Class Divided: Social-emotional Learning and the Erosion of Solidarity

Abstract: This Viewpoint article addresses the implications of social-emotional learning (SEL) for development education as an educational process concerned with illuminating the structural and political dimensions of social and global injustices.  Recent years have witnessed a growing policy preoccupation with SEL - a movement that stresses the learnability and malleability of non-cognitive skills such as ‘achievement motivation’, ‘well-being’, ‘curiosity’, ‘empathy’, ‘compassion’, ‘self-regulation’, ‘grit’ and ‘resilience’.  Having briefly traced the economisitic, productivist, and human capital underpinnings of SEL, we then draw on the OECD’s recent assessment of social-emotional skills to demonstrate how the framing of ‘disadvantaged’ students as lacking in social-emotional skills has a dehumanising and solidarity-eroding effect that positions them as undeserving and a threat to society.  We urge those working in the development education sector to actively resist SEL and the wider neuro-affective turn that is increasingly evident in global citizenship education policy and practice.

Key words: Development Education; Global Citizenship Education; Social Class; Social- Emotional Learning; Social-Emotional Skills; Neuro-affective Turn; OECD; Solidarity.

Introduction: Education’s neuro-affective turn

This Viewpoint article offers a critique of the growing influence of biological and neurologically-inflected perspectives on educational policies and practices, with a particular emphasis on the implications of this neuro-affective turn (Yliniva, Bryan and Brunila, 2024) for development education’s socially transformative agenda.  Education’s neuro-affective turn is being facilitated by medical and technological advancements in inter alia genetics, brain imaging and the neurosciences, the ‘big data’ revolution, digital tools and artificial intelligence (AI), the so-called ‘learning sciences’ and allied approaches (Williamson, 2023).  One of its clearest manifestations is the emergence of social-emotional learning (hereafter SEL) as a ‘zeitgeist’ that has been capturing the imagination of academics, policymakers and practitioners alike since the new millennium (Humphrey, 2013: 1), including in development education circles (Bryan, 2022; Mochizuki, 2023).  SEL is an umbrella term for an ever-expanding set of ‘non-cognitive’ or ‘human-centric’ capacities or ‘skills’ that are believed to be critical to the development of ‘well-rounded citizens who are equipped to tackle 21st century challenges’ (OECD, 2024a: 4). 

SEL stresses the learnability and malleability of non-cognitive skills such as ‘achievement motivation’, ‘well-being’, ‘curiosity’, ‘empathy’, ‘compassion’, ‘self-regulation’, ‘grit’ and ‘resilience’.  Whereas SEL’s roots lie in economisitic, productivist, and human capital arguments (Michel, 2013), the SEL community is far from monolithic and is ‘constituted by an expanding infrastructure of technologies, metrics, people, money and policies’ (Williamson, 2021: 129).  Reflecting this heterogeneity, different individuals or organisations that promote SEL may prioritise specific social-emotional skills that align with their values, mission and ontological perspectives about education’s purpose.

Despite the SEL community’s heterogeneity, SEL advocates often speak with similar missionary zeal about the potential of SEL to transform educational experiences, outcomes and systems, as well as major societal or global-level transformations.  A recently published UNESCO policy guidance document on ‘mainstreaming SEL in education systems’, for example, is designed to ‘[provide] policy-makers with …guidance to facilitate their conceptualization and integration of SEL in all facets of their education systems to build long-lasting peace and sustainable development’ (UNESCO, 2024, n.p.).  It ‘highlights the impact of SEL in improving academic achievement, reducing drop-out rates, and improving overall mental health and well-being, and…in strengthening emotional and relational dynamics of classrooms, schools, communities, and societies’ (Ibid.).

