Criticism of the social-emotional skills formation at school

Abstract

The development of socio-emotional skills at school has been identified as an urgent need to guarantee the individual success of children and adolescents. Those who defend these ideas consider that the school, since its emergence, has been concerned only with the intellectual development of students, regardless of their affective-emotional development, causing harm to everyone. Thus, this article presents an analysis of some proposals for the development of socio-emotional skills at school produced by the Ayrton Senna Institute, BID, OECD and present in the secondary education reform and in the Brazil’s Common Core. In these proposals, some information was selected and organized into pre-defined categories, according to the adopted theoretical framework, historical-cultural psychology and historical-critical pedagogy. As a result, there is the artificiality of the split established between the cognitive and affective functions of the human psyche that is expressed in the dichotomy between cognitive and socio-emotional skills, and that the formation of socio-emotional skills is presented as a solution to the problems arising from the alienation inherent to capitalist society, contributing, however, only to the deepening of this alienation and the maintenance of the existing relations of domination.