'Infantilised' students and staff rapped

I completely agree with the report. The "therapeutic" approach on the staff side is tool for managers to avoid having to make hard decisions (or often any decisions). On the student side, it is damaging. If we care about the employability of our students, then we need to prepare them for the real world. <p>For example, in the business world dyslexia is no excuse for being unable to produce a coherent letter or report - such output just looks unprofessional or incompetent to a client. Fine to give dyslexic students support to achieve the required standard, but please no more moving of goalposts for them. <p>"Dyslexia" also seems to be becoming a convenient cover for poor English language teaching in UK schools. Very few overseas students seem to be dyslexic in comparison. And I'd like to see figures on how many students "fail" the assessments for dyslexia. Looking at the assessment criteria, I suspect nearly all who apply "pass"...

Dyslexia is a massively middle-class phenomenon at university, but the problem happens at school level which is where the diagnosis is done. Pushy parents are looking for a justification for their child's inability to get straight A grades. At my former university, the disability office themselves openly stated that students from independant schools were more likely to be 'dyslexic' than state school pupils by orders of magnitude.

After doing extensive research on how children learn and develop, mental illness and positive psychology over the past year *, I completely disagree with what is being presented in this book. I can only assume the authors have some hidden agenda or some personal axe to grind, because I can see no other reason for such a one-sided and poorly researched book to exist. Avoid this book at all costs! <p>* The best books I've read are: How Children Learn, Nonviolent Communication, The Continuum Concept, Unconditional Parenting, Authentic Happiness, Emotional Intelligence, Bully In Sight.

I teach teachers for a living. I have daily contact with senior leadership teams under pressure to "get someone in" to offer solutions to problems. I also meet lots of teachers face to face on courses I run across the country. <p>Often, the SLTs focus on the latest fashionable panacea, they hear a headline and go with it, knowing that, if they adopt the latest panacea the inspectors will be appeased. <p>The teachers I meet often want help dealing with behaviour, help with teaching a curriculum that, for many students, just isn't appropriate. Many teachers are unhappy in their work, a bit scared of students and feel unsupported. <p>I haven't read this book yet but from what I've read about its contents I agree. We seem to be avoiding the real issues in education: it should be challenging, you will fall down, sometimes it isn't easy, but that's life. <p>I want to prove to my students "you think this bit is a bit hard and you can't do it, but you can do it , with work. So next time you're presented with a challenge your first response won't be "can't do it" but rather, "I've been challenged before, worked at the problem, succeeded eventually with effort, so I can do it again." <p>Life isn't X-factor, the credit card or the gastric band aren't the answer to developing self esteem.

As a dyslexic with a doctorate in Astrophysics from Oxford, a long peer-reviewed publication record and absolutely zero middle-class background, I have to say that I find some of the comments above to be ignorant and offensive. If I had attended an independent school where (thanks to better resources) my dyslexia had been diagnosed and supported early on, my childhood would have been considerably more pleasant. <p>I am very disappointed that the THE article makes no attempt whatsoever to critically analyse the knee-jerk, right-wing attitudes that pass for academic ideas in “The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education”. I spent some years at a university (outside of the UK) that probably fits in very well with the authors’ ideal of a culture focussed entirely on intellectual inquiry and the acquisition of knowledge, with nothing but derision for anyone perceived as weak. It was a culture in which senior academics routinely took credit for their underlings’ work and considered female students to be there for their personal pleasure, and in which suicides (student and staff) were widely viewed as a process of “natural selection” that weeded out those too weak to cope with the rigours of academia. <p>Give me a “boo-hoo” culture anyday, thanks.

To Anonymous. <p>I think that you miss the important point. The genuine dyslexic student misses out if too many other (non-deserving) students are given the same label. This does happen because of pushy parents, pushy students and (it has to be said) the growth of vested interest services on campus who then seek to expand their empires. Your hard won qualifications will be worth nothing if too many others reach the same level of achievement, not because of their actual ability but because of the undeserved extra help (longer exam times etc etc).

I was just having a mini-rant this morning about these issues and here's a book on it! Sounds interesting, though I would be interested to see whether any solutions are offered to the teacher in the workplace (such as myself) which has a 'boo-hoo' culture (ugly term). <p>Self-esteem and happiness, I believe, come from challenging, academic situations. Places of education should not also be places to share emotional experiences, unless they are relevant to the study of a topic (such as in the arts). Failing and striving to improve are great motivators. It can be exciting for a student. <p> I work in an enivornment where we do have a high level of actual dyslexia (as well as plenty of poor spelling). From my experience the dyslexic students I've worked with have placed critical thinking above emotional response and have been hard-working motivated students as a result (with an allowed level of teenage emotion here and there)because within the structure of course delivery these students have to work extra hard to achieve the same results as their peers. I have also come across students who, because of the infrastructure of the organisation I work in, have definitely become infantilised and not achieved their potential as a result, gliding on unnecessary support into uni, where the danger is that the same follies will be repeated. This book sounds v interesting.

