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 us 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 we can teach young people the means to be happy citizens. There is a shift from images of children as anxious, at risk, and emotionally fragile towards a new language of resilience, optimism, happiness and well-being. The overall effect of therapeutic education in primary and secondary schools is to dismantle subject disciplines and to use them as vehicles for the latest manifestation of social engineering.
