Illinois lawmakers’ obsession with getting in children’s minds is getting creepier, with multiple controversial bills in the legislature this session targeting students in the state.
From mandated “social-emotional” indoctrination to more forced “mental-health education,” Big Pharma-funded lawmakers appear to believe that doing more of the same thing will somehow achieve different results for Illinois children. It will not.
The initiatives are disguised as efforts to improve the social, emotional, and mental wellbeing of children. But in reality, the bills are yet another foundational step toward a national system for psychological conditioning and manipulating children’s attitudes, beliefs, and worldview. The language being used to support the rollout is merely a mask to conceal a deeply controversial agenda that should alarm all parents.
SEL Indoctrination
One of the schemes, HB 4855, purports to require that every school district in Illinois force every child to receive direct instruction in “social and emotional learning” (SEL) throughout the year.
Introduced by Democrat State Rep. Janet Yang Rohr, the legislation amends the Children’s Mental Health Act to force SEL into everything. First, it mandates direct SEL instruction four times per year. But it also forces teachers to reinforce the SEL programming by intentionally integrating it into curricula and classroom activities.
Under the bill, school districts are required to provide “professional development” to help educators align their teaching with SEL principles. The SEL indoctrination, which focuses on giving children government-approved attitudes and beliefs on a wide range of issues, must be aligned with the Illinois Learning Standards for Social/Emotional Learning.
Those SEL standards were developed in partnership with the Bill Gates-funded Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). The organization has publicly boasted about using SEL to turn children into “global citizens” and activists for “social justice.”
But perhaps even more troubling, CASEL admitted on its website that the whole idea came from a New Age institution deeply tied to the occult known as the Fetzer Institute. The institute’s leading luminary on SEL, Professor Linda Lantieri of Columbia University, has openly acknowledged in webinars getting insights from spiritual beings she claims to communicate with.
Earlier this year, lawmakers in Utah considered a bill to ban SEL in government schools. The legislation did not pass. But many more bills are expected nationwide next year.
“Mental Health Education”
Another bill being considered by Illinois lawmakers, HB 2960, orders schools to incorporate “mental health” instruction into their “health education” courses. The legislation includes a broad range of required topics, including “symptoms” of alleged mental problems, supposed “services” to deal with those problems, and more.
Introduced by State Rep. Laura Faver Dias, a Democrat whose campaign was lavishly funded by Big Pharma interests, the legislation will mainstream Big Pharma’s highly profitable understanding of “mental health” among students. The bill also brings in all manner of progressive propaganda on race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and more.
Big Pharma and Big Psychiatry
Even a brief analysis of the effort reveals the unchallenged assumption that the secular Big Pharma-backed view of “mental health” is unquestionably true and good. But even many leading psychiatrists and psychologists have rejected that notion as absurd. Legendary Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin, whose work exposing everything from lobotomies to Prozac has led to profound changes in the industry, blasted the schemes of Illinois lawmakers.
There is a long history of collaboration between “organized psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry” to “make a market out of children” by reaching them through schools, he explained.
The bills come as government schools prepare to begin mandatory “mental health” screenings of all children soon as part of an edict passed last year.
“The idea of screening school children for mental problems is equivalent to screening them for the drug market,” Breggin said when the bill was being considered. “This will stigmatize increasing numbers of children, lead many of them to taking dangerous psychiatric drugs, and push some into a lifetime ‘career’ as mental patients.”
“Nothing is worse than telling a child they have a mental problem, first because it demoralizes them, and second because the problem, if there is one, is corrected by improving how we relate to them,” added Breggin.
Psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry have “much too narrow an approach” to dealing with children’s problems, he told IFI. Instead of pushing drugs and social engineering on the children via “mental health” programs, Dr. Breggin argued for other approaches. “Their ‘problems’ may disappear with a different teacher or a different school,” he said, adding that many so-called “mental problems” are really spiritual or emotional in nature.
Mental Health Crisis?
It is true that there is a so-called “mental health crisis” afflicting not just Illinois students, but children across America. In fact, according to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), some 40 percent of high-school students report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.
Even more alarming: one in five U.S. students in public schools “seriously considered suicide,” and about 10 percent actually attempted suicide just in the last year. Perhaps even more insidiously, children in Illinois are being used as props to advance the Big Pharma’s “mental health” agenda.
“I think something that we’re seeing on a day-by-day basis throughout middle and high schools is that education is unable to address this issue,” argued Abhinav Anne, an Illinois high-school student who is supposedly involved in pushing the legislation.
“Bullying, anxiety, how to combat depression,” continued Anne. “We teach students how to recite tables and memorize every state and country on a map, but we’re not really teaching students these fundamental issues…we’re seeing this gap in knowledge.”
Just this month, the Illinois Senate Behavioral and Mental Health Committee unanimously approved a bill to promote a deeply controversial “suicide prevention” hotline to students. The hypersexualized “hotline” has become infamous for promoting LGBT ideology and for grooming children, even directing children to the horrifying “Trevor Project.”
Ironically, the mandatory “suicide prevention” demanded under the bill has been known to plant seeds in children’s minds.
Big Picture
The state and its schools are aiming to sideline and ultimately replace parents on these critical issues. It is true that children are suffering badly today. But it is not due to a lack of SEL and “mental health” schemes. In fact, for centuries, children were thriving without any such programming. What they had was faith and family.
Remember, the government’s own data prove its schools cannot even teach reading, writing, or math properly. Clearly, government and its “educational” institutions are not cut out to serve as parents, therapists, mental health counselors, or anything of the sort.
Even if well intentioned, lawmakers should recognize the danger of these SEL and “mental health” schemes.
Children need God, truth, parents, and families — not occult-themed SEL, dangerous “mental health” indoctrination, and psychotropic drugs. Unfortunately for those still in government schools, that is not an option.
