Consider, for a moment, the strange asymmetry in what we were taught. By the time most of us finished school, we had been instructed for thousands of hours in mathematics, in grammar, in chemistry, in history. We had taken exams on these subjects and been graded on our performance. The institutions of our childhood took these things seriously — seriously enough to organize most of our waking hours around them for fifteen years.

In the same fifteen years, we received almost no formal instruction in the subjects that turn out to determine the quality of our actual adult lives. How to be in close relationship with another human being. How to recognize what we are feeling and what we need. How to navigate disappointment, grief, conflict, and the slow process of becoming a person. How to love. How to listen. How to apologize. How to live with one’s own contradictions. These are the subjects that constitute most of the texture of adult life. None of them appeared on the curriculum.

We were left, instead, to figure them out — usually from the modeling of our parents (which had its strengths and its limitations), from the implicit lessons of our peer culture (which were often badly wrong), and from the relentless stream of films, songs, and stories that have always carried the burden of teaching what the schools did not. Some of us picked up reasonable approximations of these skills. Many of us reached adulthood operationally illiterate in the emotional and relational domains, trying to navigate the most important questions in our lives with vocabularies and frameworks we had cobbled together from sources that were never designed to teach what we needed to learn.

This is what Alain de Botton has called the missing emotional education. The School of Life movement he founded is built around the premise that there is a body of knowledge — drawn from philosophy, psychology, literature, and accumulated human wisdom — that should have been part of growing up, that wasn’t, and that adults can deliberately give to themselves now. The project is unfashionably earnest. It is also, on inspection, one of the more useful frames a man can adopt for the work of his own development.

What the missing curriculum actually contained

It is worth being specific about what we were not taught, because the specificity changes what the work of catching up looks like. Some of the more important subjects that were absent:

Emotional literacy. The ability to recognize what we are feeling, to distinguish one emotion from another, to name what is happening inside us with some precision. Most adults, asked what they are feeling, can produce three or four words — fine, frustrated, tired, fine — and not much more. The actual interior is far more textured than this vocabulary can describe. The vocabulary for the actual interior was never taught, because no one in our schooling was charged with teaching it.

The structure of close relationships. What it actually takes to sustain a marriage over decades. What healthy intimacy looks like and what unhealthy intimacy looks like. The specific dynamics that emerge between two people who have committed to each other. How to read your partner’s nervous system, how to be read in turn, how to repair after rupture, how to maintain warmth across long stretches of ordinary time. None of this was on the curriculum, despite being arguably the single most important subject for the quality of an adult life.

Self-knowledge. The Socratic injunction — know yourself — was treated by our culture as a kind of background virtue rather than a learnable skill. How does one actually know oneself? What practices reveal the patterns one has been operating from? What is the difference between the personality that has been performing one’s social life and the deeper self underneath that performance? These are questions with developed traditions of inquiry — contemplative practice, psychotherapy, philosophical reflection — none of which appeared in any formal curriculum.

The handling of difficult emotions. What to do with grief. With fear. With shame. With longing. With the particular kinds of pain that arrive in adult life — the failed ambition, the dying parent, the friendship that ended, the child who is struggling, the marriage going through its hardest year. We were given almost no instruction in this. We were given, instead, the implicit message that the difficult emotions should mostly not be experienced or, if they were, should be moved through quickly and without much external acknowledgment. The result is a generation of adults who are not, in any meaningful sense, equipped to be with their own difficult emotions, and so they outsource the handling to alcohol, distraction, work, or simple suppression.

The capacity to give and receive love. Love, like the other arts, requires specific learnable skills. How to recognize when someone is reaching toward you. How to reach back. How to receive being seen. How to see another person clearly. How to forgive. How to allow yourself to be forgiven. How to bring your real self into relationship with another real self. These skills were never named as skills, much less taught.

The construction of a meaningful life. What does it mean for a life to be meaningful? What are the components of a flourishing one? How does a person locate his own values and live in accordance with them? These are the central questions of philosophy, and they were treated, in most of our schooling, as if they were either obvious or unanswerable, rather than as the actual important questions they are.

The list could continue. The point is that the absence of this curriculum is not a small gap. It is, on examination, the absence of nearly everything that determines the quality of an adult life. Most of us are operating with serious gaps in our basic equipment for being human, and the gaps were not our fault — they were structural, baked into a system that had decided, somewhere, that these were not subjects to be taught.

Why the curriculum was missing

It is worth understanding how we ended up here, because the understanding makes it less mysterious that we feel as unprepared as we do.

The modern Western educational system was built largely in the nineteenth century to serve the needs of industrializing economies. Its priorities were practical: literacy, numeracy, basic civic knowledge, the foundational skills for participating in a wage-earning life. The emotional and relational dimensions of human existence were assumed to be the province of the family, the church, and the broader culture — institutions that, at the time the system was designed, were generally robust enough to do this work. The school was for the things the home and the community could not be expected to teach.

In the century and a half since, the home and the community have changed in ways the educational system has not caught up with. Extended families have dispersed. The intergenerational transmission of relational wisdom has been disrupted. Religious institutions, which had carried much of the work of emotional and existential education for centuries, have declined in their reach. The slower forms of community life that taught these subjects implicitly — the multigenerational neighborhood, the mentoring relationships of trades and professions — have eroded.

The result is that the institutions that were supposed to teach the emotional curriculum no longer do, in most cases, and the institutions that were supposed to teach the practical curriculum still don’t extend into the emotional one. We grew up in the gap. Most of us did not realize until adulthood that the gap was there.

The marketing layer of self-improvement culture has rushed in to fill the gap, sometimes well and sometimes badly. The better corners of this work — School of Life, serious therapy, certain books and traditions — do something close to honest emotional education for the adults who seek them out. The worse corners exploit the gap by selling quick fixes for problems that require slow learning. The work, for the serious adult, is to find the genuine sources of the missing curriculum and to take them seriously.

