Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.
—ARISTOPHANES
Martin Seligman, one of the founders of “positive psychology” (according to which, in order to gain enjoyment from existence, one cannot merely neutralize negative and afflictive emotions—one must also promote the birth of positive emotions), asked thousands of parents the following question: “What is the thing you want most for your children?” For the most part, their responses were: happiness, self-confidence, joy, pleasure, thriving, equilibrium, kindness, health, satisfaction, love, balanced behavior, and a life full of meaning. In summary, well-being is the first thing that comes to parents’ minds for their children.1
Seligman’s next question to the same parents is “What do we teach at school?” to which the response came: the ability to think, the ability to fit into a mold, language and math skills, work ethic, the capacity to pass examinations, discipline and success. The answers to these two questions barely overlap at all. The qualities taught at school are undeniably useful and for the most part necessary, but school could also teach ways of achieving well-being and self-fulfillment; in short, what Seligman calls a “positive education,” an education which also teaches every student how to become a better human being.
In most of his public talks, the Dalai Lama insists on the fact that intelligence, however important it might be, is simply a tool which can be used for good as well as for evil. Indeed how we use our intelligence depends entirely on the human values which inspire our existence. According to the Dalai Lama, and he is adamant about this point, intelligence must be dedicated to the service of altruistic values. In the past, these values were instilled through a religious education, sometimes in a positive manner, but too often in a normative, dogmatic fashion which barely left children any chance of exploring their personal potential. Today, education can only be secular, so respecting each individual’s freedom. But in doing so, modern education, too often focused on “success,” individualism and competition, allows hardly any scope for encouraging children to appreciate the importance of human values, of emotional intelligence and of working together. As the Dalai Lama explains:
Education is much more than a matter of imparting the knowledge and skills by which narrow goals are achieved. It is also about opening the child’s eyes to the needs and rights of others. We must show them that their actions have a universal dimension. And we must somehow find a way to build on their natural feelings of empathy in such a way that they come to have of sense of responsibility towards others. For it is this which stirs us into action. Indeed, if we had to choose between learning and virtue, the latter is definitely more valuable. The good heart which is the fruit of virtue is by itself a great benefit to humanity. Mere knowledge is not.2
He goes on to say that it is therefore essential that the teaching of these fundamental values is reintroduced into education, based on a foundation of scientific findings acquired over the course of the last few decades pertaining to psychology, child development, brain plasticity, attention and emotional balance, the virtues of benevolence, solidarity, cooperation and understanding the interdependence of all beings.
Without attempting to provide an exhaustive analysis, let us now look at some initiatives likely to facilitate the blossoming of these altruistic values.
Afraid of imposing particular values, many educators would rather adopt a morally neutral approach, thinking that it is not the role of a school to influence students’ moral preferences. We can certainly dismiss any form of prescriptive moral teaching that reflects the specific worldview of the educator him or herself. But who could decry the act of inspiring in children a constructive appreciation of benevolence, cooperation, honesty, and tolerance? Indeed moral neutrality is a delusion, since children will develop a value system regardless. Yet without the guidance of wise teachers, they risk finding it in the media, with all its violence and its focus on consumerism and individualism as promoted by advertising, or in the company of other children whose moral compass is as uninformed as theirs. In order for a society—and the education system underpinning it—to be harmonious and fair, it cannot stray from a consensus on the deleterious nature of violence and discrimination, as well as on the advantages of benevolence, fairness, and tolerance. Indeed, many teachers act as a reference point against which young people are able to find guidance throughout their lives, not to mention universally accepted sources of inspiration.3
Many initiatives are going in this direction. In Canada, for example, in British Columbia, influenced by Clyde Herzman and other researchers, emotional intelligence is now taught in most schools. In Quebec, a new program for teaching secular ethics has been launched, and, in 2010, the Dalai Lama held a conference on this subject before an audience of hundreds of trainee teachers. In India, in January 2013, still on the Dalai Lama’s initiative, the University of Delhi decided to incorporate courses in “secular human values” in all its training programs. In the United States, at the instigation of the educationalist and psychologist Mark Greenberg, several hundred schools teach their students how better to recognize and manage their (and others’) emotions, something which is contributing to a decrease in the number of classroom conflicts.4
Kidlington Primary School is located in a poor suburb of Oxford, England. In 1993, the head teacher, Neil Hawkes, decided to introduce the teaching of basic human values into the education of five hundred students at the school.5 One of the methods used there involves establishing a list of words representing the values deemed to be the most important by teachers and students, such as respect, benevolence, responsibility, cooperation, trust, tolerance, openness, patience, peace, courage, honesty, humility, gratitude, hope, love, generosity, etc. According to Hawkes: “I cannot stress enough how important it is to ensure that everyone has the chance to be involved in the process of identifying the values that the school is going to teach. If they are, then each person feels ownership of the values.”6 Each word takes it in turn to be “Word of the Month” and is placed in a conspicuous position on the school’s walls. The word then becomes the object of group discussions and represents the focal point around which different subjects are taught. It also serves as a basis for resolving disputes.
