Students increasingly ‘hapless’, say academics
An increasing number of students are unable to cope with the pressure of university life, academics from Oxford Brookes have claimed.
Dr Dennis Hayes and Dr Kathryn Eccleston have said in their book, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, that an emphasis on emotions in education is occurring at the expense of ideas and learning.
Dr Hayes told Times Higher Education: “Turning teaching into therapy is destroying the minds of children, young people and adults.”
The authors claim that criticism in academia is increasingly discouraged, creating a generation of ‘hapless’ and ‘neurotic’ students.
“Everybody looks for a difficulty to declare, like the hundreds of students who register themselves as dyslexic,” said Dr Hayes. “Being dyslexic used to be something that students hid. Now students wear their difficulties as a badge of honour.”
The increased presence of parents on campus is a sign of the ‘infantilisation’ of students, according to the academics.
The question of whether students are sufficiently prepared for university was also raised by Imperial College London’s decision to add a year to its engineering course, in order to teach basic maths skills that haven’t been learnt at school.
Only days ago Imperial announced it would be using its own entrance exams – as well as A-levels - to identify the brightest students.
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