If fostering emotional intelligence and empathic imagination and solving ethical dilemmas were discussed openly and taught methodically in K-12 mainstream (“typical”) classrooms, would we need metal detectors at the inner city schools’ entrances, and would we need special anti-bullying programs, which intend to correct bullying culture, rather than build a new one, based on kindness, openness, and consideration for others?

Will we learn lessons from the Columbine High School and the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacres, and radically change educational system, to incorporate empathic imagination and emotional intelligence into mainstream K-12 curriculum – as a mandatory discipline – instead of leaving this important part of learning and character formatting only to the special education sphere?

This symposium represents a collaborative effort of four educators from various disciplines who crossed boundaries to emphasize and foster emotional intelligence and empathic imagination throughout the K-12 curriculum.

The following are the parts of the proposed multidisciplinary panel:

– multidisciplinary approach to revolutionary education, or paradigm shift towards fostering emotional intelligence and empathic imagination across the mainstream curriculum;

– Descartes’ error, the triune brain, and neurobiology of emotional intelligence;

– changing our consciousness: imagining the emotional experience of the other;

– teaching social skills and play therapy in schools: report from the trenches of special education;

– examining cultural artifacts, tools for personal, emotional, and academic development;

– growing kind kids: mindfulness and the whole-brained child;

– Emotional Imprint™ at the street squash: ‘If you talk, you don’t kill.’