Empathy In Today's Society

 

Empathy is the process of identifying, understanding, and relating to another person's emotions or thought processes. Some people refer to it as "putting yourself in their shoes". It is one of the deepest and most fundamental instincts that human beings have and it allows us to relate and connect to one another in a way that nothing else can. It is what brings people together in times of hardship, what allows us to cry at fictional characters in movies, and what makes some fight so hard to right the wrongs they see committed by others. It is something that is as old as the human race, and something that according to The Passion Project is being phased out of our schools and society as a whole. In an article by the College of Health Care Professionals they state that "People are not interacting face to face much anymore...in order to be empathetic, one must learn to read others’ faces, particularly the eyes. People are not born with this ability, they develop it." That seems to be exactly what the students in the Passion Project meant when they said that "When teachers present their discipline's content while not taking into account who they are teaching they are actually disrespecting their discipline...understanding their nature will dictate how we teach them."(13) The teachers, mentors, employers, and parents nowadays seem content with giving the information without actually understanding the student. If one the human race continues to phase out the strongest reason to maintain true human contact what are we left with? students who don't understand information, adults who care nothing for the people around them, and leaders who view their citizens as numbers rather than people like you and I. In the previously stated article they stated that "It is thought that the point when one starts to treat someone as an object is when they can become capable of cruelty. We can explain human cruelty with the erosion of empathy." The cruelty and lack of  empathy of the teachers in the classroom is the first step. This lack of interest gives the students a lack of empathy towards one another and the rest of the world around them. This snowballs, causing those students to become adults who don't care about the race they are a part of as anything more than numbers on a computer screen. Not only that, but even if they wanted to the adults of this world will not have gained the knowledge they needed as students and will have no ability to change the environments around them. This will be because they could not properly learn the skills from their education because they were taught by educators who lacked the empathy to give them more than the allotted texts. It is a vicious cycle, and it all starts in that first classroom. All it takes to prevent that cycle from continuing is a little bit of empathy on our part, and an attempt to give more than the standards to the students in our classrooms.