What is EQ and Why Do We Need It?

This week the unbelievable occurred. A fifteen year old girl was gang raped by 6 or 7 young men while another dozen or more watched, laughed, and took photos. This act was not committed by a street gang in LA but by a group of students attending a homecoming dance at the local high school in Richmond, California.
Lessons that teach children to 'get along with your neighbor' have always been high on the agenda at preschools. During the next several grade levels social skills continue to be an integral part of school lessons until a baseline of acceptable group behavior is reached. After that, the time spent specifically on interpersonal skills begins to fade to make room for areas of academic intelligence; reading, writing, and arithmetic. But are schools truly preparing a young person for a fulfilling and useful life by neglecting emotional and social skills in later years?
Daniel Goleman brought this subject to the nation's attention in 1995 in his book, "Emotional Intelligence". He wondered why some students with high IQ's did not succeed in school as well as others less gifted intellectually. And why talented adults sometimes fail where less talented adults succeed. He concluded that education cannot be accomplished in the abstract but requires a balance of emotional and intellectual skill sets. This work set the stage for a new look at the acquisition of a full set of necessary human capabilities including self-awareness, self-discipline, and empathy, disciplines for regulating emotion termed 'emotional intelligence', or EQ. These capabilities are not set at birth, but must be nurtured and developed. A comprehensive life skills curriculum that included EQ skills would likely have prevented the tragic incident at Richmond High.
A successful EQ curriculum is developmental and chronologically allied with brain and biological maturation. Those major transition times of childhood, passing into grade school and again into junior high or middle school, and the traumatic yet critical entry into puberty, are crucial times for emotional and social lessons. The emotional effects of these passages, if particularly distressful, can echo and re-echo down life's future corridors. An EQ based life skills curriculum will establish both a realistic anticipatory understanding and a framework of behavior expectations in advance of the development of the actual cognitive capabilities that follow puberty and that will allow informed decision making in the future.
Empathy, that 'sense of other', and the self-awareness from which it stems are the building blocks of civilization and the humanity that holds it together. Who would wish their child to react to inhuman acts such as beatings and rape with laughter and photo taking? Who would not prefer their child to use that same phone to dial 911 and to raise a cry of distress? But such a culture does not develop naturally; schools must become actively involved in developing curriculums that shape the culture. In the words of the song from South Pacific, “They must be carefully taught!”.