Rather than teaching such values peripherally to other subjects, they have become the starting platform from which the entire school curriculum is formed, along with any other administrative or educational decisions taken.
With students, the awareness that they can manage their emotions and behavior transforms the classroom environment, giving rise to a more sustained level of engagement and increasing the enjoyment of studying. Over the years, reports of this method have shown that the environment created by a values-based educational approach is conducive not only to students’ personal development and the quality of their social relations, but also their learning progress. Since the program’s introduction, Kidlington School’s results have consistently been above national average, and far higher than other schools located—as in the case of Kidlington—in disadvantaged areas.7
Frances Farrer, the author of one such report, observed an improvement in emotional stability, general behavior, and a heightened sense of belonging in the community. Kidlington School is now visited by educators from across the world seeking to gain inspiration from its model. Farrer also noted that short periods of silent reflection at the beginning of morning and afternoon classes have a long-term pacifying effect on students and decrease incidences of fighting.
In 2003, in Australia, under the aegis of the Ministry of Education, Professor Terence Lovat used the Kidlington values-based education system to launch a similar program in 316 schools with a combined total of more than 100,000 students. Conclusions drawn from evaluating their results, carried out by Lovat and his colleagues at the University of Newcastle, confirmed that in a values-based environment learning improves, teachers and students are more satisfied, and the school is calmer. According to Lovat’s report, the school therefore became “a better place to teach and a better place to learn.”8
It’s morning in the classroom of a nursery school in Madison, Wisconsin. Children aged four or five, born largely to disadvantaged backgrounds, are lying on their backs learning how to focus on the in-out motion of their breathing, and on the movements of a pebble or a cuddly little bear sitting on their tummies. After some minutes, at the ding of a triangle, they stand up and head off together to check the progress of the “seeds of peace” that each of them has planted in pots that line the classroom windows. The teacher asks them to reflect on the care that the plants require and, by association, the care that friendship requires too. He then helps them realize that what is making them feel calm is something that allows other children to feel calm also. At the start of each session, the children recite out loud the motto that is to inspire their day: “May all that I think, all that I say, and all that I do cause no wrong to others, but rather help them.”
These are just a few of the elements of a ten-week program begun by the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, founded by the psychologist and neurologist Richard Davidson. Although his colleague Laura Pinger and their other partners only teach on this program for three thirty-minute sessions per week, it has a remarkable effect on the children, who enjoy those sessions very much and ask their instructors why they don’t come every day.9
Over the weeks, the children are naturally encouraged to carry out acts of kindness, to realize that the things that upset them make others feel upset too, to better identify their emotions and those of their classmates, to demonstrate gratitude, and make benevolent wishes for themselves and those around them. When they are worried, they are shown that they are very much able to solve their problems by working on external factors, but also by working on their own emotions.
After five weeks the time comes for each child to give away to another child one or more plants that they have grown. The kids are then made to realize that they are linked to all the children, all the schools, and all the people in the world, and that everyone wants peace and depends on one another. This leads them to feel a sort of gratitude toward nature, animals, trees, lakes, oceans, and the air we breathe, and to gain awareness that it is important to take care of our world.