Whereas SEL advocates often frame SEL as a magic bullet that has the potential to improve academic performance, mental health and prospects for peace and non-violence, the more pernicious effects of this zeitgeist remain under-explored.  SEL is closely aligned with global citizenship education, and is often equated with ‘values education’, ‘character education’, and explicitly to democratic and collective priorities, such as peaceful co-existence and stable democratic society based on diverse identities (OECD, 2024b).  This article builds on our earlier published work illuminating the depoliticising effects of SEL for global citizenship education, whereby structural analyses are being displaced in favour of decontextualised, brain-based understandings of social and global injustices (e.g., Bryan, 2024; Mochizuki, 2023).  In keeping with the theme of the current issue of Policy and Practice on ‘Development Education and Class’, we ask: what are the consequences of portraying poor and low-income children as universally less socially and emotionally competent than their peers from more socio-economically advantaged backgrounds?  Unpacking the ontological assumptions underpinning SEL, we consider the role of the OECD’s Survey of Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) in mobilising pseudoscientific discourses which universally denigrate and dehumanise children and families from low socio-economic backgrounds (e.g., Busso and Pollack, 2014; Mochizuki, Vickers and Bryan, 2022; Skourdoumbis and Rowe, 2024).  Taking inspiration from Banting and Kymlicka (2017), who identify relations of civic, democratic and redistributive solidarity as necessary conditions for a socially just society, we argue that the denigration of the moral character of children and families from poor and working-class backgrounds erodes solidaristic principles of mutual acceptance, cooperation and support for equality of socio-economically marginalised groups. 

‘The scarce resource is love and parenting - not money’ 

Once regarded as a private matter and thus largely irrelevant to education, the cultivation and measurement of specific emotional capacities has become a major policy preoccupation in recent years (Bryan, 2022; Williamson, 2021).  This is evidenced by a proliferation of programmes concerned with the promotion of wellbeing, mindfulness, and SEL, as well as the advocacy of AI-enabled personalised learning and advanced technologies that measure students’ affective states and capacities using physiological or ‘bio’ data.  SEL’s roots can be traced to wider political efforts of the 1960s to address social issues and undesired behaviours associated with economically disadvantaged and racially minoritised groups.  Education came to be viewed as central to the delivery of preventative programming for ‘at risk’ groups in order to ‘help them develop socially acceptable skills they were perceived to be deficient in’ (Dalrymple and Phillips, 2024: 345).  As neoliberal globalisation intensified in the 1990s, policymakers became increasingly concerned with how best to prepare students for an increasingly completive global marketplace, which paves the way for non-cognitive or social-emotional skills to become a major field of inquiry. 

One of the most vocal proponents of SEL is the Nobel Laureate Professor James Heckman, world renowned economist and founder of the Centre for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago.  Heckman effectively operates as a ‘one-man institute’ (Michel, 2013: 368) extolling the benefits of noncognitive skills and preschool education on efficiency and productivity (rather than intrinsic or social justice) grounds. Central to Heckman’s advocacy is the case for ‘predistribution not redistribution’, a pay now versus later scenario resulting in greater productivity and reduced social spending via early intervention (Heckman, 2012: n.p.).  As Heckman (2012, n.p.) puts it:

“There are many calls to redistribute income to address poverty and promote social mobility. …..[P]redistribution - improving the early lives of disadvantaged children - is far more effective than simple redistribution in promoting social inclusion and, at the same time, at promoting economic efficiency and workforce productivity. Predistributional policies are both fair and economically efficient”.

Heckman’s website - like his writing more generally - reflects a considered effort to make his findings amenable, relatable and engaging to policymakers and non-scientific audiences.  The use of catchy titles (e.g., ‘hard evidence on soft skills’), memorable phrases and slogans (e.g., ‘skills beget skills’), simplifying models (e.g., ‘The Heckman Equation’), dramatic visualisations (e.g., ‘neglected brains’), etc. is designed to predispose decision-makers to prioritise early intervention and the cultivation of non-cognitive or ‘soft skills’, over redistributive approaches to social inclusion.  His website contains an abundance of resources on how to make the case for early intervention, including sample content for those seeking to ‘make [their] case on social media’ (Heckman, 2024, n.p.).

Influenced  by neuroscientific discoveries about the criticality of the first three years of life for brain development and the importance of ‘enriching environments’ for nurturing the brain’s synapses (Heckman, 2008), Heckman maintains that ‘[g]iving families more money is not the same as enhancing the quality of the environments of disadvantaged children’ and that ‘[t]he scarce resource is love and parenting - not money’ (Heckman, 2012: n.p.).  The claim that parents living in ‘disadvantaged’ circumstances do not sufficiently love or effectively parent their children has a pathologising and dehumanising effect.  It perpetuates a deficit discourse, reminiscent of the culture of poverty thesis, which defines children from disadvantaged backgrounds in terms of what they lack, and ultimately responsibilises them for their children’s underachievement.                                                                                  

Heckman’s advocacy of focused resource allocation in the earliest years of a child’s life downplays the role of social institutions in shaping the life chances of children (Lareau, 2011). Specifically, it overlooks the cumulative advantages afforded to middle-class children, whose class privilege gives them a competitive advantage over poorer families from an early age, not least because their parents’ childrearing practices are aligned with institutional norms, standards and values (Ibid.).  Focusing on distributive early intervention measures while failing to address the unequal distribution of material, social and cultural capital or to implement redistributive policies in other domains (such as employment, health and housing) (Cantillon and Van Lancker, 2013) arguably sets poor and working-class families up to fail. 

