'Culture of therapy'

Activities such as circle time bring a 'culture of therapy' into the classroom and are damaging children's minds, a leading educationalist has said. Dennis Hayes, visiting professor at the Westminster Institute for Education, argued that anxieties that did not previously exist were being placed in the minds of young children by an over-emphasis on the emotional and said that whereas circle time used to be a chance for pupils to sit down at the end of the school day and talk about what they had learned, now children are being encouraged to sit around and talk about their feelings instead.