Should schools focus more on emotional skills than academic proficiency?

The debate about EQ vs. IQ is an age-old one! There has also been a lot of discussion around building emotional skills in students. So, what is EQ? Emotional Intelligence (otherwise known as emotional quotient or EQ) is the ability to understand, use and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict. The upbringing and nurturing of our children is done by two agencies –the home and the school. And when the home and the school are in tandem, we find the children are stronger, more confident, more resilient and generally are more happy. How do we then work towards building the EQ or the emotional quotient of children? As an educator of more than 3 decades, I firmly believe that these are built not in isolation, but while the process of teaching and learning is going on, and both at home and in school.

Surprisingly, when it comes to stress, even young children say they are “stressed out”, about a test, about a dictation, about a speech that they have to give and usually unwittingly this stress is built up by home and by school. So what do we do to relieve this stress? I think assessments, dictations, speaking and listening should all happen in the course of teaching. So the idea is not to replace academics with building of emotional intelligence but to embed it in the course of academic pursuits to assess and evaluate children without causing stress. So such children, in such schools will be relatively stress free because there is no build up of tension about an assessment or an evaluation.

An important skill for the 21st century has been accepted as one of collaboration and communication, and I think in schools most educators try and build teams which have children of varying levels of strengths and weaknesses so that they all work together and learn to share and divide work in such a way that the outcome is the desired one. In the course of this collaboration, children learn to effectively communicate with each other, empathize with the different skills of each member and work on strengths and weaknesses in such a way that the team works well. For example, in the course of an academic pursuit, if a teacher is doing a project or she is helping build a model, dividing the work in such a way that children learn to understand each other, they learn to not constantly compete but collaborate to build something. I think increasingly the world needs collaborators, team workers, people who can work together, people who can help each other and not just people who can push everyone aside and try and reach the first position.

In my opinion a good school and a good teacher should weave in the elements of emotional intelligence, emotional quotient within the fabrics of academics. So teaching good communication through languages, teaching them to diffuse conflicts through case studies, offering situations where collaborative work can be done in science projects or in building something new in computers or in setting up an app. Unknowingly and unwittingly without putting emotional intelligence in a separate box, we are teaching our children to be emotionally strong and resilient.

What the world needs today, is people who are caring, empathetic, who carry other people with them while having a certain academic background which is going to help them get somewhere. So the issue is not of EQ v/s IQ, what we need to do is build in elements of emotional quotient in the academic fiber so that EQ and IQ are enmeshed together and create strong, brave and resilient, caring and sensitive global citizens who can work together to create a better world.

(Aditi Misra is the Director Principal of DPS Gurugram. Views expressed are personal. )