Online Books and Articles Archive - File 5
Excerpts from Goleman's 96 book:
The Cost of Emotional Illiteracy
It began as a small dispute, but had escalated. Ian Moore, a
senior at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, and Tyrone
Sinkler, a junior, had had a falling-out with a buddy,
fifteen-year-old Khalil Sumpter. Then they had started picking on
him and making threats. Now it exploded.
Khalil, scared that Ian and Tyrone were going to beat him up,
brought a .38 caliber pistol to school one morning, and, fifteen
feet from a school guard, shot both boys to death at point-blank
range in the school's hallway.
The incident, chilling as it is, can be read as yet another sign
of a desperate need for lessons in handling emotions, settling
disagreements peaceably, and just plain getting along. Educators,
long disturbed by schoolchildren's lagging scores in math and
reading, are realizing there is a different and more alarming
deficiency: emotional illiteracy.1 And while laudable efforts are
being made to raise academic standards, this new and troubling
deficiency is not being addressed in the standard school
curriculum. As one Brooklyn teacher put it, the present emphasis
in schools suggests that "we care more about how well
schoolchildren can read and write than whether they'll be alive
next week."
Signs of the deficiency can be seen in violent incidents such as
the shooting of Ian and Tyrone, growing ever more common in
American schools. But these are more than isolated events; the
heightening of the turmoil of adolescence and troubles of
childhood can be readfor the United States a bellwether of
world trends in statistics such as these.2
In 1990, compared to the previous two decades, the United States
saw the highest juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes ever;
teen arrests for forcible rape had doubled; teen murder rates
quadrupled, mostly due to an increase in shootings.3 During those
same two decades, the suicide rate for teenagers tripled, as did
the number of children under fourteen who are murder victims.4. .
.
These alarming statistics are like the canary in the coal miner's
tunnel whose death warns of too little oxygen. Beyond such
sobering numbers, the plight of today's children can be seen at
more subtle levels, in day-to-day problems that have not yet
blossomed into outright crises. Perhaps the most telling No one
problem stood out; ... Children, on average, were doing more
poorly ... [feeling] anxious and depressed ... [acting]
delinquent or aggressive.
data of alla direct barometer of dropping levels of
emotional competenceare from a national sample of American
children, ages seven to sixteen, comparing their emotional
condition in the mid-1970s and at the end of the 1980s.8 Based on
parents' and teachers' assessments, there was a steady worsening.
No one problem stood out; all indicators simply crept steadily in
the wrong direction. Children, on average, were doing more poorly
in these specific ways: [exhibiting] withdrawal or social
problems . . . [feeling] anxious and depressed . . . [evidencing]
attention or thinking problems . . . [acting] delinquent or
aggressive. . .
While any of these problems in isolation raises no eyebrows,
taken as a group they are barometers of a sea change, a new kind
of toxicity seeping into and poisoning the very experience of
childhood, signifying sweeping deficits in emotional competences.
This emotional malaise seems to be a universal price of modern
life for children. . . . No children, rich or poor, are exempt
from risk; these problems are universal, occurring in all ethnic,
racial, and income groups. Thus while children in poverty have
the worst record on indices of emotional skills, their rate of
deterioration over the decades was no worse than for middle-class
children or for wealthy children: all show the same steady slide.
. . .
This is not just an American phenomenon but a global one, with
world-wide competition to drive down labor costs creating
economic forces that press on the family. These are times of
financially besieged families in which both parents work long
hours, so that children are left to their own devices or the TV
baby-sits; when more children than ever grow up in poverty; when
the one-parent family is becoming ever more commonplace; when
more infants and toddlers are left in day care so poorly run that
it amounts to neglect. All this means, even for well-intentioned
parents, the erosion of the countless small, nourishing exchanges
between parent and child that build emotional competences...
Rethinking Schools: Teaching by Being, Communities that Care
As family life no longer offers growing numbers of children a
sure footing in life, schools are left as the one place
communities can turn to for correctives to children's
deficiencies in emotional and social competence. That is not to
say that schools alone can stand in for all the social
institutions that too often are in or nearing collapse. But since
virtually every child goes to school (at least at the outset), it
offers a place to reach children with basic lessons for living
that they may never get otherwise. Emotional literacy implies an
expanded mandate for schools. This daunting task requires two
major changes: that teachers go beyond their traditional mission
and that people in the community become more involved with
schools. . . .
. . . Many [emotional literacy] courses and the momentum for
their spread come from an ongoing series of school-based
prevention programs, each targeting a specific problem: teen
smoking, drug abuse, pregnancy, dropping out, and more recently
violence. . . . The W.T. Grant Consortium's study of prevention
programs found they are far more effective when they teach a core
of emotional and social competences, such as impulse control,
managing anger, and finding creative solutions to social
predicaments.68 . . . [An effective prevention program's] main,
ongoing subject is the core competence that is brought to bear on
any specific dilemmas: emotional intelligence.
