Emotional development is a skill that can be developed as part of a curriculum designed around appreciation of the arts, and, in particular, literature. As Barrow has convincingly argued in the Philosophical Issues in Curriculum study guide, the gradual development of emotional maturity should be a concern of schools (1992, p. 49). Advancing the affective or emotional side of students is a goal worthy of any curriculum designed to produce well-rounded students.
Literature provides a basis for defining, and further discriminating, the emotions. By providing a situation in which emotions are be described in poetry or prose, literature gives us a seemingly limitless wealth of emotional "ideas" to define and discriminate. As R. W. Hepburn (1972) points out in "The Arts and the Education of Feeling and Emotion," masterful writers will seek to avoid easy, conventionalized responses to emotional situations, the sort of greeting-card stereotypical reactions to hackneyed situations (p. 487).
D. H. Lawrence has warned of the result when people do not think about emotions--they become emotional sheep, merely feeling what they have been accustomed to feel, never bothering to feel other than the way they have always felt. Lawrence wrote, "Our education from the start, has taught us a certain range of emotions, what to feel and what not to feel" (cited in Hepburn, 1972, p. 487). If education (whether formal, informal, or, "of the streets") has taught us to feel in a stereotyped manner, it can equally unteach these same bad habits, or customary ways of feeling and thinking about feeling.
It will be necessary to define our terms with regard to the emotions before an educational program aimed at teaching emotional maturity may be discussed. In Schooling: Its Nature and Point, Robin Barrow (1981) devotes several pages to differentiating between feelings and emotions. He begins by stating, "Emotions are undoubtedly feelings, but they ar...