I went to a talk this week given by Mary Gordon, founder and developer of Roots of Empathy.  The program, which focuses on developing social and emotional literacy in middle school children, invites an infant and the mother and/or father into the classroom once a month for an entire school year.  Sitting in a circle around the infant, the facilitator engages the children (and the teacher) in a dialogue about the behaviours and emotions of the infant.  Children learn how to take different perspectives (the cognitive component of empathy), appreciate the difficulties of being a parent, feel and label different emotions in themselves and others, and comfort a crying baby.  Roots of Empathy has reached over 300,000 children in four countries and the research on it shows significant reductions in relational aggression (i.e. gossiping) and proactive aggression (i.e. bullying) and increases in academic achievement and empathy (in both students and teachers).

Reflecting on Jane Roland Martin’s 1981 article about the privileging of patriarchal/productive values over matriarchal/reproductive values in the philosophy of education, I wondered what the success of the Roots of Empathy program suggests about how far we’ve come in education more broadly.  Governments, school boards, and educators across Canada are slowly coming to embrace social and emotional literacy as a legitimate and much needed area of development that complements and even improves academic literacy.  Why is this embrace happening?  Is it because there is strong evidence that emotional regulation skills, for example, can be developed with school-based interventions?  Is it because of the neuroscience that shows a neurological basis for empathy?  Or because it’s a cost-effective way of reducing violent behavior at schools and increasing achievement scores?

Surely these factors play a role in the interest in social and emotional literacy, but I think it confirms what many elementary school teachers (many of whom are females and are mothers themselves) have known all along – attending to the relationships and the emotional life world of children is vital to their development.   However, neither teacher education nor the traditional curriculum (math, science, writing, etc.) has given serious and systematic treatment to this kind of literacy.  And so now here’s a program (Roots of Empathy) that offers a demonstrably sound foundation to the cognitive, affective and social development of children.  It is certainly important to celebrate and support these efforts, but I don’t think Martin would be satisfied here.  There is still a grand, industrial narrative in education that sorts students by age and aims to prepare them for success in a competitive knowledge economy (the productive aims).  Students and schools are evaluated largely on objective measures of math and writing skills.  Surely we owe students the opportunities to skillfully participate and be productive in society, but to take seriously the notion of care and empathy invites us to question how traditional areas of content are being put in service of personal, social and ecological well-being.

The stress and distress of students, families, and the planet is not merely a function of individual behaviours, skills and choices, but also systematic forces that support inequity and massive accumulation of wealth and power.  Teachers bringing social and emotional literacy into the classroom are in a complicated position because they are educating students to go beyond the current failing system, while simultaneously trapping them in the system.  Helping students develop empathy and emotional regulation in one moment, and in the next moment, valuing and evaluating individual acts of intellectual regurgitation, is problematic because there is an “evil [that inheres] in the scarcity of desired places and the dependence on social rewards on educational accomplishment” (Wolff, 1992, pg. 68).  Schooling is not separate from evaluating, sorting and ranking individuals, processes that divide and put people in conflict with each other over these rewards.

The integration of a reproductive ethic into the heart of any philosophy of education would encourage us to find ways to collaboratively engage knowledge and evaluation in service of envisioning and creating ‘desired places’ and ‘social rewards’ that are different from those dependent on patriarchal and consumerist values.  The pedagogical power of perspective-taking and collaborative inter-generational inquiry that underpin the success of programs like Roots of Empathy do not need to be limited to educational add-on interventions.  Resource sharing, mixed-use community planning, and local food production are good examples of topics and activities that have concrete and substantial regenerative rewards.  These activities, which will increasingly become important as we move towards a post-carbon society, also require serious inter/trans/disciplinary knowledge that traditional school curricula could be organized towards.

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