Emotional Health and Social Learning in Primary Education

Introduction: Pressure on Young Children

In today's hyper-competitive world, even young children are subjected to significant pressure to succeed. Getting into the right play group to get into the right preschool to get into the right kindergarten has become a real concern for parents. While in most cases the parents who worry that a child who doesn't make the grade at age five has already fallen permanently behind are simply hoping for the best possible life for their beloved child, they are also overlooking some of the most important aspects of childrearing.

This paper examines the ways in which young children can and should be treated and taught so that not only their intellect is nurtured — certainly an important part of raising children to have successful adult lives in the 21st century — but that their emotional well-being is also taken care of. It investigates why emotional development is essential, not just to help create happy children, but because emotional well-being is an essential part of development for the whole child.

This paper discusses the connection between a child's personal social development (PSD) and his or her learning and achievement levels, focusing on the ways in which personal social and health education (PSHE) can be integrated into the curriculum to promote emotional development — and, as a direct result, improve learning and achievement.

As we explore the connections between learning and emotional health, we must be careful not to fall into the trap of considering intellectual achievement and emotional balance to be entirely different and unrelated. The idea of a split between "left brain" and "right brain" activities, or between traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine perspectives, is both false and fundamentally limiting. Instead of relying on these stereotypes, we will examine the actual ways in which young children develop and the complex ways in which intellectual and emotional vigor are related to each other.

Schools across the United States are increasingly focusing on standardized testing, finding ever-new and ever-more-rigorous ways to determine how much knowledge children are acquiring and retaining. While there are legitimate questions about such tests — for example, whether they are biased against members of certain racial groups or against children from lower-income families — those questions are not the focus of this paper.

Achievement, Learning, and Intelligence

For the purposes of this discussion, we will stipulate that standardized tests are now widely used in schools to determine the degree to which children are learning certain facts, and that there is at least some connection between those tests and the actual knowledge a child possesses in certain fields.

What is clearly missing from the tests administered under the authority of teachers, schools, school districts, and states is any meaningful assessment of students' emotional progress. This gap exists in part because, as difficult as it is to assess traditional intelligence or IQ, it is even more difficult to assess a child's "EQ," or Emotional Quotient. This does not, however, mean that there are no means of measuring emotional and social maturity, or that there is no clear consensus among behavioral scientists about what normal emotional development should look like in young children.

The prevailing theory of intelligence for much of the past century — and one that many people still find persuasive — was that there is a single, centralized "general intelligence." The researcher who popularized this idea was Charles Spearman:

British psychologist Charles Spearman was one of the first important theorists to tackle the study of human intelligence, introducing an early method of factor analysis. In 1904 he authored his General Intelligence Theory, in which all cognitive activities share a common general intelligence factor (g). In addition, there are also specific abilities (s) that require different levels of this general intelligence.

This theory closely resembles the way intelligence is commonly understood by most people — the idea that there is only one intelligence, measurable perhaps by IQ tests, that determines levels of intellectual ability.

The idea of a general intelligence remains popular, no doubt in part because our everyday experiences lead most of us to conclude that we can tell whether the people we interact with are, in general, smart or not. It rarely occurs to us that some of the people we might dismiss as dim are in fact still suffering the effects of inappropriate teaching methods from their early years. They may have been so deeply traumatized or isolated by teachers — or even parents — insufficiently concerned about their emotional well-being that their intellectual capabilities, along with their inherent human curiosity, became stunted.

An increasing number of educators and researchers share the view that schools at all levels must pay closer attention to students' emotional development. Their concerns go beyond efforts to boost self-esteem. In a sense, they are talking about the survival skills needed to participate effectively as citizens in a democracy: "All adolescents have basic human needs that must be met if they are to grow up into decent, caring, informed citizens."

A number of researchers have also created alternative ways to conceptualize and measure intelligence — and it should be noted that not all models of intelligence contradict one another; many can in fact be used in tandem. These alternative models also carry within them implications for how best to teach children.

Emotional Intelligence and Its Development

The following widely accepted definition captures the core concept of emotional intelligence:

Emotional intelligence (EI) is sometimes referred to as emotional quotient or emotional literacy. Individuals with emotional intelligence are able to relate to others with compassion and empathy, have well-developed social skills, and use this emotional awareness to direct their actions and behavior. The term was coined in 1990 by psychologists John Mayer and Peter Salovey. In 1995, psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman published the highly successful Emotional Intelligence, which built on Mayer and Salovey's work and popularized the EI concept.

Mayer and Salovey argued that there are four distinct factors that compose each individual's emotional intelligence:

First, the ability to identify emotions — both those one is feeling oneself and the probable emotions of those around one. Second, the ability to use one's emotions to assist in thinking through a situation and in making appropriate decisions about how to act. Third, the ability to understand one's own emotions, and later the emotions of others — and especially to understand how one emotion tends to lead to another. For example, the relief at finding that a loved one who was feared missing is indeed safe quite often transmutes very quickly into annoyance or anger that the person caused such fright. As adults we understand this complex emotional switch, but it is something we had to learn as children. Fourth, the ability to manage and control our own emotions, and to know how to deal with the emotions of others.

One reason that many teachers and parents may not be overly concerned with teaching children social and emotional skills is the belief that such skills are "natural" — something all humans will acquire proficiency in, just as all non-disabled humans learn to walk. Certainly making friends seems in some senses more "natural" than calculus, but humans can do both because of the ways evolution has shaped our brains, and both improve significantly with practice.

Moreover — and this is the central point of this paper — helping children acquire emotional competence not only allows them to learn other subjects more quickly, because they possess the confidence and sense of well-being needed to attempt and master new skills, but developing emotional and social skills also has neurological ramifications that make it biologically easier for children to learn mathematics, language arts, and science.

Goleman notes that research shows children can learn to be emotionally competent. Perhaps most importantly, the timeline for developing the "neural architecture" that helps children handle emotional impulses is comparatively long: the areas of the brain involved in these decisions develop throughout childhood and early adolescence, giving schools a wide window of opportunity.