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ACADEMIA Letters PANDEMIC Emotional intelligence, poetry, and the fallacy of the uselessness of the humanities Valmir Luis Saldanha da Silva In this brief essay, I revisit some previously covered ideas (Saldanha da Silva, 2016, 2019) and put them into perspective, in line with the results of the research on the human skills needed for employability, published by the World Economic Forum in 2020 (WEF, 2020), and my analyzes of these data during the first half of 2021. In this regard, my conclusion is that there is a mismatch in the world concerning the importance attributed to some skills. It is believed that the humanities- either social and language sciences, being understood as irrelevant in comparison with health and math sciences, as well as with engineering. However, more accurate analysis on the future of jobs and skills that have been listed and disseminated by the WEF in October 2020, i.e., in the middle of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic cycle, precisely reveal the need of having a balance in investments and, therefore, in valuing the various fields of knowledge that make up human activities. As we know, the contemporary world has been waiting for new skills from future professionals. It is believed that the professional of the 21st century should be able to work online and offline, invest time in building good interpersonal relationships and networking, set solid personal goals, be creative and innovative, but, mainly, should have the ability to continue learning and reinvent themselves constantly. Despite this, many people and world leaders believe that these qualities listed above are: a) are or unique attributes of the personality of each human being and that is therefore immutable, b) or attributes that should be encouraged and developed by the family, c) or attributes that can only be developed by desire and individual performance. The coronavirus pandemic in countries such as Brazil, for example, reinforced this individual accountability (Arbix, 2020). The cult of autonomy and freedom without questioning the results of the actions, encamped by the head of state, has brought harmful consequences Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Valmir Luis Saldanha da Silva, didapeu@gmail.com Citation: Saldanha da Silva, V.L. (2021). PANDEMIC Emotional intelligence, poetry, and the fallacy of the uselessness of the humanities. Academia Letters, Article 2249. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2249. 1 for the entire Brazilian population and the whole world (Andreoni, 2021, Andreoni et al 2021). The key point of what we mean by strengthening individual and personal desires and weakening more collective and social needs is (among other things) contempt for scientific knowledge and the humanities. Thus, in the pandemic context of the years 2020 and 2021, despite the contrary assertions of denial statesmen, the lack of investment in the humanities will generate a deficit of employability for the most vulnerable people, will reduce competitiveness, and make international cooperation unfeasible, instead of generating “immediate return to the taxpayer” (Jornal Nacional, 2019), as governments expect. In this sense, the institutional and social devaluation of studies in human sciences becomes the opposite of what is propagated. The technological growth of nations ends up being disorganized. The increase in the possibilities of qualified employment for young people does not become something factual, as the lack of training to reflect on their own work practices prevents them from creating and innovating. This results in a demand for constant movement and creativity but does not allow for stopping moments to examine the movement itself (Han, 2015). Therefore, it is seen that the moments that will come after the pandemic requires nations to rethink their investment model and rethink education: The huge wave of insecurity that runs through countries will have a lasting impact on the way we live and work, with long-term impacts on the world economy, particularly harmful to developing countries like Brazil. Today’s decisions will shape societies for the next generations, who will have to learn to live with uncertainty. This new reality will have a special meaning for education, to produce science and technology. And it will require substantive changes in our schools and universities. (Arbix, 2020, p.65-66). Like Antonio Candido (1995, 1995a, 1996), we believe that the practice and study of poetic texts may be able to help us understand the place of the human in a “liquid world”, in addition to illuminating fundamental contemporary issues, e.g., the understanding that all robotics and engineering products are only valid as products if they serve human life. Human life, however, cannot be measured and defined only by metrics and quantifiers. What’s more, even algorithms are cultural and human products, which makes them necessarily subject to change. According to Candido, the poet works with sound, sense, and image of words. Thus, reading a poem through these tools requires: 1. Thinking of text as an intrinsic relationship between content and form. 2. Testing the understanding of relationships between sound and letter, both in silent or recitative readings. 3. Relating the text to its historical moment of production and the moment of textual reception. 4. Associating words with personal mental images, i.e., fostering one’s imagination and relating these images to different cultures based on the various possibilities of association. 5. Understanding that some sounds, senses, or images do not have full meaning, and finally Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Valmir Luis Saldanha da Silva, didapeu@gmail.com Citation: Saldanha da Silva, V.L. (2021). PANDEMIC Emotional intelligence, poetry, and the fallacy of the uselessness of the humanities. Academia Letters, Article 2249. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2249. 