Do you consider yourself to be an empathetic person? Do you try to understand how others are feeling? Is empathy is an important skill for all of us to have? Why, or why not?
In the Op-Ed “The Trouble With Empathy,” Molly Worthen explores the power — and limitations of — empathy:
Few would quarrel with a kindergarten teacher’s noble efforts to teach listening skills to 5-year-olds. But as my daughter and her classmates get older, they will run into thornier dilemmas, our era’s version of old questions: Are some divides too great for common humanity to bridge? When we attempt to step into the shoes of those very different from us, do we do more harm than good? At the same time, trends in American education have worked at cross-purposes, nurturing social and emotional learning in some ways, hampering it in others.
Our capacity to see one another as fellow humans, to connect across differences, is the foundation of a liberal pluralist society. Yet skeptics say that what seems like empathy often may be another form of presumption, condescension or domination. In his 2016 book “Against Empathy,” the psychologist Paul Bloom argued that empathy can cloud rational judgment and skews toward people “who are close to us, those who are similar to us and those we see as more attractive or vulnerable and less scary.” The scholar and activist bell hooks put the matter more starkly. White desire to feel Black experience is predatory, exploitative, “eating the Other,” she wrote.
It’s impossible to perfectly inhabit another person’s experience. The important question is the value of the effort, and whether it leaves us separated by an asymptote or a chasm. Can a straight TV writer create an authentic gay sitcom character? If an author of European descent writes a novel from the perspective of Indigenous people, is it an empathic journey, or an imperialist incursion? “I don’t want to throw out what empathy is trying to do,” Alisha Gaines, a professor of African-American literature at Florida State University, told me. “I’m very critical of it though. Empathy has to be considered in the context of institutions and power.”
She also investigates the history of how empathy came to be included in curriculum standards, “nurturing social and emotional learning in some ways, hampering it in others.”
In the hands of the social scientists who rule our own time, empathy has become one piece of “emotional intelligence,” a term coined in the 1960s and developed by the psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer in 1990. The journalist Daniel Goleman popularized that phrase in his 1995 best seller “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ,” which argued that focusing on emotional skills would reduce school violence and equip students for greater success in life. Research has shown that these capacities are at least as important for long-term happiness and economic security as “hard” skills like reading and math.
In 2004, Illinois became the first state to adopt standards from preschool through high school for social and emotional learning, or SEL. Since then, anti-bullying workshops, classroom rules stressing compassion and wall charts of “feeling words” and “emoji meters” have become more common in schools nationally. “The overwhelming majority of educators and parents acknowledge that teaching children SEL skills is critical,” Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, told me. “At the other end, in corporate America, employers are looking for people who have these skills.”
But the colorful classroom posters and the drive for data through “social-emotional competencies” student assessments — not necessarily bad things in themselves — risk reducing our idea of empathy to yet another job skill. The mania for standardized testing that followed the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act has further hampered teachers’ best and oldest tool for developing emotional understanding: the study of literature.
Students, read the entire article, and then tell us:
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The New York Times guide “How to Be More Empathetic” defines empathy as “understanding how others feel and being compassionate toward them.” Do you think you are good at empathizing? Do you try to understand how others are feeling? Do you think of yourself as a compassionate person — even toward people you don’t know? And if you do think of yourself as good at empathizing, how did you get to be that way?
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Do you think empathy is important? What are the benefits of trying to understand someone else’s experience and point of view?
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What are the limits to empathy? To what extent can we really know, understand and feel what someone else is experiencing? Is it worth trying? Why?
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In the Op-Ed, the author mentions anti-bullying workshops, classroom rules stressing compassion, and reading of literature as some of the varying methods that schools use to promote social and emotional learning — including empathy. Should schools be teaching empathy as a skill for students to practice and learn? And if yes, how?
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Ms. Worthen asks these two questions: “Are some divides too great for common humanity to bridge? When we attempt to step into the shoes of those very different from us, do we do more harm than good?” What do you think? Are there potential dangers to trying to be empathetic?
Ms. Worthen quotes bell hooks, a Black scholar and activist, who warns about white people who desire to feel what Black people feel, calling it “predatory, exploitative, ‘eating the Other.’” What do you think? What are the potential pitfalls or dangers in using empathy across racial — and other — differences?
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Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
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Can Empathy Be Taught? Should Schools Try to Help Us Feel One Another’s Pain? - The New York Times
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