Check your child for neck bolts …

the educational Frankensteins are at it again.

Forget geography, composition, and math …

school is now all about feelings. And emotions. And attitudes.

It’s the hot-rage in education … the creepy premise that schools can instill acceptable human emotions and reactions in your child because … I guess … you can’t. Or won’t. Or don’t know how.

It’s just another comment on your parental ineptitude.

So the schools will take over … and take your child’s emotional temperature … and then take whatever steps are necessary to give your child an emotional tune-up. They’ll spike their self-awareness and polish their social skills … and make certain they never have a social fumble or offend a single soul. Ever.

That’s baffling stuff … because these are the same geniuses who declared recess a waste of time … and then tossed away interactive kid-stuff that taught children how to get along.

Then they plopped them in front of blue screens …  and hypnotized them like hamsters.

And now they feel compelled to measure the scope of their damage … and offer mind-bending remedies for their screw-ups.

So, they’ll pie-graph your child’s emotions … measure their empathy, quantify their happiness, and assess their social ability. Let’s hope they gauge their misery and despair, too.

They’ll infuse ‘em with norms and ethical standards … which they’ll approve … and auto-correct their emotions so they lose any traces of childhood … and become perfectly calibrated, social creeps.

And that’s how they’ll retool your kid’s personality … and rehabilitate their identity … pretty much without bothering you at all. But that should bother you to no end.

The acronym du jour is SEL … Social and Emotional Learning … aka … freuding with your child’s personality. Tampering with who they are … auto-correcting their feelings … and dog-whistling their responses to life’s stimulations and situations.

SEL pavlovs kids into emotive automatons  … as designed under the watchful eye of the very same school leaders who only recently blistered their childhood … cut them off from social interactions … infused them with “grit and rigor” … and morphed them into touch-screen bots.

In other words … schools are now emotional chiropractors that will realign your child’s emotional backbone, manipulate their personalities, and customize their social reflexes. And produce … perfect cardboard children.

But here’s the truth …

This is one reform effort that should be flipped back on these dangerous savants. It’s not the kids who need a dose of mindfulness … it’s the schools themselves.

It’s teachers and bureaucrats who’ve smothered their own memories of childhood. Something’s very, very wrong when a suicidal twelve year old flies under the radar of an entire faculty. Lots of someones aren’t doing their jobs … and lots of someones need lots of mindfulness themselves.

No one saw that circumstance? No one noticed that desperate child? No one saw that ugliness? No one heard a single whisper? How the hell is that possible?

And if they’re missing that … imagine what else their missing. The bullying . The stress cues. The testing trauma. The homework hell.

And it all piles up … and leads to those sad-awful stories of kids calling it quits on a world designed without them in mind.

It’s not the kids who need an emotional overhaul …

it’s teachers.

And principals.

And guidance folks.

And superintendents.

This reform mania has slipped into a dangerous dimension. Wacky reading theories and goofy mathematics are one thing. Mind-bending … well … that’s dangerous stuff.

Don’t let them tug your child into that warped world. There is no virtue is asking your child to withstand the idiocy of adults. 

When educators lose the sensations of their own childhood … and can no longer imagine themselves as children … perhaps it’s best if they move on.

Now … now the stakes are just too high.

Denis Ian