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02/19/2008: "Emotional support no substitute for knowledge, accomplishment"

In recent years, officials and educational experts have sought to solve the problems afflicting learning environments through behaviour management. Increasingly, the focus is on students' "wellbeing", "emotional literacy" and "self-esteem". Since this reorientation, the ambitions of therapeutic education have gone from strength to strength. Yet there is no evidence that it works.

It is depressing news that the self-help manual has made it on to the university curriculum. In therapy-obsessed America, positive psychology is one of the most popular new classes at Harvard. And Britain is going the same way, with a whole institute devoted to wellbeing at Cambridge.

In schools, decades of silly programmes designed to raise children's self-esteem have not improved wellbeing, and the new initiatives designed to make pupils happy will also fail. Worse still, emotional education encourages an inward-looking orientation that distracts children from engaging with the world.

Perversely, the ascendancy of psychobabble in the classroom has been paralleled by an apparent increase in mental health problems among children. The relationship between the two is not accidental. Children are highly suggestible, and the more they are required to participate in wellbeing classes, the more they will feel the need for professional support.

[ We want to make everyone feel OK, so we eliminate challenge. That eliminates meaning, and then we are sad. Did we engineer our own doom? ]

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2257747,00.html