You are looking at posts that were written on April 1st, 2007.
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The educational question of the century is, “Are we even teaching the right things?” Daniel Goleman’s research on emotional intelligence confirms that high IQ has a low correlation to high life success (Goleman, Daniel, 2005). Emotional intelligence. Bantam Publishing.The most important factors in life are not as much mental as emotional. Emotional Intelligence includes :
Self-Awareness - Knowledge about our personal strengths and weaknesses and our impact on others.
Self Control - Trustworthiness, responsibility, and impulse control.
Goal Achievement - Willingness to sustain creative efforts to achieve worthwhile goals.
Empathy - Awareness of, and caring about, others’ needs, feelings and concerns.
Social Wisdom - Ability to influence, negotiate, communicate, collaborate and form lasting bonds.
These skills are not controversial. They are not part of a religious or political agenda. The research validating their essential utility is overwhelming. These skills are the common sense equipment any parent would want their children to have. They are fundamental to a successful, happy individual life and a high-functioning society.
But millions of our children are not learning these skills or gaining emotional maturity. In many homes, these skills are neither taught nor modeled. This is not just an inner city problem. In lots of middle class homes, family life has disintegrated to community living arrangements. Parents are little more than roommates living high-speed, separate lives while their children live in entertainment-saturated luxury suites, isolated from adults, operating with digital identities and running with their tribal peer groups.
We’ve reached a critical mass. For society to work, we must institutionally teach emotional intelligence to our children. Only then will they have the self-awareness, self-control, self-discipline, and selfless motivations to be high-functioning humans. There is no mystery about how to teach these skills. We know how. We just have to want to.