In classrooms across America, something strange is happening.
Kids can’t read, can’t multiply, can’t tell you who fought in the Civil War — but they can tell you how they feel, how they rank on the “resilience scale,” and how to “reflect on their privilege.”
Welcome to what author Priscilla West calls the new face of woke education.
In her blistering new book, The New Face of Woke Education, West tears into the multi-billion-dollar social-emotional learning (SEL) industry — a movement she says is “weaponize[ing] empathy, using emotional appeals to smuggle radical ideology into classrooms under colorful banners of compassion.”
The pitch sounds harmless: teach kids to manage feelings, build empathy, improve focus. But West, like New York Post opinion writer Wai Wah Chin, sees something darker — a system that rewires how kids think while tracking their every thought.
Chin paints the scene like an Orwell novel: “Swap Big Brother for big program, the telescreen for the iPad and the Ministry of Truth for the SEL dashboard.”
Mood-tracking apps. “Circle-time confessions.” Teachers trained as unlicensed therapists. Kids as test subjects for data dashboards that “measure and track today’s children with a precision that would impress George Orwell himself,” West writes.
The numbers are staggering — 49 states backing it, 83% of schools using it, and a market pushing $10 billion. Giants like CASEL, Panorama Education, and Imagine Learning are cashing in. And while parents think their kids are learning kindness, West argues they’re being nudged toward ideological compliance.
Once it was “Be kind and respectful.” Now it’s “Interrogate your complicity in systemic oppression.”
Once it was “Share your toys.” Now it’s “Reflect on your power and privilege.”
West warns that SEL “normalizes the behavioral conditioning and psychological profiling of children and embed[s] it into everything they do,” destabilizing kids as young as kindergarteners with lessons on race, class, and gender identity.
The worst part, she says, is the data trail — “predictive profiling,” “behavioral nudges,” “social-emotional fitness” scores that could follow a child for life.
Her conclusion is straightforward and chilling: SEL doesn’t build stronger kids. It creates more compliant ones.
“Everyone wants kids to succeed socially, emotionally, and academically,” Chin writes. “But above school bells, alarm bells should be ringing.”
Because, as West and Chin both warn — Big SEL isn’t just watching your kids. It’s teaching them how to think.
About The New Face of Woke:
Sold to parents and teachers as harmless programming for “emotional intelligence,” Social Emotional Learning (SEL) became – with the use of cloud-based technology – a centralized apparatus for values transmission that threatens the autonomy of future generations. Through SEL, collectivist propaganda now pervades modern classrooms, shaping your child’s worldview, click by click. What started small has become a dangerous subversion of the educational system aimed at surveillance, indoctrination and, ultimately, compliance with a globalist agenda.
Transparency is their enemy. In this Broadside, Priscilla West exposes SEL as a toxic brew of psychology and sustainability, promoted by an alliance of billionaires, politicians, and consultants at the expense of true education. Only by confronting it can we hold the education-industrial complex accountable and reclaim our schools for authentic learning.
