Science and Empathy
I am fond of saying all the time that empathy is probably the most important skill that an education system needs to nurture in children. But then I am also fond of telling parents, who want to enroll their children in my Science course, “You will be paying me money so that I can learn Science from your children.”
If you are wondering why the hell am I telling this, then let me tell you that its my job to warn you that you are choosing to read a post by a person who a lot of people categorize as an illogical idealist… but I have to do my work of warning you in a way that my work is also done and you won’t even understand that you were warned… like those mutual fund ADs do, which no one can follow, but everyone lives happily. Now that I have done my job of warning you, let me move ahead.
“Caution! Be very careful of false, meaningless, self-contradictory, and not even very funny warnings, like this one.”
- Ashleigh Brilliant
Ok. If you still reached here then you are committed to read this post…so let’s move ahead.
Invariably my words, w.r.t empathy and its place in education, meet the lug holes of three different kinds of people and thus it elicits three different kind of responses:
1. Category1 (~50%): People who smile at me and then patiently tell me to get lost, in the sweetest possible words. Once I am able to ignore their words, I always love this category of people because they have understood and imbibed the truth of life that its good to smile as long as you have teeth.
2. Category2 (~50%): People who don’t say anything but ignore me with all kinds of facial expressions that I have been never able to decipher till now. I love this category of people also for they are the true torch bearers of war against sound pollution.
3. Category3 (<<1%): People who choose to question me and ask me a lot of questions. Honestly these people irritate me a lot, but then it’s only thanks to these people that I have survived in this profession called teaching.
So, let me focus on Category3 people as far as this post is concerned. One of the most common question that I face from this category of people is,
“How can one teach empathy through Science? That clearly is not possible… right?”
I must say I love this question and I can talk for hours on it. But for starter let me just say, “Science is nothing but empathy in action”. Before moving further let me first clarify the meaning of word “empathy”. Let me stress here that lot of us mistake empathy and sympathy to be one and same and use them interchangeably. Empathy is not sympathy.
“You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power.
Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.”
- Dennis Lehane
To give an e.g., empathy is actually walking in someone else’s torn shoes and appreciating their pain first hand, while sympathy is just feeling bad for them. In my words, empathy is being able to truly appreciate alternate perspectives without feeling a burning need to pass a quick judgement.
This is where Science comes in very easily because history of Science is a continuous evolution of alternative perspectives or in other words,
To make my point further clear let me share an example.
If you ask any child (or for that matter any adult also) as to why does an object thrown up falls down, the standard answer is gravity…
If you ask them if there can be other possible alternative answers to explain this phenomenon, the answer is generally always a straight No (at least I have not come across a single child >10 years old or an adult who even thinks there can be a possible alternative answer to this question)…
If you now give then a possible alternate answer (let’s call it AltP) that can explain this phenomenon, its straightaway rejected without even giving a second thought…
If you further this conversation and tell them that AltP was believed by people for almost 1700/1800 years… till almost 16/17th century this alternative answer i.e. AltP, was considered a valid answer, the straight response is because they were not as advanced as us…
Ok, fair point… but can someone explain to me as to how come a so-called advanced being like Newton who gave us gravity, which we so much believe in, also believed that light is made up of physical particles or what he called as corpuscles, a theory we have happily rejected as of today?
Now there is a pause… a pause that should have more logically occurred somewhere earlier in the conversation.
“Take a walk with a turtle. And behold the world in pause.”
- Bruce Feiler
I just don’t understand this habit of jumping to conclusions… sometimes I wonder if people don’t know that jumping to conclusion is not counted as exercise by their Fitbit. We have been so hardwired into scientific thoughts of a particular kind that our standard assumption/conclusion is that every other possible answer can only be given by beings who were/are less advanced than us… in simple words, idiots.
Sometimes I really think jellyfish is a great creature… it gives hope to a lot of people…
The fact that Jellyfish survived for more than 600 million years, despite not having a brain, gives hope to a lot of people that they can also survive without using their brains.
Anyway… What we don’t realize is that history of Science has been a journey of continuously replacing one perspective (or what we call as theories) with another… many times in this journey we have even gone back and re-embraced the perspective that was discarded. Every generation think that they are the most advanced and everyone before them are old/ancient/idiot.
“From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.”
- Napolean Bonaparte
It’s this kind of hardwired thinking that needs to be replaced by a more empathetic thought process if we as a specie (on a larger scale) want to touch the soul of Science or let me say, if we intend to discover deeper knowledge w.r.t workings of mother nature. We can’t leave it to handful of so called geniuses to do it for the rest of us all the time…
This leads us to the question…
What should we adults do so that more and more children start appreciating Sciences in a more meaningful way?
Every time I hear this question I can’t but feel empathy for the person who honestly asks this question to me, for someday I had asked this same question with all honesty… however, I am always simultaneously reminded of the following quote,
“If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?”
- Scott Adams
Without demeaning anyone, let me say, this is one of the most important question to ask and yet one of the most stupidest question to ask. The reason for saying so is that the answer to this question is so simple that, in all probability, you cannot even imagine it in your wildest dreams… at least I could never imagine, when I asked this question. And because its so simple, its one of the most difficult task for majority of action-oriented/ego-driven/assumed-smart adults (which basically means majority of us) to even accept it… so, more often than not the answer is rejected and that’s why the question ends up becoming a stupid question.
Life is extremely simple. But the problem is that if we earnestly accept its simplicity, what will all the consultants/advisors/experts/thought leaders/gurus/etc. do?
