It is truly bizarre that, given emotions are at the centre of our lives, students leave school almost completely ignorant of them, says Jamie.
I admire Sue Nicolson for speaking up again about child suicide, years after having tragically lost her own son.
Sadly, mental and emotional health still seem a secondary issue in New Zealand and an area where we are quickly falling behind other parts of the world. Without major action, tragedies will continue.
In 2008, I was fortunate enough to win the nationwide Massey University Speech Writing Contest with a speech on the need for emotional intelligence (EI) in the New Zealand curriculum.
In hindsight it was a hollow victory, despite the $1000 award. What I had really hoped was that it would start a conversation across the country. It didn’t.
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Simply put, EI is the ability to understand and regulate our own emotions. It also covers recognising different emotional states in others and responding to them appropriately.
My analysis was very simple: a lack of ability to understand and control anger leads to violence, injury, crime, and divorce, to name a few. A lack of tools to deal with unhappiness leads to suicide, drug abuse, including alcohol, and various other addictions (crime, health problems and benefit dependency are frequent secondary effects).
When we can’t deal with these two emotional realities, let alone jealousy, stress, or anxiety, the result is not just people’s lives, but also upwards of perhaps a billion dollars a year. This is money which could be creatively used to help our communities in all sorts of ways.
In my speech, I wrote that if we don’t implement EI in our curriculum, “some more insightful government of another country will, and in due course we will ‘Ooh’ and ‘Ahh’ at their system, before eventually, years later, implementing our own version”. Little did I know that the United States was already well ahead of me.
GETTING RESULTS
In 2003, Illinois passed the Children’s Mental Health Act, which called for the incorporation of social and emotional development into the education system.
Teachers now work within a social and emotional learning (SEL) framework from the beginning of elementary school till the end of high school. Regions are allocated “family advocates” whose role it is to work with and educate parents on the SEL standards and how they can be “reinforced in the home”. Other states are following.
Further east, after years of development and planning, Yale University opened its own Center for Emotional Intelligence in 2013. Its central programme, the RULER Approach, has reached over 500,000 elementary to high school students.
The results have been astounding: reductions in depression, anxiety and bullying, and improvements in academic performance and school climate and relationships.
Since 2008, I have learned a lot about the political process by approaching a number of MPs about the idea. Melissa Lee was in favour and passed my proposal to Anne Tolley (then Minister of Education) on my behalf. The Minister eventually replied that it was not the government’s job to dictate to schools what they had to teach and that their “positive behaviour for learning” programme was already sufficient.
MP at the time, Dr Rajen Prasad, was also in agreement with EI and said he would try to talk to the new Labour spokesperson of education. Nanaia Mahuta was so supportive she took the proposal to her policy committee, which was split on the issue. The Greens were non-committal but agreed that life skills education was needed till the end of high school.
‘REDUCING PROBLEMS’
As of today, in a poll running on my blog, 70 out of 77 voters have been in favour of EI in high school and only three against.
I often hear concerns, however, that the curriculum is already overcrowded or that introducing EI will cause overworked teachers even more stress. The many possible solutions include making EI a separate subject, integrating EI into existing achievement standards, or hiring more staff to relieve teachers of their burdens.
Also, EI education has been shown to reduce behavioural problems, meaning teachers need to spend less time on discipline. Besides, this shouldn’t be regarded as foreign to our curriculum which already includes “managing self”, “relating to others” and “thinking skills”.
The 564 suicides in New Zealand last year and our high incarceration rates show us that what we are doing is not working. EI is too important not to find room for it.
It is truly bizarre that, given emotions are at the centre of our lives – and if you think about it even our economy, students leave school almost completely ignorant of them.
Without EI in our curriculum, people will continue to be bullied, abused and assaulted, and then through their taxes made to pay for the imprisonment of their victimisers. Addictions will persist. Lives will continue to be destroyed or lost altogether.
Every day our education system is slipping another step behind that of Illinois and Yale University with their future-oriented programmes. EI is not a silver-bullet solution but it is the closest thing the world has to one. I am convinced our government will one day try to catch up. The question is: when?
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