Some might consider it somewhat naive to think that such a program, interesting though it may seem, could have a real effect on such young kids. This is why the researchers went further than mere subjective observations, assessing the program’s effects by questioning the teachers and parents in great detail about the behavior and attitudes of the children before and after taking part. This assessment revealed an overall improvement in prosocial behaviors and a decrease in the emotional issues and aggression among those who underwent the experiment.
But the scientists added one last test, known as the “stickers” test. On two occasions, at the start and the end, they gave each of the children a certain number of those adhesive figurines they adore so much, along with four envelopes containing respectively a photo of their best friend, their least favorite child, an unknown child, and a visibly ill child wearing a bandage on his forehead. They then asked each child to distribute the figurines across the four envelopes, which would then be handed out to their classmates. At the start of the program, the children gave almost all of their stickers to their best friend, and very few to the others.
One would hope that, after ten weeks of practicing benevolence, a change would come about. As it turned out, the difference was spectacular: in the second test at the end of the program, the kids gave an almost equal number of stickers to the four groups of children: they no longer made any distinction between their favorite classmate and the one they liked least. The significance of this outcome can be measured by considering what we know about the extent to which in-group out-group discriminations are typically long-term and marked, and about the toxic effect those discriminations have on society.
In light of the remarkable results of this method, its simplicity, and the effect it could have on a child’s subsequent development—something which is currently the object of further study—it seems a shame not to implement it throughout the world. Indeed, Madison city council has now asked Richard Davidson and his team to roll out the program in several schools across the city. When the Dalai Lama was made aware of these results, he made the following comment: “One school, ten schools, a hundred schools, and then—through the United Nations—all the schools in the world…”
The realization that all beings are interdependent forms part of a program developed by Emory University in Atlanta. This program aims to teach a form of analytic meditation on altruism and compassion (Cognitive Based Compassion Therapy, or CBCT) to kids taken into foster care after suffering traumas linked to neglect and separation from their biological parents. There is a very high probability that these children’s formal education has been interrupted.10 As part of the program, they participate in twenty-five-to thirty-minute sessions twice a week during the normal school day.
Emotional intelligence, compassion for oneself and for others, awareness of interdependence, empathy, non-discrimination: these are the principal qualities that the program seeks to promote. On a wider scale, the CBCT program’s objective is to work simultaneously in the school community, with teachers, school administrators, parents and even the system for placing children, always with an emphasis on compassion.
This program lasts eight weeks and comprises: 1) developing attention and stability of mind; 2) observing the inner nature of thoughts, feelings, and emotions; 3) exploring self-compassion—recognizing our desire for happiness, the mental states that lead to personal fulfillment, and willingness to free oneself from emotional states that detract from happiness; 4) developing impartiality toward other beings, be they friends, enemies, or strangers, and at the same time questioning the value—fixed, or superficial and changing—of this categorization, and identifying a shared desire in everyone to be happy and to avoid suffering; 5) developing gratitude toward others, with no one able to survive without the support of countless other people; 6) developing benevolence and empathy; 7) developing compassion for those who are suffering, and a desire that they be freed from that suffering; 8) implementing altruism and compassion into everyday life.
Children are very receptive to this sort of education. When one of the instructors compared anger to a spark in a forest, which at the start can easily be extinguished but which rapidly becomes a huge, destructive, out-of-control inferno, a little five-year-old girl said: “There are a lot of forest fires in my life.”
Learning with others, by others, for others, rather than alone against others: cooperative learning is about making students work together in small groups where they give each other mutual assistance and encouragement, praising one another’s success and effort. When a difficult task must be completed, the efforts of each group member are necessary for the overall success of the project, something that requires them not only to work together, but also to think about how best to utilize each member’s skills.
In schools, cooperative education involves forming groups of children at different levels, with a view to letting the most advanced help those having difficulties. In these circumstances, one sees how the children who find learning easy, rather than feeling superior to the others (as is the case in a system driven by constant testing and assessed written work) are filled with a sense of responsibility to help those struggling to understand. What’s more, the spirit of group camaraderie and the absence of intimidating, judgmental influences from others bring confidence to the kids and inspire them to give their very best.
