Companies, Schools Teach Kids to Follow UN Sustainability Goals

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The United Nations wants your children to embrace its Sustainable Development Goals, and Thomas, a cartoon train character beloved by kids and parents alike, is on board with that.

In September, the U.N. and the toy company Mattel Inc. announced a collaboration to “introduce the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to preschool audiences through the animated children’s series Thomas & Friends.”

“The SDGs proved to be the perfect tool for Thomas & Friends to teach children the importance of taking part in the global efforts to end poverty, providing girls and boys with the same opportunities, and, of course, doing so while protecting our planet,” said Maher Nasser, U.N. director of outreach.

The terms of the collaboration stated that “elements from five of the 17 SDGs are incorporated into nine of the 26 episodes of the new season of Thomas & Friends.”

Even more dogmatic than a TV show that families can choose to watch or not watch, the U.N. SDGs are now being taught in most public and private schools through a curriculum called Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). SEL is the kids’ version of what environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is for companies: a means to indoctrinate them to U.N. SDG ideology.

Overcoming Cognitive Dissonance

In an article titled “SEL for SDGs: Why Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Is Necessary to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals,” the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) stated that this form of psychotherapy is necessary not just for troubled children but for all children, because many of the SDG concepts they are being taught are self-contradictory.

“Eradicating poverty—a societal objective—might entail (at least in the short term) working the self to the point of compromising personal well-being, another SDG,” UNESCO states. “At the level of the individual and social collectives, these tradeoffs in SDGs will be quite taxing because the conflicting goals are, in effect, inconsistent cognitions, generally referred to as cognitive dissonance.”

SEL therapy is thus necessary to soothe children’s minds when they realize that the SDGs aren’t only logically inconsistent, but often conflict with the reality that they see around them. According to UNESCO, “dissonance is unpleasant—the aversive arousal state is because inconsistent cognitions impede effective and unconflicted actions.”

James Lindsay, founder of New Discourses and author of “Cynical Theories,” told The Epoch Times: “Social and Emotional Learning is the ideal academic tool for helping children overcome their cognitive dissonance and basically accept what’s being told to them. [SEL] teaches them to overcome their dissonance and stay on board.

“You wouldn’t want them to get fragile, like white fragility, and throw a fit; you want them to be resilient and absorb the lesson. That’s what Social and Emotional Learning is actually designed for.”

Another potential source of dissonance that SEL must overcome is when SDGs don’t align with the values that parents are teaching to their children.

The CASEL Wheel and Transformative SEL

One key channel through which SEL and the SDGs find their way into school curriculums is the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). Founded in 1994, CASEL describes itself as “a multidisciplinary network that includes researchers, educators, practitioners, and child advocates across the country who are passionately committed to SEL for all students.”

CASEL has become a gatekeeper for many SEL programs being taught in American schools today. Among its board members are Linda Darling-Hammond, author of “The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future.” Darling-Hammond led former President Barack Obama’s education policy transition team in 2008 and President Joe Biden’s education transition team in 2020.

CASEL’s mission is for all children to “develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.” The SEL goals are laid out in a framework called the “CASEL Wheel.” At the center of the wheel sits the CASEL 5—the five SEL disciplines that are being taught in most schools today: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.

Under the category of self-awareness, CASEL lists various “concerns” that SEL must fix, among them that “dominant U.S. cultural norms promote materialism or acquisitive individualism, an orientation associated with health problems and unethical behavior.”

“These norms are even more problematic when wealth and whiteness are conflated and uncritically accepted as indicators of success,” CASEL states. “This fosters a sense of white racial entitlement and dominance.”

Underscoring the importance of race in a child’s identity, CASEL promotes what they call ethnic-racial identity, stating that “it is necessary to explicitly consider issues of race/ethnicity and class to advance an equity-focused SEL agenda.”

What CASEL calls “Transformative SEL” teaches kids to “critically examine root causes of inequity, and to develop collaborative solutions that lead to personal, community, and societal well-being.” On the CASEL wheel, teachers and counselors are the central disseminators of Transformative SEL, with “families and caregivers” on an outer circle, given the role of “authentic partners.”

