In my last post I explained how Ecclestone and Hayes (2009) see the rise of therapeutic education and its focus on 'personal relevance' and 'soft skills' to be a grave threat to established liberal notions of education. Indeed, they deem it to be profoundly 'anti-educational'. Such techniques, they claim, turn young people's worlds inwards and instead of broadening their horizons cause them to see themselves as fragile, vulnerable and 'diminished' selves. Ecclestone and Hayes make it clear that they do not see this as a predicament facing education alone, as the idea of the diminished self has now come to permeate our entire culture and they attempt to chart why and how this has come to be the case. The withdrawal from subject based teaching to what they dismiss as 'faddish innovations' such as 'learning to learn' reflects an anti-intellectual climate in which confidence in the potential of human beings has tumbled. This view they make startlingly clear in perhaps one of the most controversial sentences in their book. Regarding the decline of the ideal of liberal education they state:
"Part of the reason for its loss is that many educationalists and teachers see children as incapable of education because they are no longer seen as truly human: there is no point offering an education you do not believe in to children you believe cannot benefit from it." (Ecclestone and Hayes, 2009: 143)
So as well as being anti-educational, it would seem that modern trends in education are also anti-human and reflect the misanthropic sentiment that humans are no longer masters of their destinies. Ecclestone and Hayes cite Bookchin (1995) as identifying this problem over a decade ago, in his contention that human society was suffering from a 'failure of nerves', a waning belief in our 'uniquely human attributes' and a general decay in our self-confidence as a species. The decline of traditional subjects in schools mirrors this large scale trend. The outcome of all this, for these authors, is a disastrous paradox: despite the rhetoric of empowerment and increasing happiness, the incursion of therapeutic education results in a population that is unconfident and unsure of itself and which turns to the state in order to receive instruction on what to value and how to behave. They claim that this is why the New Labour government has been so eager to adopt these ideas into its educational policy. All in all, the current drive towards happiness and well-being looks to be authoritarianism by another name.
Now, surely most if not all educationalists can agree that education should enable those educated to become confident and happy individuals, even if this is not the foremost aim they have in mind. If Ecclestone and Hayes are right then there would seem to be a strong argument here against the variety of techniques they group together as 'therapeutic education'. But despite adding a whole section of their book subtitled 'a response to our critics' I still remain unconvinced in a number of areas. For a start, throughout the book the evidence for the case remains at a very anecdotal level, usually consisting of short interviews with friends and colleagues and their children! In addition, there seems to be something very arbitrary about what they choose to bundle together under the 'therapeutic' label. Of course, any teaching practice whose sole focus is on instilling proper attitudes, values and behaviour into children is really rather undesirable, as is any practice that instills a feeling of vulnerability and weakness. But do all of the diverse pedagogical methods that these authors put under this banner really have this insidious effect? With such anecdotal evidence I really find myself with no way of knowing.
Their arguments remind me of these put forward by the philosopher and one time French Minister of Education Luc Ferry in his book The New Ecological Order (1995) which I read whilst researching my MA dissertation. In this book, Ferry mounts a case against deep ecology, which he considers to be threatening human culture and self-confidence in the same way as Ecclestone and Hayes think the therapeutic ethos is. According to Ferry, the entire world of reason and the mind is endangered by the emergence of radical ecology. This dangerous theory papers over all that is truly special in human culture and jeopardizes our democratic societies and institutions. For Ferry, deep ecology is fundamentally undemocratic and as a fundamentalism it has arisen to fill the void left by the demise of other ideologies. It represents a new ideological order that, left unchallenged, would seize the hearts of those battle hardy militants who have been 'left in a state of shock' by the 'death of communism and leftism'. This is somewhat similar to a point made by Ecclestone and Hayes to the effect that therapeutic culture has replaced the gap left by the passing of collective forms of working class organisation and the consequent 'absence of politics'.
In both these cases, the opposition depicted seems to be one of human reason and autonomy against looming and sinister forces that would undermine that hard won reason and autonomy. These forces might take the form of peculiar ideas about humans as mere parts of a living, interdependent system called the Earth or they may be more general doubts about our ability to reason, tackle difficult areas of knowledge and to cope with our emotions. These are big claims and all I am doing at the moment is setting out the scene. These are issues that I will be confronting again and again in my work, and I feel sure that some reconciliation can and must be made. Ecclestone and Hayes state with conviction that 'the majority of young people are not damaged'. On the contrary, based upon my own (anecdotal!) school experiences and from conversations with my partner who takes yoga into schools, I see that there are a lot of young people out there needing some healing. I am also unafraid to acknowledge that the Earth itself is desperately in need of healing.
The big question is, what kind of humanity do we aspire too? As the Ecclestone and Hayes are at pains to point out, we are not going to get very far if our human capacity for self-belief and self-will are reduced to such a level that we come to consider ourselves as inherently flawed beings, who can't even lift a finger without harming the Earth. In order to stand a chance of changing the world, we first need the requisite confidence to do so. We also need the requisite knowledge, and for me that's exactly where geography education comes in...
References
Bookchin, M. (1995) Re-Enchanting Humanity. A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Anti-Humanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism and Primitivism. New York: Cassell.
Ecclestone, K. and Hayes, D. (2009) The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. London: Routledge.
Ferry, L. (1995) The New Ecological Order. Volk, C. (Trans.) Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
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