Empathy lessons for schoolchildren: a waste of time or a valuable pursuit?

You would assume that the proposal to give 15- to 16-year-olds lessons in empathy as part of a revised transition year syllabus would be uncontroversial. It may seem a little “new age” to some, but it is hard to see how it can do any harm and it could do a lot of good.

This may prove an over optimistic assessment in the wake of the weekend’s referendum results, which are being cast, in some quarters at least, as a victory over the efforts of the “wokerati” to undermine traditional Irish values, whatever they may be.

But before we get to that, the first obstacle the initiative may have to overcome when confronted by sceptical parents is explaining what exactly empathy is. The word is often used in a similar way to words like compassion and sympathy, but it is more than that. The best definition I ever heard – and I am not sure where from – is that empathy is having a sense of what is going through someone’s mind and acting accordingly.

A second obstacle is the debate over whether empathy is innate or something that can really be measured and taught. The answer is both, according to researchers at University College Galway whose 2019 study forms the basis for the proposed inclusion of empathy classes in the transition year syllabus.

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The study initially involved 1,600 students at 25 schools. Junior cycle students at 12 of the schools agreed to participate in a 12-week empathy education Activating Social Empathy (ASE) programme with weekly interactive sessions “designed to help young people develop, hone and reflect on their empathy skills in a fun and interactive manner”. The students at the other 13 schools were to be taught the normal curriculum. Both groups were to be assessed on their empathy, social values, peer relationships and prosocial behaviours at the start and the end of the 12 weeks. The project was disrupted by the pandemic and the school closures that followed. It did not conclude until May 2021, by which time only 10 schools were involved, of which four ran the ASE programme.

The researchers concluded that ASE programme can produce “significant” improvements in young people’s empathy, social values and prosocial behaviours when compared with the children who did not do the course. But they added that the improvements “may not be substantial”. “Hence, caution needs to be exerted when considering the applied utility of the ASE programme,” they said.

The study also comes with a health warning about carrying out research of this nature during the Covid-19 pandemic. The researchers point out that “feedback from school personnel suggests that stressors arising from the Covid-19 pandemic (eg school closures, social distancing guidelines) not only adversely affected school/student engagement in the evaluation, but also made fidelity to the ASE programme difficult for participating intervention schools.” Fidelity is a reference to the ability of the school to implement the programme as planned.

Despite these warning notes, the study’s findings will help inform a redesigned transition year programme for 15- to 16-year-olds, which is due to go to public consultation soon, according to Prof Pat Dolan, Unesco chairman in children, youth and civic engagement at University of Galway.

In the current climate you wonder whether the National Curriculum Council would not want to have a slightly stronger evidential basis for introducing concepts such as teaching empathy into the curriculum than a study that is clear about its limitations. The unintended but unavoidable consequence of last weekend’s double referendum defeat can only be to strengthen the hand of those who are seeking to make political capital out of a perceived backlash against “progressive values”.

Dolan and the NCC need to be careful that they don’t give them an open goal by overselling the UCG research – leading to the inevitable social media posts about elitist woke academics pushing dangerous nonsense on our kids based on dodgy research.

Dolan has a powerful ally in the form of actor Cillian Murphy, who strongly supports the initiative and co-edited a book with him in 2022 Ionbhá: The Empathy Book For Ireland. Murphy has spoken about the value of empathy in acting and his Oscar-winning turn as J Robert Oppenheimer embodies his approach.

[ Cillian Murphy: ‘Irish people are afraid of emotion. Acting saved me from that’ ]

Murphy might agree that empathy has always been “taught” in school via the English syllabus. Reading a novel requires one to have empathy for the protagonists to a greater or lesser extent. It is almost impossible to get through the education system without being asked to read a novel by John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men or The Pearl are perennials. Steinbeck’s work is rich in empathy and the line from East of Eden, “you can only understand people if you feel them in yourself” eventually crops up in pretty much any discussion of the subject.

But the sad reality is that it is probably easier to get your children to do a 12-week course on empathy than read a Steinbeck novel.

[ When John Steinbeck visited Ireland to trace his ancestral roots ]