In cases of cooperation groups comprising children at the same level who were experiencing difficulties studying, it was observed that solidarity helped them come up with new ways of resolving their difficulties, something which before they felt was out of reach and led them to be marginalized in the class. In his book Cooperative Learning, Robert Pléty, math teacher and researcher at the University of Lyon, France, explains his approach in class as follows: he gives his math lesson followed by an exercise to establish which students have understood and which have not. He then divides them into groups of ten, three or four, with some made up solely of students who haven’t understood, others made up of students who understood everything, and then others with a mixture of the two. He then observes what happens when he gives them the same exercise again (which is important in the case of the students who didn’t understand) or a new one (to see whether cooperation also improves the better students’ results). Pléty continued his study for seven years, accumulating a large amount of data.
The results are impressive: in the case of the mixed groups, the success rate increases by a full 75%. The groups of better students remain, in the majority of cases, at the highest level. The surprise comes with the groups who failed first time around: after being put together, 24% of them managed to do the exercise. The learning dynamic therefore changed. Less good students succeed in making progress together by adopting the trial-and-error method, which serves them well in the end. In addition, Pléty observed that “interest and satisfaction seemed to be etched on the faces of students whose brows had before been constantly frowning during math classes.”11
The idea of cooperative learning is nothing new. In the seventeenth century, Johann Amos Comenius, a Czech educator who was a forerunner to Rousseau, highly influential in his day and now considered by some to be the father of modern education, was convinced that students could benefit from reciprocal teaching.
Later, in the nineteenth century, in Quincy, Massachusetts, a passionate educator by the name of Francis Parker made cooperative learning widespread in all the area’s schools. Thousands of people came each year to visit his schools, and his cooperative learning methods spread across the whole of North America’s education system. Unfortunately, in the 1930s, competition became increasingly popular in public schools. In the 1940s, however, cooperative learning became the order of the day once more thanks to the sociologist Morton Deutsch, and then championed from the 1980s to the present day by David and Roger Johnson and many other educators. It is now practiced successfully more or less all over the world, even if it does remain a minority approach.
The Johnsons created a method that they have implemented in numerous schools, the results of which they have already assessed. Along with Mary Beth Stanne at the University of Arizona, they have also processed the data from 164 research studies on different cooperative teaching methods, observing that the best results come about when small groups of two to five students who, after receiving instructions from the teacher, work together until they have understood everything and completed the task given them. They then celebrate their joint success. The best results arise from groups that are mixed in terms of skills, sex, cultural background, and motivation levels.12
Compared with competitive teaching, cooperative learning has many advantages related to memorizing lessons, the desire to learn, the time taken to complete a task, and the transfer of knowledge between students. What’s more, there is evidence of an increase in emotional intelligence, moral awareness, friendships, altruistic behaviors, and relations with teachers. Children enjoy better psychological health, greater self-confidence, and greater enjoyment from learning. With regard to behavior, cooperative learning goes hand in hand with lower levels of discrimination (racist and sexist), delinquency, bullying, and drug addiction. Sixty-one percent of classes practicing cooperative learning received higher results than those following traditional methods.13
The Johnsons describe competition as “negative interdependence” whereby students work against each other to achieve a goal that only a few of them can attain.14
Bringing together children with different aptitudes can also be done in the context of mentoring. Here, a child is entrusted with giving a younger kid one-to-one classes for a few hours a week under the supervision of a teacher, who helps the tutor prepare the sessions. There are multiple benefits to this arrangement, as shown in a report carried out by Peter Cohen with James and Chen-Lin Kulik of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan, which analyzed sixty-five studies.15
A somewhat unexpected finding has been that not only does the child on the receiving end of the teaching make progress, but so does the tutor. When the tutor is not at a high academic level, there is a reasonable fear that spending time worrying about someone else’s studies might aggravate their own difficulties. What surprised the researchers was that the precise opposite occurred: the tutor, feeling a sense of responsibility toward his pupil, made an effort to revise the subjects that he had studied one or two years previously, while also taking greater care of his own studies. As such, the struggling child is sometimes the one who receives the help, and at other times the one who does the helping—so the mentoring grows the tutors’ capacity for learning while simultaneously developing their capacity for teaching. At the end of the year, the children placed in tutor-pupil pairs had, on average, higher results than those children who had not taken part in the program.16 One-to-one mentoring is practiced today in the USA, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and several hundred schools in French-speaking Belgium, and to some extent throughout the world.