Despite the limitations of Heckman’s social investment paradigm, his research has been widely deployed to legitimise a paradigm shift away from welfare-based policies based on principles of shared responsibility, universal protection and equality of outcome, towards early years’ interventions concerned with identifying and prioritising individual risk factors and equalising opportunities (Gillies, Edwards and Horsley, 2017).  It has further helped to generate a consensus among international organisations such as the UN (United Nations) and World Bank about the importance of Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) - and on what parents can do to ‘optimise’ their children’s development - in order to level the playing field and create equal opportunities for children (Morabito, Vandenbroeck and Roose, 2013). 

The World Bank has been particularly active in extending Heckman’s policy recommendations to the global South, as part of its wider investment in human capital strategy, with a view to improving young children’s school readiness and laying the foundations for academic success and participation in the global economy (Mahon, 2016).  In a recent Background Paper for the International Congress on Brain Sciences, Early Childhood Care and Education, UNESCO invokes Heckman’s research as a ‘groundbreaking economic framework that transformed how ECCE is valued globally’ and attributes his work with having shifted ‘public policy and increasing investment in ECCE, framing it as a developmental necessity and an economic imperative with far-reaching societal benefits’ (UNESCO, 2024: 7).  This instrumentalist framing of education is remarkable for an agency whose distinguishing feature has been its recognition of the ‘intrinsic’ value of education and its role in realising human potential and human emancipation, dialogue and international cooperation (Elfert, 2018).  As Michel (2013: 380) puts it:

“[W]hile stigmatizing and instrumentalizing the poor, [the social investment] rationale appeals rather baldly to the self-interest of the middle class - the taxpayers - by assuring them that investment in [Early Childhood Education and Care] will protect them from the harm and expense of crime and social deviancy.  Such a rationale degrades social politics and widens the gap in an already class-divided polity”. 

The remainder of the article considers the role of recent attempts to assess SEL in exacerbating social divisions along class lines, and what this means in terms of development education’s role in forging relations of solidarity and social justice.

The OECD’s Survey of Social and Emotional Skills: ‘Social and Emotional Skills for Better Lives’?

First conducted in 2019 in 10 cities from around the world, the OECD’s survey on social and emotional skills (SSES) represents ‘the largest global initiative to gather comparable data on the development of social and emotional skills - including creativity, empathy, achievement motivation, responsibility and collaboration skills - among 10- and 15-year-old students’ (OECD, 2024b: 155).  A key report outlining findings from the second round of the survey, which was carried out in 2023, entitled Social and Emotional Skills for Better Lives, explains that ‘…students’ social and emotional skills - or 21st century skills - are linked to better life outcomes, including academic success, greater life satisfaction, healthier behaviours, less test and class anxiety, and more ambitious career plans’ (OECD, 2024a: 156).  Reflecting the fact that new media technologies have become a core element of the policy pipeline in education, providing reach for international organisations’ ideas, findings from the survey have been widely circulated by the OECD on social media (Barnes, Watson and MacRae, 2022).

One such infographic that has been repeatedly circulated on platforms such as Twitter/X and LinkedIn, visually depicts ‘lower levels of all social and emotional skills compared to their advantaged peers’ accompanied by the text ‘What’s the impact of socio-economic disadvantage on social and emotional skills?  Not good.  Having a disadvantaged background can take a toll on creativity.  Other skills are also impacted: tolerance, curiosity, sociability and empathy’ (see Figure 1).  The designation of dis/advantaged status is based on a crude measure comprising parental occupation, educational attainment and possession of certain items in the home.  The image depicts ‘disadvantaged students’ and ‘advantaged students’ positioned on their respective cliff edges separated by a vast chasm.  The caption, which reads ‘students from disadvantaged backgrounds report lower levels of all social and emotional skills compared to their advantaged peers’, reinforces this binary by defining students from ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ in terms of the social-emotional skills they lack, relative to their advantaged peers. 

