Teachers can’t heal every child’s scar – and parents shouldn’t expect them to

I spoke to this week to Shannon, who’s a shiny, new Victorian graduate teacher. He’s just a few short weeks into his first year as a fully fledged, full-time educator. After getting a taste for the job with a contract at the end of 2024, he’s enthusiastic, yet sober about the importance of the task ahead of him.

Even further, he’s a male early childhood teacher. That’s an endangered species these days, but one crucial for many impressionable kids bereft of other positive male role models.

Teachers are there to educate children – they can’t resolve every problem in their lives.Credit: Getty Images

We desperately need Shannon nurtured, supported and kept in the teaching caper.

Yet, he bemoaned his first experience of a pupil-free day held just after Australia Day. It was with one of the therapeutic models that have become so trendy in our schools. Their unquestioned proliferation is a threat to the careers of teachers like Shannon, and it’s time it was called out.

The fundamental premise of therapy-based approaches is that our kids are broken. All of them. And they’re not.

While it’s true that they’re all affected by the omnipresent scourge of technology and that many are carrying backpacks loaded with poverty and family dysfunction through the school gates each day, not all of them are traumatised and in need of laborious individualised interventions. Very few are.

These therapeutic fads, guised as teaching methodologies, are determined that we should see pain and suffering in every child and the manifestation of this in schools is that we lower the expectations we have of them – academically, developmentally and behaviourally.

And it’s leaving teachers like Shannon in a precarious position. After being told to develop an individual therapeutic plan for every single one of his year 1 students, his first response was: “I’m not doing it. I just can’t.”

According to Shannon, this was the response of most of the staff who had just been instructed by a youthful, evangelical trainer in a branded polo shirt that they’re doing it all wrong by focusing on the class as a whole.

This presenter was telling teachers how to suck eggs … with zero years of teaching experience.

Shannon has a decision to make now. Ignore the advice and practise outside the school’s demands, thereby risking being viewed us underperforming or unprofessional, or dedicate his entire energy to scrambling madly around his classroom each day chasing individual needs.

To attempt the latter, like some educational plate-spinner at the circus, will fail. That failure, shame and disappointment, experienced daily, has the potential to drive Shannon from the profession and toward one where he might experience a little daily progress.

It’s not even good for the students to begin from a position that every kid in the class is so messed up or emotionally fragile that they need a daily-dose, individual therapeutic rescue.

Controversial US academic Abigail Shrier speaks to this in her 2024 book Bad Therapy. Shrier contends that constantly diving like secret service agents on students experiencing any difficulty or misfortune conditions them to cultivate sadness and helplessness.

The pouring of attention on every one of life’s trials is fuelling a national rise in mental health disorders and anxiety while also explaining why our teachers are observing plummeting rates of resilience, executive functioning and motivation.

It seems that there’s no better excuse for a lack of student effort than being broken beyond the possibility of repair.

Psychologists, social workers, pundits, politicians and even parents know far less about what works at the classroom coalface than our teachers do. Their advice should be appreciated and then duly ignored in deference to the lived experience of real teachers.

Teachers know that making the job of teaching impossible is no way to produce better outcomes. If we really want better learning results, better mental health data and better citizens produced in our schools then it begins with letting teachers take a collective, not individual, focus.

After all, a school is a collective noun.

For eons these critical institutions have helped all-comers point on a slightly better life trajectory, without the responsibility to heal every student’s scar or attend to every societal ill.

It is not the responsibility of our schools, or our Shannons, to overcome entrenched developmental risks such as child abuse, neglect, poverty, obesity and the pervasive force of social media.

It’s their job to create an environment to where kids smile occasionally, forget a few of their worries, and see themselves as capable learners when they try and where they’re responsible for their own futures.

The last thing our society needs is to build a generation of kids who suppose that their teacher’s attention, their next prescription or a counselling session are their only way to find a productive future.

It’s the last thing Shannon needs too.

Adam Voigt is a former principal and founder and CEO of Real Schools.

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