Manners, and Other Ghastly Stuff

Government plans to introduce "emotional intelligence" into the national curriculum have met with derision from Daveybloke's spokesbloke on schools, Nick Gibb: "This kind of stuff is ghastly. Schools have really got to focus on the core subjects of academic education and teaching children how to learn," he said. Apparently the programme of Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) has had "a dramatic effect on improving behaviour in primary schools, including on attendance records and marks", which doubtless lies at the root of Gibb's abhorrence. When one has no particular policies of one's own to hawk, the last thing one wishes to see is the success of a policy adopted by one's frère and semblable on the other side of the looking-glass. A little more to the point, perhaps, is the speculation by the Independent's political editor that "the policy is likely to provoke accusations that this is the latest example of the nanny state, and that the Government should leave it to parents to drum into their children moral values"; but then, the main objection to the nanny state is surely that it is inappropriate in the case of adults. Children have to be socialised one way or another; and as long as fools continue to reproduce themselves, and parents have to work full-time in order to make ends meet, somebody else will have to help the process. An obsessive focus on "core subjects" and "teaching children how to learn", whatever that may mean, is unlikely to do much for anyone's academic achievement if classes are thinned by nonattendance or disrupted by rowdy behaviour. How much help their new-found emotional intelligence will be to the children themselves, once they inherit the world which the generation of Tony has built for them, is a different matter. "We are gentle, we are kind, we work hard, we look after property, we listen to people, we are honest, we do not hurt anybody," may be a handy enough mantra for keeping order in the classroom; but it is to be hoped that its introduction into secondary schools will be accompanied by some sort of perspectival enhancement on the potential for problems for business and humanitarian interventionism should ideas like "we are honest" and "we do not hurt anybody" be taken to unnecessary extremes.