(This one outgrew its position in the July 8 Link Log.)
Is it possible to teach empathy to preschoolers? This
teacher thinks so. I think the teacher is a nice, kind person, whom some
students may remember fondly after they do develop the hormones and
neural circuits to feel empathy. I think children who've bonded with a kind,
loving, empathetic mother (or other parent-figure) can learn some behavior that
looks like empathy, that will feel like empathy whenever the children are able
to feel empathy. I don't think children actually feel empathy before
puberty.
Because children are hard-wired to admire, imitate, and try
to please parent-figures, they do learn to mimic behavior that's motivated by
genuine empathy. If Mommy stops the annoying noise of one baby's whining by
cuddling that baby, and if another baby is attached to Mommy and observes that
behavior, then, yes, that baby will try to cuddle the other baby when it
whines. If Mommy models petting and grooming animals the way the animals like
to be petted and groomed, tending plants the way plants thrive on being tended,
listening and talking about things other people want to talk about, then, yes,
preschoolers will mimic those behaviors too. If Mommy rewards those behaviors,
too, or if the other baby and/or pets and/or plants and/or friends do, then
those behaviors will come to feel rewarding to those children. But...
My brother and I were considered child prodigies, such that
our mother sincerely believed she was teaching us empathy before we'd reached
puberty. She had certainly taught us enough empathetic-looking behavior that,
to this day, I'm willing to imagine that my brother might have felt some sort
of preliminary glimmer of empathy--sometimes. I can say, though, that what I
felt was strictly conditioned, child-pleasing-parent pleasure all the way up to
puberty. Humans are by nature predators before we're herd-joiners; children
feel pleasure in beating other children at things, including physically beating them
in fights, long before they feel pleasure in empathy. Thus the child who learns
to mimic empathy in some ways will turn around and reveal an utter lack of
empathy in other situations. We did, in fact, learn to cuddle babies and change
diapers and hold warm bottles over infants' mouths. We learned to warm baby
birds in our hands and talk to plants and write sweet little letters to our
aunts (whom we did in fact like), like any child whose parents or teachers
believe it's showing precocious empathy. We also learned to kick, shove, punch,
stomp, pinch, verbally abuse, tattle, and generally deal with the other
pre-pubertal monsters at school in a more efficient, and no less cold-blooded,
way than Wednesday and Pugsley Addams. I learned to do many kind things more
efficiently at a younger age than most children; I was still a mean, even
sadistic, preadolescent troll.
I suppose nature intended children to learn both empathetic
and hostile behavior, and a case can be made that you have to develop some
capacity to feel empathy in order to become really cruel, too. (The
terrifying thing about sociopaths is that they do clearly show a
capacity for empathy when manipulating people; they just lack, or inhibit,
empathy about the results of their schemes. Autistic patients, who don't
develop empathy at all, may inadvertently hurt others--usually when fleeing
from things their scrambled perceptions make painful to them--but they don't
scheme and manipulate.) I'm all in favor of teachers who model and reward kind
behavior in the classroom. I'm not in favor of proposals to add
empathy, or kindness, or "values," or "touchy feely" to the
elementary school or preschool curriculum...because I can say firsthand that,
even when children learn kind, gentle, nurturing behaviors, trying to tell them
about empathy is as much a waste of time as trying to tell them about romantic
love.
We feel things, whether as "emotions" or as
"passions" or as "experiences," by way of hormones
and nerves. Most of those hormones and nerves develop as we grow up. Estrogen
generally seems to intensify the "feelings" associated with
empathetic responses; normal male adults have enough estrogen to feel empathy,
which may be why some men seem to feel that women's expressions of empathy are
excessive. Children seem to start to feel empathy, within themselves, as
distinct from acting out empathetic behavior they've learned, a year or two
before puberty. The refined emotional cruelty of middle school "mean
girls" is an early development in this process, where the "mean
girl" starts to notice what hurts other kids' feelings most before she
starts to care how badly she's hurt their feelings. By the time young people
start to feel physically attracted to one another, most of them have learned
that kindness is attractive...though a few people seem to fail to learn this at
any time in life.
Unfortunately many elementary school teachers are adults
whose own levels of empathy never rise very high. A chronic problem we have in
these United States is that these teachers' clumsy efforts to teach things for
which they're not really talented, themselves, creates "mental
blocks" that prevent people from learning grammar, music, math, science,
or even sports. John Holt wrote three entire books about some of the ways this
happens.
He hardly scraped the surface. And if this approach to
teaching were to become the way we expected people to learn empathy, Heaven
help us all.
Mandatory education in overcrowded, industrial-model schools
has made many Americans into couch potatoes who, for some reason (such as
astigmatism), didn't learn anything from the formal instruction in baseball and
basketball we got in elementary school, and therefore concluded that we're
"just not good at sports." We as a society can live comfortably with
large numbers of people who believe, correctly or not, that they "just
can't" hit a home run, shoot a basket, or kick a goal. We can't live so
comfortably with similar numbers of people who believe that they "just
can't" learn to tell when they are causing others pain.
And if anyone does need help learning to tell when s/he is
causing others pain--if that ability does not develop, on schedule, somewhere
between the ages of ten and fifteen--that help is very unlikely to come from
adults who don't instinctively know why trying to explain the concept
of empathy to a large mixed group of randomly chosen reluctant
"students" is a stupid idea. It's a stupid idea because it causes
pain, that's why. All emotional feelings, along with sexual reactions and
spiritual experiences, are in that category of private, personal, subjective
experiences that nature did not intend us to try to share with large mixed
groups, under any circumstances, but least of all when most of the people in
the group don't even want to be in the group. A teacher who blunders onto those
topics is causing pain. If the teacher doesn't know that, the teacher is not
qualified to teach about empathy.
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