Emotional Literacy - The Missing Piece

Excerpts from Maurice Elias Interview

In an interview with The Guidance Channel, Maurice Elias of The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning said he considers emotional literacy to be the missing piece of modern education.

Elias talked about the skills developed through social and emotional learning:

• An awareness of and ability to recognize feelings in yourself and others
  
  
• Self-regulation of emotion
  
  
• Motivation
  
  
• Empathy and perspective taking
  
  
• Social skills needed for effective interpersonal relationships

and about abilities that make us human:

the media and the fast pace of society are actually working against the way that human beings work their best. For example, interpersonal relationships are things that can't be "surfed" and can't be "scanned." These are things that take time. You have to look at somebody for a few seconds to get some clue about how they are feeling. Yet in our current society, we're training people visually to stay on the surface, to move very quickly, and to go from place to place in fractions of seconds.

Read the entire Maurice Elias interview.