NYC just elected a self-described socialist, Zohran Mamdani.
The campaign began in the classroom.
In 2022, NYC DOE poured $80 million into “Social-Emotional Learning” (SEL)—a program that’s spent decades installing a collectivist operating system in students’ minds. 🧵
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The election of socialist Zohran Mamdani as NYC mayor isn’t a political fluke.
It’s the result of 30+ years of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and progressive teacher-training that rewired how young Americans define “justice” and “community.”
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For 3 decades, SEL has been sold as “teaching empathy.”
In reality, it re-centers education around feelings, identity, and group belonging instead of knowledge, discipline, or merit.
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This emotional curriculum was propagated by institutions like Columbia’s Teachers College—where faculty like Linda Lantieri spent decades embedding SEL “spirituality” into K-12 schooling.
4/ By the mid-1990s, the Fetzer Institute had launched CASEL, which pushed SEL nationally as “the missing piece” in education.
But the “piece” it added wasn’t academic—it was ideological.
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Teacher-ed programs were saturated, too: “equity,” “social justice,” and “global citizenship” replaced “character,” “virtue,” and “individual responsibility.”
The mission of schooling quietly shifted from learning → social reform.
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A generation raised under that model now sees systemic changeas the moral goal.
And they vote accordingly.
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So when Mamdani campaigns on “free buses,” and “city-run groceries,” it resonates.
Decades of kids primed through "social emotional" language for collective entitlement.
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Teachers were taught: “Schools are vehicles for social reform.”
And SEL gave activist teachers a framework for injecting their radical values.
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The moral currency of the West—liberty, virtue, reason—was quietly replaced by a new political currency: empathy, inclusion, equity, belonging.
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You can trace the trajectory:
1970s – Progressive teacher training
1990s – SEL developed
2000s – SEL mainstreamed
2010s – SEL digitized & moved to the cloud
2020 – Schools went online, SEL went full “equity”
2025 – A generation votes for socialism in America’s largest city
Learn how SEL in K-12 education is turbocharging “woke" -- and why.
👉Read The New Face of Woke Education.
📘a.co/d/dT7Tu59
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