Over the past few weeks, I’ve published two major pieces about a body of psychological research that I believe deserves much wider attention in K–12 education. One appears in the October issue of National Review, titled “There’s Too Much Doom and Gloom in the Classroom.” The other is a chapter in the book Mind the Children: How to Think About the Youth Mental Health Crisis, edited by my AEI colleagues Naomi Schaeffer Riley and Sally Satel. Because these pieces are either behind a paywall or between the covers of a book, I want to bring the discussion here.
The research at the center of both is Jeremy Clifton’s work on primal world beliefs, or “primals.” I consider it among the most important and eye-opening ideas I’ve encountered in over two decades in education thought and practice—important for two reasons: First, it’s almost completely unknown in K–12. In fact, the only mention I could find in a publication for educators was a 2022 Education Week interview in which Clifton offered a quiet warning: “Don’t assume teaching young people that the world is bad will help them. Do know that how you see the world matters.”
Second, it challenges two of the most widely accepted assumptions in schools today: that more social and emotional learning (SEL) and trauma-informed pedagogy are the right responses to the student mental health crisis.
In my National Review piece, I imagined a day in the life of an eighth grader named Maya. She reads a novel about a suicidal teen in English, studies systemic racism in social studies, watches a climate disaster documentary in science, and works on a gun-violence “action civics” project. Meanwhile, her teachers head off to professional development on trauma-informed pedagogy.
“Almost no one will consider the possibility that we are the ones traumatizing students,” I concluded.
