The Emotions

I would like to speak about teaching emotions at schools. First of all, I’m going
to talk about emotions and what we know about them, then I’ll focus on why we
don’t teach emotional intelligence at schools in Spain and compare it with other
countries. Finally, the consequences of some emotions in adulthood will be
mentioned as well.

What we know about emotions nowadays.

Emotions are something that everybody feels. Although there are many types,
some of which can be very complex, we have 6 core emotions which were
defined by Paul Ekman who discovered that they are universally
understandable for every single person, regardless of culture, they are:
Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Surprise and Anger. We can also mix
them, for example when we receive a present that we were not expecting we
can feel surprised and happy at the same time.
It is said that by knowing your emotions, you can know yourself and you will be
able to know how to react or deal with different situations in a healthy way.
However, some of them are not easy to identify and happen to us automatically.
So, why don't we teach emotional intelligence at school?

The importance of emotions at school.

With this in mind, I think emotions need to be taught (tot) to children from an
early age. I have personal experience of how significant they are for them. I am
a preschool teacher and every day in our class, we have a circle time session
so that we can understand how each child is feeling. This helps us give them
the correct emotional support throughout the day. Moreover, we try to do
activities to work with emotions, such as role plays or class discussions.
Emotions are extremely important not just because they help children know
themselves, but also because they support them to have better relationships
too.

Why are emotions not important at schools?

It seems to be the case for some governments and families who are against
teaching emotions, because they are more focused on other subjects such as
Maths or Literacy. It appears that some parents only want their children to
achieve high grades, it doesn’t matter if they are happy, sad, or depressed.
Nowadays, we need to pay attention to how children are reacting to different
situations. For example, here in Spain, when the pupils have to do an exam, the
children feel stressed and they start to forget the knowledge they have, so we
should give them techniques to avoid this unnecessary strain and tension. This
could be done by changing the word “exam”. In the education system in Finland
children do not take any exams until they reach the age of 12. Therefore, they
are not encouraging stress or anxiety from the early years. Furthermore, in
Denmark, children are trained in empathy, for a good relationship with other
people, I think this is fantastic! Probably, if we had copied their system, we
would have a better emotional education.

The consequences of some emotions in adulthood.

Despite all of this, we have to say that we have progressed remarkably in
emotional intelligence. Some schools are dedicating time to emotions and we
are more conscious in our society that they are important for us. We can also
find research about adulthood, psychologists found that when many people
have difficulties such as anxiety, nerves, aggressiveness, etc. they are doing so
because they have not known how to handle their emotions adequately from the
beginning. However, if we want to change this, we could also take into account
the high price of psychological treatment, if the price were cheaper, everyone
could have access to it.

Conclusion
To sum up, I strongly believe we should deal with emotions from an early age
because in the future, this will help us feel better about ourselves and the rest of
the people who are around us. Emotions are vital and that is why we should
teach or treat them to make a better society.