Educating the emotions from Gradgrind to Goleman

Abstract

Charles Dickens famously satirised the rationalism and mechanism of utilitarian educational ideas through the figure of Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times. Even in the nineteenth century there were very few people, in reality, who would have agreed that the education of children should be a matter of purely intellectual, rather than emotional, instruction. The surge of interest in emotional intelligence and emotional literacy since the 1990s has given this topic new currency but, on all sides of the debate, it is mistakenly assumed that the idea of educating the emotions is something new. The present article retrieves one part of the forgotten history of emotional education by examining nineteenth-century British discussions about the proper places of passion, feeling and emotion in the classroom, in the context of debates about utilitarianism, religion and the role of the state. The views of educationalists and philosophers, including Samuel Wilderspin and John Stuart Mill, are considered and compared with more recent policy debates about 'Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning'. The article concludes by asking: Who are the Gradgrinds today?

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