Education Reform: Emotional Learning

Monday, August 24th, 2009

Think back to grades 3 through 12. What dominated your thoughts as you sat at lunch? In algebra class? Waiting for the bus? The answer for most people I talk to is always the same: “I was thinking about other people and myself.”

I would venture to say this is true of our experience as adults as well, as we continually process emotions at work when developing relationships with colleagues, or thinking about the relationships we have at home with family.

As a teacher I observe that students focus on subject matter to varying degrees, but it is clear that children’s happiness as human beings depends significantly on their ability to have successful relationships with other people. The same is true for adults. Why, then, have we failed to bring explicit emotional learning into mainstream education?

A place to start might be to ask: what is the function of K-12 education in America? Education as it now stands in our country functions to prepare children for the careers they will assume in society as adults, and so we teach them the intellectual skills necessary to be successful in the workforce. Math, reading, writing, science and history teach children the skill sets they need to organize and manage jobs relevant to these subject areas.

Aside from a handful of progressive programs and schools on the fringe, our education system has remained relatively unchanged for the past 50 years, which is ironic given the rapid pace at which the world is globalizing around us.

I agree that academic excellence is of great importance because it enables us to train a workforce that fuels our economy and serves as an integral part of our society.

What I advocate for is a greater vision: a significant reform in our country’s education system that puts emotional learning on par with academic excellence. I believe that we can have both, and that to do so would result in a nation of adults who are much happier individuals, and an economy that is strengthened because of it.

The reason emotional learning results in happier individuals is because it allows people to gain a self-awareness that provides stability. The confidence in knowing oneself—fears, weaknesses and strengths, allows a person to better communicate their needs to others, and allows a person to better understand the needs of another individual. In the classroom, one example I have found to be transformative is helping children feel comfortable exposing a mistake they have made, rather than covering it up.

Emotional learning in schools would not teach children how they should feel, because that is up to an individual to determine. Rather, emotional education would teach children the explicit communication skills needed to gain self-awareness and to communicate joy and pain to other people in order to build stronger relationships.

Connecting to other people to build strong cooperative relationships is essential to teaching sustainability now and in the future, and for this reason as well, emotional learning belongs at the core of our education system.

-Kristen von Hoffmann