For too many decades, through a diaspora of discourses and innumerable voices, we have tried to better mankind through improved curriculum. When the news reports with alarming regularity the murders of children by children, we cannot complacently assert that we have made notable progress. Perhaps for too long we have based our efforts on the wrong concept: the wrong concept of the learning, developing brain. Recent years have seen an increased interest in the role of emotions in many disciplines, but specifically in the field of neuroscience. Neuroscientists, such as Antonio Damasio and Joseph Ledoux, have determined that emotions have a cognitive dimension and are therefore not contrary to, but necessary for rational thought. Neuropsychologists, most notably Daniel Goleman, have explored the psychological and physiological mechanisms associated with emotions and feelings. Goleman sees mankind in crisis and elucidates the need for educators to address the emotional mind.

Education, however, has been reluctant to apply neuroscientific findings regarding emotion. Although the importance of emotion has been acknowledged recently in some educational literature and discourse, its role remains limited and undertheorized. Discourse in the arena of emotions has been limited to the role of teacher emotions related to the politics of educational reform and to teacher-student interactions. Feminists have politicized emotions in their battle to overcome the binary notion of emotional versus intellectual rigor.

Some educators have proposed implications for pedagogy based on brain-based research, but little research has been conducted to ascertain specific applications of how emotion functions, perhaps because educational theorists have not ventured into the arena of neuropedagogy and there is distinct lack of discourse concerning its status and merit. The diaspora of curriculum theory has not elicited substantive progress in pedagogical practice to take us much beyond the non-emotive Cartesian “animal machine...and Kantian angel” (DeSousa, 1980, p 135). Perhaps it is time for a dramatic paradigm shift.

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