Educating the Heart

We live in an environment of life skills crisis which can be conceptualized as a potentially disastrous imbalance between resource and need. In education circles there is abundant discussions of the need to boost academic achievement with solutions given that include boosting provision of textbooks, increasing the number of teachers, and formulating what is perceived as performance enhancing policies. In reality, though, in terms of importance, the need to boost academic achievement runs a distant second to the need to boost life skills. The happiness and success of our students and the productiveness and success of our society depend on the level of our life skills and, as educators, we need to admit, face, and address the challenge of life. Being in the profession of teaching and curriculum development for as long as I have, I can tell students today are radically different from students a generation ago. Students of past generations came to class with basic virtues and life skills such as honesty, courtesy, and perseverance which were nurtured and ingrained within the family or the closely knitted communities. If we fast-forward from that time to today, we find the norm has become dishonesty, rudeness, and impulsiveness arising from fragmented families and communities. Students were sensitive to the feelings of others; today's students too often treat others as objects. An alarming percentage of students have lost the fundamental values of respect, honesty, kindness, and lawfulness. Today they are insensitive; they are hurting, are not sure of their identity and feel lonely. In a nutshell, today's students do not come to school with basic life skills. Compared to students of a generation ago, students today lack basic intrapersonal and interpersonal skills. They are rude, and uncooperative. They lack emotional skills: They act out their feelings without awareness of the feelings. They are not empowered with personal, organizational, and planning skills, and are not exposed to basic citizenship skills. We know that when we learn to deal with the psychological requirements of learners, and when we become sensitive to what makes them want to learn, we can then focus on what they need to learn. “Addressing the needs in the affective domain is more important than cognitive needs”. We need to educate the heart as we educate the heart. A humanistic approach is needed to view the child as a whole and everything that makes him an individual. Instruction in EQ will help students understand themselves and understand others. Instruction in emotional intelligence is not a quick fix or a one-time lesson. Social and emotional learning programs work best when parents and teachers are partners, and that means schools need to bring together parents and teachers in ways to promote behavior that improves communication, empathy, self-awareness, decision-making, and problem-solving. Parents, educators, policymakers, and business people all have a role to play in supporting the social and emotional learning of schoolchildren. It’s a whole new vision of education that says that educating the heart is as important as educating the mind.