Social Emotional Learning, PART 5: UN PLANS TO SHAPE YOUR CHILD’S PERSONALITY!

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SEL is now a global phenomenon. For example, in 2017 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) launched its Study on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES). OECD has long administered the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test to measure academic knowledge, but now is branching out into methods of measuring and shaping students’ personalities. 

 The SSES will analyze two cohorts of students, at ages 10 and 15, to determine what social-emotional skills they have and should have, and to develop “international instruments” to measure such skills. The extraordinarily intrusive study will survey students, parents, teachers, and education administrators to gather data on “children’s [social-emotional] skills, . . family background, child’s performance, home learning environment, parent-child relationship, parental style, learning activities, and parents’ own attitudes and opinion.” SSES will also analyze information from students’ interaction with online instruments to surveil “what people do, think, or feel, when interacting with, and responding to, the item or task.”

 Regardless of its reliability, the mountains of data from the study will be crunched to produce assessments, perhaps to be linked to PISA and other OECD academic assessments. The goal is to measure students’ performance in the five broad domains (known to psychologists as the “Big Five model”) of “emotional regulation (emotional stability); engaging with others (extroversion); collaboration (agreeableness); task performance (conscientiousness); [and] open-mindedness (openness).”

On the theory that such traits are malleable and can be taught, SSES aims to determine how to mold students into people most useful to the government and the economy. Analysis by the Middle East North African Financial Network (MENAFN) reported that OECD’s reason for developing “the test is that social and emotional skills are important predictors of educational progress and future workplace performance. Large-scale personality data is therefore presumed by the OECD to be predictive of a country’s potential social and economic progress.” 

OECD is also working to implement a similar assessment for the preschool age group. Its International Early Learning Study (IELS), being piloted in partnership with the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, seeks to focus: 

 … on young children and their cognitive and non-cognitive skills and competencies as they transition to primary school. The IELS is designed to examine: children’s early learning and development in a broad range of domains, including social emotional skills as well as cognitive skills; the relationship between children’s early learning and children’s participation in early childhood education and care (ECEC); the role of contextual factors, including children’s individual characteristics and their home backgrounds and experiences, in promoting young c