Kirsten and Allie

Kirsten:

I'm very excited about Kirsten's topic of emotional literacy as a part of education. I really think the New York Times article she chose was spot on with this topic and did a good job articulating the exact lack of emotional literacy in our schools. I think a lot of times we take for granted the social education that happens in and around our classrooms as we're growing up. School is often the place where you learn to interact with other people who aren't your family, and through this you learn a lot about yourself.

However, I think that this article points out the more focused attention we could be putting on emotional literacy in our schools alongside this social education. It's almost that school provides an extremely convenient venue for teaching emotional literacy and it would be foolish of us to pass up on the opportunity. I also like how the article questioned the effectiveness of hypothetically required emotional education, as we're not really sure that it works. I think this type of fallibility is important, and a reluctance to immediately add this type of emotional training to every public school in America would be silly.

Allie:

Allie had a great topic as well, boys and emotional literacy. Based on her blog and attached articles, Allie wants to question the traditional gender binary we uphold in American culture and how that effects the emotional literacy of the males in our society. From personal experience, I think this binary totally has an effect on how boys are expected to emote and express emotions. She also brings up the fragility of masculinity, which is a great call-out of this dangerous binary within our consumer culture. We really do cater to a very specific idea of masculinity that often subverts men into an unemotional or hardened stereotype.

I think Allie could definitely dig deeper into this topic by examining different types of masculinity and how they're constructed. For instance, depending on your socioeconomic standing and area of upbringing, the type of masculinity that is forced upon you can be really different.