Stephen Cenatiempo:
I don’t know how she does it, but she always seems to tap into where I’m going with something on the programme. But we talked earlier about the level of violence being subjected towards teachers here in the ACT. And we know it’s a more national problem, but seems to be worse here than anywhere else. But Clare Rowe, Psychologist and Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs has recently written that schools have become experts in emotion, not education. Clare, never a truer word spoken. Good morning.
Clare Rowe:
Good morning, Stephen. Good to be with you.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
It’s a frightening situation that we seem to have lost sight of what the core function of education is and that is education.
Clare Rowe:
Yeah. I mean, a lot of your listeners may not have been into a classroom for some time. I occasionally go into classrooms, particularly primary school classrooms. There is a huge push in the last 10 years to do what they call emotional literacy, which I’m not completely against. Being able to recognise and express emotions is an important life skill. But you walk into many classrooms today and you’ll see emotion charts, feeling thermometers, daily check-ins, asking children to identify exactly how they’re feeling at multiple points during the day, like when they come in from recess, when they come in from lunch. It’s this kind of continual push to, I think, navel gaze a little bit and teach children that every single emotion deserves attention and deserves analysis, which it doesn’t, because another important life skill is to learn that emotions come and go and can’t always be relied on.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
But some of the stats that I was reading out this morning suggest that we’re failing at this because we’ve got unprecedented levels of female teachers being sexually propositioned by male students. Now, clearly that’s an emotion they need to get under control.
Clare Rowe:
Yeah. Well, one would think so, exactly. So it’s not actually translating into outcomes. And I would say a lot of this for mental health education and interventions in general in the last 20 years, certainly when it comes to kind of programmes. I know I’ve got young kids in primary school and they’ve put through something called the anxiety project. And I tried to actually take them out of it and say, “I don’t actually agree with this.”
My kids are happy-go-lucky kids at the moment. They don’t need to be told about anxiety. And it was the psychologist doing that, that the school found quite perplexing. But a lot of these interventions aren’t actually resulting in the outcomes we want. I mean, if we spent this much time and money on something else like breast cancer research or breast cancer intervention and it didn’t result in a lowering of breast cancer rates, we’d stop. And all that mental health education and intervention does is result in more and more diagnoses and people struggling with their mental health. So we need to take a step back and think this isn’t actually working.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
I guess the difficulty is though finding that balance because most people I talk to of my age bracket or high, I think, “Well, in my day, we didn’t put up with this and we seemed to turn out all right.” And sometimes I question whether I did turn out all right, but can we possibly find the balance? Are we equipped to find that balance point?
Clare Rowe:
Well, I don’t know. I certainly think we’ve gone too far. Certainly, I’ve been accused of, “Clare Rowe wants to take us back to the 1950s where we all kind of put up and shut up and don’t talk about our emotions.” And as a psychologist, that could not be further from the truth, but you’re right, we have to recalibrate to something where there is a certain amount of emotional literacy going on, but it doesn’t come at the behest of everything else.
And as you started off saying, teachers are there with the remit and the goal to teach. That’s why they got into the profession. They want to teach maths and English and science and history, not because they want to spend a growing proportion of the day interpreting emotional checklists. And it’s this kind of idea of continually scanning oneself to see if they’re okay. And that overlooks what we know in decades of research that people actually generally feel better about themselves when they’re purposeful, when they’re looking outward, when they’re helping other people. When they’re doing something for their community or a charity, or they’re helping a friend, that actually we know makes you feel good about yourself, not the continual looking inward.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
I have an app on my phone that counts my steps and calories and stuff, and it pops up every couple of days telling me, “Hey, check in and tell me how you’re feeling.” I’m annoyed because I had other things to do is how I feel.
Clare Rowe:
And we also have this negativity bias, we call it. And so if you continually ask someone, “How do you feel? How do you feel?” If you ask me that through my working day, eventually, the answer is going to be negative if you keep asking me. It’s like kind of scanning your body for any aches and pains. You suddenly start to notice everything and it becomes amplified, and that’s what can happen with emotions.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
We used to call that hypochondria once, didn’t we?
Clare Rowe:
Absolutely. Still there and it happens emotionally. Absolutely.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Clare, good to talk to you. We’ll catch up again soon.
Clare Rowe:
Thanks, Stephen.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Clare Rowe, Psychologist and Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.
This transcript of Clare Rowe speaking on the Breakfast Show with Stephen Cenatiempo on 2CC Sydney from 6 July 2026 has been edited for clarity.
