Emotional development

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 man

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than "bad." A student at the rudimentary level might choose "bad" because "bad" is the generally accepted response, whereas a range of other options is open: "ambivalent," "disheartened," "bitter," or even "nothing." In order for the student to display emotional maturity, however, the instructor would urge the student to find the object of his or her feeling, thus advancing it to the level of an emotion. An example of this advancement would be as follows: "When I don't get good grades in math class, I feel "nothing" toward the class or my achievement in it, because I am not interested in math, and have always excelled in the humanities, instead." Even the response, "nothing," a fairly undiscerning response, is more mature than "bad," because the student has (1) no problem owning up to a disinterest in math, and (2) no problem making something positive out of something negative. Our student realizes that his or her innate interest and ability is directed toward, say, literature, rather than math. Such self-knowledge displays a maturity beyond basic values clarification exercises, even though "bad," and "nothing" are both fairly undiscerning responses. The point to be made is that the student (1) has found an object for the
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Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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