Therapeutic Education, Greenland and The Blob
Why we need to get our kids off the couch and start filling their minds again
As recent events at Davos confirm, the established way of doing things doesn’t last forever. As The Guardian put it, yesterday’s events, saw Donald Trump using the global elite’s get together as a ‘stage for his own vision of how the world should work’. This only goes to show that orthodoxies are overturned. They lose their hold and - eventually - they come to an end. And if it can happen on the world stage, surely it can happen in our schools too.
The education system is, seemingly, more interested in kids emotional and mental states than it is in their intellectual development. For those of us who understand the principal role of schools as the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another, this is - to say the least - a problem.
We have not only seen the downgrading of knowledge in the classroom, and the increasing politicisation of the content of lessons. The idea of children’s frailty as a defining feature of their experience has really taken a hold too.
The numbers of children with anxiety issues, special needs and ‘behaviour disorders’ are all on the rise, despite this therapeutic and inclusive approach having been in place for decades. It’s clearly not working.
Coming to think of it, this goes back decades - perhaps as far back as the end of the Cold War when the turn inwards, if not the turbulent events we are now witnessing globally, has its origin.
So, whatever you think of The Donald. Whatever your views on the rightful owner of Greenland - surely ‘the blob’ isn’t more immovable than the Berlin Wall?
Read Class is in Therapy Session in Teach Secondary magazine.