Figure 1: OECD Survey of Social and Emotional Skills Infographic posted on Twitter by OECD Education, 28 August 2024.

As shown in Figure 2, a similarly stark pattern is depicted in the visual representations of how social emotional skills are distributed by socio-economic status in a written report outlining these findings.   The text of the report presents a more nuanced picture of the disparity between advantaged and disadvantaged students, stating, for example, that ‘…it is not inevitable that disadvantaged students will have poorer outcomes.  Behind the averages, there are many disadvantaged students who report high levels of skills, comparable to how many disadvantaged students achieve academic success’ (OECD, 2024a: 47).  The OECD attributes the gap to ‘different access to social and emotional learning opportunities both in and outside school’ (OECD, 2024b: 25).  From a policy perspective, the OECD report recommends such measures as ‘support[ing] students’ extra-curricular engagement’ (OECD, 2024b: 62) by  ‘integrating extracurricular activities in school structures’ (Ibid.: 33) as well as giving them an ‘extra boost of social and emotional skills outside schools and homes’; improving school experiences for those who report less sense of belonging at school and ‘cultivating optimism’ to improve student well-being and health outcomes (Ibid.: 57).

Figure 2: ‘Standardised differences between the scores of the advantaged and disadvantaged 15-year-old students, average across sites’ (OECD, 2024a: 45).

While recognising that ‘students with less advantaged backgrounds have more challenges to overcome and fewer opportunities…to develop these skills’ (OECD, 2021: 4), the ontological assumption underpinning SEL maintains that the causes of educational underachievement reside inside poor and working-class students themselves.  Against the backdrop of a logic which presupposes that all learners can acquire the requisite social-emotional skills needed to thrive in the 21st century, findings of this nature arguably implicitly position those from lower socio-economic backgrounds as undeserving of care, rights, or justice.  Sociological research consistently highlights the impossibility of equalising educational outcomes in the absence of more fundamental re-distributive measures which tackle unequal opportunities at their source (e.g., Lynch, 2000).  SEL programming, however, is focused on altering mindsets and changing culture (see e.g., Duckworth, 2016; Dweck, 2017) rather than the social structures and institutions that maintain inequality in the first instance.  This approach ignores far messier social and contextual realities, such as an uneven distribution of educational and societal resources that produces differential outcomes and results in very different experiences of the education system for students from different social class backgrounds (Gruijters, Raabe, and Hübner, 2024).  For example, as McDermott and Nygreen (2013) suggest, no amount of SEL programming for children from poor and working-class backgrounds will prevent middle- and upper-income parents from acting in ways that preserve their children’s relative advantages.  In other words, the logic underpinning SEL perpetuates existing dynamics of social power and privilege by undermining the role that structural forces play in shaping different educational experiences and outcomes (Zembylas, 2024). 

Moreover, with an ever-increasing number of character traits and affective capacities being added to the list of human-centric skills believed to distinguish humans from artificial forms of intelligence such as tolerance, empathy, compassion, responsibility etc., those who lack these ‘skills’ are implicitly framed in deficit terms as less human or less than human.  As Popkewitz (2023: 1) informs us, accounts of student performance and characteristics are not merely descriptive; rather ‘[t]hey embody desires as normative inscriptions of who students are, should be, and the dangerous populations threatening the imagined future’.  While enabling the OECD to expand the scope of its measurement and bolster its moral legitimacy (Auld and Morris, 2019; Kim, 2024), the production of ‘evidence’ and ‘facts’ about the character traits of particular population sub-groups has material consequences for people’s lives.  These ‘facts’ are especially pertinent against the backdrop of  neoliberalist  societal re-stratification, with its attendant emphasis on workfare, welfare conditionality, self-help and charity (Powell, Scanlon, Leahy, Jenkinson and Byrne, 2024).  The use of evidence that frames an entire sub-group as substantially less creative, less empathetic, less tolerant etc. reinforces a problematic dichotomy between ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ populations and normalises ideologies of ‘(un)deservingness’ where access to resources, rights, and entitlements are concerned (Tošić and Streinzer, 2022:2).  This ideology in turn legitimises the hollowing out the welfare state and excuses the social consequences of inequality (Powell, Scanlon, Leahy, Jenkinson and Byrne, 2024).

