The Empathy Gap and How to Fill It
Summary: This article talks about the existence of an “empathy gap” in many of our students. The gap also affects adults. In education, it stops administrators, teachers, staff, and students from fully understanding, acknowledging, and addressing issues that are critical to learning. It is up to us, as educators—teachers, parents, leaders, citizens—to create the conditions that will foster and support children’s empathy. This requires us, first, to take a hard look at ourselves.
Source: Jessica Sager, Education Week, October 4, 2016
Description:
The empathy gap is a deficit that most of us suffer from unconsciously. And in education, it is paralyzing the progress of many students. The empathy gap is an inability to recognize and respond to the feelings of others, especially others we perceive as different from us and, most perniciously, those whose race is different from our own. This gap appears in multiple contexts, from physicians’ perception of their patients’ suffering to the way in which juries perceive criminal defendants. It mutes our reactions to atrocities in Aleppo and Baghdad, even as we show fellow feeling to the victims of terror in Brussels and Nice.
Read the full article here!
Source: Jessica Sager, Education Week, October 4, 2016
Description:
The empathy gap is a deficit that most of us suffer from unconsciously. And in education, it is paralyzing the progress of many students. The empathy gap is an inability to recognize and respond to the feelings of others, especially others we perceive as different from us and, most perniciously, those whose race is different from our own. This gap appears in multiple contexts, from physicians’ perception of their patients’ suffering to the way in which juries perceive criminal defendants. It mutes our reactions to atrocities in Aleppo and Baghdad, even as we show fellow feeling to the victims of terror in Brussels and Nice.
Read the full article here!
