After the news broke, my LINE group lit up almost immediately.
Most comments reduced the incident to “too impulsive,” “poor EQ,” or “psychologically fragile.”
The harm caused must be seen clearly, and the person who acted must answer for their choice. A serious incident of violence usually involves multiple converging factors; it cannot be summarized as “poor EQ,” nor can the blame be reversed and placed entirely on family or education. This piece is not an attempt to identify a single cause. It asks a different question: beyond law, safety, and psychological support, does education give children enough relational practice: enough opportunity to learn how to face rejection, handle conflict, and respect boundaries?
We’ve Only Been Teaching Half of EQ
The word EQ has been used so freely in Taiwan that it’s nearly lost its edges. A child quarrels with a classmate, and parents say, “We need to work on EQ.” An employee loses their temper in a meeting, and the manager says, “His EQ isn’t there yet.” A friend falls apart after a breakup, and people say, “Her EQ still needs work.”
When we talk about EQ, we usually picture one thing first: can this person manage their own emotions? Not exploding when angry, getting back on their feet after setbacks, knowing how to calm down under pressure. These are real capacities, but they cover only part of what EQ actually is.
In education, the CASEL framework for social-emotional learning places self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making side by side. Social-emotional learning is not quite the same thing as popular conceptions of EQ, but the framework makes one point clearly: self-regulation and interpersonal competence have always been two parts of the same learning.
Many emotions are triggered in relationship and need to be understood and adjusted in relationship. Fear may signal a warning to those around us; anger may express that a boundary has been violated; shame is often bound up with how we see ourselves within a group. Emotions have personal, physiological, and psychological sources, but how we express, receive, and respond to them usually only becomes visible when we are with other people. EQ, then, is not only self-management. It is also a relational capacity.
How Group Education Got Pushed to the Margins
Taiwan’s education system once had a term for it: 群育, group education. It stood alongside moral education, intellectual education, physical education, and aesthetic education. It was one of five recognized dimensions of the whole child.
Think back to your own schooling. How much time went to intellectual development? How much to group education?
I remember the choir, the clubs, the inter-class competitions. In choir, you learned to hear the voices around you, to adjust your own volume and timing so the whole sounded better. In inter-class competitions, you learned to work alongside people with very different personalities, to work through disagreements, to coordinate toward a shared goal.
These experiences seemed unrelated to academic performance. They were, in fact, among the most important arenas where children practiced relational competence.
Today, choir rehearsals, club activities, and inter-class events routinely compete for time against tutoring, exams, and university preparation. Not every parent withdraws, and not every school ignores group education. But when these activities are repeatedly pushed to the edges of the schedule, children genuinely lose opportunities to practice cooperation, conflict, and negotiation.
That alone cannot explain every EQ problem. But it is a dimension education cannot afford to ignore.
When Protecting Children Becomes Eliminating Friction
Group education doesn’t erode for a single reason. Exam pressure, time constraints, the concentration of parental attention on fewer children in a low-birthrate society, and decades of educational language centered on individual self-actualization have all played a part.
Most parents simply don’t want their child to be shortchanged, and they want limited time to go toward learning with visible results. That choice is understandable. The risk is that when “don’t let my child be wronged” gradually becomes the elimination of all discomfort, children may also lose the chance to practice waiting, negotiating, and bearing rejection.
“Why should my child have to accommodate everyone else?”
Children shouldn’t be required to accommodate others unconditionally. But living together with other people means learning to articulate your own needs, hear other people’s limits, and find a way to keep going when the two come into conflict. If adults remove a child from friction before it can develop, those capacities never find a place to be practiced.
Emotions Happen in Relationship
When I manage teams, I often notice that people who handle relationships well tend to have had sustained, substantive experience in group settings: a sports team, a church fellowship, a student organization, a long-running project that required real collaboration.
This is an observation, not a proof that group experience necessarily produces better EQ. But it showed me that friction, compromise, conflict, and reconciliation are not things anyone learns by understanding the concepts alone.