Another form of mentoring is that which occurs when an adult supports a child who is going through difficulties. In 1991, philanthropist and humanitarian Ray Chambers17 founded the Points of Light Foundation in the United States, with the aim of enrolling appropriate people to work as mentors for children from disadvantaged areas. This program now has more than five million mentors and is producing remarkable results.
This initiative from the Canadian branch of UNICEF helps schools transform their learning environment by adopting an approach based on respecting rights, which promotes an understanding of universal values toward others and oneself within the school community. It has now been applied to several other countries, including the United Kingdom.18
A studied performed in the United Kingdom in over 1,600 Rights Respecting Schools revealed an improvement in learning, a decrease in absence, prejudice, and bullying, as well as an improvement in prosocial behaviors and a more positive attitude regarding diversity. What’s more, students attending these schools are motivated and know how to express their own opinions, participate in decision-making processes, resolve disputes in a peaceful manner, and better understand the global challenges relating to social justice.
In the small village of Tursac, in the Dordogne region of France, the teacher Claude Diologent decided to run philosophy workshops with his elementary students. Over their heads? Not a bit of it. The children love it. Sometimes it’s the teacher who introduces a topic, sometimes the students pick an issue that interests them—happiness, honesty, fairness, kindness, etc.—and, with the teacher’s help, they discuss it together. They sit in a circle and pass each other a baton to give them the floor. The child who receives the baton can speak calmly without fear of interruption. When the baton has gone full circle, a debate opens up between the children, guided by the teacher. Every Friday afternoon, the students gather around the person who, for that month, is “Speaker” of the children’s assembly, and they discuss any issues that have arisen over the week. If, for example, a student has insulted a classmate, the Speaker asks him why he acted in such a way and if he realizes that he has hurt someone’s feelings. The student willingly accepts that that is the case, explains himself, and says he is sorry, and the other one forgives him.
These philosophical workshops aimed at very young pupils have been rolled out in several parts of the world. Keith Topping, of the University of Dundee, and Steve Trickey, an educational psychologist, have carried out a review of ten studies which have shown an improvement in creative thinking, cognitive skills, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, reading, mathematical skills, and self-confidence. In light of their findings, Topping and Trickey found themselves wondering why philosophy among young children wasn’t systematically integrated into the education system.19
The Jigsaw Classroom is a teaching technique developed in 1971 by the American psychologist Elliot Aronson.20 Based on the principle of cooperative learning, this method encourages schoolchildren to listen, interact, and share by allocating each one an essential role to carry out: learning cannot take place without the cooperation of each pupil, and—just like a jigsaw—each piece is indispensable to the whole.
The students are split into groups of six and the lessons are divided into six parts, with each child having just one of these set aside for studying alone for a period of about ten minutes. The students of each group who received the same lesson then join together and confer, checking that they have fully understood their part. After that the groups of six reconvene and spend half an hour exchanging what they have learned with the other members of the group. Finally all of them are questioned on the overall lesson. In this way, the students quickly learn how to share their knowledge and become aware that each of them cannot pass the test without the help of all the others.
Jigsaw classrooms reduce hostility and bullying among students. They have been shown to be particularly effective in eliminating racial prejudice and other forms of discrimination, and in improving academic results in children from ethnic minorities.21 The best results are obtained when this method is applied from an early stage. It has also been observed that this technique improves results in schoolchildren even if it is implemented for only 20% of classes. It can therefore be used in conjunction with any other pedagogic approaches.
