Education & Empathy

My sister recently bought me a copy of The Myth of the Shiksa and Other Essays by Edwin H. Friedman, the most prevalent student of Bowen theory, a systems approach to family counseling. In an interview entitled "Empathy Defeats Therapy," Friedman writes,

...I think it is precisely our focus on empathy that is one of the major factors that has everybody stuck. It's a post-World War II emphasis. The world doesn't even appear in the original Oxford English Dictionary published in 1932. It first show up as a human relations concept in the 1970s version.

The interviewer asks, "What would you emphasize instead?" Friedman says,

Responsibility...Put more simply, most therapists are too sensitive to be effective. In therapy emotional fusion with another is far destructive than lack of concern or understanding...My favorite biblical story is the one about the golden calf. Aaron, feeling for the anxiety of the people while Moses has disappeared up a mountain to search for truth, gives them the valium of the that day - an idol. The distinction between Moses and Aaron, the prophet and the priest, has characterized every helping profession ever since. It is only a small percentage of physicians, lawyers, and therapists who can tolerate enough pain in their clients to enable them, or challenge them, to grow. Most, like Aaron, only want to relieve their pain.

These words struck me when I read them. I have been thinking about ways to promote personal responsibility in my classroom. Education research shows that students simply will not learn something if it is spoon fed to them. They have to be active participants in their learning. They have to struggle through the thinking themselves, not rely on a teacher to hold their hand through it all. I've understood this on a surface level for years, but I realized that I have not been putting it into practice very well. There were times where so many kids needed help that I ended up simply telling people why they were getting the wrong answer. I would tell them that they need to use conservation of energy, not dynamics, or that they were multiplying when they should be dividing. But I think that robbed them of something, even if it saved them a little mental turmoil and me a little time.

I'm not sure why I slipped so easily into giving too much help. I guess part of it is that I had no problem sweating away at a problem when I was in school. I liked it. Sitting down to a new homework set was something of a challenge, a chance to test my knowledge and wit. I would hardly ever ask a teacher or professor for help. I'd get with a friend and we'd slog through it together. So if a student was asking me for something, it must have been because they really needed it, or so I thought.

But now I realize that I was a crutch for too many of them. My students did not do as well as I expected them to on the AP test this year (this was a national trend and the first year of a brand new physics exam, but I still felt they could have done better). So many students just want the answer so they can finish and dig out their phones. If they haven't seen an exact problem like it before, they don't know what to do. They don't know how to look things up, to check their notes, to apply a concept to a different context from which it was learned. This generation has been told that, to quote Sir Ken Robinson, "there's one right answer, it's in the back, and don't look at it." Once that bubble is filled in, all thinking ceases because they have what they were told is important.

This next year things will be different. My classroom will not be empathetic. As a teacher I will be compassionate; I will know that what they are trying to learn is difficult and requires a substantial amount of time and effort, but I will be a little more comfortable with a bit more discomfort on their part. I'm worried about parents complaining that I'm not "teaching" their children or that their student has been an A student all his life so what's wrong with your class Mr. Gardner? What will be wrong with my class is that it will be right for once: a place where students learn that, in life, answers really aren't the point. The important thing is to be able to communicate, to take a stand and defend it, to be able to justify  your conclusions, to think clearly, to collaborate, to argue for your answer, and to grow.