The German-Jewish philosopher and religious thinker Martin Buber wrote in I and Thou: “I become through my relation to the Thou.” (Ich werde am Du, translated here by the author; see the original text and scholarly discussion.) In my own words: we confirm our existence in relationship. We do not first become a complete, self-enclosed “I” and then enter into relationship. We come to know who we are, and what responsibility we carry toward others, through being responded to, being rejected, being understood, and learning to respond in turn.
A child can practice deep breathing alone, but cannot practice being rejected alone. She can keep an emotion journal by herself, but cannot learn alone how to face conflict, repair a relationship, or hold her own ground without crossing someone else’s. EQ can be observed in a single person, but it is rarely built by one. It requires relationship, and it requires a community where children are allowed to make mistakes, receive a response, and recalibrate.
When a person knows their own feelings and needs well but has little experience responding to others, two risks tend to emerge: when they have power, they may habitually override those around them; when they are frustrated, they may find it hard to bear, having so little practice with negotiation and adjustment. The two reactions look different on the surface. Underneath, they share the same gap: not knowing how, in a world with other people, to hold your ground and still leave room for the relationship.
Feelings do not originate only in relationship, but they often find their meaning there. Understanding an emotion means asking not just “what is happening to me?” but “what is happening between me and this other person?”
When Is Friction Learning, and When Has It Become Harm?
Parents don’t need to eliminate every discomfort their child encounters. They also cannot interpret every discomfort as growth. Three questions help: Can the child safely say no and ask for help? Do adults see when there is a power imbalance, sustained exclusion, or humiliation? After a conflict, does anyone take responsibility and participate in repair?
If any of these is consistently absent, the answer is not to ask the child to endure more. Group education exists to help children practice living together with others. The adult’s responsibility is to ensure that practice never comes at the cost of a child’s safety or dignity.
What Education Owes
I am not an education scholar. My observations come from raising a child and leading teams.
My own child follows a non-institutional homeschooling path. One reason we chose that route was that the institutional education experiences we encountered tended to subordinate group education to academics and university preparation. I write more about this in The Truth About Homeschooling. Even within a homeschooling framework, I make a deliberate effort to ensure my child has group interactions that require cooperation, coordination, and navigating conflict.
I want him to be capable of solitude. I also make sure he has opportunities for genuine interpersonal collaboration, because without the latter, he loses the chance to practice negotiation, face rejection, and repair relationships.
Every time a campus emotional tragedy makes the news, public discussion tends to center on dangerous objects, campus security, and psychological counseling. All of that work matters; it addresses environmental risk, crisis intervention, and individual mental health. Group education cannot replace any of it, and it cannot be treated as the single explanation for tragedy.
Education still has to answer a more upstream question: as children grow, do they have opportunities to practice facing rejection, handling conflict, naming their own limits, and learning to respect others’?
A World with Other People
I cannot solve this problem, and no single article can.
But the next time we say “that person has poor EQ,” perhaps we can add one question: in their childhood, did they have opportunities to practice (within a group) facing rejection, negotiating conflict, and repairing relationships?
If those opportunities were scarce, responsibility cannot fall entirely on the individual. That said, it does not relieve anyone of accountability for their actions. Individuals must answer for what they do. Families, schools, and institutions also need to examine themselves: have we only asked children to control their emotions, while failing to provide enough relational experience for them to learn how to live alongside people who are different from them?
When education consistently reserves more time for individual achievement and competition, and rarely gives children practice in living together, we cannot then attribute every relational difficulty to a personal failure of character.
EQ is shaped by temperament and environment, and it can develop gradually through self-awareness, self-regulation, and relational experience. Reading, meditation, and emotion exercises help with some of it. But facing rejection, repairing conflict, negotiating limits, and taking responsibility still have to be practiced in a world that contains other people.
Children will eventually have to live in that world. What education can do is give them the chance, before the real rejections and conflicts arrive, to practice holding their ground without crossing someone else’s.
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