Do people genuinely need to learn empathy from these Emotional Intelligence classes?
are you making it to college without knowing what empathy is?

@whirly most (ignore psycho-/socio-/autistipaths for the following text, they are extra layers to this baseline info) are born with the built-in skillset to feel empathy for every common human emotion seen, heard and sensed.

not using them, the built in empathy reactions from mirror-neurons will cause internal-reactions that one has no clue what to do with. if you havent felt some emotion's empathy reaction more than once and are age 20, you will be unlikely to figure out a good expression of the empathy-induced-emotional reaction, and hit a "WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DOO?!?!?" wall

a good emotional intelligence class will explain to a human, what are the common emotional reactions for bystanders emotionally, how they commonly react, and what are the ranges of expected reactions and behaviours. Including bad ones, good ones, and gray-area ones. Not to forget info on why empathy happens and why its good. and when empathy is bad too, and how to use it for nefarious malicious purposes! It is the most critical knowledge when one must protect themselves against social engineering scams and hacks: how is the target, the college student, being abused empathically. similarly, it is critical info for better repairs of breaking/broken relations with family/friends/lovers.

tl;dr : yes and yes

@Ergo @whirly the more reglemented the world we live in becomes, the less chances for empathy related learning moments (positive AND negative) for a human as he grows. It is an inevitability of advancing society. I believe, maybe wrong with this assumption.

@Ergo @whirly you cant ignore them, true. they come in as extra layers on top of the "normalcy", or default (aka most common) behaviour so to say. from the PoV of common behaviour, the alternative brainbuilds can be contextualized.

@Ergo @whirly i do think they would work it out, but working it out without prexisting, guiding knowledge, and instead, doing instinctual trial and error, takes a lot more time, like days or weeks more rather than minutes or hours more. Something that there's less and less in a more and more advanced society: socializing repeatedly with the same target in a short time frame (several times a week, for an hour+ at a time, per target)

i think that "ah I didnt notice I was doing that, my bad, I'll stop" is a mild autistic trait. I have an assumption in a direction of beliefs that i have not really manifested or explained to myself: Autistic people do, by default, roleplay to learn what empathy related actions should be done. So the response-learning behaviour is faster for autistics in a non-serious envorinment (ie, someone causally saying hey stop that). Meanwhile, un-autistic people, would be the opposite: empathy response-learning behaviour is faster in a serious environment (ie, the thrown-into-cold-water figure of speech). A roleplay like, emotionally unattached situation would barely register with such a person if only applied once, hence must be applied very many times through roleplay before it begins to register.

Previous paragraph comes from my understanding from the army, where i understood repeatedly that one sentence was absolute gold: "For over half the soldiers in a large group to understand over half of new instructions, the instructions must be said 3 times, clearly"

I can recollect several moments in my life where the autistic-end of the empathy-emotional-response-learning trait has really hit me hard and permanently and instantly cemented inside of me.

i have not thought deeper in this topic so there might be contradictions or big exceptions here. I still ignore fully psycho and sociopaths right now as i write.