By Dee Longfellow
On Monday evening, about 135 people gathered at the Diplomat West to hear Jennifer McWilliams, a speaker sponsored by the Elmhurst Parents for Integrity in Curriculum or EPIC.
McWilliams is a self-proclaimed expert in social emotional learning or SEL, currently a hot topic of discussion among District 205 stakeholders. After being fired from a school district in Indiana, she began her own consulting firm to educate people about SEL. McWilliams is still part of a lawsuit regarding the situation in Indiana, in which she feels her First Amendment rights were violated.
McWilliams was introduced by State Rep. Deanne Mazzochi, who said the concerns about SEL are happening all over the state.
“Governor Pritzker’s administration is politicizing how teachers teach,” Mazzochi said.
McWilliams said she learned about the Ultra-Woke Illinois Mandate and believes it is the top threat to U.S. education.
“The whole focus [in the school that fired me] is on attitudes, values and beliefs, not academics,” she said. “We should go after the big picture in learning—not just ban one book. Some use revisionist history, which is picking and choosing what they want to teach and if the student doesn’t learn, they revise the lesson.”
She went on to explain that proponents of SEL believe in giving surveys to students, then placing the results through a filter to determine where the student should be placed on a scale of oppressors vs. oppressed.
Apparently, according to McWilliams, SEL proponents believe we are all oppressed; it’s just a question of where we fall on the scale. According to the curriculum of an organization called Leader & Me, all kids are traumatized; it’s just a question of to what degree and, of course, how students understand and deal with the trauma.
Much of her talk was based on a company called CASEL—Collaborative for Academic Social Emotional Learning. She noted that while it “sounds nice,” one should be wary of a game of semantics.
According to McWilliams, CASEL believes it needs to teach life skills for success but place less emphasis on academics because so much information is available online.
“Children have the Internet now,” she said. “[CASEL believes] they can find out what year a war was fought and won, so they don’t need that; they need school to prepare them for life.
“Educational equity means there are equal outcomes, but equality equity means there are equal opportunities. CASEL is looking through an equity lens. It’s really like a 12-year brainwashing program.”
McWilliams said CASEL wants kids to “know who they are,” based on the surveys conducted, and then make decisions based on their identity. She claimed CASEL wants all students to have a “emotional score” that could stay with them throughout their lives. She even said the score may one day be tied to people’s Social Security numbers, so it would stay with them all the time throughout their lives.
The data collected [through SEL surveys] provides longitudinal data bases which are state-wide and, according to McWilliams, will eventually go global.
She noted that Gloria Ladson-Billings, a pedagogical theorist and educator, did a study with eight teachers regarding Cultural Responsive Teaching, or CRT. SEL proponents talk about the necessity of having a “growth mindset.”
“That sounds good, doesn’t it? Who doesn’t want their child to grow?” McWilliams said. “But they mean grow collectively, not as individuals.”
McWilliams said one of the habits kids are conditioned to develop is the ability to “seek to understand, rather than to be understood.”
“That sounds very nice, but what if my daughter goes into an inclusive [all-gender] bathroom and there’s a transgender man in there?” she said. “Rather than having that man ‘understand’ her need for the restroom, is she supposed to ‘understand’ that he is transgender and has just as much right to the bathroom? Is a young child honestly supposed to comprehend that?”
She also opposes classrooms that have a “Calm Corner” or “Zen Den,” a place with calming things like quiet games and puzzles, maybe soft music, and students can go there when they are having a stressful time during the school day.
“But what’s to stop a child from going there to calm themselves down during a math test and then the student gets out of taking the test, or at least taking it with the rest of the class as it should be?” she said.
Toward the end of her presentation, McWilliams talked about her beliefs that SEL leads to indoctrination, conditioning and brainwashing, much like a cult.
“What we’re really doing is creating victims, which allows them to get out of taking any kind of responsibility,” McWilliams said. “Our government has no place intervening in a child’s social emotional development. That should be left to the parents.”
