Almost every day, I watch the flow of Twitter tweets containing the words ”empathy” and “empathic.”
This morning I noticed many tweets and retweets containing ”Can You Teach Empathy to Children?” with a link to a New York Times article by Lisa Belkin, which referred to another article in the Huffington Post by Liane Kupferberg Carter entitled “Those Kids.”
I read with curiosity, hoping for more evidence of empathy infiltrating our culture, as I sometimes do these days in similar tweets. I read about a mother, sharing her pain, wanting her autistic son to be treated with respect, to be acknowledged and accepted as he is. Instead, he is treated as an after-school project by other students’ parents and ignored by peers. I read about a mother who deeply loves her son and wants him to have a fulfilling life as a member of a community, not as a tolerated object of community service.
I expected the story would have a happy ending as we Americans are so conditioned to do. Instead, I was just left with questions and no answers. Can You Teach Empathy to Children? It seems neither Liane nor Lisa can say, although I trust they truly and deeply want it to be true.
I find myself imagining Liane’s life in an affluent neighborhood, filled with privileged children. High school students, jockeying for position to gain entrance to America’s most prestigious Universities perform community service as a task much like homework– I have to do this to get what I want. I imagine parents encouraging their sons and daughters to do so, well-intentioned, thinking such activities will be good for them. I find myself wondering who is guiding this program and what their intention might be.
I don’t know. I’m just imagining all of this. But what I do know is that empathy and compassion are real and require gentle care and nurturing to grow within us. Empathy, like many skills is learned most deeply by example. Here’s an example of a teacher teaching empathy and compassion to his students. These kids aren’t preparing for college or even the next grade level, they are learning to listen and care for each other, how to be truly happy. I long for the day when we can allow and even welcome teachers like Toshiro Kanamori here in the United States of America. That is my Christmas wish for 2009.
