellbeing.”

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What this means is that it’s impossible for the average American K-12 student to get through a day without having their emotional temperature taken at least once. They are asked repeatedly to share, document, and rank their emotional state, and there is no option to say “None of your business.”

Why does this matter? Because as

Abigail Shrier

has explained in her book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, it’s demonstrably unhealthy for children to spend so much time each day thinking about and analyzing their own emotions. Making matters worse, the information children share at school could be exploited by people who want to manipulate or exploit them for personal or professional gain. This becomes particularly relevant when you consider the massive dollar value of the contracts schools sign with so-called “mental healthcare” providers, school counselors, SEL program developers and facilitators.

It was with all these facts mind that I opened the Share My Lesson links, and discovered Teach PERMA+. The program purports to be for students with Autism, but since SEL also started off claiming to serve students with special needs, I’m operating on the assumption PERMA+ will soon find itself in mainstream classrooms too.

Let’s take a look at some of the low-lights:

The teaching slides begin with this image depicting things we measure using objective criteria. The time, our weight, our height, and the volume of liquid in a beaker are not subject to interpretation, and require no special context to fully understand. In short, they are not analogous to what the lesson plans to teach students to measure: HAPPINESS.

Leaving aside the pressure this would put on a child between the ages of 8 - 17, who may fare better not thinking too much about how “happy” they are (or are not) on any given day, there are the subjective “components” of happiness, or what they call “wellbeing” that PERMA+ uses:

Did we have an old theory of wellbeing that needed replacing? If so, what was it, and why weren’t parents informed it would be changed? Who decided these were the components, and what if a student, or their family, disagrees with the definitions of these terms? Do the students even understand the vocabulary, and if they don’t, won’t the teacher’s biases be reflected in the definitions? What if those biases regarding things like “Mattering” and “Accomplishment,” for example, contradict the parents values and world view? Is anyone going to be held accountable for the child’s confusion and impaired “wellbeing” when they find themselves in the middle of a dispute between their parents and the school?

Finally, what happens to children who are prompted to rank their own happiness on a regular basis? Has anyone considered the possibility that contained in this lesson are the seeds of despair, or a strong message that masking one’s true feelings is important, lest you make other people uncomfortable? What if children come away from this believing it’s their obligation to rate other people’s wellbeing, and they put pressure on other people to perform wellbeing to avoid further scrutiny or ongoing surveillance?

Here’s one of the many images PERMA+ uses to teach students to rate other people’s wellbeing. Can you imagine rational, positive explanations for this boy’s negative emotional expression? Perhaps he’s reacting to someone prying into his emotions while he’s trying to learn to read.

If the increased levels of anxiety and relational bullying we have seen since SEL became ubiquitous in our schools are remotely predictive, I think all of these scenarios are not just realistic, they are likely to play out, with disastrous effect.

I am urging my readers to take a close look at this program, and to be wary of the words “wellness” and “wellbeing” in their children’s schools. Children deserve to have their personal boundaries respected, and to have their parents and primary caregivers be the ones to decide if, when, and from whom they need emotional support.

For a deeper dive into the program, with a slide-by-slide analysis, watch this episode of Dissident Dispatch: