Session Information
13 SES 14, Long Paper Session
Long Paper Session
Contribution
This paper summarises my doctoral study on emotions and education. That enquiry focusses on secondary schooling in the policy context of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE). Whilst we now aspire to an educational system that produces ‘successful learners, responsible citizens, confident individuals and effective contributors’ (CfE, SEED, 2004), educational research has not yet paid much attention to the construct of emotions or to how an understanding of emotions can help us produce such individuals. In order to explore emotions and their relationship to justice and education, I draw on a philosophical account of the composition of emotions and their importance to well-being, dignity and personhood. My particular focus is on compassion because, of all the emotions, compassion has been regarded as a sound basis on which to deliberate about the value of external goods and appropriate action in private and public life. Compassion, Nussbaum argues (2001:387), requires an appropriate education in connection with a sound theory of concern. Education in compassion needs, I assert, to be constructed so that we are aware that notions of humanity can be derailed by negative emotions that include some people but exclude others, or that divide us on the basis of non moral categories. Repression, too, of emotions can also corrode well-being. Demonstrating that the emotions of men and women are gendered, often with harmful results, my work notes that moral education in many cultures seeks to cultivate compassion amongst women to a greater extent than it does men, particularly in relations of love, friendship and care. The difference between men and women in their emotional expression is the underlying factor of their appraisal of what is of value to their wellbeing and that of others. I suggest that we could begin to eliminate differences between the sexes on this basis if appraisals of what is important to a good life were taught equally to all. Equal access to emotional resources, engendered through good developmental processes, learned early in childhood and supported in schools, might begin to help us eradicate inequalities and their attendant injustices. However, compassion alone , is not enough and it is not, of course, a complete moral theory (Nussbaum, 2001:399). It provides, nonetheless, a bridge from the self to others, reducing the distinction between disparate groups of people and differences between the sexes. While there have been great efforts to de-gender the curricula, assumptions about the innate capacities of the sexes still persist and I argue that, starting from early years education, we should cultivate in our pupils the capacity to have, to express, and to understand emotions that shape the landscape of mental and social lives, so enriching emotional wellbeing. Moreover, my claim is that particular emotions, especially compassion, do not belong to a particular sex but are, rather, expressive of what it means to be a dignified human being. At issue, I suggest, is how we educate all children to have healthy emotions that are ethical, proportionate, discerning, and deliberative and which have ethical action as their goals.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Nussbaum, M.C. (2001) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M.C. (2010) Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scottish Executive Education Department (2004) A Curriculum for Excellence - The Curriculum Review Group, Edinburgh: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2004/11/20178/45862. Solomon, R. (1999) The Joy of Philosophy – Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life, New York: Oxford University Press.
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