I feel you are inaccurate, in that schools all focus more on emotional intelligence over any single academic subject matter.
Add up all the required group projects, team stuff, etc and there you have it.
Add up all the required group projects, team stuff, etc and there you have it.
It's the same in other fields, e.g. sports/physical ed often works that way, language and maths as well depending on the teacher. But with none of them, the failure to impart that knowledge increases the risk of murder (as seen here, even though that's an extreme case.)
Edit to add: and in cases like Hans Reiser it's doubly sad because he surely was a smart kid. Sending him off into special "emotional intelligence classes" probably wouldn't have affected his intellectual skills in the slightest (or maybe even in a positive way). But while it's an aspect that most schools try to impart through osmosis, they don't detect when they fail, or even when they notice, there's little they can do about it.
Instead we should teach kids cognitive empathy and explore applied theory of mind. Do it in an intellectual way. Why do people think differently, what motivates people, how does this motivation lead to events and outcomes in society? It's sort of an intersection of psychology and sociology. If people get skillful at this it helps to reduce how judgemental people can be, which is one of the things the author talked about. You could tie it in with teaching kids about CBT. Teach kids to analyze their own thoughts and assumptions about themselves, others, and the world they're in.
The other comment hits the nail on the head perfectly with referencing lord of the flies.
Your parents read to you, and you developed a love of books? Probably you know pretty well how to imagine another person's emotions in a hypothetical situation. And that different characters could feel very differently about otherwise-similar situations. You can probably name three to five different ways a person might feel about, say, having their work usurped.
On the other hand, a decade or two ago attempts to teach this sort of thing used exercises like dividing people into four quadrants, named things like 'plants' and 'stars' as if the very idea that different people are different was a shocking revelation they needed to spend several weeks introducing.
Perhaps our techniques for teaching this stuff have improved in the past few years? The way it used to be taught was something of a waste of time.
I didn't say it's working, I said that they focus on it more than you think.