ABSTRACT
The rise of therapeutic education takes different forms in different sectors of the education system and reflects changing ideas of what problems it is trying to address. In primary schools, the development of emotional literacy and the ‘skills’ associated with emotional well-being begins children’s preoccupation with themselves, introduces the idea that life makes vulnerable and offer prescriptive rituals, scripts and ‘appropriate’ ways of behaving emotionally. In secondary school, interest shifts from responding to vulnerability towards the seemingly positive idea that teaches young people the means to be happy citizens. For numerous critics, focusing on emotional aspects of learning is integral to good teaching. The claims and assumptions of therapeutic education subjugate the teaching of subjects to the supposed emotional effects of processes and go much further than merely requiring teachers to be ‘sensitive to feelings’ and to ‘take emotions into account’.
