The school of emotions

It’s midday, it’s finally sunny and almost warm, after the days of the polar storm the children can put their noses outside their classrooms.

They are about twenty, standing in a circle holding hands in the courtyard of Corlears School in Chelsea in lower Manhattan. In their midst LaTasha, the teacher, speaks in an almost musical tone: ‘Is there something you want to tell them? Something not going as well as you would like at home or at school? Or with your friends?”

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Tim is bundled up in an oversized jacket, is eight years old, lowers his gaze and raises a voice: “I don’t like my older brother: he always steals my toys. Roles are assigned: one taller than the others plays the ‘bad guy’ and in the middle of the circle the ‘stealing’ is staged. The teacher leads all stages until Tim regains his smile, the fake brother apologises and everyone rocks back and forth on their imaginary stage.

La Tasha’s is not an empirical experiment but follows to the letter one of the many programmes for “that fundamental subject still missing in American schools”: emotional education. That is, teaching children to deal with what happens around them, to understand their own feelings, those of others, to develop empathy, to tame anger and nervousness. The small revolution that puts emotional intelligence, as defined by psychologist Daniel Goleman’s best-selling book, at the centre of education is based on scientific grounds and is gaining increasing acceptance. Marc Brackett, of Yale University, is one of the most careful scholars of the phenomenon: ‘After years of research and experiments, there is no longer any doubt: we know that emotions can improve or hinder learning ability,’ he explained at a conference. The concept is simple but not obvious: if a pupil has problems at home he will certainly struggle to concentrate on his books, if he quarrels with his classmates he will not be able to pay attention, if he is driven by euphoria or weighed down by sadness it will be impossible for him to progress in his studies.

School is a huge boiling cauldron, from childhood to adolescence emotions travel at lightning speed: learning to govern them becomes decisive. For a long time, teachers (and parents too) were not concerned about this: the general idea was that these skills develop naturally with time, through experience. But studies confirm that this is not the case at all: many never manage to control their moods, they go through their entire school career in a kind of emotional seesaw until they become problematic young men and women. “These are natural perceptions,” someone still tells me, “children learn them by looking around the family. This is nonsense: like all skills, they have to be trained,’ says Brackett, who then adds: ‘It is not enough to shout calmly to get the desired effect, you have to explain to them how to regain control: you have to recognise the problem, deal with it, solve it.

The benefits are assured, experts swear. Not only in their immediate careers as students but also in the future: according to a study by the University of Virginia, emotional education is the key to success in life and at work, then relationships and even health gain. “The positive effects go far beyond a good grade on a test: there are so many that it is almost dizzying,” exults Maurice Elias of Rutgers University.

Many sites have sprung up where one can find behaviour manuals, in blogs fathers and mothers lost in front of unfamiliar terrain find the answers they are looking for, on Google there are more than 8,000 related links (there was one in 1981). Edutopia, the foundation of George Lucas, that of Star Wars, allocates millions of dollars every year to promote these programmes, other non-profit organisations lobby Congress and individual states to make the subject compulsory by law. Illinois, since 2003, is the first state to adopt it, now others are also moving: from California to New York. All are convinced that this is the way to prevent the nightmare of American teachers: bullying, including its cyber version: “If we can teach our children self-control, in twenty years we will have a better world,” assures Jessica, who also teaches at Corlears. Confidence in prevention is also winning over politicians: so much so that Washington has issued a directive to change the line on ‘zero tolerance’ at school. Until now, undisciplined students were punished severely, ranging from expulsion to imprisonment in cases of violent offences: now remedial courses are being implemented, not losing children on the street becomes a priority, and in the hours spent with support teachers, it goes without saying that emotional education is the queen subject.

Billy is a headmaster at a school in Sacramento, he recounts his experience to the New York Times, which devotes a cover of its magazine to the subject: ‘It was all going badly, bad results, indiscipline, fights and similar troubles. So I changed a lot of professors, redid the teaching programmes but still nothing: things were not improving. Then I put the course into teaching and after a very short time the situation improved. I feel better too, even my wife tells me so’.

The exercises and teaching techniques vary: the common trait is physicality, the attempt to make children visualise their emotions so that they learn to recognise them and thus tame them. Pupils have to remember what their face looked like when they were angry with their mother, or when they were celebrating a good grade: having found that expression, they recreate it and stand still for a while. Or they have to colour squares in different shades, each linked to a particular mood and then glue them to the wall so that they have an up-to-date chart of their mood. And they are also asked to animate books, to recite what they have read or themes they have written. Breathing is the other thread that holds them together: much of our ability to manage different moods, especially fear, passes through here. Then the various programmes leave a lot of freedom to the teachers, who have to understand what kind of child they have in front of them: there are those who forget a feeling after a few seconds and those who carry it around for months. “You have to be careful, you are walking in a delicate field: training teachers well becomes decisive,” warn the psychologists.

But not everyone applauds the novelty. Writer Elizabeth Weil raises the alarm in New Republic: ‘They want to standardise our children. I defend their right to be exuberant, original, non-conformist even at the cost of getting hurt. Our schools already do not shine for imagination: now we are running the risk of an emotional orthodoxy’. And an attentive scholar of American schools, Diane Ravitch, agrees with her: ‘The trouble with our educational system is that it does not accustom us to freedom of thought, other than controlling our emotions: they should be unleashed.

The shadow stretches across the Chelsea schoolyard. It is cold and the children hurry back, pushing and screaming in the narrow doorway, LaTasha scolds them, smiling: ‘I don’t think we create robots, we offer a tool to help them feel better. Take English, we teach grammar then each one of them, thank God, puts their heart, their life and their personality into what they write’.

by Massimo Vincenzi (from La Repubblica of 20 January 2014)