And Now, Teaching Emotions

The fifth-graders at Denver's Thomas A. Edison elementary school sit in a circle with their principal, Forest Fransen. Placing an empty soda bottle on the floor, Fransen and the kids spin it to choose the order of children who will "tell about themselves." After a few embarrassed giggles, a boy named Paul says: "I like to go fishing a lot. There's six in my family and two are babies. That's all." Don reveals that "I've got a sister in junior high; I had another sister but she had cancer." The children are fidgetless and fascinated. Finally the bottle points to Fransen, who tells of his pride in a father who came from Sweden to homestead in a sod house.

So goes the first class in "emotional skills," a new course that has spread to several dozen public and private schools in cities from New York to San Francisco. Increasing numbers of states are mandating some form of classroom instruction in mental health. The goal: helping children forestall the emotional scars that lead to drug abuse, delinquency and adult unhappiness.

Induced Jealousy. Based on the idea that neither guidance counselors nor existing hygiene courses meet the need, the Denver program uses one of the nation's first comprehensive guides for teaching mental health to the young: Dimensions of Personality, a new series of fourth-through sixth-grade textbooks published by Dayton's George A. Pflaum. The series was originated by Walter J. Limbacher, a Denver clinical psychologist, who started the program as a consultant to the U.S. Army and pilot-tested his ideas in Denver's Roman Catholic parochial schools.

To help young children cope with their feelings, Limbacher aims to show them what is normal for their age --"peer pressure," for example, or reluctance to associate with the opposite sex. Limbacher's guidelines for teachers call for gently provoking children into emotional experiences that they can discuss later on. The bottle-spinning game is designed to start the children discovering both their individual qualities and how much they have in common with others.

For one fifth-grade lesson, the teacher induces jealousy by repeatedly choosing the same bright, attractive youngster to do blackboard work. When the class balks at this favoritism, the teacher admits her ploy, then tries to coax the students into conceding that they feel jealous. "It is important," says the teachers' guide, "that no one feel he is strange or wicked if he is jealous from time to time. By admitting jealousy and talking about it, children are less likely to act out their aggressive feelings."

At four schools in Colorado Springs, where the courses have been taught for the past two years, about half the parents say their children have become more willing to discuss their problems. "Before," said one mother, "my daughter just threw a fit." Teachers report fewer discipline cases; social workers say they get more "self-referrals--kids with problems they sense they can't handle alone." Among the few criticisms, one parent said "these attitudes and insights are training I would rather my child received at home."

Despite this seeming success, no one is yet sure how much of the kids' improve ment is due to normal growing up or merely the extra attention they get in the course. Noting that the Colorado teachers have been trained in special seminars, critics also fear that untrained or insecure teachers could easily confuse the kids they are trying to help.

More fundamentally, Educational Sociologist David A. Goslin of the Russell Sage Foundation contends that simply ventilating emotions is no substitute for working with others. The real problem in developing healthy personalities, he feels, is that today many of the young are isolated in a world of their own, out of contact with good adult models. As Goslin sees it, a more effective road to emotional maturity lies in reuniting the generations. He thinks schools should provide more chances for kids to share responsibility for important outside projects with a large variety of adults.

Emotional-skills courses are obviously well-intentioned efforts to forestall critical social problems. As the courses spread, though, mistakes seem inevitable. Thus sharp questions are likely to be raised about whether those efforts are pointed in the right direction.

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