Blog

Updated July 27th 2023

Educators need to put more focus on developing a child’s Emotional Intelligence, giving them the skills to assist them while in school, as well as to prepare them for the adult world.

These skills include communication and coping skills as well as helping them to build their confidence.

I remember when I was 11 years old sitting in class, and someone spotted a pool of liquid on the floor under the chair of another girl in my class.

It was class time, there was no liquid to drink and she had not split anything, if you get my drift. Everyone in the class started pointing and laughing. This young girl was humiliated. Her reaction was a mixture of fear, anger and sadness.

This girl was generally being treated badly by her classmates. She was excluded from everything in the playground, was being passed cruel notes, calling her a ‘freak’ and was generally having a terrible time of it. On reflection, her accent would have been perceived as different to the rest of us, because she had spent the first few years of her life in a different country. I think, most likely, that she was singled out based on this.

This type of exclusion and bullying is also not uncommon in the workplace, when children become adults.

Call me weird, but I remember at that time in school thinking it was strange how they didn’t teach us how to protect ourselves, how to understand our emotions, how to be confident, how to make friends.

Einstein is said to have written ‘Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school’.

Good point! How much specific information do you remember from your time at school? Or maybe I should be asking, how relevant is any of it to your life now?

Often those who have been bullied in school, see that pattern re-emerging later in life. Alternatively they become the bully themselves. Much of the behavior in the workplace echoes exactly what happened in school. What’s worse is that it takes only one person to be the bully, or one person to be negative or one person to be in resistance. Eventually many people in the organisation will be living from a similar mindset. We’ve all heard of the herd or mob mentality.

In my humble opinion, educators need to think about giving children and teenagers the skills to assist them while children in school, as well as to prepare them for the adult world. These skills include communication and coping skills as well as helping them to build their confidence.

Many of the skills needed are very different to the skills that you or I ever would have thought we needed back when we were school age, until we became adults and realized the world can be a tough place, where we often don’t feel heard, or we feel blamed, or attacked for doing the wrong thing, or for just not being in the ‘IN’ crowd.

As we can’t turn back time and revisit our school days (phew!) we need to be given or seek out the opportunity to develop our emotional intelligence, our positive intelligence, and to question our patterns of behavior as adults. Otherwise the same issues just repeat themselves over and over again.

The damage to individuals, teams and organisations is sometimes not possible to turn back. We are not children anymore, but if you can put your hand on your heart and tell me you are not repeating any behavioural patterns from your childhood, you deserve a medal!