Stanford University, Zolzaya Badral
Social-emotional learning (SEL) has spread rapidly through global education policy, yet its adoption is frequently contested, particularly where critics associate its individualist orientation with the values of capitalism. Mongolia, a post-socialist country, presents a puzzle: in 2025, it embraced SEL, restructuring its national pre-primary curriculum around OECD, CASEL-aligned competencies. Drawing on world society theory and the concepts of decoupling, policy translation, hybridization, this study explains the embrace through document analysis and semi-structured interviews with curriculum developers, policymakers, and teachers. Findings show that SEL is not a rigid Western export but a bundle: alongside individualist competencies, it carries collectivist elements: compassion, interdependence, relational harmony, that remain obscured in many settings but were deliberately foregrounded in Mongolia, in continuity with Buddhist-inflected moral traditions and socialist-era collectivism. The Mongolian case thereby serves as a laboratory for studying translation, hybridization, and decoupling: which components of global models are adopted substantively, which not, and why.