Education; Educational psychology; Moral education
The next stage in the development of a desirable form of sensitiveness
is sympathy. There is a purely physical sympathy: a very young child
will cry because a brother or sister is crying. This, I suppose,
affords the basis for the further developments. The two enlargements
that are needed are: first, to feel sympathy even when the sufferer
is not an object of special affection; secondly, to feel it when the
suffering is merely known to be occurring, not sensibly present. The
second of these enlargements depends mainly upon intelligence. It may
only go so far as sympathy with suffering which is portrayed vividly
and touchingly, as in a good novel; it may, on the other hand, go so
far as to enable a man to be moved emotionally by statistics. This
capacity for abstract sympathy is as rare as it is important. Almost
everybody is deeply affected when some one he loves suffers from
cancer. Most people are moved when they see the sufferings of unknown
patients in hospitals. Yet when they read that the death-rate from
cancer is such-and-such, they are as a rule only moved to momentary
personal fear lest they or some one dear to them should acquire the
disease. The same is true of war: people think it dreadful when their
son or brother is mutilated, but they do not think it a million
times as dreadful that a million people should be mutilated. A man
who is full of kindliness in all personal dealings may derive his
income from incitement to war or from the torture of children in
“backward” countries. All these familiar phenomena are due to the fact
that sympathy is not stirred, in most people, by a merely abstract
stimulus. A large proportion of the evils in the modern world would
cease if this could be remedied. Science has greatly increased our
power of affecting the lives of distant people, without increasing
our sympathy for them. Suppose you are a shareholder in a company
which manufactures cotton in Shanghai. You may be a busy man, who has
merely followed financial advice in making the investment; neither
Shanghai nor cotton interests you, but only your dividends. Yet you
become part of the force leading to massacres of innocent people, and
your dividends would disappear if little children were not forced into
unnatural and dangerous toil. You do not mind, because you have never
seen the children, and an abstract stimulus cannot move you. That is
the fundamental reason why large-scale industrialism is so cruel, and
why oppression of subject races is tolerated. An education producing
sensitiveness to abstract stimuli would make such things impossible.
Cognitive sensitiveness, which should also be included, is practically
the same thing as a habit of observation, and this is more naturally
considered in connection with intelligence. Æsthetic sensitiveness
raises a number of problems which I do not wish to discuss at this
stage. I will therefore pass on to the last of the four qualities we
enumerated, namely, intelligence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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