“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
– Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird

On a recent Outdoor Education trip, another chaperone and I observed a student have an awkward interaction with their peers. It was a perfectly developmentally appropriate momentary lapse. As you would hope and before he received prompting from the adults, he apologized, acknowledged his misstep, and committed to doing better.

This incident led to a conversation with the other chaperone on the importance of empathy. The necessity to teach this emotion in school and parenting can be overlooked, perhaps because it’s so obvious. And yet, when problems arise, they can often be attributed to a lack of empathy and can be resolved when we ask children and young adults to sit for a bit and consider “how this must have felt for the other person.”

An online dictionary defines empathy as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” It doesn’t necessarily mean that we agree with someone or we see the world in the same way as they do, but it does demand us to consider how they may have felt in the moment.

The decision to include empathy in the Cobra Code stemmed from discussions among the Keystone faculty/staff on ways to make our pillars-academic excellence, ethical growth, community involvement, and responsible leadership-more comprehensible and tangible among our students in grades PK3-senior year of high school.

When a four year old takes another child’s toy, they may not understand it when we tell them they are not demonstrating “ethical growth.” Similarly, when a 12th grader is working hard in their classes, extracurricular activities, and college applications, they may not stop in the moment to think how a cutting remark felt to the recipient. While events like these are completely understandable, they also provide the perfect teachable moment. Grounding the spontaneous lesson in the concept of “empathy” helps a student of any age learn and grow.

In the Little School, the Helping Hands curriculum teaches students how to consider the feelings of others and act appropriately. In other divisions, these lessons can be the foundation of a grade-level assembly, or they can arise in a class discussion.

The historian Barbara Tuchman explained in her writings that a key element of being a strong student of the past requires “historical empathy” where we analyze our predecessors in the context of their world while not necessarily approving their actions. Here again, empathy and sympathy are very different.

Empathy can be part and parcel of a world language course where we seek to learn not just the verbs and nouns of a different language, but also how that term developed. Many years ago, our older son had a prompt for a college essay where he had to explain a concept from a language other than English that has no quick and easy translation. He wrote on the Spanish cultural tradition of “sobremesa.” “Sobremesa refers to the tradition of relaxing at the table after a meal, where people converse and enjoy each other’s company. The word literally translates to ‘over the table.’” To understand this delightful tradition, we need to leave our own way of doing things and put ourselves in the shoes of another.

Similarly, one of the benefits of overseas travel, whether it’s part of the Middle School Mexico City Exchange Program or the Upper School Travel Society trip during the summer is the opportunity for students to see other places and live in other cultures where they can build their empathy skills.

For many years now, members of our faculty/staff have served on visiting teams for an Independent Schools Association of the Southwest (ISAS) accreditation. This requires teachers or administrators from one school to spend three days immersed in the life of another school and help write a report filled with commendations and recommendations. I have had the good fortune to chair these teams, and the first piece of guidance we give the group is to leave your own institution behind and judge the school based on who they say they are. In these situations, Keystone faculty/staff members practice what we preach and demonstrate empathy toward their colleagues in other schools.

Adhering to the values in the Cobra Code-empathy, curiosity, integrity, creativity, and service-allow us to teach Keystone students’ hearts as well as their heads. In the process, they grow into excellent academicians and outstanding people.