Mike Wakeford

Jeremy Rifkin has a smart essay titled “Empathic Education: The Transformation of Learning in an Interconnected World” in the Chronicle of Higher Education online (full Article here). In response to some of the rhetoric adjoining President Obama’s ‘Educate to Innovate’ initiative, Rifkin asks whether too much emphasis is being placed on the goal of preparing students to compete for jobs in competitive marketplace, and conversely, too little on educating young Americans in the values of ‘empathy.’ As Rifkin sees it, our increasing understanding of the interdependent nature of the world, in both biospheric and political-economic terms, makes all the more necessary that schools of all sorts and all levels prepare young people with the habits and techniques of empathic collaboration. He writes:

. . . Ultimately, our ideas about education flow from our perceptions about reality and our concepts of nature—especially our assumptions about human nature and the meaning of the human journey—which become institutionalized in our educational processes. What we really teach, at any given time, is the consciousness of an era. . . .

I think Rifkin’s probably being intentionally hyperbolic when he suggests elsewhere in the essay that the modern system of education, which emerged in tandem with the age of industry, has been one-sidedly devoted to the preparation of workers for market. He surely knows, as all of us who work in classrooms know, that classrooms are places where a whole tangle of values and goals flow (sometimes in direct contradiction to one another, which is as it should be!). The value of “empathy” has always been one among the many, and I dare say most teachers in the past century-and-a-half (and certainly today) have held pretty tightly to the goal of producing fundamentally decent human beings able to experience the world as others do and to guide their actions accordingly.

But perhaps we can’t be reminded enough that, ultimately, education is about values—not in a restrictive or dogmatic way, but in the broadest sense of the term. For many educators, including me, the dissemination of “knowledge” or “information” is really just a vehicle for promoting the “value” of knowing, of asking, and of ceaseless wondering. For when one values those habits, they come to understand themselves as unfinished beings in process and incomplete in their understanding of themselves and their world. And they come to understand that they share with all other human beings—in the present, past, and future—that basic state of unfinishedness. Those sorts of realizations are the roots of empathy, no?

Anyways, I can’t help but consider the work we’re doing in ARTStem as enacting and perpetuating these values. The project’s genesis resides in a spirit of asking and wondering, and in an embrace of the reality that we, as educators, and our schools, as institutions, are unfinished beings in process: What would happen if a group of faculty from UNCSA and Reynolds High School got together and started thinking together about what they teach and how they think? And what could happen if familiar ideas about the bifurcation of the arts and the STEM disciplines were cast aside? And why shouldn’t college and high school faculty be in closer dialogue, and what would happen if they were? And why shouldn’t conversation and learning about the leading edges of neuroscience, of complexity systems theory, of parallel worlds theory, etc., occupy a front-and-center place in the intellectual culture of an arts conservatory? What kinds of art might be generated as a result? What kind of artists, filling what kinds of roles in society, might be produced?

Anyways, Rifkin’s article is worth a read. Enjoy, and feel free to comment below!