{"id":14203,"date":"2012-03-21T08:51:03","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T13:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=14203"},"modified":"2013-09-25T09:45:36","modified_gmt":"2013-09-25T14:45:36","slug":"converting-teachers-into-pre-grief-counsellors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/03\/21\/converting-teachers-into-pre-grief-counsellors\/","title":{"rendered":"Converting teachers into pre-grief counsellors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dennis Hayes<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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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 \u2018pain of falling out\u2019. Gaynor Sbuttoni, an educational psychologist working with schools in south-west London, told The Sunday Times<\/em>, \u2018I have noticed that teachers tell children they shouldn\u2019t have a best friend and that everyone should play together\u2026 They\u2019re doing it because they want to save the child the pain of splitting up from their best friend.\u2019 Sbuttoni is not the first to speak out against this trend in the UK, and \u2018no best friend\u2019 policies have been in place in some US schools for quite a while.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018vulnerable\u2019 children and young people. As this new therapeutic profession develops, more and more interventions like \u2018no best friends\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Meddling in young children\u2019s emotional lives is the worst feature of contemporary schooling. Children are now trained to have \u2018appropriate\u2019 emotions through emotional literacy classes and so-called subjects like SEAL — the \u2018Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,79,66,73],"tags":[374,570,39,139,932],"class_list":["post-14203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-education","category-health-science","category-randomness","tag-children","tag-england","tag-junkscience","tag-psychology","tag-thecrazyyears"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3H5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14204,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14203\/revisions\/14204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}