Let the souls of our children sing - Leonora Langley

As the stigma and taboos around mental health issues soften, unparalleled numbers of people are seeking counselling, psychotherapy and life coaching. Millions of viewers are transfixed to the emotional traumas played out in reality TV shows, soaps and dramas such as Homecoming, The Bodyguard and Wanderlust. As part of this awakening to the importance of emotional well-being, many parents, educators and carers of the young are bravely attending to their own wounds and are now more determined than ever to mitigate the wounding of the children in their care.
Langley believes that the greatest impediment to young people's development as free-thinking, spiritually-enlightened and emotionally-responsive, integrated human beings is that mainstream education is still based on a nineteenth-century model emphasising cognition and logic, which can be counted and measured, over the enrichment of children's souls which is beyond measure. The existing anachronistic structure desperately needs a new paradigm. At a time when arts education is seen as an increasingly marginal activity in state schooling, she argues that it is only by putting children's innate creativity and curiosity at the heart of our educational mission that we can hope to re-engage the vast number of young people switched off from the current system and avoid the poverty of imagination and the absence of hope which are the root causes of so many contemporary ills.