Schools as “therapeutic institutions”

This. From the Sunday Times.

Schools have become “therapeutic institutions” for children, and should return to their pre-pandemic focus on academic and extracurricular activities, according to the former head of Ofsted.

Baroness Spielman said schools are encouraging children as young as three to identify negative emotions, which are a normal part of childhood, when many would be better off simply being “fully engaged” in school life.

Spielman, who ran the schools watchdog from 2017 to 2023, said: “If schools have reconceived themselves as therapeutic institutions and are looking for things to be wrong with the child, they’ll probably find some. And we’ll stay in this sort of negative spiral of unintentionally encouraging children to find things to be unhappy about.

“Wellbeing is an outcome of getting various pieces of a child’s life right, including their learning. It’s not an activity. Adolescence is a period of massive psychological adjustment with lumps and bumps, but you have to experience the lumps and bumps to be a resilient adult.”

Exactly. Tell that to the puberty blocker fools – the ultimate example of trying to “cure” children from imagined social-contagion maladies instead of allowing them to grow and develop naturally.

She added: “The danger is you get into a downward spiral where the more of that kind of [mental health] support you give to a child, the more you reinforce the idea that they can’t cope without it.”