I agree with comments above by Ian Ward-Burton that these authors probably have a hidden agenda and also seems to be a poorly researched book, with about as much intellectual objectivety as a Daily Mail columnist. <p>The arguments of the book as outlined show a total lack of understanding of therapeutic goals and a conscious misrepresentation of welfare support for students. Good therapy and welfare support is about challenging students who have been infantilised by a variety apects of contemporty culture, such as the media, over protection from parents who have lost their confidence and authority in parenting, new technology, such as the permanent umbilical cord of the mobile phone and probably bad educationalists who have tried to take 'struggle' or any intellectual challenge and rigour out of secondary education. <P.Good therapy is helping students grow up, face challenge, cope with struggle and take responsibility for their lives which should be allied to the goal of eductaional development, the last thing genuine therapeutic goals should be is about creating infantilised students or a victim culture. I think there are far greater and more powerful forces which have created infantialised population, not just students, if you want to start playing the blame game.

The goal of good therapy is to help students grow up, face challenge, cope with struggle and take responsibility for their lives which should be allied to the goal of eductaional development, the last thing genuine therapeutic goals should be is about creating infantilised students or a victim culture. I think there are far greater and more powerful forces which have created infantialised population, not just students, if you want to start playing the blame game.

I find it disappointing that a THE forum should operate at such a superficial level. I shall wait until I've read the book before feeling qualified to comment on its arguments or validity.

I agree that a lot of what passes as dyslexia is actually low-intelligence and/or lack of will to put in effort, supported by a culture of indulgence. There are plenty of smart dyslexics who manage to learn to compensate for their disabilities and achieve at a high standard. <p>However bullying of lecturers is a real and growing problem in UK Higher Education, caused, in large part by the new managerialism. This book appears to minimize real cases of bullying which happen everyday against those who dare to challenge the status quo of mediocrity and who seek excellence from their students and from themselves. So it is actually a movement against quality and achievement that is often in force when bullies strike. <p>I suggest that the authors of this book look at the writings of Ken Westhues, a leading scholar on academic bullying. Obviously they've not bothered to do so.

How many of you have actually read the book?

I would encourage anyone who is in any doubt about the beneficial effects of raising children's emotional awareness to look at the DCSF material around Social and Emotional Aspect of Learning (SEAL). <p>This wonderful resource not only helps children understand theirs and others emotions, but also to recognise when there ISN'T a problem as much as when there is. <p>The article reads as one long rant that could be simply summarised as 'Pull Yourself Together.'

I look forward to reading this book as someone who has been working in the education system that I would guess it is trying to deconstruct. Rafts and rafts of government initiatives VAK, BLP, SEAL have all pandered to emotional aspects of learning, and I like many other teachers have felt like real learning has been sidetracked by hubris. It is impossible to break through and present an alternative opinion without personal risk to individuals careers because of the Stalinist way in which education policy is managed in schools. I just hope this does not become an argument about whether or not Dyslexia exists as I am sure that this is not the point. The point is that it is madness teaching children about educational theory, learning styles and emotional techniques. This is not arming them with the information they need to approach learning in a new and independent way but it is stripping them of any sense of responsibility and giving them an opportunity to cop out. Meanwhile I like all my fellow sufferers of DFES fads are tasked with delivering strict targets from these empowered independent learners full of excuses that we have not met their personal needs. I hope this book does what I think it will do, that is fight present an alternative viewpoint finally.

I went through University as a mature student and don't have dyslexia - as far as I know. I was, however, tempted to apply to become 'officially dyslexic' by the large number of friends who did so themselves to recieve free computers, oh and they also got longer in exams, not that they were really interested that. <p>In all seriousness though, it does seem that the days of university being the place where you learned to stand on your own two feet are a long time over. <p>Now, working in a higher education establishment it seems that cuddling students through their course is far preferable to pushing them through. Obviously it is desirable for students to drive themselves, but in all but the most hopeless of cases, those that can't aren't allowed to fail. <p>As I have a partner who is a school teacher I recently had to listen to them complaining that they weren't allowed to tell a parent in a report that their child is likely to fail because they don't do their work or apply themselves to even trying. No, the child 'isn't going to do as well as we might hope because their work isn't reaching the standards we would like to see'. <p>Now I don't know about you, but as the parent of that child I can't help thinking I would rather be told straight early on, rather than wait for some GCSE results to tell me what I really needed to hear while there was still something that could be done about it. Obviously the child concerned needs to be encouraged but parents and children need to understand the gravity of what they are or are not doing. <p>Emotional wellbeing should not be ignored, but neither should it ever be at the expense of improving a student's academic achievement regardless of the level of study or the level of a student's ability.

I find this argument compelling, but am yet to be convinced through not having not yet read the book. Above all it seems to state that educational ambitions are not instilled by the softer approaches to student support. But it also strays onto an important issue to do with a correlation between knowledge, learning and happiness. Can learning - should teraching - aim to produce happy individuals or is it more preferablke to suggest that teaching ought to produce happy learners, ie those with a desire to learn whatever the consequence of the experience. If the HEI sector's support for the student as a person is actually obstructing their ability and joy in learning then there ought to be some big changes implemented.

As the head of a university counselling service, I think we need to differentiate between different and sometimes competing interests. Good therapy helps people to grow up - take responsibility for themselves, face reality, and learn to relate better to others. Not many people get this far in or out of higher education. Retention means financial gain for educational institutions - and this may sometimes have a bearing on supporting weaker students. Dyslexia is still much under diagnosed in schools because they cannot afford to offer the support needed - independent schools have the resources to allow them to recognise the need, hence the greater representation of such students. The emotional fallout from being told that you are 'not working hard enough', 'not trying' 'stupid' when there is a genuine learning problem can be damaging to confidence in learning. There will always be people who play the system - in any endeavour. Why should this prejudice the many genuine cases?