Schools Are Failing Emotional Boys

Eton School Head, Tony Little, is to be complimented. He has fired the debate on childrens’ emotional development beautifully. To his great credit, he is urging those involved in education to take on board that boys can be more emotionally aware – and more vulnerable, than girls. Also he is championing the fact that just as youngsters come in different shapes and sizes, they can each carry their own level or intensity of emotional awareness. He urges too that boys need to be taught differently to girls, even if educated in the same schools.

More importantly, he advocates that the level of a boy’s emotional awareness can condition the way he learns. He believes that boys reveal greater emotional reactions under stress. Also, boys perform better when they have one point of focus as a target. Meanwhile girls perform best when they are multi-tasking.   

My view is that teaching methods will have to change and change quickly to take heed of John Little’s comments, if more boys are to avoid becoming adults with inadequate emotional patterns in place. These will most often dog them throughout their adult life certainly until they have cause to re-visit and re-frame the patterns.

I believe education at school and university will have to become much more attuned to the emotional needs of the students. Subjective teaching of subjects in one form of intellectual presentation to whole groups will work less and less well. It has long been recognised intellectually that young people learn differently, one to another. Their emotional education and learning processes need to be incorporated into the curriculum in the same way.

More and more, research on human behaviour obliges us to accept the dramatic impact of human emotions on our learning processes, judgements and decision-making powers. Acceptance of the linkage of our emotional intelligence with our intellectual powers as human beings becomes unavoidable.

Reading, writing, and numeracy have long since been acknowledged as critical intellectual components to lay down the basic foundations on which students can build subsequent learning programmes. Now the ways we feel about learning new tasks will need to be incorporated too as a core emotional component.

The current disconnect between intellect and emotion in education has to be cured. To be more contentious still, too few in education are willing to accept that the inability in a student to read is as likely to be down to the way they are being taught rather than to any inherent disability. What has now come over the horizon is the challenging proposition that a students inability to ‘emote’ effectively is equally down to the way they are taught by teachers and parents - or perhaps more to the point, were not taught but in ignorance, copied their peers.

Gerry Neale

Author of  cognitive Novel ‘Squaring Circles: From The Dark Into The Light’
Available at www.amazon.co.uk