From emotional and psychological well-being to character education: challenging policy discourses of behavioural science and ‘vulnerability’

Abstract

It is difficult to challenge a strong consensus that governments must intervene in a worsening crisis of emotional and psychological well-being. The article relates rising estimates of problems and corresponding calls for intervention in educational settings to the increasingly blurred boundaries between a cultural therapeutic ethos, academic research and policy. The recent revival of an old discourse of ‘character’ reinforces a search for better measurement as the basis for behaviour change strategies reflected in government interest in new ideas from behavioural science. In response to C. Wright Mills’ injunction that a sociological imagination should try to understand how social change reflects changing images of the human subject, the article explores the educational implications of these development. It argues that the depiction of well-being and character as a set of behaviours and the parallel drive to measure them are rooted in a diminished view of an essential human vulnerability. This legitimises the imposition of psychological interventions that avoid moral and political questions about the nature of well-being and character and the conditions needed to develop them.