ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the government has come to sponsor therapeutic education as part of New Labour’s approach to ‘social justice’. It offers examples of popular concern about emotional well-being and the therapeutic orthodoxies that underpin and reinforce this interest. The chapter shows that a political evolution from ideas about conferring esteem on a vulnerable public to more active promotion of ‘the means to be happy’. Interchangeable, ill-defined terms such as emotional literacy, emotional intelligence, emotional well-being, self-esteem and mental ill-health, together with proliferating lists of disorders and syndromes, simplistic cycles of deprivation and permanent damage wreaked by ‘emotionally illiterate or ‘dysfunctional’ parents’, all reinforce popular therapeutic orthodoxies. Emotional and social competences have been shown to be more influential than cognitive abilities for personal, career and scholastic success, so they need to be central to school and learning to increase school effectiveness.