Nonetheless at the risk of being rejected, let me share the answer — What we all need to do is that we need to “do nothing”. We just need to let children be the way they are. They are born with qualities that make them appreciate Sciences in just the right way (Why are children the best scientists in the world?)… a way which majority of us have lost long ago and we have very little hope of getting it back in this life. Now if my previous statement sounds demeaning to you, then let me say two things — firstly, “sorry”; and secondly, that’s why I said it’s so simple that it’s bound to be rejected.
I’m often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice. Get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period. I don’t care about your economic background. I don’t care what town you’re born in, what city, what country. If you’re a child, you are curious about your environment. You’re overturning rocks. You’re plucking leaves of trees and petals of flowers, looking inside, and you’re doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you. And so then so what do adults do? They say, “Don’t pluck the petals off the flowers. I just spent money on that. Don’t play with the egg. It might break. Don’t….” Everything is a don’t. We spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.
So you get out of their way. And you know what you do? You put things in their midst that help them explore. Help them explore. Why don’t you get a pair of binoculars, just leave it there one day? Watch them pick it up. And watch them look around. They’ll do all kinds of things with it.”
- Neil deGrasse Tyson
I learnt this valuable lesson the hard way, when God made 5 children, aged 7yrs and 12 yrs, crash through my action-oriented/ego-driven/assumed-smartness, and by the time I realized what’s happening, I was “destroyed” from inside forever. Anyway what happened to me is, I guess, not a point of concern to anyone for I am no SRK/MSD/etc. So, let me come back to my point and move forward…
Whenever I ask such a question to a very young child (a child who knows nothing about gravity and typically in my experience such children are less than 7/8 years old), I invariably see them attempting to create answers without boundaries… in fact I recall a specific instance when a child once explained to me logically as to why the atmosphere/air surrounding the Earth is responsible for the ball that is thrown up to come down. Now I am sharing only the so-called logical answer here, because the other answers I have heard are so interesting/creative/over-the-top that most of the people will classify them as absurd straightaway… and some will even launch an argument to convince me as to how can I be such a useless teacher to call such answers scientific. However, as far as I am concerned, these were some instances when I realized how alternate answers and alternate phenomenon are completely discarded by us when we engage with children leading to a very disintegrated model of education… eventually the end point of this approach is that generations of children grow up thinking that Science is only for the so-called scientific variety. We adults are trained to focus… an open ended exploration/conversation, without a goal, is something that’s not a part of our skillset. It’s only children who appreciate that goals can be achieved by even focusing on process and not on goals themselves… in fact when eyes are taken away from clock, amazing goals shape up with real learning as icing on the cake.
Not only that, the surprising thing is that in a no. of cases, when a child is creatively imagining alternate answers, one potential answer is gravity itself… just that the child does not call it gravity. In fact because of this many times we adults miss out the brilliance of young minds. It is therefore important that we adults appreciate that this is how a brilliant scientific mind works… this approach is what that makes children so in tune with a scientific thinking. Nothing is considered a fact. All possibilities are entertained... all perspective are respected. Only when we learn to live at peace with alternate perspectives we become truly scientific and in the larger context truly empathetic.
“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.”
- Issac Newton
This is why “do-nothing” approach when it comes to, at least teaching sciences to children, works best. And this is what adults don’t get… so they make the cardinal mistake of actively teaching children in a way that in the first place made we adults pretty ordinary thinking/scientific minds. If my previous statement sounds demeaning to you then please assume that my intent is served… after all if you have come so far in reading this article then I am assuming you have hopefully left your ego, w.r.t your scientific capability vis-a-vis a child, long behind.
Now think this way… if we can create an education system wherein boundary less conversations around Science are encouraged while engaging with children on Sciences… if we can allow all possible alternate alternatives to make their presence felt and evaluate them respectfully without a rush to finish a predefined curriculum in a predefined time… if we can listen to all the answers that our children create without categorizing them as childish or wrong and we adults make an effort to reflect on them without impatience… if we can give up this mad race to “teach” scientific facts, like gravity, to our children but let these concepts (and many more possible alternate imaginations) evolve through a boundary less exploration… if only we can do it, we will understand how Science, and in the larger context good education, is empathy in action. What we all adults and our schools give to children is not Science, it’s just dead body of Science and no wonder that children, who are such deeply scientific beings, lose all interest in it.
To cut the long story short… if I have to answer the question that is asked by Category3 people, then my response will be and emphatic Yes… “Yes… Science can definitely teach empathy because Science is nothing but empathy in action.” This is what my attempt at DreamNobel is… engage with children on Sciences in an empathetic fashion and create an environment where I can learn Sciences from them… whether they will learn anything from me or not, I have left it for God to decide. If after hearing this you are willing to smile at me or ignore me then it’s fine, but if you choose to take it seriously then let me warn you that I fail in this hallowed purpose of mine too often.
Before I end, I must congratulate you. You have heard me for more than 10–15 minutes. Heartfelt thanks. And if you agree with me do share my article. See I am working hard to become a better marketer. I have been told that a social media worthy message has to have a call for action. Unfortunately, all along I thought people act when they think it’s logical and not because the writer asks them to act. But now as I think about it , it makes sense, for Newton’s Third Law of Motion says, “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” If I want people to react, I have to act. So, here I am courtesy a legendary scientific guru, asking you all to react because I have acted by asking, “Please share, like and subscribe”. Thank you.
About DreamNobel
DreamNobel is an education initiative to engage in a way that “independent thinking” and “empathy” becomes an integral part of student’s personality. We have developed a unique and revolutionary science course whereby a kid can be “taught” broadly all the Science subjects (Physics, Chemistry, Biology & Geology) in an integrated manner, through a unique story and rationalization led pedagogy. The following are our social media handles: Twitter, Instagram, Medium, LinkedIn. If the thoughts posted here resonate with you, then please follow us so that we can reach out to a wider audience.
