We have brought emotion seminars into the institutes but we have driven books out of them

BarcelonaIn 2022, the results of the program were published for mindfulness largest school study to date, with the participation of 84 high schools and more than 8,000 students aged 11 to 13. The data showed that it was of no use and, furthermore, the adolescents who were already struggling ended up worse off. In Australia, an eight-session emotional skills program increased depression and anxiety in students, and worsened their relationship with their parents. Psychologist Lucy Foulkes, from the University of Oxford, says that if we teach young people to observe their emotions, some learn to interpret discomfort as a symptom and the label ends up becoming true. Talking about emotions is not the problem: the key is how we talk about them, because monitoring oneself is not the same as understanding oneself.

The philosopher Alain de Botton explains that, in order to get ahead with the demands of day-to-day life, we cannot feel everything: there are children, work, bills, aging parents... and we must learn to set aside what does not belong. But this does not mean that emotions disappear. This is where art comes in, because it allows us to open doors to feelings without being overwhelmed. It can be a novel, a song, a painting, or a film. Kafka said it in a letter he wrote to a friend: a book must be the axe that breaks the frozen sea within us. The difference with an emotions seminar is that a book does not ask us how we feel, but rather explains to us how another person feels with a life and circumstances that may be very different from our own. Reading fiction facilitates empathy in an indirect way, without us having to put our guard up.

The problem we have in our high schools is that we have introduced emotional seminars but have driven out books. A Columbia professor recently explained that one of his students had finished high school without ever having read a whole book, only fragments. In our country, in two of the ESO grades, one weekly hour of Catalan language and literature has been reduced, and in high school (baccalaureate) this cut has been going on for ten years. Furthermore, in the 2024-25 academic year, the mandatory high school readings, which were four complete books per year, were removed. A few weeks ago, the Department of Education said it would bring them back next school year; we shall see if it fulfills this.

Knowing how to say "I have anxiety" is knowing the name of a thing, but having been Colometa for three hundred pages is having felt from within what another person feels. Teenagers today have more emotional vocabulary than ever, but they have spent very few hours inside the head of someone who is not themselves. Perhaps it is no coincidence that one in five boys between 15 and 29 years old says, as surveys show, that sexist violence is an invention. A boy who has never had the opportunity to be a woman during a novel will hardly know how to put himself in her shoes in real life. We have exchanged Kafka's axe for an emotional thermometer, and it turns out that the ice sheet has become thick for us.