Today the NY Times ran an article about a school system in Scarsdale, NY, that includes mandatory lessons in “empathy.” The article says that these seventh- and eighth-grade kids are required to do things like interviewing octogenarians and disabled people to learn about their lives and feelings, and to avoid doing things that might leave classmates feeling “excluded” from cool social events. The hope is that this will increase not just empathy for others, but that this kind of training may be instrumental in reducing the amount of bullying, teasing, and other social ills that are common in schools.
Surprisingly, the article cites a number of critics who disagree with this training. Reasons include the risk of “empathy training” crowding out other, more critical academic items, and kids’ complaints that the schools shouldn’t try to dictate how they live their personal lives.
These are probably misplaced fears. In fact, there may be few things that are more useful to a child than to learn some of the critical skills, and incorporating some of the key attitudes, that go along with “empathy.” Because empathy is actually a core component of the broader set of skills that are now called “social intelligence.”
What is “social intelligence,” then? The concept has been around for nearly a century in psychology, though it’s only really gotten a lot of press in the past few years. The idea of social intelligence was originally developed as one of several core parts of intelligence, or “IQ,” in general. It was thought that there were several broad types of intellectual ability, such as memory, the ability to manipulate mechanical objects, the ability to understand written/academics, and so on. “Social intelligence” was broadly thought of as the ability to understand and “manage” people.
In my book on the topic, I suggest that social intelligence includes four broad categories of ability: self-understanding (of your emotions/motives) and emotional self-control; the ability to have empathy for others (to understand their emotions, what they want from you, etc.); the ability to connect with/communicate with others; and genuine caring.
Unlike traditional, academic “IQ,” the evidence suggests that emotional intelligence can indeed be improved with training. So teaching kids about empathy is probably a really good thing. It may not automatically bring the “new age of happiness” to every child, and yes, there will still be bullies. (There may even be a rare few who, like psychologists who helped the CIA learn to torture better, become better bullies because of their new empathy into “what would really hurt her.”) But for the most part, creating a group of youngsters who have higher empathic quotients is likely, over time, to help them to become both more resilient, more effective (even in dealing with those new, “highly trained” bullies), and more successful in life.
