This book explores the problems involved in touching children in an educational environment. It uses real-life examples taken from groundbreaking research into the mentality of today s risk culture, and highlights a maddening state of affairs in which ordinary well-meaning professionals feel they cannot offer even very young children basic levels of comforting or affection.

This fascinating and long-overdue book examines the no-touch pandemic in early years settings, by use of extensive interviews with practitioners, parents and pupils, which:

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This book offers a critical and deconstructive account of global discourses on education, arguing that these overblown 'hypernarratives' are neither economically, technically nor philosophically defensible. Nor even sane. Their 'mythic economic instrumentalism' mimic rather than meet the economic needs of global capitalism in ways that the Crash of 2008 brings into vivid disarray. They reduce national education to the same 'hollowed out' state as national capitalisms, subject to global pseudo-accountancy and fads. The book calls for a philosophical and methodological revolution,...