The renaming of the Department for Education and Skills as the Department for Children, Families and Schools removes 'education' as a social and political aspiration for the first time in 60 years. This enables the government to tune into popular concerns about unhappiness and well-being and, through 'Every Child Matters', to change the key purpose of educational institutions.
There is an unchallenged assumption that we face an unprecedented epidemic of mental health problems is now a key feature of social and welfare policy in the UK: the chief executive of the charity NCH was quoted in the Daily Mail on 20 July 2007, saying "the lack of emotional well-being amongst our children and young people is undermining the foundation of any social policy to combat social exclusion, deprivation or lack of social mobility. We urge Gordon Brown and his new Cabinet to commit to tackling this hidden and fast-growing problem". The Conservative Party has commissioned a review of children’s unhappiness as has the National Children’s Society.
A political shift from education to welfare institutionalises popular concerns about emotional vulnerability and unhappiness. Emotional interventions attract rising levels of funding. The Social, Emotional and Affective Learning Strategy for Schools cost £10m in 2007-8, with a further £31.2 million ear-marked over the next three years. Anti-bullying schemes cost £1.7 million a year, while peer mentoring currently receives £1.75 million. Another £60 million was added in July 2007 for schools to improve emotional well-being, phased over the next three years to be £30 million in 2010-11.
Unsurprisingly, a huge and lucrative huge industry is flourishing around emotional well-being and emotional literacy. Over 70 organisations and growing numbers of private consultants, including university academics, have created a deluge of interventions, guidance, training courses and text books around slippery and interchangeable concepts such as 'self esteem', 'emotional and mental well-being', 'emotional literacy' and 'emotional intelligence'.
Such initiatives include ‘circle time’, ‘nurture groups’, anti-bullying and mentoring schemes, drama workshops to deal with transitions and bullying, activities to develop ‘learning power’, ‘learning to learn’ and ‘self-esteem’, ‘philosophy for children’ classes, ‘emotional audits’ and ‘whole school strategies for emotional literacy’. There are over 30 different instruments to assess emotional well-being. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority requires schools to assess young children’s emotional competence in a Foundation Stage Profile while the National Institute for Clinical Excellence is drawing up formal guidelines for primary schools to diagnose emotional well-being.
Until now, there has been no public challenge to all this. A recent report from the Centre for Confidence and Well-Being is the first serious criticism of this policy. It questions the way in which children’s emotions are being formalised, regimented and trained. It points to the poor theoretical and empirical base of evidence for notions such as self-esteem, emotional intelligence and emotional literacy and challenges the government to justify carrying out a ‘national psychological experiment on the nation’s children’. The report challenges the way that policy is founded on and reproduces images of emotionally ‘fragile’ and ‘vulnerable’ people who need ‘support’.
Although the report is right that emotional interventions are founded on dubious evidence and incoherent concepts, it is precisely the lack of evidence and incoherence of underlying ideas that enables government to relate to public ideas about emotional vulnerability.
Carol Craig (2007) The potential dangers of a systematic, explicit approach to teaching social and emotional skills (Glasgow, Centre for Confidence and Well-Being) http://www.centreforconfidence.co.uk/docs/SEALsummary.pdf
Tuesday 18 September 2007
Monday 17 September 2007
Dennis Hayes on a special edition of the British Journal of Educational Studies (BJES) on ‘Citizenship and Democracy’
Another collection of academic papers on ‘citizenship’! What is there that is new to say about this so-called ‘subject’? A start could be made by pointing out that the cash cow of ‘citizenship’ is a very well-funded New Labour project to protect them from the bankruptcy of their politics, and their constant worry that, like the 400,000 active young citizens who walked out of their healthy school canteens into the nearest chip shops, we might all walk out of the ‘political [third] way’ and start thinking and acting for ourselves.
That said, this collection does manage to do something new. It expresses the profound problem, if not quite the profound paradox, of citizenship theory.
This is best expressed in Elizabeth Fraser’s contribution ‘Depoliticising Citizenship’. She argues that citizenship is being depoliticised, not least by proponents of ‘citizenship’ themselves, and reminds teachers in particular of the importance of the ‘political way’. She reminds teachers that ‘Conflict…is a necessary condition of the political process’ (p259) and that what goes on in schools is so frustrating, patchy and ineffective that it can be, ‘an object lesson in how awful and petty and useless politics is’ (p260).
She argues that citizenship has lost any sense of the political way because ‘liberal democratic political cultures have lost sight of the foundational political power that underpins them’ (p259). To re-politicise citizenship requires that teachers ‘and the rest of us need to practise facing up to the difficulty of political conflict’ (p261).
