" 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.