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January 22, 2008, 12:55 pm PST
Empathy
Quote From: starlet234Your last line is of great importance to me. The question: How can this be best accomplished? To teach people to have greater empathy and compassion for others requires starting very early in a child's life, I think. In fact, it is so important for these qualities to be instilled in children that I would think ethics lessons would be taught in the public schools. Some sort of sensitivity training in the school curriculum beginning in the primary grades and continuing through high school, perhaps. Why can't this be implemented? There would be much less bullying types of behavior that are so prevalent in public schools now if schools would all implement a zero tolerance for gossip and all forms of harrassment. and show their sincerity by offering sensitivity training.
Hope this gets printed. You CAN teach empathic skills. They've done studies in elementary schools (I think it was with earlier grades) where they had after-school "retreats" or sessions and taught thru role-playing and such. I believe in these cases it was a success. I wish this practice would become common-place. If so, we would probably have much less of this behavior in later grades.
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