“According to Kraft and Grace (2016), the structural transformations in the economy are increasingly compelling education systems to ‘prepare students with a broader and more complex set of fundamental skills than the traditional domains of reading writing and arithmetic.'”(Weston 2018).

The “fundamental skills”, outside of the three Rs (reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic), that the Weston article believes schools should help students to develop, are categorized as either intrapersonal and interpersonal. Intrapersonal skills have to do with “behavior and emotional management”, and interpersonal skills have to do with “communicating and collaborating with other individuals”.To that effect, schools are increasingly taking on the responsibilities of modern psychotherapists, many of whom treat patients with a style of therapy known as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT focuses on teaching the patient to manage their psychological issues with proven behavioral strategies. These strategies generally involve developing the patient’s intrapersonal and interpersonal skills up to the point that these skills can compensate for the mental health issues that the patient is suffering. We can conclude that modern school teachers and modern psychotherapists have a similar responsibility to explicitly teach students/patients the inter/intrapersonal skills necessary for them to thrive.

The article states, several times, that there has been an ongoing increase in the prevalence of psychological/mental health issues amongst the American student body and the American populace, as a whole. For that reason, it is becoming increasingly necessary that teachers and schools counterbalance this increase in mental health crises by becoming more well-equipped to deal with the mental health issues of students. The end result is a sort of convergence between the work of the teachers, in regard to preparing the students, generally, to deal with the outside world, and the work of therapists, to prepare their patients to deal with the outside world. On the path of this convergence, schools have begun to incorporate parallels to CBT in their curricula meant for the general population of the student body. For example, ICE, my student teaching placement, has a behavioral and emotional management class, referred to affectionately as the “feelings” class, which (as I understand it) replaces one of the 10th graders gym periods every week.

Is this an adaptation, by schools, to a changing society? At some point, the class that taught “real-life” skills was called Home Economics, but I have yet to meet anyone younger than my age group who has been through that or a similar course. It seems like a new set of “real-life” skills, involving inter/intrapersonal management, has superseded Home Economics type classes, in importance to the process of creating a student body that is well equipped to deal with modern life. It follows that teachers have less responsibility to teach students how to manage a home, but more responsibility to teach students how to manage their and other’s “feelings.”

This situation is an interesting example of how changes in schooling can be a direct response to changes in society. In my opinion, these specific changes in mental health schooling/pedagogy are an example of the educational system working well. By these changes in schooling, the educational system is rapidly and accurately responding to the needs of our changing world.