It’s 7 p.m. on one evening in the month of February. Near Tilonia, a small village in Rajasthan, India, we enter a room, four meters by six, in a house located at the edge of a marsh. Two hurricane lamps, recharged during the day by solar panels, light up the space. In a few minutes, about thirty girls aged from six to fourteen, along with four or five boys, sit down on the clay floor.
The schoolmistress is barely any older than the most senior of the children. The class begins with a wonderful hubbub. She has laid out a series of white sheets of cardboard in a circle, on which are written various syllables in the Hindi language. As soon as one of the pupils puts together two syllables to form a word, she pounces onto one of the sheets, shows it to the others, and explains the meaning of the word. Then a long sentence is written in a circle using the cardboard, and the students have to, each in turn, go around the circle reading it aloud. After that, in pairs, the children sing little rhymes about rain (in Rajasthan, rain is so scarce that everyone prays for it to come), the harvest, and farm animals, animating their songs with gestures reflecting the subjects. This playful approach continues into the evening until 10 p.m., during which time the children seize every opportunity to answer the schoolmistress’s questions. Not even the slightest sign of boredom or distraction can be read on their faces.
These girls are not like the others. All day long, they tend to cows or goats. In the area around Tilonia, the team at Barefoot College, founded almost forty years ago by Bunker Roy,22 have year after year created 150 evening schools for the children of people living in the countryside throughout the whole region. In each classroom (a space made available by the village), the schoolmistress gives five levels of lessons.
Sita is fourteen. The schoolmistress asks her how many liters of milk her cow produces each day. “Four.” “How many cows do you look after?” “Three.” “How many liters of milk does that make every two weeks?” Sita heads over to the blackboard, made especially for Barefoot College by the local women, takes from her pocket a piece of chalk made by young handicapped children from the College, and does the multiplication. Three girls join her, checking the numbers that she is lining up and whispering their opinions. Here, no one is punished for helping their classmates when their teacher asks a question. It’s a normal reaction. Their entire education, related like this to everyday life, is based along the lines of cooperation.
Under the aegis of Barefoot College, the children of these 150 evening schools have also formed a “Children’s Parliament,” forty members strong, the majority girls, which operates all year round, electing ministers and gathering once a month to discuss issues relating to the children’s lives. From this, the children gain awareness of their rights, and do not hold back from addressing even the most delicate matters when injustices or abuses are committed against any of their members. Parents and village leaders take this very seriously and send a delegation to attend, in silence, the Parliament’s deliberations. The children also campaign in the villages during their elections, held every two years, and so learn the central tenets of democracy. The Rajasthan Children’s Parliament allows them to become equal, responsible members of society, irrespective of their caste, sex, or economic situation. Members regularly inspect the 150 evening schools placed under their jurisdiction.
The children put pressure on local village authorities to improve living conditions in villages, for example by installing solar energy or water pumps. They also organize cultural activities and festivals for children, designed to bring a welcome reprieve from their tough daily routines. Health authorities have observed, remarkably, an overall improvement in the health situation of the region’s villages that are covered by the Children’s Parliament.
Bunker Roy tells how when the Parliament received a prize in Sweden, one thirteen-year-old girl, who then held the rank of prime minister, met the queen of Sweden. The queen was so impressed by the poise and composure which the young village girl displayed before the gathering of adult dignitaries that she asked her: “How is it that you manage to be so self-assured?” To which the young girl replied: “I am prime minister, Your Majesty.”
According to the American educator Mark Greenberg, in the eyes of students a good teacher is someone who is not only able to give a good lesson, but who also shows a range of human qualities (listening, benevolence, availability, etc.). In addition, it has also been observed that when teachers show signs of empathy, students’ academic performance goes up, while violence and vandalism go down.23
As the French psychologist Jacques Lecomte explains in an article on humane education, it is effectively essential that teachers establish a personal relationship with their students and do not settle for transmitting knowledge in a cold, detached manner.24 To kindle the flame of which Aristophanes speaks, the teacher must be genuinely concerned with the pupil’s fortune. He must in particular display three vitally important qualities: authenticity, solicitude, and empathy.