2 concluding that partiality and incompleteness as a fundamental part of human relationships. We need to teach these skills at school. It is necessary to develop in students the ability to understand the meaning of the text as the result of intertextual relations at different levels. Reading a poem requires calmness to interpret it, as your senses are not on the surface. Knowing this forces the reader to test the relevance and belonging of meanings according to the text itself, not your reader’s judgment. However, it is only possible to achieve such literacy if we do not fall into the denial fallacy that the humanities are expendable. In other words, reading poems conducted by well-prepared professionals in the field of the humanities can give new meaning to the post-pandemic human experience. Learning to read a poem while developing technical-scientific skills can help to develop creativity through the discovery of unusual and unexpected metaphors. It can also aid in emotional intelligence through the relationship between human feelings and the words that define them. It can also help organize social life through the need to move away from a single worldview and translate the variety of the world into words. And it can also prepare for a more ethical coexistence through understanding that the senses of the texts are in constant rotation. The gain of the development of intellectual skills that concern the contexts of the human sciences as the reading of poetry is not related, therefore, to elitist values or “away” from reality. On the contrary, developing by the means we point out is fundamental for entering reality itself. Observe, in this sense, what are the fifteen main skills that employers in the world will seek by 2025, according to the WEF: The result of the research developed by the World Economic Forum is self-explanatory— or at least it should be. Except for competencies 7, 8, and 14, all others correlate with the humanities and the social and language sciences. It is not possible to expect skills like these, Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Valmir Luis Saldanha da Silva, didapeu@gmail.com Citation: Saldanha da Silva, V.L. (2021). PANDEMIC Emotional intelligence, poetry, and the fallacy of the uselessness of the humanities. Academia Letters, Article 2249. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2249. 3 which demand an understanding of the complexity of human beings, to be developed by people who do not understand that the purpose of technological development is to improve the lives of other people. Those who are unable to relate their ideas to the history of humanity, or to perceive linguistic nuances, or to draw social and philosophical parallels, or to associate the same feeling to different words and different words to the same feeling, are the same people who believe that, in times of COVID-19 pandemic, we must turn the resources of our researches to the “real” sciences. Take the example of the poem “Ensinamento”, “Teaching” (2008, p. 118), by the Brazilian poet Adélia Prado, translated by Viviana Bosi (2020, p. 50): Teaching My mother thought study was/ the finest thing in the world. / It is not./ The finest thing in the world is feeling./ That day at night, father moonlighting,/ she said to me:/ “poor guy, so late and still working so hard.”/ She laid out bread and coffee, left the pan on the fire with hot water./ She didn’t speak to me about love./ That luxury word. The poem translates the common, the prosaic of everyday life. There is nothing extraordinary about this. Adélia, through this text, leads the reader to reconstruct these sentimental memories of the past –or invent them if the reader does not have them. The mother relates to her son/daughter through the transmission of everyday experience, not through big speeches. Life, in the poem, is a simple life, a life in which the actions of care for the other reveal love much more than words. The “Teaching” of the text proposes a reorganization of the world, seen from partnership and companionship. We can study many subjects in depth in a poem like this: empathy, the valorization of actions, the construction of solid alliances, the danger of words that do not materialize, the ways of living love, the reconfiguration of maternal and paternal images, the importance of memory, etc. And each of these topics can help build our subjectivity and develop the skills needed in this century and opening a fundamental aesthetic window to the life we want to build in the post-Coronavirus world. If we aspire to a society in which the solutions to the problems of existence are effective and creative, we can neither walk on paths already traced nor ignore the strength of the humanities to imagine the present and the future but to combine ethics and aesthetics to keep our species alive. References Andreoni, M. (2021, Jan 10). Coronavirus in Brazil: What You Need to Know. The New York Times, Article. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/article/brazil-coronavirusAcademia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Valmir Luis Saldanha da Silva, didapeu@gmail.com Citation: Saldanha da Silva, V.L. (2021). PANDEMIC Emotional intelligence, poetry, and the fallacy of the uselessness of the humanities. Academia Letters, Article 2249. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2249. 4 cases.html Andreoni, M. Londoño, E., & Casado L. (2021, March 4). Brazil’s Covid Crisis Is a Warning to the Whole World, Scientists Say. The New York Times, Americas. Retrieved from https:/ /www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/world/americas/brazil-covid-variant.html?action=click&block=more_in_recirc&i 7db0-11eb-8b27-f78fa14c64bb&index=4&pgtype=Article&region=footer Arbix, G. (2020). Ciência e Tecnologia em um mundo de ponta-cabeça. Estudos Avançados. 34(99), 65-76. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1590/s0103-4014.2020.3499.005 Bosi, V. (2020). 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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17648/asas.v16i2.1881 Saldanha da Silva, V.L. (2016). O mal de viver na poesia de Luigi Pirandello. [Masters dissertation, São Paulo State University UNESP Repository: http://repositorio.unesp.br/ handle/11449/141530 World Economic Forum. (2020). The future of jobs reports 2020. Geneva: World Economic Forum. Retrieved from http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2020.pdf Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Valmir Luis Saldanha da Silva, didapeu@gmail.com Citation: Saldanha da Silva, V.L. (2021). PANDEMIC Emotional intelligence, poetry, and the fallacy of the uselessness of the humanities. Academia Letters, Article 2249. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2249. 5