Dena Simmons, founder of LiberatED, a collective focused on integrating SEL with racial justice, explained why SEL and racial identity ideology must go hand in hand.

“If we don’t apply an anti-racist, abolitionist, anti-oppressive, anti-bias lens to social-emotional learning, it can very easily turn into white supremacy with a hug,” Simmons said.

World Economic Forum and the Rise of Ed-Tech

In 2016, the World Economic Forum (WEF) declared its support for SEL in a report titled, “New Vision for Education: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning Through Technology,” which was co-authored by the Boston Consulting Group.

“To thrive in the 21st century, students need more than traditional academic learning,” the report states. Children will also need “character qualities,” and schools should adopt its “4Rs Program—reading, writing, respect, and resolution.” The WEF said that technology products for classrooms, including wearable devices, apps, and virtual reality, should be “embedding SEL content into existing academically oriented ed-tech products.”

Regarding data collection, the WEF cites the example of Kidaptive, which creates “AI-based algorithms that empower education companies to use the data they collect to increase learner engagement.” Regarding cognitive dissonance, the WEF cites the Embrace watch, made by Empatica, which “can be programmed to vibrate when stress reaches a specified level, giving someone time to switch to a more positive response before stress gets out of control.”

Virtual reality programs can “forge stronger links to real life … without the high cost and time required for travel,” the WEF states. Leading companies in the educational VR market include EON Reality, Google Cardboard, and Oculus VR, which is owned by Facebook/Meta.

The WEF warned that one of the impediments to having more of these platforms in schools was “the perception that technology is little more than additional screen time for children that threatens to displace human interaction” and called for “the combined efforts of a group of stakeholders, including policy-makers, educators, parents, researchers, businesses, technology developers and investors, to overcome the challenges facing both SEL and related education technologies.”

Along with its support for SEL, the WEF formed a strategic partnership with the U.N. in 2019 to advance the SDGs throughout the corporate community in the form of ESG.

“All of this information they gather on students goes into their learner profile,” Lisa Logan, co-founder of Utah Parents United, told The Epoch Times. “It follows them from preschool through age 20. Now, there’s people advocating that we make all that information linkable not only to higher ed but also the workforce.”

One company that’s also involved in surveying schoolchildren is Panorama Education, which has contracts with 25,000 schools covering 15 million students to assess their “social and emotional climate.” Panorama recently made headlines when it was reported that one of its founders, Xan Tanner, is the son-in-law of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has directed the FBI to investigate parents who protest too vehemently at school board meetings.

“Panorama has all these surveys, and they’re all based around the CASEL framework,” Logan said. These surveys score students according to questions such as, “How often do you hang out with people of a different race than you?”

“You have to wonder,” Logan said, “if they circle ‘Almost Never,’ does that count against their score in cultural perspective taking?”

“They’re actually building out individual profiles of these tens of millions of children so they can contour whatever devices they think those children are using, whether it’s for educational algorithms, marketing algorithms, political propaganda algorithms,” Lindsay said. In addition, “it can track one person endlessly and can be the basis for a social credit score.”

The Role of the Federal Government

The federal government is also backing SEL through laws such as the Every Student Succeeds Act, signed by former President Obama in 2015, and through federal agencies, primarily the Department of Education (DOE).

“The DOE is complicit in this quite directly,” Lindsay said. “The advancement of social-emotional learning, which has the data mining attached to it, is being done through their initiatives and through appropriations of their money … All the surveying, the relentless surveying of our kids that has started in schools and has taken off in the past seven, eight years has been done so on the back of meeting the requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is managed by the Department of Education.”

Calls to accelerate the use of SEL in schools have intensified after the pandemic lockdowns and school closures, during which many children were taught online and made to wear masks and “social distance” when schools eventually reopened. A professional teachers’ organization called LearningForward was one voice among many to advocate for a further expansion of SEL programs to fix the damage done to children.

In an article titled, “The Need for SEL Is Greater Than Ever,” LearningForward states that “up to 40 percent of K-12 students and more than 60 percent of young children have experienced negative mental health, emotional, or social impacts during the pandemic … The closure of school buildings played a significant if unavoidable role in social and emotional turmoil, but the reopening of schools can and must play a role in healing it.”