Higher education has a problem with feelings. Walk into any classroom and you’ll witness the elaborate dance of affective suppression that defines modern education. Students learn to hide frustration behind blank stares, to swallow anxiety whole, to perform engagement even when drowning in confusion. Faculty become adept at sidestepping emotions until they become “disruptive,” at which point they’re quickly pathologized or punished. This affective hide-and-seek isn’t merely unfortunate. It’s academically devastating in ways that most educators are only beginning to understand.
The recognition that emotion fundamentally shapes learning has deep roots in psychological research, though it took decades to gain educational traction. Howard Gardner’s groundbreaking theory of multiple intelligences, introduced in the 1980s, challenged narrow definitions of cognitive ability by identifying “personal intelligences” as distinct forms of human capacity. These included both intrapersonal intelligence (understanding oneself) and interpersonal intelligence (understanding others), categories that opened space for recognizing emotional and social skills as more than personality traits.[i] Gardner’s framework provided crucial legitimacy for educators who suspected that success required more than traditional academic skills.
It was Daniel Goleman’s 1995 bestseller Emotional Intelligence that brought these ideas into mainstream conversation, arguing that EQ often matters more than IQ for success in work and relationships.[ii] Goleman synthesized research from psychology and neuroscience to demonstrate what many educators intuitively knew. Emotions are not distractions from thinking but rather integral to how thinking happens. When learners cannot recognize, understand, or regulate their emotional states, everything else becomes exponentially harder. Memory formation falters under affective stress. Attention scatters when anxiety floods the system. The very cognitive processes that schools claim to prioritize become compromised when emotional literacy is absent. Yet most educational institutions continue operating as if feelings were optional accessories to the real work of academics. This disconnect reveals something profound about how human learning itself is understood. The myth persists that cognition and emotion occupy separate realms, that thinking happens in pristine isolation from feeling. Neuroscience tells otherwise. Every decision, every moment of attention, every act of memory formation involves affective processing.[iii] The student staring out the window isn’t necessarily defiant or disengaged; they might be overwhelmed, understimulated, or struggling to manage competing affective demands that no one has taught them to navigate.
Building on this foundation, Marc Brackett’s research at Yale demonstrates that emotional intelligence can be taught, learned, and strengthened at any age. His RULER framework provides concrete tools for what he calls “permission to feel.” The acronym stands for Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating emotions, creating a systematic approach to emotional literacy.[iv] This isn’t about touchy-feely therapeutic interventions divorced from academic rigor. Instead, it’s about recognizing that emotional skills are academic skills, relational skills, and ultimately, democratic skills that determine how successfully learners can engage with content, peers, and complex social challenges. However, the rise of emotional intelligence as an educational priority hasn’t been without controversy. Critics argue that EI frameworks often to reinforce forms of social control, teaching students to manage their emotions in ways that serve institutional needs rather than their own authentic expression. When schools emphasize “appropriate” emotional responses, whose standards of appropriateness are being enforced? The concern runs deeper than cultural sensitivity; it touches on fundamental questions about power, resistance, and whose emotional experiences get validated versus pathologized.
A student experiencing anxiety during a math test illustrates these dynamics clearly. Without emotional literacy, that anxiety becomes a cognitive hijacker, flooding working memory and making problem-solving nearly impossible. With RULER training, that same learner learns to recognize anxiety’s physical signs, understand its triggers, label it precisely (“I’m feeling overwhelmed, not stupid”), express it appropriately, and regulate it effectively.[v] The politics of emotional intelligence become unavoidable when that student’s anxiety stems from stereotype threat, the well-documented phenomenon where awareness of negative stereotypes about one’s group impairs performance.[vi] Teaching individual emotional regulation without addressing systemic bias can inadvertently blame learners for problems they didn’t create while leaving oppressive structures intact.
