"I, You, and It" - The Importance of Empathy

When I began reading “I, You, It” by James Moffett, the first thing that I noticed and circled was the date, 1965. After the first couple of paragraphs, I found myself thinking that this article could have been written within the last year, the ideas are so pertinent and problems and their solutions seem so timeless.

            There was one sentence that does not flow from the mentality of this decade, however. Moffett writes on page 24 of the article that as a child grows, “he gradually yields up his initial, emotionally preferred vantage point, and expands his perspective so as to include many other points of view.” Moffett writes this as a synthesis of Piaget and Vygotsky, and is simply adding his vote to the idea that empathy is an integral part of the process of psychological development.

            Empathy has been studied extensively in the last century, but research has gone even further in the last two decades as educators, researchers and parents discover a growing trend in a narcissism that children are forgetting to grow out of. The implications of this trend cannot be ignored. Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatric correspondent and author worries about our country’s future leadership in his article, “The End of Empathy.” [http://www.foxnews.com/health/2010/06/01/end-empathy/]. It is true that, while our long-term goal as teachers is to prepare the next generation of leaders, our more immediate concern in to assist our students in grasping the content we teach. What is equally true is the fact that narcissism stands in the way of education, especially the realm of learning how to write. How can we expect students to write complex characters or individualized emotions if they are only used to operating in reference to their own emotions? How can we expect them to master 1^st and 2^nd and 3^rd person?

            Good writing requires empathy. When students can mentally substitute another’s experience and feeling for their own, the process of committing it to paper becomes doable. While empathy is a natural part of development, something has allowed that natural process to be compromised. Individualized experience has been encouraged through social media and empathy is now expressed by the facebook "like" button. There are websites, projects, studies and mentorship programs devoted to the art of teaching real empathy, but I believe that the best way to give empathy the rights and respect it deserves is to model it for our students. Students often complain the teachers don’t see things from their point of view. We must value the behavior that we expect from these kids.