The Boy Falling out of the Sky: The Need for Empathy in Education
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along […]
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster […]
the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden’s poem explores our capacity to stop empathising with other people. It displays our striking and harmful potential to disconnect from those around us. Auden refers to Bruegel’s painting of Icarus. The painting represents Icarus through two small, tragi-comical legs disappearing into a green sea in the corner of the piece. The rest of the world continues, unabashed: the ship sails ‘calmly on’. In Auden’s representation, the suffering of other people – ‘the boy falling out of the sky’ – is inconsequential to the lives of others. People are insulated and isolated. The poem conveys the eerie outcomes of human detachment.
Other worlds are possible. Take, for example, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Her book inspires its readers to see the power of understanding other peoples’ suffering. For Lee, detachment enables discrimination. Empathy, in contrast, enlightens us. To use Lee’s words, we can learn to help one another if we ‘consider things from [another person’s] point of view…climb into their skin and walk around in it’.
Our power to connect with other people by imagining their point of view is vital in ensuring a fair, compassionate, and equal society. But what exactly do we mean by empathy? And why is it important in education?
Empathy refers to our ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of others. It is to imaginatively enter another person’s mind – to feel as they feel (Demetriou 2021). Scholars who have specialised in empathy, such as Bazalgette (2017) and Simon Baron-Cohen (2011), divide the term into ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ empathy. Cognitive empathy refers to our capacity to understand another person’s thoughts, gathered through cues such as facial expression, body language, or eye contact. Affective empathy refers to our ability to echo another person’s emotions: if we know someone feels sad, we too feel sad. Both cognitive and affective empathy are altruistic emotions; they can cause us to help each other. In an empathetic world, when we see the boy falling out of the sky, we feel as if we fall with him. In so doing, we seek to help him.
Beyond literary representation, empathy has been central to psychology, philosophy, ethics, medicine, psychiatry, neuroscience, and more, something explored by Coplan and Goldie (2011). More broadly, empathy enables a cohesive, effective, and caring society. It creates cohesion because it lets us transcend difference and work together. It renders society more effective because our capacity to see as other people see widens our vision, broadening our creativity. And it makes society more caring, inspiring altruistic social action.
One of the most fascinating aspects of empathy is that it can be taught. A large scale genetic study in 2018 suggests only 10% of our empathy is inherited; 90% is developed through our upbringing and environmental factors. Further, research suggests our capacity to learn how to become more empathetic diminishes as we age, requiring early intervention in empathy development (Demetriou 2021).
And empathy education is most needed now. We learn cognitive empathy through face-to-face interaction with others, wherein we develop our ability to read emotional cues. In a post-pandemic world, the opportunities for children to practice such skills have been curtailed through increased electronic communication. Further, the rise of social media has led to the dehumanisation of those we speak to (Bazalgette 2021). Electronic communication distances people, making it harder to see them as a person – they become objectified. Dehumanisation encourages our empathy to be switched off - we are more able and more willing to be cruel to others online. Such threats to our empathetic capacity, when placed alongside the fact that empathy can be taught, points towards the need to integrate empathy more fully into our education system.
Oppidan’s mentoring programmes do this in a number of ways. For example, students are encouraged to imagine the emotions of people in different scenarios, and to use this understanding to suggest how they would act. This is done through discussion and debate, but also through role play. Similar exercises, including role play and simulacrum, are employed in medical training to teach doctors empathy towards patients, as pioneered by The Oxford Empathy Project and Leicester Medical School's Centre for Empathetic Healthcare. Another route to teaching empathy is through literature. Reading literature helps us understand characters’ emotions. Described as the ‘mind’s flight simulator’ by the cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley, reading transports us into the consciousness of another person. Research suggests that, after reading fiction, our ability to empathise increases. Finally, pairing older pupils with younger peers increases cross-year interaction. Students consider the perspective of peers they would not normally speak to, encouraging them to see the point of view of people who are different from themselves.
The programme’s empathy focus makes our Y12 students better mentors. But teaching empathy has also been linked to increased pro-social behaviour, alongside decreased poor behaviour, wherein a student’s understanding of another person’s perspective induces guilt if they hurt that person (Simon Baron-Cohen 2011). It has been linked to increased creativity, as one is able to imagine the user or audience’s perspective when creating a product (Demetriou 2021); improved problem solving; and better well-being.
The need to yoke academic teaching with emotional development is essential to ensuring a civil, active, and altruistic society. Peer mentoring helps here, teaching students to read other peoples’ emotions in a non-judgemental and open-minded way. By seeing the perspective of another person, we are encouraged to support them. Empathy moves us to help the boy falling from the sky, stopping us from simply sailing calmly on.
Reading Suggestions
Bazalgette (2017) – The Empathy Instinct: How to Create a More Civil Society
Simon Baron-Cohen (2011) – Zero-Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty
Helen Demitriou (2021) “Empathy is the mother of invention: emotion and cognition for creativity in the classroom” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1365480221989500
Coplan and Goldie (2011), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives