Our society assumes that emotional education might be either unnecessary or in its essence
unteachable, lying beyond reason and best abandoned to individual instinct.
We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds – a move as
wise as leaving each generation to rediscover the
laws of physics by themselves. But The School of Life believe that the journey
to finding fulfilment begins with self- knowledge, with emotional intelligence.
The emotionally intelligent person is able to introspect and communicate, to read the
moods of others, to relate with patience, charity and imagination to those around them.
The emotionally intelligent person knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining
steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence.
The emotionally intelligent person is committed to fathoming their inadequacies.
There can wisely be no solutions that remove problems altogether. What we can aim for,
at best, is consolation. To believe in consolation
means giving up on cures; it means accepting that life is a hospice rather than a hospital,
but one we’d like to render as comfortable, as
interesting and kind as possible. The School of Life dares to believe that we
might learn, in good time and systematically, what we might otherwise acquire only through
many decades of stumbling. The School of Life teaches us how we can live
a little better through a deeper understanding of:
The Self Others
Our Relationships Our Work
And our Culture If, as a society, we have collectively left
to chance some of what it is most important to
know, if we have denied ourselves the opportunity to systematically transmit wisdom, then
The School of Life is a modest attempt to try to spare us a bit of time.