Mary KennyMary Kenny considers the Golden Rule as a means to combat bullying
It is being proposed by UNESCO that one of the ways to combat bullying in schools is to teach “empathy” to young children. The dictionary definition of empathy is “the power of entering into the feelings of another person and understanding them fully”.
If children were taught to be empathetic from an early age, perhaps there would be less bullying in schools, colleges and, later, workplaces. If you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes, then you would be less likely to bully or boss them unkindly. That is the view put forward by Prof. Pat Dolan from the UNESCO child and family research centre at Galway.
Who would argue with the notion of ‘empathy education’? Don’t most responsible parents try to teach it anyway when they say to a child who has been unkind to a sibling or playmate – “How would you feel if someone did that to you?”
It’s seems a fine project, in which the actor Cillian Murphy will be involved as a narrator of empathy documentaries for teens (though I hope it’s not ‘bullying’ to say that I felt rather critical of the last voiceover that he did – a BBC programme about the Irish coastal waters. I thought there wasn’t enough life or expression in his diction. Actors, the poor darlings, do have to take the critics’ brickbats!).
But isn’t there an element of reinventing the wheel in empathy education? Anyone who has had any Christian education has been taught a most basic tenet of the New Testament – “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
I remember being taught that you should see, among the least favoured person you encounter, the image of Jesus Christ. This lesson has often come back to me when I’ve sat beside a down-and-out in a church, or encountered someone objectionable on a train, say. “All God’s chillun!”
The anti-bullying theory has always been available to us, surely, and the UNESCO programme is but drawing on what is already there, on deposit, in our culture.
However, whether this is enough to halt bullying is a more complicated question. We also know that however many good values we may be given, humans are flawed, and the Old Adam will always emerge. If some individuals can gain power, money, social advantages, fast cars and private airplanes through bullying – someone always will!
Empathy also needs the health warning: “watch out for Original Sin – not yet abolished!”
Wise mentors can help young people
I certainly believe that young people – and perhaps especially young lads – often need a wise mentor to help them through the confusing years of adolescence. Mentoring was once carried out through the tutorial system at colleges and universities, and equally, via the apprentice system in a working life. The master and his apprentice were a classic template of this.
The actor George Cole, who died recently at the age of 90, often said that he would never have made anything of his life if he hadn’t been mentored by the older Scots actor, Alastair Sim, from the age of 15. Sim and his wife took George Cole under their wing – and into their home – after young George left school at the age of 14. George had been adopted, and only discovered that fact at the age of 13, so he may have felt the teenage angst of identity even more so than usual.
But Sim guided him and helped him through the troubled years until he found his feet and established himself in the world. This was in London in the 1940s and the social services did not involve themselves in such unofficial forms of fosterage.
Not all adolescents will easily accept ‘mentoring’ and the mentor has to be skilled, patient and tactful. But it can be such a valuable role – and it is also being re-invented, often very usefully, as ‘life coaching’.
Many a priest has acted in the position of mentor. Maire Mhac an Tsaoi has written about her priest-uncles who played just such a role in her years of growing up. Her late husband Conor Cruise O’Brien (…) also recalled that his uncle, Fr Sheehy, was a mentor to a very youthful Eamon de Valera.
Bomb in Bangkok
Atrocities like the bomb placed near a Hindu shrine in Bangkok always bring to mind the poignant lines written by Sean O’Casey in Juno and the Paycock. Mary Boyle, who has been abandoned, pregnant and is in despair about the trouble she has seen, cries out that if there was a loving God “He wouldn’t let these things happen!”
Her mother, Mrs Boyle, replies: “…These things have nothin’ to do with the Will o’ God. Ah, what can God do agen the stupidity o’ men!”
And, in some cases, the wickedness of men.