This new [focus on emotional intelligence] makes emotions and
social life themselves topics, rather than treating these most
compelling facets of a child's day as irrelevant intrusions. . .
. While the everyday substance of emotional literacy classes may
look mundane, the outcomedecent human beings is more
critical to our future than ever. . . .
The classes themselves may at first glance seem uneventful, much
less a solution to the dramatic problems they address. But that
is largely because, like good childrearing at home, the lessons
imparted are small but telling, delivered regularly and over a
sustained period of years. That is how emotional learning becomes
ingrained; as experiences are repeated over and over, the brain
reflects them as strengthened pathways, neural habits to apply in
times of duress, frustration, hurt. And while the everyday
substance of emotional literacy classes may look mundane, the
outcomedecent human beingsis more critical to our
future than ever. . . .
An Expanded Mission for Schools
. . . Emotional literacy expands our vision of the task of
schools themselves, making them more explicitly society's agent
for seeing that children learn these essential lessons for
lifea return to a classic role for education. This larger
design requires, apart from any specifics of curriculum, using
opportunities in and out of class to help students turn moments
of personal crisis into lessons in emotional competence. It also
works best when the lessons at school are coordinated with what
goes on in children's homes. Many emotional literacy programs
include special classes for parents to teach them about what
their children are learning, not just to complement what is
imparted at school, but to help parents who feel the need to deal
more effectively with their children's emotional life.
That way, children get consistent messages about emotional
competence in all parts of their lives. In the New Haven schools,
says Tim Shriver, director of the Social Competence Program,
"if kids get into a beef in the cafeteria, they'll be sent
to a peer mediator, who sits down with them and works through
their conflict with the same perspective-taking technique they
learned in class. Coaches will use the technique to handle
conflicts on the playing field. We hold classes for parents in
using these methods with kids at home."
The optimal design of emotional literacy programs is to begin
early, be age-appropriate, run throughout the school years, and
intertwine efforts at school, at home, and in the community.
Such parallel lines of reinforcement of these emotional
lessons not just in the classroom, but also on the
playground; not just in the school, but also in the homeis
optimal. That means weaving the school, the parents, and the
community together more tightly. It increases the likelihood that
what children learned in emotional literacy classes will not stay
behind at school, but will be tested, practiced, and sharpened in
the actual challenges of life.
Another way in which this focus reshapes schools is in building a
campus culture that makes it a "caring community," a
place where students feel respected, cared about, and bonded to
classmates, teachers, and the school itself.12 . . .
In short, the optimal design of emotional literacy programs is to
begin early, be age-appropriate, run throughout the school years,
and intertwine efforts at school, at home, and in the community.
. . Whether or not there is a class explicitly devoted to
emotional literacy may matter far less than how these lessons are
taught. There is perhaps no subject where the quality of the
teacher matters so much, since how a teacher handles her class is
in itself a model, a de facto lesson in emotional competence or
the lack thereof. Whenever a teacher responds to one student,
twenty or thirty others learn a lesson. . .
While many teachers may be reluctant at the outset to tackle a
topic that seems so foreign to their training and routines, there
is evidence that once they are willing to try it, most will be
pleased rather than put off. In the New Haven schools, when
teachers first learned that they would be trained to teach new
emotional literacy courses, 31 percent said they were reluctant
to do so. After a year of teaching the courses, more than 90
percent said they were pleased by them, and wanted to teach them
again the following year. . . .
Does Emotional Literacy Make a Difference
. . . A revealing moment came when I was observing a seventh
grade class in social development in the New Haven Schools, and
the teacher asked for "someone to tell me about a
disagreement they've had recently that ended in a good way."
A twelve-year-old girl shot up her hand: "This girl was
supposed to be my friend and someone said she wanted to fight me.
They told me she was going to get me in a corner after
school."
But instead of confronting the other girl in anger, she applied
an approach encouraged in the classfinding out what is
going on before jumping to conclusions: "So I went to the
girl and I asked why she said that stuff. And she said she never
did. So we never had a fight."
The story seems innocuous enough. Except that the girl who tells
the tale had already been expelled from another school for
fighting. In the past she attacked first, asked questions later
or not at all. For her to engage a seeming adversary in a
constructive way rather than immediately wading into an angry
confrontal is a small but real victory.
Perhaps the most telling sign of the impact of such emotional
literacy classes are the data shared with me by the principal of
this twelve-year-old's school. An unbendable rule there is that
children caught fighting are suspended. But as the emotional
literacy classes have been phased in over the years there has
been a steady drop in the number of suspensions. "Last
year," says the principal, "there were 106 suspensions.
So far this year we're up to March and there have been only
26."
These are concrete benefits. As children advance through the
curriculum there are discernible improvements in the tone of
school
But apart from such anecdotes of lives bettered or saved, there
is the empirical question of how much emotional literacy classes
really matter to those who go through them. The data suggest that
although such courses do not change anyone overnight, as children
advance through the curriculum from grade to grade, there are
discernible improvements in the tone of school and the
outlookand level of emotional competence of the girls
and boys who take them.
