Synopses & Reviews
In recent years ideas about therapy have found their way increasingly into educational practice: there is Circle Time in the elementary school and a new emphasis on self-esteem, there is assertiveness training and stress management for adults, and the bookshop shelves are heavy with volumes on self-help. In a different vein, and since ancient times, education has itself often been thought of as a kind of therapy, at minimum a cure for bad intellectual and moral habits, and sometimes a progressive working on the self with philosophy its essential ally. Yet formal education today, with its compulsive fixation on assessment and league-tables, seems, ironically enough, to need therapy of its own.
This book examines the many connections between education and therapy, critically but sympathetically. It brings to bear on areas of confusion and mystification the philosophical attention that has sometimes been thought of as potentially therapeutic and conducive to personal growth and flourishing.
Review
"At a time when it seems that everyone, at whatever level of society, has fallen behind the banner of Business, blindly caught up in its ruthless and deadening rationality, it is such a relief to find writers so able to resist the trend. They remind us of a humane culture we seem to have forgotten, and their intelligent and illuminating understanding of the relations between education and 'therapy' sweeps away many of the absurdities that have over the past two or three decades invaded both."- David Smail former Special Professor in Clinical Psychology at the University of Nottingham, and author of Illusion and Reality: the Meaning of Anxiety and Taking Care: an Alternative to Therapy.
Synopsis
In the modern day, it is understood that the role of the teacher comprises aspects of therapy directed towards the child. But to what extent should this relationship be developed, and what are its concomitant responsibilities? This book offers a challenging philosophical approach to the inherent problems and tensions involved with these issues.
Synopsis
The idea of education as therapy goes back to ancient times. Today, it is understood that the role of the teacher comprises aspects of therapy directed towards the child. But to what extent should this relationship be developed, and what are its concomitant responsibilities? This book offers a challenging philosophical approach to these issues.
About the Author
PAUL SMEYERS is Professor of Education at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.
RICHARD SMITH is Professor of Education at the University of Durham, UK.
PAUL STANDISH is Professor of Educational Studies, University of Sheffield, UK.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I: THE KINDLY APOCALYPSE
Self-Esteem: The Inward Turn
Diffidence, Confidence and Self-belief
What Can be Said, What Can be Shown
Reading Narrative
Learning to Change
PART II: COMING TO TERMS
Practising Dying
Room for Thought
The Thoreau Strategy
A State of Abstraction: Knowledge and Contingency
Unfinished Business: Education Without Necessity
PART III: REDEEMING PHILOSOPHY, REDEEMING THERAPY
Beyond Cure
Narrative and Number: What Really Counts
Learning from Psychoanalysis
Enlarging the Enigma
Expectation of Return
Notes
References
Index