After COVID, something strange happened in America’s classrooms. The whiteboards stayed the same. The teachers stayed the same. But the mission quietly changed. Academics gave way to “well-being.” Grades were replaced with “growth.” And the new goal was not knowledge, but ideology.
In her explosive new book, The New Face of Woke Education, author Priscilla West traces how that shift happened — and who paid for it.
“Billions in COVID relief were meant to address ‘learning loss,’” West writes. “Instead, schools bought identity-based lessons, emotional check-ins, and equity dashboards.”
It wasn’t a coincidence. It was a system — already built, waiting to be triggered.
At the center of it all is CASEL, the nonprofit that defined “Social Emotional Learning,” or SEL. Once a modest idea about self-regulation and empathy, SEL now preaches “redistributing power to promote social justice” and moving students “from anger, to agency, to action.”
And the money trail? It leads straight to America’s elite. Gates. Buffett. Rockefeller. Zuckerberg. Each saw SEL as the perfect lever to reshape society — starting with children.
“CASEL’s shift wasn’t organic,” West reveals. “It was funded.”
Two of CASEL’s founding board members came from the Fetzer Institute, a group steeped in mystical spiritualism and inspired by occultist Alice Bailey, founder of Lucis Trust, which, to this day, works with the United Nations to expand SEL worldwide.
Their goal was “mind–spirit integration.” CASEL turned that vision into national policy.
By the 1990s, the mystical language had been repackaged into something bureaucratic and data-driven — emotional learning. CASEL wrote the playbook. Tech firms built the tools. And schools became laboratories, measuring hearts instead of minds.
Today, under the banners of “school climate,” “belonging,” and “well-being,” SEL is the software of a new ideological system. Misbehavior is reframed as “racial trauma.” Children are sorted by race, gender, and “lived experience.” And their emotional data is quietly harvested by Big Tech platforms funded by the same billionaires who designed the system.
“What’s said in circle time stays in the circle,” one SEL motto reads — a chilling summary of the new separation between parents and children.
The web doesn’t stop at the classroom door. SEL programs now align directly with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which urge schools to cultivate “activists” around global equity, climate, and migration.
But West warns that this kind of empathy often curdles into intolerance. She cites cases where teachers and affiliates openly celebrated the death of conservative figures like Charlie Kirk, asking whether students are learning to imitate the hate.
Her conclusion is clear — and damning:
“SEL is not neutral,” West writes. “It’s the operating system of a new political religion.”
The New Face of Woke Education exposes the hidden architecture behind the movement reshaping schools, tracing the ideology, the money, and the international networks driving it.
It’s not just a book about classrooms. It’s a book about control.
And every parent in America needs to read it.