There have been a handful of objective evaluations, the best of
which compare students in these courses with equivalent students
not taking them, with independent observers rating the children's
behavior. Another method is to track changes in the same students
before and after the courses based on objective measures of their
behavior, such as the number of schoolyard fights or suspensions.
Pooling such assessments reveals a widespread benefit for
children's emotional and social competence, for their behavior in
and out of the classroom, and for their ability to learn
[Appendix F]:
*Emotional Self-Awareness . . .
*Managing Emotions . . .
*Harnessing Emotions Productively . . .
*Empathy: Reading Emotions . . .
*Handling Relationships . . .
One item on this list demands special attention: [in
"harnessing emotions productively"] emotional literacy
programs [were shown to] improve children's academic achievement
scores and school performance. This is not an isolated finding;
it recurs again and again in such studies. In a time when too
many children lack the capacity to handle their upsets, to listen
or focus, to rein in impulse, to feel responsible for their work
or care about learning, anything that will buttress these skills
will help in their education. In this sense, emotional literacy
enhances schools' ability to teach. Even in a time of
back-to-basics and budget cuts, there is an argument to be made
that these programs help reverse a tide of educational decline
and strengthen schools in accomplishing their main mission, and
so are well worth the investment.
[In the long run, emotional literacy] courses seem to help
children better fulfill their roles in life, becoming better
friends, students, sons and daughtersand in the future are
more likely to be better husbands, wives, workers and bosses,
parents, and citizens. . . . Being able to put aside one's
self-centered focus . . . opens the way to empathy, to real
listening, to taking another person's perspective. Empathy, as we
have seen, leads to caring, altruism, and compassion. Seeing
things from another's perspective breaks down biased stereotypes,
and so breeds tolerance and acceptance of differences. These
capacities are ever more called on in our increasingly
pluralistic society, allowing people to live together in mutual
respect and creating the possibility of productive public
discourse. These are basic arts of democracy.17 . . .
. . . While not every boy and girl will acquire these skills with
equal sureness, to the degree they do we are all the better for
it. "A rising tide lifts all boats," as Tim Shriver put
it. "It's not just the kids with problems, but all kids who
can benefit from these skills; these are an inoculation for
life.". . .
A Last Word
. . . [Today's] teenagers are the first generation to have not
just guns but automatic weaponry easily available to them, just
as their parents' generation was the first to have wide access to
drugs. The toting of guns by teenagers means that disagreements
that in a former day would have led to fistfights can readily
lead to shootings instead. And, as another expert points out,
these teenagers "just aren't very good at avoiding
disputes."
One reason they are so poor at this basic life skill, of course,
is that as a society we have not bothered to make sure every
child is taught the essentials of handling anger or resolving
conflicts positivelynor have we bothered to teach empathy,
impulse control, or any of the other fundamentals of emotional
competence. By leaving the emotional lessons children learn to
chance, we risk largely wasting the window of opportunity
presented by the slow maturation of the brain to help children
cultivate a healthy emotional repertoire.
Despite high interest in emotional literacy among some educators,
these courses are as yet rare; most teachers, principals, and
parents simply do not know they exist. . . . Of course no program
. . . is an answer to every problem. But given the crises we find
ourselves and our children facing, and given the quantum of hope
held out by courses in emotional literacy, we must ask ourselves:
Shouldn't we be teaching these most essential skills for life to
every childnow more than ever?
And if not now, when?
Notes
Excerpted from Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman.
Copyright ©1995 by Daniel Goleman. Used by permission of Bantam
Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
Footnotes are numbered as they appear in the book.
Chapter 15
1. Emotional literacy: The New York Times (March 3, 1992).
2. Uniform Crime Reports, Crime in the U.S., 1991, U.S.
Department of Justice.
3. Violent crimes in teenagers: Ruby Takanashi, "The
Opportunities of Adolescence," American Psychologist (Feb.
1993).
4. Suicide rates: Health, 1991, U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services, and Children's Safety Network, A Data Book of
Child and Adolescent Injury (Washington DC: National Center for
Education in Maternal and Child Health, 1991).
8. Thomas Achenbach and Catherine Howell, "Are America's
Children's Problems Getting Worse? A 13-Year Comparison,"
Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry (Nov. 1989).
68. W. T. Grant Consortium on the School-Based Promotion of
Social Competence, "Drug and Alcohol Prevention
Curricula," in Hawkins et al., Communities That Care (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992).
Chapter 16
12. Schools as caring communities: J. David Hawkins et al.,
Communities That Care (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992).
17. The arts of democracy: Francis Moore Lappe and Paul Martin
DuBois, The Quickening of America (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1994).
Appendix F Social and Emotional Learning: Results
Appendix F provides program overviews as well as results
summaries and their sources from several social and emotional
learning programs. Pp. 305-309.