........................Emotional Intelligence

by Daniel Goleman

Published by Bantam Books

New York, 1995

352 Pages (hard cover) $23.95

It's finally gotten to the point where someone has decided to write a book pointing out the value of helping children to understand and handle their feelings. I'm not sure which is the good news and which is the bad news.

Drawing on Howard Gardner's now familiar notion of "multiple intelligences," psychologist/writer Daniel Goleman places emotional awareness and expression where they rightfully belong - at the center of a model of real intelligence. Goleman defines "emotional intelligence" as "aptitudes for living," a combination of motivation, persistence, self-control and zeal, and he says that kids who develop these attributes are far more likely to realize their potential than kids who do not. In other words, intelligence is not genetically fixed, as some would argue, but rather is largely a learned function whose successful development depends a great deal on emotional well-being.

The author readily acknowledges that this is not a revolutionary concept, but claims that he now has the science to back it up; and so the first half of Emotional Intelligence runs through the recent and astounding research on the structure of the brain. Goleman starts by pointing out that once upon a time B. F. Skinner and the behaviorists had succeeded in virtually banning the emotions from being a subject of scientific study, and that even Gardner had chosen to more or less ignore them, focusing instead only on cognitive functioning. I was sorry to find that Goleman makes no mention, as Joseph Chilton Pearce did extensively in Evolution's End, of recent research which shows the heart literally to be a thinking organ working in close communion with the brain; but then again, popularizers tend to stick to middle of the road stuff.

Goleman's style is journalistic. He uses sensational stories gleaned from the newspapers to demonstrate how serious a pickle the society is in and to reinforce his thesis that much of the trouble - the violence, crime and abuse - is symptomatic of how much we have ignored the dynamics of emotion in modern life.

So far, so good. But then Goleman, in the book's final section, goes on to describe model school programs from around the country which are teaching "emotional literacy" to children. Now I realize that objecting to such a thing would be tantamount to arguing against motherhood; but, quite frankly, there's something about the idea, and even this clever new term, which frightens me. What a sad commentary on today's world that there has to be a didactic curriculum to "teach" children to identify their feelings and to be empathetic. Isn't this an indication of the increasing artificiality of modern life? - with everything one step removed from its original source of meaning - like classroom lessons in emotions and empathy.

My problem with professionally engineered, pre-packaged solutions like these is that they have the invisible effect of reinforcing the very problem they're purporting to solve. Why not just allow kids and adults to set up a community where they create their own rules and where they all have an equal stake in the time they spend together each day? Remove the artificial authority, the sorting and grading and all the restrictions on movement and association and they will begin to teach themselves and each other how to recognize, understand and appropriately express their feelings, and how to work out their differences more or less to everyone's satisfaction.

Short of that, I guess we need a book like Goleman's to teach adults how to teach kids how to be "emotionally literate." Oh well.

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