In their book Kids Don’t Learn from People They Don’t Like, David Aspy and Flora Roebuck, of the National Consortium for Humanizing Education, in Washington, noted how teachers who most exhibit these three qualities help their students’ progress more on average than other students in an establishment over the course of the academic year.25 Aspy and Roebuck cited a program aimed at improving the three qualities among teachers in a school located in a very socioeconomically poor neighborhood. The results were conclusive: the school climbed nine places in the reading competency scale. On average, pupils aged seven to ten made more progress in math than all other students in the same zone. The school saw its rate of absenteeism reach its lowest level in all the forty-five years since its creation. There was an overall decrease in vandalism and brawling between students. And the benefits were mutual: the resignation rate among teachers fell from 80% to 0. Once the news had spread, many teachers from other educational establishments asked for a transfer to the school.
In Nepal, Uttam Sanjel, founder of the Samata Shiksha Niketan schools—which are built entirely from bamboo, each one home to as many as two thousand children26—uses a somewhat unusual method for recruiting teachers. When he needed to hire a hundred new teachers for a newly built school in Pokhara, he placed an advertisement in the newspaper, for which he received almost a thousand applications. Along with his team, he made an initial selection of around three hundred (the majority women), then he gave a trial to three teachers per class, each one for a week. He then asked the children to decide which teacher they found most inspiring and understood the best, and with whom they most wanted to study. I imagine that there would be quite some resistance from teachers’ unions in Western countries toward introducing such ways of recruiting teachers, but in this case the results seem to have been highly successful. The classes are very dynamic and the students are in constant discussion with their teachers. In the yearly national exams, the pupils at Samata schools have an above-average pass rate.
In a class reserved for difficult children with a frequent tendency to violent behavior, a mother brings in her young baby and places it on the ground on top of a blanket, around which the students form a circle. They observe the baby closely for a while before being offered to take the infant in their arms. The students hesitate, but eventually a few of them go for it and pick up the baby with great care. They are then asked to describe what they imagine the baby’s experience to have been, as well as their own emotions.
This is the Roots of Empathy project conceived by Mary Gordon who, along with her team, works in Canada and Australia to increase solicitude and mutual respect among schoolchildren. This organization now has over 1,100 programs numbering 70,000. Mary Gordon regards this original form of intervention as a way of building, “child by child,” a more attentive, peaceful, and civil society.27
Once a month, the mother returns with her baby and the students chart its development, its new ways of interacting with those around it, etc. At each session, the students talk among themselves and with their teachers.
Evaluations of the effectiveness of the Roots of Empathy project, carried out by Kimberly Schonert-Reichl of the University of British Columbia, show that the program has a positive effect on the students’ emotional development. A more benevolent atmosphere in classes is noted, as well as better emotional intelligence, an increase in altruistic behavior (in 78% of students), in the ability to adopt another person’s perspective (71%), and in sharing (69%), and a decrease in aggressive behavior in 39% of pupils.28 What’s more, these improvements were sustained or enhanced over the three years following the program.29 According to Mary Gordon, the answer to bullying and other antisocial behaviors lies in the benevolence and compassion that occur naturally in each of us.
The children, guided by the Roots of Empathy instructor, observe the parent-child relationship and the ways in which the child develops, and by the same token they learn how to better understand parental love as well as their own temperament and that of their classmates.
Darren, a fifteen-year-old student, had already been sent twice to a reform school. His mother had been murdered in front of him when he was four, and ever since he had lived in foster care. He would always act in a threatening manner to establish his authority. He had a shaved head, with the exception of a ponytail, and a large tattoo on the back of his head. That day, a young mother was visiting class with Evan, her six-month-old baby. At the end of the class, the mother asked if anyone wanted to hold the baby. To everyone’s surprise, Darren raised his hand. The mother seemed a little apprehensive, but nevertheless handed him the baby. Darren put him in the harness, turned toward his chest, and the baby snuggled there peacefully. He carried him over to a quiet corner of the room and rocked him back and forth for several minutes. Eventually he returned to where the mother and instructor were waiting and asked: “If no one has ever loved you, do you think you can be a good father?” A seed had been sown. Thanks to those few moments of contact with a baby’s unconditional affection, a teenager whose life had been marked by tragedy and neglect began to build a different image of himself and the relationships possible between humans.
