Making intellectuality and emotionality development meet

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): The imbalance between education toward intellectuality and education towards emotionality that has plagued the entire world has been discussed in many formats for many years. Yet no sign of significant improvement is in sight. Schools throughout the world still give much more attention to the development of the rational mind than that of the emotional mind. Only schools which enjoy the services of reform-minded educators with solid scientific capability can afford to conduct systematic experiments. These experiments lead toward methods of bringing together academic development on one hand and emotional and social development on the other. In this kind of school, there is effort consciously carried out to guide children toward a unified goal of being intelligent and wise at the same time.

Is being intelligent enough? Not anymore. If you believe all the stuff about a knowledge explosion and all its consequences, you will probably have to accept the notion that life, in these modern times, is indeed no longer a simple matter. It has been said that you have to educate yourself throughout your entire life to keep abreast with ongoing developments. Lifelong education has become imperatively important to keep ourselves from premature senility. It has also been said that to live wisely and intelligently in these modern times, we need to equip ourselves with several kinds of literacy: functional literacy, cultural literacy, information literacy, scientific literacy, computer literacy, and lastly, according to Daniel Goleman, emotional literacy.

What is emotional literacy, and what is its significance in modern life?

Daniel Goleman defines "emotional literacy" as knowledge about the ways of handling emotion. The skills that grow out of such knowledge are called "emotional intelligence" which Howard Garner from Harvard University describes as comprising self-awareness and impulse control, zeal and persistence, ability to motivate oneself, and empathy and social deftness. Like any other skill, these emotional and social skills have to be learned. No one can become intelligent emotionally without going through the proper exercises. Just like the fact that no one can swim or play music without first doing exercises in swimming or music.

Inability to handle emotion in modern times can have fatal consequences. Goleman contends that modernity has its price, i.e. rising rates of depression. Just as the 20th century put humankind into an age of anxiety, the next millennium is taking us into an age of melancholy. Experiences in all modern societies have indicated that youth who cannot handle their emotions have ultimately fallen into various kinds of depression. This, in turn, has brought about juvenile delinquency problems, such as juvenile violent crime, which include rape, murder and suicide, but also other problems such as teenage pregnancy, eating disorders, alcoholism and drug addiction.

Adults who cannot handle their emotions fare poorly in modern life and in modern societies. Goleman mentions that modern times call for two moral stances: self-restrain and compassion. Adults who fail to develop these two emotional skills usually end up having problems in their marriage, in parenting, in their careers, and also in their physical health. Such adults usually do not have the capacity to raise their children properly and, as a result, these children will grow up with a severe emotional malaise.

Does it mean that among normal people there are no problem of emotional deficiency? That there is no individual among normal people whose emotion just runs out of control now and then? Of course not. Normal people can also go berserk if pitted against unbearable conditions for too long. Goleman mentions, as an example, the act of getting angry. Every person gets angry now and then, but normal people get angry only for real and obvious reasons. People with emotional deficiencies often get angry for imagined reasons or for no reason whatsoever. There is still another difference. Quoting Aristotle, Goleman maintains that when emotionally mature people get angry, they "get angry with the right people, to the right degree, at the right time, for right purpose, and in the right way." They just do not let their anger lash out at anyone around them for an indefinite period of time.

The challenge that has been put before us in this regard is how to manage our emotional life with intelligence. This is especially true during these trying times. Is it wrong to be angry in the face of all the greed, injustice and blatant abuse of power in our society? Of course not! Again, as Aristotle once said, our passions, when well executed, have wisdom. They guide our thinking, our values and our survival. The problem is not with emotionality, but with the appropriate emotion and its expression. The question is how to bring intelligence in our emotion, how to bring civility to our streets, and how to bring care to our communities.

In spite of all the evidence -- some of which is very dramatic -- emotional intelligence constitutes a very important characteristic of life in these modern times, still throughout the world schools generally pay only scant attention to it. Schools in general still consider academic competence much more important than emotional and social competence. International studies have been conducted, for instance, to compare achievements of 13-year-olds in mathematics and science, but no study has ever been done to compare skills in self-control and building up interpersonal relationships. This educational discrepancy has led many of us into the habit of confronting modern dilemmas with an emotional repertoire tailored by urgent situations of the past. Perhaps today this is the primary reason why our economic system is oriented toward the future, whereas our political system is still locked in the past. For generations our nation has suffered an imbalance between our rational capacity and our capacity to control our emotions.

How do we solve this problem?

I don't know. This is a very difficult problem, especially because modes of emotional expression and patterns of interpersonal relationships are culturally determined. Promising programs promoting emotional literacy have been developed by psychologists and educators around the world, but these programs cannot just be borrowed. We have to know first, for sure, how our basic cultural contour really looks like at the moment. What is the accepted pattern of relationships between parents and children, teachers and pupils, functionaries and citizens, and between husbands and wives? Only after we have clear answers to questions like these, can we proceed to design programs aimed at helping our children achieve emotional intelligence within our culture.