This critique points to a fundamental tension within emotional intelligence frameworks. When Goleman’s work gained popularity in corporate settings, it often emphasized helping employees manage their emotions to fit organizational needs rather than questioning whether those organizational cultures were emotionally healthy to begin with.[vii] The same risk exists in schools: EI can become a tool for teaching students to adapt to problematic conditions rather than empowering them to recognize and challenge those conditions. The concern about emotional intelligence as a normalizing force becomes particularly acute when we consider whose emotions are deemed acceptable in educational settings. A Black learner’s anger about racial injustice might be labeled as “poor emotional regulation” rather than recognized as an appropriate response to legitimate grievances. A Latina student’s passionate engagement might be seen as “too emotional” rather than celebrated as intellectual enthusiasm.
These examples illustrate how emotional intelligence, despite its progressive intentions, can become another mechanism through which schools police difference and enforce conformity. When “emotional regulation” means suppressing justified anger about injustice, it serves power rather than challenging it. When “appropriate expression” is defined by white, middle-class norms, it reproduces rather than disrupts educational inequity. The risk is that learners learn to internalize dominant emotional norms without developing critical consciousness about why certain emotions are welcomed while others are pathologized. The key lies in implementing emotional intelligence approaches that build learner capacity while questioning dominant cultural assumptions about correct emotional behavior. Promising approaches emerge when emotional intelligence frameworks explicitly grapple with these tensions. Rather than teaching universal emotional norms, they emphasize cultural responsiveness and critical consciousness. Students learn not just to regulate their emotions, but to understand how social contexts shape emotional experiences differently for different people.
This more critical approach to emotional intelligence recognizes that some conflicts shouldn’t be de-escalated, but instead engaged productively. This means moving beyond the individualistic framework that has dominated much emotional intelligence discourse. Brackett’s work, particularly in later iterations, has begun incorporating some of these complexities. His research shows that schools implementing RULER see improvements beyond individual emotional regulation but in overall affective climate, including reductions in bias incidents and increases in student reports of feeling valued for who they are.[viii] This suggests that when emotional intelligence is implemented systemically rather than individually, it can support rather than suppress authentic student expression. However, the implementation process requires careful attention to how power dynamics shape affective experiences and responses. The most powerful applications of emotional intelligence in education happen when individual skill-building meets systemic awareness and structural critique. Faculty who learn to recognize their own cultural biases in emotional interpretation become better at reading diverse learners accurately. Schools that examine their disciplinary patterns through an affective lens often discover how certain emotions are policed differently depending on who expresses them. When emotional intelligence training includes explicit discussions of culture, power, and identity, it becomes a tool for justice rather than conformity.
Classroom conflict resolution reveals how this plays out in practice. Traditional approaches focus on getting students to “calm down” and follow rules, effectively teaching them that their affective responses to injustice or misunderstanding are problems to be suppressed. More critical applications of emotional intelligence help learners recognize the emotions underlying conflict, understand different perspectives, and develop solutions that acknowledge everyone’s affective experience while also examining the power dynamics at play.⁹
The promise and challenge of emotional intelligence in education ultimately point toward larger questions about what schools are for and whom they serve. If education’s purpose is sorting students into predetermined categories, then emotional expression becomes a distraction from efficient processing. But if education’s purpose is human flourishing within democratic community, then emotional literacy becomes as essential as traditional academics. Brackett’s framework provides a method for this transformation. But tools alone aren’t enough. The real work involves reimagining educational relationships, restructuring institutional practices, and recommitting to the idea that all learners deserve not just academic instruction but emotional validation, support, and growth.[ix] This means making schools more human, more just, and ultimately more effective at their core mission of helping young people thrive in a complex world that requires both intellectual capacity and emotional wisdom.
[i] Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 237-276.
[ii] Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Matters More Than IQ (New York: Bantam Books, 1995), 34-45.
[iii] Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 128-145.
[iv] Marc Brackett, Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive (New York: Celadon Books, 2019), 87-92.
[v] Marc Brackett et al., “Enhancing Academic Performance and Social and Emotional Competence with the RULER Feeling Words Curriculum,” Learning and Individual Differences 22, no. 2 (2012): 218-224.
[vi] Claude M. Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 87-108.
[vii] Marc Brackett and Susan Rivers, “Transforming Students’ Lives with Social and Emotional Learning,” in International Handbook of Emotions in Education, eds. Reinhard Pekrun and Lisa Linnenbrink-Garcia (New York: Routledge, 2014), 368-388.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid.