Emotional Education: Integrating Feelings and Intellect

Posted on Nov 30, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

ITEM 5: Education of the Feelings

Feeling: Concept

Formal education emphasizes knowledge acquisition, often separating it from emotional development. This leads to:

• Emphasis on skills for economic ends, treating education as a product.
• Disconnect between skills development and personal/emotional growth.
• Limited critical examination of values in educational language.

Understanding and Feeling

• Understanding and feeling should be integrated.
• Educating a person involves refining feelings and promoting understanding.
• Students should make sense of and objectify their feelings.
• Making sense involves both feeling and intellect.

Initiatives and Opinions

• UNESCO (2007) Kronberg Declaration: Promotes values-oriented education, emphasizing social and emotional skills.
• Steve Biko: “The path to coexistence is in the humanization of education.”
• Martin Luther King: “Our scientific product has outrun our spiritual power.”

Feeling, Emotion, and Knowledge

Social and emotional education is based on values; some emotions are perceived as better than others (e.g., love over hate).

Emotion

• Emotion: “Mental state that adjusts priorities, influencing actions, memory, and attention” (Oatley and Seema, 1988).
• Emotion: “Feelings of meaning and justice” (Pring, 2005).
• Emotions involve feelings (anger, fear, happiness) and value judgments.
• Emotions are valuable and contain data; “The absence of emotion destroys rationality” (Damasio).
• Education must consider the role of feeling and reason in human happiness.

What are Feelings?

Feelings are the origin or totality of emotions, encompassing all conditions and effects of feeling.

Feelings are equivalent to emotions.

Human feeling is interconnected with rationality; “Thoughts are powerless without passion, feeling without reason is blind” (Carr, 2008).

Intelligence is based on feeling, creating sentient intelligence (Zubiri).

Emotions and feelings are rarely independent of cognitive content.

Expressions of feeling contain a cognitive core, involving judgments about the world.

Regardless of cognitive involvement, emotions have an undeniable affective basis.

Educating the Emotions

Emotions are evaluations and can be educated.

Emotions reflect a person’s state of being:

• Too emotional: emotions dominate judgment.
• Too “cold”: lacking appropriate emotions.

Firm decisions influence feelings, modulating neuronal patterns (neural plasticity).

Media Software for Emotional Education

To manage affections:

1. Consider the nature of the dominant affection (somatic, mood).
2. What’s Up?: Determine what motivated the feeling.
3. Why do I feel this way?: Assess if it’s good or bad, real or apparent. Weigh its impact on personal values.
4. Is it worth feeling, and why?: Act according to the conclusions.

Educating a person engages both feeling and intellect.

Education should enable students to make sense of and objectify their feelings.

“We need to explore with students the perennial questions about what it means to be human, how to become so, and how to be better people” (Pring, 2008).

Access to Moral Sentiments: Family Education

Fundamental

• First-time kernel and effectiveness.
• The future condition of the subject.

Inevitable

• Family transmits values and life goals.
• Family is a point of reference.

There is growing interest in Science Education for Family Literacy.

The Family and Moral Development of Children

Meaning of Family

• Difficulty: Polymorphism, variety, complexity.
• Definitions:

• “Small groups whose primary residential internal relations are socially institutionalized by rules of kinship” (Pastor, 2002).
• “Intergenerational union, where the older generation educates the younger, living stably and lastingly” (Elzo, 2004).
• “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 16.3).

Family Diversity

• Emerging traditional extended families.
• Current traditional nuclear families.
• Single parents: widowhood, divorce, temporary, single motherhood, adoption.
• Stepfamilies.
• Homosexual families.
• Headless families.

Family Educational Styles

Democratic: High communication and affection, adapted control requirements.

• Consequences: High self-esteem, competence, social skills, self-control, autonomy, long-term rewards.

Permissive: High communication and affection, low demand and supervision.

• Consequences: High self-esteem, low social competence, poor impulse control, lack of motivation, immaturity, happiness.

Authoritative: Low affection and communication, rigid rules.

• Consequences: Low self-esteem, poor social competence, aggressiveness, impulsivity, heteronomy, short-term rewards.

Negligent: Low affective involvement and communication, inconsistent rules.

• Consequences: Low self-esteem, low social competence, low impulse control, low motivation, disrespect for rules, emotional instability, behavioral problems.

Functions of the Family for Child Education

• Host function.
• Dialogical-communicative function.