The Other Kind of Smart

"What they call 'social and emotional knowledge' – the ability to read other people, manage our own emotions and thereby master social situations – doesn't have to be imparted solely through the cut and thrust of lived life. It can be taught, they say, like trigonometry or French grammar." - Drake Bennett, Dallas Morning News, May 3, 2009.

One of the ideas to which I'm irrationally attached is that our program of compulsory education (K-12) should contain more psychology. More specifically, students should be taught more about human behavior and motivation, child development, and critical reasoning and reasoning errors. In an idealistic way (that probably comes from my own passion to understand the human mind), I think that we could turn out more thoughtful, emotionally-aware graduates - who are better prepared for the challenges of adult relationships, responsibilities, and parenting - by adding some basic psychology and applied critical thinking to the average school curriculum.

So I was pleased to see Bennett's recent opinion piece, which expresses part of that sentiment. Bennett's piece is more well-researched than anything I've ever put together, and he does a good job of pulling together both pro and con arguments for teaching social and emotional knowledge skills in schools. Interestingly, one of the arguments against teaching emotional awareness is that "[i]f you know how to understand and manipulate other people's emotions, it can turn into something Machiavellian" - a quote attributed to Moshe Zeidner, co-author of What We Know About Emotional Intelligence. I'm going to take just a moment to share my semi-formal gut-reaction protest of that idea - 'And do you really think ignorance might be a better alternative?'

From a humanist perspective, don't we need to understand more about what our flaws are and how they hamper us, in order to overcome them without relying on supernatural imperatives about what is right and wrong? If I have a better understanding of you and what motivates you, and if I have cultivated the ability to have empathy toward you, am I more or less likely to misunderstand you? Assuming that misunderstandings and the inability to empathize drive a good portion of our ugliness toward our fellow man, shouldn't we be looking for opportunities to cultivate better social and emotional awareness in ourselves and in our children?

Before I start thumping the pulpit too hard, let me back down and point out one of the more compelling con arguments that Bennett mentions - the idea that we might unintentionally be creating a type of emotional conformity about what emotions are 'right' or 'wrong'. Anything that is systematized for mass consumption is likely going to backfire in some way. Would we be indirectly reinforcing ideas about certain emotions being 'bad'? Would this lead to an increased desire to suppress those emotions, via psychopharmocology or other artificial means? And what would be the ultimate cost of that?

Whatever your opinion about what might happen if emotional awareness skills were to be taught on a large-scale, the results of such teaching is showing that "emotional-learning classes can make kids better at controlling themselves when upset" and "less likely to assume hostility in ambiguous social situations."

That sounds hopeful and promising.