EMOTION AND EDUCATION

Among the noteworthy characteristics of reflective education is its willingness to reexamine the role of emotion. However, the objective of such a reexamination is called into question almost immediately. Are we talking about the emotions as a subject matter of education, or are we talking about the emotions as playing a role in education? (A third possibility would be to educate emotions themselves.)

Philosophers have long been fascinated by the “affects” as subject matter and have offered countless accounts and definitions of them. The propensities of human beings to experience this or that emotion under this or that set of circumstances fascinated the writers of the Early Renaissance, and their phenomenologies of the emotions were studied assiduously by students and scholars alike. The treatises on the emotions had formed a curriculum of sorts for centuries before Descartes and Spinoza, and have continued to do so for centuries afterward. We have only to think of Spinoza, carefully polishing his geometry of the emotions: joy, sorrow, astonishment, contempt, love, hatred, inclination, aversion, remorse, derision, hope, fear, and so on.

On the other hand, what about the role the emotions have played in education? To arrive at this point, we first have to consider the undesirable epistemological status often ascribed to the emotions. One's emotions are supposed to have a blurring, distorting effect upon one's thinking, and since clarity and distinctness have been taken for granted by the Cartesian tradition as the criteria of truth, the emotions have frequently been alleged to be the cause of error and falsehood.