Conclusion: reclaiming development education

Animated by rapidly evolving EdTech and AI industries and a shifting global governance landscape that is challenging the traditional role of governments and international organisations in educational policy-formation, education’s neuro-affective turn has the potential to fundamentally reshape understandings of education, teacher-student relationships and conceptualisations of the ideal learner.  Existing research suggests that global citizenship education’s increasing alignment with SEL is concerning, not least because it has a major depoliticising effect that forestalls political dialogue and undermines an appreciation of the material and economic determinants of various local and global injustices (Bryan, 2022; Bryan and Mochizuki, 2023).   Global citizenship education scholars who are critical of SEL maintain that it is fundamentally incompatible with development education because it promotes individualism over collectivism, privileges civility over conflict, advances personally responsible citizenship, and conditions learners to adapt to existing socio-ecological realities, leaving them ill-equipped to take action to address the root causes of social and global injustice (Bryan and Mochizuki, 2023; Clark, Chrisman, and Lewis, 2022; Keegan, 2023; Yliniva, Bryan and Brunila, 2024).

This article extends this critique to address the othering and stigmatising effects of SEL for development education’s radical agenda of cultivating politically engaged, self-reflexive global citizens who have a deep understanding of power and politics and who are firmly committed to working collectively toward fundamental change.  Specifically, we argue that the portrayal of ‘students from disadvantaged backgrounds’ as universally lacking in key twenty-first century competencies and capacities has a dehumanising effect that destabilises collectivist values and normalises ideologies of (un)deservingness to societal resources and entitlements (Tošić and Streinzer, 2022).  Stated another way, this deficit-based framing of disadvantaged students exacerbates exclusion by undermining solidaristic attitudes of mutual concern, acceptance and support for socio-economically marginalised groups that are vital to building and sustaining a just society and fulfilling the demands of justice.  Specifically, this polarising logic - which discursively positions disadvantaged and advantaged students on opposite sides of a social-emotional cliff face - creates the conditions for a hardening of attitudes towards ‘disadvantaged’ groups and promotes the view that they deserve their lot in life (Banting and Kymlicka, 2017).  The ideology of (un)deservingness that it reflects intersects with a range of other beliefs about the extent to which ‘the disadvantaged’ actually belong in a shared society, the extent to which they are seen as likely to help others in need, and  the extent to which they are perceived as grateful for what they receive.   

Whereas deficit framings of working class and minoritised students have a lengthy history, they are taking on much greater significance in an era of AI wherein skills such as empathy, tolerance, compassion etc. are increasingly identified as the very things or qualities that distinguish humans from machines.  To portray students from disadvantaged backgrounds as universally possessing less of the distinguishing capacities that make people human perpetuates a demonising and othering logic that sows the seeds of class division, rather than the  solidarity so desperately required to meaningfully address the problems that define the twenty-first century, such as worsening ecological crises, mass displacement, rising inequality, authoritarian populism, civil unrest and war.  In other words, this dehumanising logic militates against the forging of relations of solidarity which would enable people to work across inter alia racial, ethnic, class divisions to act collectively towards social transformation.  To prevent further deradicalisation of the development education sector (Bryan and Mochizuki, 2023), we must pay close attention to how SEL is being operationalised, weaponised and invoked in the name of global citizenship education and ensure that all forms of solidarity - including solidarity with poor and working-class communities - remain at the forefront of our pedagogical efforts to bring about social and global transformation.

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Audrey Bryan is a Professor of Sociology in the School of Human Development at Dublin City University’s Institute of Education (DCU IoE).  Her teaching spans a number of undergraduate as well as post-graduate programmes in the sociology of childhood, sociology of education, advanced research methods and sustainability.   Her most recent research advances critical perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and Education, the psycho-affective turn in education, parenting children and youth in the 21st century and climate justice pedagogies.  She is Section Editor (with Yoko Mochizuki) of the Climate Section of the Springer Handbook of Children and Youth Studies (2024).

Yoko Mochizuki is an associate member of the EDA (Éducation, Discours, Apprentissages: Education, Discourse, Learning) laboratory, an interdisciplinary research unit of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Université Paris Cité.  Previously, she was Head of Policy at UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) in New Delhi and Programme Specialist for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Climate Change at UNESCO Paris.