The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education

"The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education discusses the recent attempts, within the last five or ten years, to take a ‘therapeutic’ approach to education. This approach was born out of the whole self-esteem movement in the USA, which is based around trying to make people feel better about themselves. Ecclestone and Hayes argue that as this approach has been introduced, the way children feel has become more important than what they learn. This book brings to the surface the problems with this – for example, its potentially authoritarian implications. There is a big difference between a teacher telling me not to do something and a teacher telling me how to think. By teaching ‘positive emotions’, teachers are enabled to colonise your interior life. The authors are not saying that emotions are completely irrelevant (obviously emotions are a very important part of a child’s life) but there is a world of difference between emotional education and educating people so that they can deal with their own emotions. There is a caricature of what education was like in the past. In previous centuries it’s true that society in general was fairly desensitised to human emotion. But I think for a very long time most teachers, especially good teachers, have been concerned about the wellbeing of the children they teach. In the past, however, the way that this was confronted was by trying to be sensitive to children’s needs, while at the same time teaching them. This was a way of increasing children’s confidence: the way to make a child feel better about themselves is not by telling them that they are special, or using some novel technique, but through the confidence they gain from understanding the world."