Socialisation as Behaviour Management and the Ascendancy of Expert Authority

Book excerpt: Annotation. Where schools in the past used to introduce young people to the norms and values of society, today it seems that schools are there primarily to deal with students' difficult behavior. The school has become a course in Life Skills. Students have to be taught to control their behavior. This shift in priorities has been fed largely by experts in education and other fields, and in so doing they have often pitted schools against parents. This is one of the dangers of the trend, but this kind of therapeutic education also leaves insufficient time and resources for teachers to intellectually stimulate their students. This title can be previewed in Google Books - http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9789056295707.