Is SEL actually just DEI?

One day, as part of my student-teaching at Stanford, I was explaining a math lesson to a fourth-grade classroom, when a boy became disruptive. I repeated my directions to him, but then he got up from his seat and tried to bite me. Shaken up about this, I decided to bring this to my supervisor’s attention later that afternoon. I expected her to be concerned.

Instead, she told me how powerful it was that he felt safe enough to bite me. “If he didn’t feel safe with you,” she said, “he wouldn’t have done that.”

That’s why I wasn’t surprised to see political fireworks erupted recently on the Texas House floor during debate over a proposed school discipline bill. An opponent of the bill argued that it’s not “gracious” to discipline 5-, 6-, or 7-year-olds because “little kids do little kid things.” The bill’s author asserted that it is, in fact, “not compassionate for kids not to have consequences.” He concluded that “We just fundamentally disagree about human nature.”

This fundamental disagreement over human nature explains the growth of a number of malign forces intruding themselves into the education of our children—and my supervisor’s response.

During my time in the master’s program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, we were taught to teach children—but first, we were taught to dismantle “harmful” stereotypes and to teach our students to see the world through the lens of the “oppressed.”

What I was taught at Stanford—Social Emotional Learning (SEL)—didn’t merely support Stanford’s curriculum, it was the curriculum.

Every course, every lesson plan, every assignment was filtered through it. While SEL spoke the language of kindness and empathy, it quickly became a framework built to expose “white privilege” and cultivate “social justice.”

One of our required readings, Creating Equity Warriors in the Face of White Fragility warned us teachers against becoming “kindhearted” white teachers who believed they were helping “the less fortunate.” We were taught that kindness without ideological reprogramming was harmful. Alongside this, we read and discussed White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, which argues that white people must take responsibility for their defensiveness, framing white fragility as a form of bullying. Also assigned was How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, who argues that one is either actively confronting racial inequality or allowing it to exist through inaction. These texts prompted months of interrogating our own identities as barriers to equity (equal outcomes, not equal opportunity). Nearly every assignment circled back to three driving questions:

• “How does your power and privilege show up in your classroom?”
• “Do you and the materials you use uphold whiteness?”
• “Are you perpetuating single narratives when you grade or discipline students?”

In one of our graduate-level math courses, for example, the focus wasn’t on mastering math instruction, but on “survival.” The guiding quote for the lecture read, “We can no longer believe that a focus on curriculum, instruction, and assessment alone will be enough to prepare our children for survival in the world.”

Survival? Yes, but only if you frame education as a battleground between the oppressor and the oppressed.

We also frequently visited a Guide to Racial and Restorative Justice. This guide helped “abolitionist” teachers and Abolitionist SEL. In order to be an abolitionist teacher, you had to remove all punitive or disciplinary practices that “spirit murder” Black, Brown, and Indigenous children. And abolitionist teacher “demands to remove any and all police and policing from schools.”

If you think this is only happening in higher education institutions, consider the third-grade class in Cupertino, California. A teacher hosted a lesson in which students were required to identify aspects of their identity that were either privileged or oppressed.

The National SEL Collaborative now defines SEL as a tool to “address various forms of inequity” and help students “co-create just communities.” SEL is about more than teaching kids to manage emotions or build healthy relationships; it has incorporated the DEI DNA of justice, identity, and power.

Somehow, my ability to teach had become irrelevant—and with it, my safety. What mattered was the boy’s brave expression of “emotion,” regardless of the harm. In this framework, order, fairness, and merit had all been replaced by “lived experience,” which simply means feelings.

It has been said that “By their fruits, you will know them.” SEL’s fruits, as practiced and preached in education schools like Stanford’s, operate much the same as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Despite their initial differences, SEL has been captured by DEI. While SEL announced itself to be concerned with individual social and emotional learning, too often it incorporates the “moral teaching” of DEI. DEI doesn’t only suggest that identity matters, it demands allegiance to an interpretation of identity that views every interaction through the lens of systemic oppression.

The language of SEL, framed around “empathy,” “community,” and “social justice,” provides the emotional and psychological tools to engage with the world in a way that aligns with DEI’s racial power dynamics. This isn’t a mere coincidence.