" We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. " ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Schools don’t foster the vital life skill that is emotional intelligence. No. Better to instill in our children since day 1 that their emotional health ain’t amount to much the moment they step onto the school playground. They don’t want you to be in touch with your emotions – they want you to be in touch with their program, one which sadly doesn’t aim to better us as human beings.
Broken homes, broken school system, broken society, when are we going to repair this human brokenness? Perhaps the day we will start investing in teaching students how to become whole after they’ve been torn apart to pieces. Your IQ is like the tip of the iceberg. In other words, if you don’t possess what’s underneath (a.k.a emotional abilities), you will have a hard time surviving in this cut throat world.
Fostering empathy into students doesn’t demand more than it requires teaching them about the order of operations. (math concept for those of you wondering what on earth I’m talking about) Talking about order, it wouldn’t hurt to take some time to examine the order of priority we’ve given to the subjects kids are being taught in school.
It isn’t normal that learning about life’s most important matters is nowhere to be found on schools’ priority list. Maybe if instead of teaching kids about constellations we’d teach them about the importance of their internal value, there’d be less hurt and bullying outside the classrooms.
Normalizing healing and human suffering shouldn’t be only therapists’ jobs. The truth is that most people have never been taught how to properly cope with their emotions and their pain. It’s all cool to display your 15 diplomas in your doctor’s office, but the fact is that you may still be a little kid in the emotional department. But hey, I get it, it’s not as if you needed to be a champ in the domain of emotional intelligence to get your PhD!
Maybe people wouldn’t be projecting their pain onto one another and rubbing their wounds against each other if they’d be taught early on that their pain isn’t to be secretly swiped under the rug. Our pain bleeds out into our lives and our relationships as a result of not having been felt and healed.
Yet schools, and also parents, keep on drilling into kids’ minds that having the perfect checklisted childhood is what matters the most. This only contributes to perpetuate the giant fat mess we’re caught up in. People leave their emotional health unchecked because they’ve never been taught in the first place that it mattered.
I find it quite curious anyone is surprised at the nature of students’ mental health, when those departments, guidance counselors and the like are the first to be cut or outright missing when it comes to budgets. Couple that with issue of school’s lack of funding for teachers in most cases to uncover the real reason kids are as unhealthy in every sense. I can’t speak to change, but I do the best I can for my kids.
Absolutely true!
I get the school provides a foundation for the rest of our lives. Provides structure when we probably need it. But not providing a long and lasting relationship with our emotions places that foundation on shaky ground. The slightest vibration can turn the ground to liquid and the foundation and building we placed upon it can fail.
I wonder how many children could have walked different paths in life if school would have addressed this subject along the way.
My Chris is back on track!!😘
Wow you put it so well man! That last line is profound! I badly wish I could know how different things could have been!
I wish I could be more active right now. You have been doing such great work and I have not gotten the chance to engage on it. My normally mundane job has been busy and challenging and has thrown me off my game.
Just want to heap some more kudos at you, as always, you do wonderful and thought provoking work. I am supremely jealous of your talent for words and your ability to produce quality work at such an impressive rate.
Aww Chris! Thrown you off the game in a good way? Your comment is just too sweet and thoughtful! You make my day! Thank you so much it means more than you know sweetheart! Xox
Well that's the way it is...
Not that the teachers necessarily understand how to interact with people and handle their emotions either.
We absolutely should cover things like this in school. I've posted about it myself. No one these days knows how to talk to each other or handle their emotions. We don't teach kids how to actually live.
Hell, we don't even teach them how to balance their check book or do their taxes.
We should teach these things. We should have people kids can talk to, more than just a counselor they need a pass to see. We need to make it normal to talk to people about our emotions and concerns. We need to teach people how to really connect and handle their emotions. I think a major problem with these shootings is because of people that aren't necessarily insane...but they are broken. We need to make emotional and mental health something normal that is dealt with in schools and society.
And not just have it where therapy is just something that rich people do. We need to come up with ways to heal society, because we let this get so bad. If we had dealt with teaching kids how to live and interact in society, it might be easier to deal with. But, now we have to figure out how to patch society in addition to fixing schools.