This has nothing to do with putting Mills and Boon on the national curriculum. A shame, really, as it would be fun to see how a group of 15-year-old boys would deal with such questions as “Why did Nurse Samantha deliberately brush her leg against Doctor Damien while he was stitching up a patient?”
No, this is about learning to recognise, control and express our emotions, and teach our precious charges to do so, too. This will result in controlling anger, negating conflict, increasing self-confidence, handling relationships and generally producing harmony where there was discord, order where there was chaos, world peace and justice for all.
It sounds terrific until you realise it is based on a false premise: that we are all positive, lovable people who want only the best for everyone. It is only their failure to see this that leads The Kids From Shame to wreck the school, destroy equipment (if there is any) and try to kill each other and any teacher brave enough to appear without an escort of classroom assistants trained in unarmed combat.
We know that we are paragons ourselves, but the idea that everybody else is as well is patently ridiculous. Only the hopelessly naive could really believe that the paranoid psychopaths we work with every day (and that’s just the staff) will be transformed into a regiment of saintly Doctor Damiens by a process of emotional self-examination.
Much more likely, they will come to recognise that what they really feel is an atavistic need to smash everything and kill everyone. And some twit has just given them permission.
