Hi Phanto,

Roots of Empathy does not 'tell' children anything. A mum brings her baby into the primary school classroom for a year. "Guided observation means children connect to the baby's humanity on a deep emotional level. This connection becomes the lever to discover their own feelings and the feeling of others. It is the very essence of empathy."
http://www.rootsofempathy.org/
So kids learn by looking and connecting that everyone has rights and feelings, even themselves. it has profound outcomes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4cgG9Thxs8

Squeers,
What a laugh! You interpreted me saying "If you have a problem, get to the bottom of it, do not blame the other and get violent.” as directed at you, the man. Anyone can be emotionally immature. Claiming reason for men and emotion for women is really silly. Everyone has both. How they use them shows how mature they are. I don't think men and women are emotionally incompatible. I've been happily married for 24 years. What is incompatible in any relationship is bullying, manipulation, entitlement and abuse. This is why I think programmes such as Roots of Empathy are important. Also removing the structural injustices in our society that restrict and damage women but also warp men. Back to patriarchy again.

Hi Poirot, Killarney and Squeers
We are all dealing with the existing system. It was not invented last week and it has some very persistent roots. The oldest and most persistent is the exploitation of women that has not yet been successfully tackled.

The capitalist system has made great strides in power and lunacy by the use of propaganda (see Chomsky Manufacturing Consent) think tanks, the support of very wealthy men, the revolving door between government and business, globalisation, deregulation, control of the press, rigorous suppression and silencing of dissent. If you are really concerned about equality and women's rights and the ills of patriarchy then surely you should be working with others on these issues. Condemning feminists that do not share your critique of capitalism is a waste of time. There are plenty of people who are condemning it, many of whom are feminists. For example the Occupy movement, people working against the G20 and just loads of small organisations all over the place.

Also we are social animals. We cannot survive without each other. It is better to recognize this and develop systems for behaviour that are not exploitative and nasty rather than pretending this is not the case. As Killarney says there have been systems in the past that do not rest on the exploitation of the vulnerable. If we've done it before we can do it again and it is time to get busy.

lillian,

Empathy is innate in the human species. Without it a human would be unable to interact at all with other humans. It's the capacity to recognise that others feel the same emotions as oneself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy

Sympathy and compassion are further offshoots of the basic ability to empathise.

An example of a human unable to feel empathy is a one who's profoundly and classically autistic, who cannot read and reciprocate human emotions from other humans.

Empathy is understood very early in human development - from the get go in recognising like emotions in one's close family, in the parents and sibling's eyes and facial emotions. I'm sure bringing a baby into classroom is helpful, but probably unnecessary, for encouraging empathy, as it would already be a feature of a young child's emotional intelligence.

Notwithstanding, that children can be quite perverse and sadistic and exquisitely cruel, especially if they glean a peer has a weakness and has been isolated as a target by other peers. That's more of a "pack mentality", which is another human foible, probably more a consequence of the mammalian brain than the rational neocortex.

Hey guys, still going! Bravo for perseverence! Just a quick post:

Guardian Australia Nov 3, 2014. Victorian Police Commissioner Ken Lay: “I place family violence in a wider culture where vulgar and violent attitudes to women are common . . . These attitudes show that we perceive women differently than men and by differently I mean we perceive them as less valuable. In order to stop a problem we have to tackle the cause.”

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/nov/03/culture-of-hostility-to-women-leads-to-domestic-violence-say-police-chiefs

Lillian,

I'm glad I misunderstood your comment, though it did read like that.
As for the rest, again you paraphrase me poorly, miss the complexity and are too quick to dismiss:

"Claiming reason for men and emotion for women is really silly".

I made no such bald claim; the observation was highly qualified since I knew I was likely to meet spontaneous (unconsidered) resistance. True to form, you follow through with truncated truth claims which profess common sense yet are unsubstantiated:
"Everyone has both. How they use them shows how mature they are. I don't think men and women are emotionally incompatible. I've been happily married for 24 years."
Such clarity and confidence is heartening, but hardly conclusive. The reality is that political correctness has taken "offensive" constructs off the table and we may denounce them out of hand, indeed we're obliged to. Yet it is true that certain patterns of behaviour remain highly predictable and gendered. Male violence for instance.. I don't suppose you'd argue with that?

You then say that, "What is incompatible in any relationship is bullying, manipulation, entitlement and abuse."

More common sense. Yet these are staples in every relationship, more or less. We live and think within discursive and power matrices, language games, which structure and lend our "thinking" its "kudos". "Emotional maturity" is a construct which suggests the healthy couple operates somehow above the flux, are able to orchestrate emotions/reason independently so as to reflect something "essential" about themselves. All communication is patterned and rhetorical, and its aim is to prevail or achieve some end.
Women stereotypically trope with emotion, and men with "reason". This is not a qualitative, sexist or insistent observation, and if it is true for any statistically significant number, as I suggest it is, it is more than likely conditioned behaviour. Ergo it doesn't have to be construed as an insult to women, but more evidence of her oppression.
Political correctness is the denial of unpalatable possibilities.

I'm glad btw that you've found my cues useful: humans being "social animals", and Chomsky's "manufactured consent"

Hi Everyone
Thanks for the discussion. Thanks to imho for the original article and the latest link.

To Phanto and Poirot, The evidence is in that encouraging and developing empathy in children is important. If you've ever been bullied, witnessed bullying, been a bully or parented a bullied child I think you know the damage that can be done. I find it interesting that you both seem to resist this idea. Forgive me if I'm wrong but it seems that both of you had difficult childhoods and I wonder if this could be part of why you reacted like this. Regardless of your/my ideas:

"Studies have long shown that stress can have a lasting, negative impact on the brain. Exposure to even a few days of stress compromises the effectiveness of neurons in the hippocampus—an important brain area responsible for reasoning and memory. Weeks of stress cause reversible damage to neuronal dendrites (the small “arms” that brain cells use to communicate with each other), and months of stress can permanently destroy neurons. "
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/10/28/comment-how-handle-toxic-people

To me the personal is very important. Creating a culture where empathy flourishes would benefit everyone.