Schools are often where children’s and adolescents’ mental health problems are identified. While there is ever growing demand for mental health support for pupils, such as in-school counselling and mentoring, the focus now – just like for any health problem – should be more on prevention than intervention. Prevention makes sense financially, given that specialist mental health services for […] … learn more→
Author Archives: Kevin
Schools need to start teaching pupils mental health prevention skills – here’s how
Black student activists face penalty in college admissions
Back when I taught at a predominantly white, selective liberal arts college, I came across a book called “Acting White? Rethinking Race in ‘Post-Racial’ America.” In the book, legal scholars Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati argue that in the “post-racial” era, white-controlled organizations prefer to hire “‘good blacks’ who will think of themselves as people first […] … learn more→
Mental health crisis in teens is being magnified by demise of creative subjects in schoo
After the recent report by The Children’s Society that a quarter of 14-year-old girls have self-harmed, many campaigners have called for the root causes of the adolescent mental health crisis to be tackled – rather than just firefighting the symptoms. Resilience lessons, peer mentoring, awareness campaigns and provision of early intervention may be valuable initiatives. But they do […] … learn more→
Residential writing retreats: three wishes for academic output
If academia was a Disney film and I was a street rat (early career researcher) living on the sandy backstreets of Agrabah, who happened to summon a genie, my three top-of-my-head wishes would be: publications, grant money, and a pipeline of non-traditional research outputs. But after the wishes were granted and I was flying away on […] … learn more→
Are there only four kinds of writers?
Self-help books are my secret shame. I can’t resist them, especially if I find myself in an airport bookstore. The siren call of the self-help section means I inevitably board the plane clutching two more paperbacks (which I have no room for at home). My latest secret shame is Gretchen Rubin’s ‘The four tendencies: the indispensable […] … learn more→
Universities creating “Democratic Socialists”
I’ve been slow to accept that our higher education system is turning into, or already is, a mass indoctrination system. Focusing more on the falling standards and mass academic fraud, I’ve perhaps missed that these were simply side effects of the political goal of indoctrination (and thus education is of no importance) rather than the […] … learn more→
Want to solve the world’s problems? Try working together across disciplines
Labor Day is our New Year’s Eve. Rather than vowing to lose weight or spend less time on our phones, as college professors we head into the new school year with a different kind of resolution: to inspire and prepare our students to become agents of positive change. The world’s problems certainly didn’t take a […] … learn more→
Teachers and school leaders: a positive relationship, but one that is weakening
rfp-459 While teachers generally take a good look at the role played by their school leaders, this report also suffers from more marked tensions, as shown by the results of the Militens survey (conducted by CERAPS of the Université de Montréal). Lille and the DEPP, department of statistics of the ministry, with the relay of […] … learn more→
Digitising the historical fight for women’s equality at Cambridge
Two small boxes in the department of archives and modern manuscripts at Cambridge University Library contain a few pieces of detritus from an extraordinary afternoon in Cambridge in 1897. That day, crowds of undergraduates gathered to protest against a change in ordinances that would allow women to be granted degrees and membership of the university. […] … learn more→
Air quality and brightness: what are the challenges for the class of the future?
In France, it is still quite rare to consider school spaces according to their environmental qualities. This is a critical issue, with potential implications for educational success, such as children’s health. As early as 2005, several European studies presented at the symposium of the Réseau Recherche santé environnement intérieur (RSEIN) converged on the following observation: […] … learn more→
