Dennis Hayes on the recent trend in teaching: preventing children from having “best friends” because the emotional pain of losing a best friend is too much for kids to bear.
In some English schools, having best friends can now get you in serious trouble with teacher. At the weekend, it was reported that primary school children in certain areas are being discouraged from having best friends to avoid the ‘pain of falling out’. Gaynor Sbuttoni, an educational psychologist working with schools in south-west London, told The Sunday Times, ‘I have noticed that teachers tell children they shouldn’t have a best friend and that everyone should play together… They’re doing it because they want to save the child the pain of splitting up from their best friend.’ Sbuttoni is not the first to speak out against this trend in the UK, and ‘no best friend’ policies have been in place in some US schools for quite a while.
Reading the reports, it might seem like this is just a silly intervention by meddling teachers, which simply needs to be stamped out. But that underestimates what is going on in our schools. The teaching profession is being reformed as a therapeutic profession, often prioritising the delivery of therapy over education to ‘vulnerable’ children and young people. As this new therapeutic profession develops, more and more interventions like ‘no best friends’ will arise, either spontaneously in classrooms or as a result of conscious intervention by school heads, local authorities, government and, of course, Ofsted, which runs with every fad and fashion.
Meddling in young children’s emotional lives is the worst feature of contemporary schooling. Children are now trained to have ‘appropriate’ emotions through emotional literacy classes and so-called subjects like SEAL — the ‘Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning’. The training on offer in such sessions is nothing short of emotional manipulation. Children are taught to be moderate; empathy is good, anger is bad. They are taught to be emotionally dead, out of touch with all the emotions that make up human relationships, passion, anger, jealousy, hatred and even love, which is sentimentalised and sanitised. This is the anodyne therapeutic ethos that now dominates education at all levels.
the emotional pain of losing a best friend is too much for kids to bear.
Heaven forbid!
We must pad all corners, round off the sharp corners. Dull the feelings, drug the tots so they feel nothing not sanctioned by a panel of expert head bangers.
Wrapping a child in a warm, comfortable embrace of nobadfeelings … nothing can go wrong with that idea. Ever.
My grandson – he’s 1 year old and cute as the dickens – was over at the house yesterday. To keep him occupied while I did the dishes, I handed him a pot, a metal spoon, some measuring cups, cookie cutters. Dropped them in the pot (clatter bang) showed him that spoons are for banging. Look kid – you can bang pots at grampa’s house: go nuts. He started banging away, dropping stuff in the pot (bang clatter) … kid stuff.
Exchange Student from China was worried – won’t he cut himself on the cookie cutters? They’re sharp …
Dude: they’re not _that_ sharp. And he won’t do it more than once, anyway.
Comment by Brian Dunbar — March 21, 2012 @ 16:06