Educating the Emotions: Interior and Exterior Realities

In this paper Mike Radford questions a view of emotions which sees them as essentially an inner and subjective phenomenon discovered through processes of introspection and developing self awareness. This process of self-exploration is conducted through a combination of dialogue, encouraging pupils to talk about their feelings and explain them, and something akin to therapy. Such a perspective tends to be closely associated with the increasingly popular notion of emotional intelligence/literacy. In his view it is more productive to try to understand emotions in the context of objective understanding, in terms of the language and behaviours, and see them as public events open to common experience.