Fraser does not go far enough in her analysis. It is not facing up to the difficulty of political conflict that teachers and the rest of us need to practise; we need to practise political conflict. Of course, it would be philistine to argue in any other subject than citizenship that theorists should get their hands dirty. However, by the logic of their own arguments, theorists of citizenship have a special duty to be citizens and to take the political way, otherwise they do not combat cynicism, passivity and indifference to democracy, they add to them. The implication of theoretical analyses of the need for citizenship by pure theorists is that active citizenship is not for the clever but for the great untheoretical masses they lecture from the sidelines.
Theorists could say that arguing for the political way is to take the political way, but that would be playing with words.
Citizenship today is not a real topic as it was, for example, during the French Revolution where there was a discussion of citizenship and the role of citoyens actifs and citoyens passifs. Nothing was said then about citoyens théoriques. The armies of citoyens théoriques that exist today - educationalists, consultants, academics and citizenship teachers - are not part of the solution to social and political passivity but an expression of that problem that has the perverse consequence of increasing passivity.
Do these theorists think they are too clever to need to be citizens and that doing theory is all that matters? Or is it just that it is comfortable and rewarding work? Whatever the answer, taking the moral high ground about citizenship and democracy is not enough. Here the example of Socrates shows us what a model theorist and a model citizen can be; endlessly examining every individual about what is the very best thing that they can do. The result of Socratic practice, real citizenship, is never the ‘free maintenance by the state’ that our current citizenship theorists enjoy.
In citizenship theory, theorising is simply not enough, and the eight contributors to this volume could start on the political way by picking a fight or two in the academic, if not the real world.
James Arthur and Paul Croll (eds.) (2007) ‘Citizenship and Democracy’, British Journal of Educational Studies, Special Issue, Vol. 55, No. 3, September 2007. http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/bjes/53/3?cookieSet=1
That said, this collection does manage to do something new. It expresses the profound problem, if not quite the profound paradox, of citizenship theory.
This is best expressed in Elizabeth Fraser’s contribution ‘Depoliticising Citizenship’. She argues that citizenship is being depoliticised, not least by proponents of ‘citizenship’ themselves, and reminds teachers in particular of the importance of the ‘political way’. She reminds teachers that ‘Conflict…is a necessary condition of the political process’ (p259) and that what goes on in schools is so frustrating, patchy and ineffective that it can be, ‘an object lesson in how awful and petty and useless politics is’ (p260).
She argues that citizenship has lost any sense of the political way because ‘liberal democratic political cultures have lost sight of the foundational political power that underpins them’ (p259). To re-politicise citizenship requires that teachers ‘and the rest of us need to practise facing up to the difficulty of political conflict’ (p261).
Fraser does not go far enough in her analysis. It is not facing up to the difficulty of political conflict that teachers and the rest of us need to practise; we need to practise political conflict. Of course, it would be philistine to argue in any other subject than citizenship that theorists should get their hands dirty. However, by the logic of their own arguments, theorists of citizenship have a special duty to be citizens and to take the political way, otherwise they do not combat cynicism, passivity and indifference to democracy, they add to them. The implication of theoretical analyses of the need for citizenship by pure theorists is that active citizenship is not for the clever but for the great untheoretical masses they lecture from the sidelines.
Theorists could say that arguing for the political way is to take the political way, but that would be playing with words.
Citizenship today is not a real topic as it was, for example, during the French Revolution where there was a discussion of citizenship and the role of citoyens actifs and citoyens passifs. Nothing was said then about citoyens théoriques. The armies of citoyens théoriques that exist today - educationalists, consultants, academics and citizenship teachers - are not part of the solution to social and political passivity but an expression of that problem that has the perverse consequence of increasing passivity.
Do these theorists think they are too clever to need to be citizens and that doing theory is all that matters? Or is it just that it is comfortable and rewarding work? Whatever the answer, taking the moral high ground about citizenship and democracy is not enough. Here the example of Socrates shows us what a model theorist and a model citizen can be; endlessly examining every individual about what is the very best thing that they can do. The result of Socratic practice, real citizenship, is never the ‘free maintenance by the state’ that our current citizenship theorists enjoy.
In citizenship theory, theorising is simply not enough, and the eight contributors to this volume could start on the political way by picking a fight or two in the academic, if not the real world.
James Arthur and Paul Croll (eds.) (2007) ‘Citizenship and Democracy’, British Journal of Educational Studies, Special Issue, Vol. 55, No. 3, September 2007. http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/bjes/53/3?cookieSet=1
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