Schools have a vital role to play in this area, not least because of the amount of time pupils spend there, the relationships they form with teachers and the various interpersonal dynamics that arise within the school community.
The tragedy of teenage suicide raises many questions, particularly within the education sector. While we have written extensively about the role of parents as their children’s first and natural educators, we have repeatedly emphasised that they should not be blamed, but rather helped and supported by other educational institutions. Even the most educated parents cannot withstand the onslaught of a culture that conveys different values and unwittingly fuels violence alone.
Schools play a vital role, not least because of the time children spend within their walls, their relationships with teachers and the interpersonal dynamics that arise within the ‘school community’.
Schools aim to educate young people cognitively. Consequently, we end up with children and teenagers who are intellectually emancipated yet still confused and at the mercy of their emotions, which can be overwhelming at that age. Young people learn to solve problems and speak other languages, yet they remain illiterate in the world of relationships and emotions. The result is much suffering because, in their struggle to manage their emotional world, they are unable to build healthy relationships, only precarious ones. It is an injustice to the younger generations that there are no adults willing to take responsibility for the distress experienced by so many young people.
Schools could do more, but they often find themselves unable to forge effective educational partnerships with families, who inevitably harbour their own emotional and affective ambivalence. School is not just about learning facts and concepts. Following incidents of violence among teens, a measure promoting relationship education in schools has been approved, but it is not enough. If educating also means, though not exclusively, ‘bringing things out’, it is necessary to work on a young person’s heart and inner world so that values such as respect can be fostered from within. Dialogue, discussion and emotional engagement are needed for education. An educational partnership with the family is also needed to ensure that, when faced with a teacher’s reprimand, parents do not become their child’s advocates, ready to defend them unconditionally and regardless of what they may have done.
At the heart of all emotional education, we are called upon to recognise our fundamental need to love and be loved. It is a matter of educating through desire rather than need, and this is where the ability to tolerate frustration comes in. The ‘nos’ we hear from childhood cause temporary frustration, but they can lay the foundations for desire, which requires waiting and patience, without needing to have everything straight away. Thus, the limit imposed by those ‘nos’ is not a wall that blocks progress, but a springboard that fosters growth.
It is also important to distinguish affection from emotion, so as not to remain at the mercy of the latter, but to open them up to a form of affection that can tame them. Feeling affection is different from feeling emotion, but our individualistic and narcissistic culture encourages us to live in the here and now, focusing on and acknowledging only what we feel, regardless of others. We need credible, consistent and authoritative adults. In this regard, let us ask ourselves about the role models we have held up to our young people over recent decades: powerful men who have used women as objects of pleasure and women who, for money, have accepted all this in the name of freedom; a consumerist society that no longer seeks meaning in life; and the culture of war – not to mention the fact that even the Church struggles to find an appropriate place for women.
Young people learn to solve problems and speak other languages, yet they remain illiterate in the world of relationships and emotions