Emotions dominate our existence from birth and play a fundamental role in the construction of our personality. Including the teaching of emotional education in curricula could help from childhood to recognize, decipher and choose the way we think, perceive and act.
Last update: June 07, 2020
Emotional education is a response to social demands that are somewhat neglected in ordinary curricula. Among these needs are anxiety, stress, depression, violence, drug use, suicides, risk behaviors, etc. All of this is mostly a consequence of emotional illiteracy.
Emotional education aims to develop emotional skills. By emotional skills we mean the set of knowledge, skills, abilities and attitudes necessary to become aware, aware, express and adequately control one's emotions.
Emotional skills
Emotional skills include emotional awareness and control, emotional independence, social skills, the ability to survive and well-being.
Developing emotional skills requires constant practice, therefore emotional education begins in the first years of life and must be present throughout the entire life cycle.
It should therefore be present among the school disciplines in kindergarten, elementary school, high school, in the family, in the field of adult education, in socio-community means, in organizations, among the elderly, etc. (Bisquerra, 2011 ).
An emotion does not cause pain. Resistance or repression of an emotion, on the other hand, causes pain.
-Frederick Dodson-
Is providing emotional education at school a requirement?
Author of the book Emotional Intelligence (1995) and cofounder of CASEL, Daniel Goleman is one of the most authoritative voices in the field of emotional education. He makes it clear that we have to learn to control emotions, especially stressful and disabling ones.
We always step on the ground of emotions, even if we are often unable to identify which tiles we are moving on. Everything we learn is influenced by our emotional state.
We live with emotions from birth and they play an important role in building our personality and in social interaction. We experience emotions in any space and time, with family, friends, with our acquaintances, with our peers, at school, with our teachers, etc.
School is a context of learning and experiences in which emotions develop. Educating means promoting integral development, developing cognitive, physical, linguistic, moral skills, but also affective and emotional ones (Cassà , 2005). The contents of emotional education that can be worked on in school are the following:
- Emotional awareness. Become aware of your state of mind and knowing how to manifest it through verbal and / or non-verbal language. At the same time knowing how to recognize the feelings and emotions of others
- Management of emotions. The ability to regulate unpleasant impulses and emotions, to tolerate frustration and to know how to wait for gratifications.
It is very important to understand that emotional intelligence is not the opposite of intelligence, it is not the triumph of the heart over the head: it is the intersection of the two.
-David Caruso-
Emotional education for well-being
Well-being has a personal and a social dimension and working on this dimension will help us to overcome the myopia of individual well-being. This will orient us towards a complete development according to our organizations. The goal is social well-being in interaction and personal well-being (Bisquerra, 2011).
Recent research has helped to demonstrate the positive effects of emotional education. The general conclusion is that the systematic development of emotional education programs capable of bringing together minimum quality criteria and dedication time has a considerable impact on the integrated development of pupils.
It must be borne in mind that emotional skills are among the most difficult to acquire. An ordinary pupil in a term can learn to solve problems of second degree equations.
However, making impulse control an automatic stimulus in anger situations (and preventing violence) takes years of training. This is one of the challenges of emotional education: to dedicate the necessary space to it.
It could be of great help to carry out weekly sessions of 45 to 60 minutes throughout the course, for several years (Bisquerra, 2011).
Change your attention level and you will change your emotions. Change your emotions and your attention will focus elsewhere.
-Frederick Dodson-
