In the collective imagination, school is often perceived as a neutral place, a setting where only the transmission of knowledge and the assessment of skills matter. This vision ignores an essential dimension: school is also a space for emotional socialization, a place where values, attitudes and representations are forged.

Of course, we learn mathematics and modern languages ​​there, but we also learn to make friends, to respect authority, to find our place in a group… The majority of social relationships between school-age children (6 to 15 years old) take place in a school establishment.

Adults in the educational community play a role in this socia(bi)lization , becoming concerned when a student seems to have no friends and sometimes taking on the role of mediators in conflicts between students. And, beyond the spaces of school life, the classroom itself is a place where academic learning and emotional construction are combined. This is particularly evident in French classes, where the study of literary works plays an unsuspected role in the sentimental education of students .

A cross-sectional approach to emotions

Official Bulletin No. 9 of February 27, 2003 of the Ministry of National Education stipulates this  

“All staff, members of the educational community, participate, explicitly or not, in the individual, social and sexual construction of children and adolescents.”

Integrating emotions into learning does not deviate from the primary mission of the school but rather broadens its scope, by preparing students to become not only educated citizens, but also human beings capable of living and thriving in interaction with others.

Rethinking the classroom as a place of emotional education does not mean making it a substitute for families or other spaces of socialization. Rather, it is about recognizing that school contributes, in an indirect but fundamental way, to the construction of students as beings who feel emotions.

Emotional education is integrated in a transversal manner into all school disciplines without being present in the program. This is what is called the hidden curriculum. The different disciplines offer visions of what emotions should be and how they should be expressed in society.

History, for example, offers opportunities to explore collective emotions such as hope or revolt, while science turns to the biological dimension of emotions. In the Earth Sciences and Life program, for example, we find the following entries: jointly and responsibly taking charge of one’s sexual life, becoming a man or a woman, living one’s sexuality.

In physical education and sports , it is the emotions generated by victory and defeat that are taught. Recreation times, managed by members of the school life, are full of friendly, loving and even hostile emotions. Educational assistants (known as supervisors) also play a role in emotional education by deciding which times are appropriate to shout or not, how it is allowed to cry or express anger, etc.

The educational community as a whole instills in students standards regarding the expression of emotions that are accepted in the adult world, based on a Western and professional model.

Sentimental education in the classroom

The French program sequence entitled “Dire l’amour” brings about the irruption of intimacy in a school context. The teachers interviewed note the parallels made by the students between the works studied and their love lives:

“It echoes what they can experience outside, showing that school is not a separate microcosm, that it is also integrating school into what is happening around them in their everyday lives.” (Laurianne, 31 years old, nine years of teaching)

Some even believe that students can draw inspiration from the works they study to shed light on their own feelings and romantic situations, sometimes for the first time. The 2011 documentary Nous, princesses de Clèves by Régis Sauder shows how the study of Madame de La Fayette’s novel by a class of high school students leads them to adopt a new perspective on their own love lives.

“There is a moment in the construction of the individual where we go through a form of pastiche, a model that inspires us. That the school can convey models that are more controlled or at least explicit, placed in a historical context, and that these models can be diverted, reappropriated by the students, in truth I find that cool”, remarks Georges, 27 years old, and three years of teaching under his belt.

Timothée, 24 years old and also a teacher for three years, makes a similar observation:

“In fourth grade, love is at the heart of a lot of stories, discussions, and topics between students. And then I think that, whatever the subject, literature and the arts influence the way we behave.”

Students and teachers alike then have in mind that this teaching moment has the potential to go beyond the academic world to enter the framework of a sentimental education.

The role of teachers

Committed teachers take advantage of the “Saying Love” sequence to disseminate prevention speeches about sexist and homophobic violence to their students. Some rely on the texts studied to cultivate students’ critical thinking about what is presented as romantic in certain works.

An observed teacher takes advantage of a spontaneous debate in class to deliver a speech on preventing violence in romantic relationships. This debate emerges during an exercise on the lexical field of love, which asked students to arrange the verbs of love in order of intensity. Students then mention “crimes of passion”, to which the teacher responds “it is the justice system that decides that it is extreme in these cases. That is why, if there is too great an imbalance in the relationship, we can end up with problems of harassment and even violence.” Here the French teacher notes her students’ intervention in order to deliver a speech on preventing violence in couples.

For the majority of teachers interviewed, the “Saying Love” sequence “inevitably” leads to discussions in class about romantic relationships.

Creating a safe environment, where everyone feels free to express their feelings, is an essential condition for emotional education to bear fruit. The issue of gender and sexual orientation has proven to be decisive in differentiating teaching practices. Women, young people and LGBTQIA+ people seem more likely than other teachers to have prevention discussions in class, occasionally going beyond the strict framework of the school curriculum.

Within the panel of teachers, those who do not use the “Saying Love” sequence to offer their students reflections on violence in romantic relationships are heterosexual men who do not have LGBTQIA+ people around them.

Author Bio: Marine Lambolez is a PhD student at ENS de Lyon