Recently I was in Franche-Comté, France, at the house of a friend whose parents were the last independent farmers in the region. As we were wandering around the countryside, my friend said to me: “Once upon a time, during cherry season, we would all be up in the trees filling our boots. Nowadays the cherries stay on the branches. The children don’t climb trees anymore.”
Several studies have shown that children in urban areas in Europe and North America play ten times less in public places, especially the street, than thirty years ago.30 Contact with nature is often restricted to a background image on a computer screen, and games have become increasingly solitary, violent, stripped of beauty, wonder, and any notion of camaraderie. Between 1997 and 2003, the percentage of children aged nine to twelve who spent time playing together outside, going hiking, or gardening fell by half.31 This phenomenon is linked to a number of factors: that more and more people are living in urban areas, that “the street” has become more dangerous in parents’ minds—traffic, potentially dangerous encounters, etc.
In his book Last Child in the Woods, the American author and journalist Richard Louv writes that we are raising a generation of young people who are suffering from “nature deficit disorder” as a result of having lost virtually all contact or interaction with their natural surroundings. Louv cites this remark from a young student: “I prefer playing at home because that’s where I have all my electronic stuff.”32 There is a lot of research to suggest that intensification in contact with nature has a major impact on a child’s cognitive and emotional development.33
For years, Finland has had the reputation for being the European country with the best education. Several factors have contributed to this, including the fact that the teaching profession is very highly regarded there, and that teachers are given a lot of latitude for choosing the pedagogic techniques that seem most appropriate to their pupils. The Finns also take care to attain a balance between hard work in the classroom and group play outdoors, which improves the children’s faculties for empathy and their emotional intelligence. Finland’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Health summarize the country’s educational philosophy as follows: “The most important aspect of knowledge acquisition is not regurgitating information… that has come from outside, but in a child’s interaction with his or her environment.”34
Very often success is measured simply by the passing of school examinations and the securing of a well-paid job. In today’s world there is considerable pressure placed on children to succeed. Martin Seligman and other psychologists are of the opinion that this pressure and the vulnerability it can activate in the event of failure are among the factors contributing to the sharp increase—ten times greater than in the 1960s—in depression and suicide among teenagers in developed countries. Fifty years ago, the average age of someone suffering from depression for the first time in the United States and Western Europe was around twenty-seven; nowadays, it is below fifteen.35
Under the banner of what has been named “positive education,” where the aim is to teach wellbeing to children, Seligman and his colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania, Karen Reivich and Jane Gillham, have developed two main programs targeting schools. These are the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP) and the Strath Haven Positive Psychology Curriculum. The objective of the first is to improve students’ ability to deal with the day-to-day problems faced by all teenagers. It promotes optimism and teaches children to reflect on their problems with greater flexibility. It also teaches them stress management techniques.36 Over the course of the last twenty years, 21 studies centered on 3,000 young people aged eight to twenty-one have shown that this program is particularly effective in lowering the risk of depression.
In 2008, a school in Australia, Geelong Grammar School, invited Martin Seligman and his family, along with about fifteen of his colleagues, to spend several months implementing their positive education methods at all levels of the school, from the principal to the cooks via all students and faculty. The teachers at Geelong have integrated positive education into all theoretical subjects, on the sports fields, in class councils, and even in music lessons.
Empathy and benevolence are important parts of the program, and students are encouraged to integrate them into their everyday lives. “You feel better when you do something for someone else,” declared one of the students, “when you’re playing, even with video games.”
One year later, the school had, in everyone’s opinion, changed profoundly. Not one of the two hundred teachers left Geelong at the end of the school year, and admissions and applications were on the rise.
The majority of initiatives underpinning positive and cooperative education are founded in reports that have widely shown the benefits they have for children. It is also apparent that human values, particularly the various aspects of altruism, cooperation, and mentoring, can play a very positive role in education.