What adult emotional education looks like

For the man who recognizes the gap and decides to do something about it, the project is more available than it sounds. The curriculum exists. It is scattered across philosophy, psychology, literature, and accumulated practice. It is not always presented in obviously useful forms, and some of the most valuable material is buried in places — long philosophical texts, slow novels, contemplative traditions — that the modern reader, trained on quick consumption, has to relearn how to approach. But it is available. The work is to undertake it deliberately.

What the work looks like in practice:

Reading slowly and well. Not the rapid consumption of self-help books that the optimization culture promotes. The slow, careful reading of a small number of genuinely substantive works — the moral philosophers (Aristotle, the Stoics, Montaigne), the great novelists (Tolstoy, Eliot, Proust, the modernists), the serious psychologists (Bowlby, Winnicott, Schwartz), the contemplative traditions, the better contemporary writers in this space (de Botton himself, the more serious psychotherapy literature). Read with a notebook. Return to the books that matter. Lifelong learning of this kind is not a hobby. It is the slow construction of the education that should have happened earlier and didn’t. The cultivation of genuine curiosity is part of what makes this kind of reading sustainable over decades.

Working with a good therapist. Therapy, at its best, is not crisis intervention or symptom management. It is a sustained relationship with a skilled person whose job is to help you understand yourself, learn the patterns you have been operating from, and develop the capacities you were not given in childhood. A good therapist is, in this frame, something like a tutor in the missing curriculum. Not all therapy meets this standard. Finding the kind that does, and engaging with it seriously over years, is one of the higher-leverage uses of money and time available to a modern adult.

Joining or building communities where the missing curriculum is being taken seriously. The men’s groups, the contemplative communities, the book clubs that read serious things slowly, the friendships that involve actually talking about your inner life — these are the modern analogs of the institutions that used to do this work. Most of them have to be built deliberately now rather than inherited. The building is part of the work.

Practicing the skills, not just reading about them. Emotional literacy is not learned only through reading. It is learned through the actual practice of attending to your inner life, naming what you find there, sitting with what is uncomfortable. The skills of listening, repair, presence, and love are learned through the actual practice of doing them in the actual relationships of your life. The reading provides the map. The practice provides the territory. Without both, the project remains theoretical.

Allowing the curriculum to take years. This is the part the modern impatience makes hardest. The emotional education was supposed to happen across childhood and early adulthood — twenty years of slow accretion. Catching up in adulthood is also a multi-year project. The man who expects to fix the gap in six months has misunderstood the scale of what is missing. The man who commits to the work for the rest of his life, in slow accumulation, gets the actual education in the form available to him. The practical wisdom that the schools did not give us accrues, like compound interest, over years rather than months.

What this gives back

The man who undertakes the emotional education seriously over years gains something the early gap had denied him: the equipment to actually navigate adult life. The same difficulties continue to arrive — the conflicts, the losses, the difficult emotions, the questions about how to live — but he has been slowly acquiring the tools for being with them. He can name what he is feeling. He can be in conflict without it becoming catastrophic. He can sit with difficult emotions instead of having to discharge them. He can love and be loved more accurately. He can ask the meaningful questions of his life without panic.

He also gains, gradually, a different relationship to his own past. The events of his childhood and early adulthood that did not make sense at the time begin to make sense through the lens of what he is learning. The patterns that he had been running, often without awareness, become visible to him. The work to revise them becomes possible. He stops being run by what was never made conscious and starts being able to operate, increasingly, from his own deeper Self.

The relationships in his life benefit, sometimes dramatically. The partner who has been with him through the years before the work began gets to be with a different version of him as the work proceeds. The friendships deepen as he becomes more available to them. The children, if he has them, receive a father who is doing the work he wishes had been done before him, and who is therefore more likely to give them at least part of what he himself did not get.

And he gains, slowly, what the missing curriculum was originally for: the capacity to be more fully alive in the life he has. The emotional vocabulary makes the interior more accessible. The relational skills make connection more possible. The philosophical work makes the larger questions of his existence less paralyzing. The accumulation of these things produces a different quality of life from the inside, even when the outer circumstances have not changed much.

The starting point

You did not get the emotional education you needed in childhood. This is true for almost everyone reading this. It was not your fault, and it was not, mostly, your parents’ fault — they were operating with the curriculum they had been given, which was also incomplete. The project, now, is to deliberately undertake the work that was not done for you.

You do not have to do it all at once. The starting point is small. Pick one book in the missing curriculum that interests you and read it slowly. Find one practice — therapy, contemplation, journaling, a meaningful conversation with a friend — that lets you actually attend to your inner life, and do it regularly. Choose one skill to work on this season — listening, perhaps, or naming feelings more accurately, or being more honest with one person you love. The project unfolds in small increments, over many years.

The neuroscience of changing the patterns we were given has accumulated enough evidence to be reassuring on the point that the brain remains capable of this work across the lifespan. The man at sixty can still learn. The man at forty has decades of life ahead in which the work will pay back. The man at twenty-five can save himself considerable suffering by starting now. The relevant time horizon is the rest of your life, and the rest of your life is long enough for the work to deepen substantially.

The institutions of your childhood did not give you what they should have. This is not a complaint. It is the situation. The institutions of your adulthood, mostly, will not give you what you need either. The work is yours to undertake, deliberately, with the slow patience the project requires. The reward is the quality of the life that emerges as the gap closes — a life in which you are equipped, finally, to be in it more fully than you were ever taught how to be.

The curriculum was missing. It is, in the form available to grown men willing to seek it out, no longer missing. Begin.