Compassionate anger as a mobilizer for social justice: feelings application in curriculum design

ABSTRACT

While learning a broad sense of compassion (feeling/being kind), students are seldom given a sustained opportunity to learn why they feel angry at the suffering of the other and what to do with that anger. Prosocial anger that adheres to compassion is not deemed as official affective knowledge in schools. While defining compassion as a virtue, this paper conceptualizes compassionate anger as a mobilizer for social justice. Becoming empathetic towards the suffering of the other is, and should be, one of the core educational goals in the era of a pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. To this end, by examining the interaction between compassion as an ontological virtue and anger as an emotion, which is a somewhat paradoxical relationship, this paper theoretically juxtaposes compassion with four prosocial angers (impersonal, defensive, Aristotelean, and political) to construct four curriculum approaches to social justice (conservative, experiential, rational, and emancipatory).

KEYWORDS:

• Compassion
• virtue
• morality
• anger
• curriculum theory

Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions. We also appreciate our mentors Dr. William Pinar, Dr. Robert Donmoyer, Dr. Thomas Barone, Dr. Janet Miller, Dr. Patti Lather, Dr. James Henderson, Dr. Thomas Poetter, Dr. Francisco Rios, and Dr. Won-Hee Lee for their forever care and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Interestingly or somewhat surprisingly, Buddhism defines compassion as something that has little to do with warmth. Buddhist compassion is not based on what is generally called feeling; rather, it has more to do with knowing a sense of interdependence between the part and the whole. It is considered a result of practiced meditations. Therefore, Buddhist compassion is without heat or passion, and is rather objective, cold, constant, and universal. Buddhism’s ‘universal compassion’ (Gyatso, 2011, p. 79) is a mindset that sincerely wishes to liberate all living beings from suffering. Islam also views compassion as a central concept, evidenced by the words rahma (mercy), ihsan (benevolence), and adl (fairness and justice), which are usually encompassed in the fundamental beliefs of Islam: tawhid (unity of God) and risalah (messengership of Mohammad) (Yunoos, 2018). Thus, because words such as compassionate and merciful are used to describe the Muslim God, Muslims are equally mandated to show mercy and compassion to all human beings, animals, plants, and the non-living (Alharbi & Al Hadid, 2018). Lastly, Christian compassion is shown when tending to fellow human beings in need without seeking repayment or a public display of gratitude. Christians follow the example of compassion set by Jesus the Messiah. Compassion in Christianity takes many forms, such as forgiveness, hope, mercy, or love, and provides dignity to the dying. Compassion is modelled by Jesus Christ in the Bible and is a virtue that Christian believers strive to demonstrate (Gilman, 1994). There must be many other religions or cultural groups in the world that value compassion in their own rights. The bottom line is that compassion is grounded in a universal mindset, a fundamental belief, or a core principle that all human beings should embrace liberating or relieving all living beings from suffering, in different forms or languages. As such, it is likely that a religious notion of compassion is holistic/universal in terms of scale, a fundamental obligation to do with no expected repayment, or a guided action requirement that should be taken for those in need.

2. Peterson (2017) argues that compassion is more than the sum of the three similar but distinctively different concepts/constructs of pity, sympathy, and empathy. While these four emotions are related in one way or another, psychologically and philosophically, there is some confusion about the relationship between pity and compassion, and caution is needed when comparing the two. Pity is a feeling of recognition and sorrow in response to the suffering of others. In other words, pity is ‘a largely negative (or at least largely unproductive) response to the suffering of others … as an excessive form of compassion, involving a deviation [and] … feeling distressed for those whose suffering is of their own making’ (Peterson, 2017, pp. 41-42). Juxtaposing pity and compassion, we understand that compassion is based on an unequal power relationship between a privileged person who feels compassion and another person who is the object of compassion. There is a possibility that people with privilege and power may mindlessly feel compassionate towards those who are treated unjustly and unequally. In this paper, we argue that feeling pity towards the suffering of the other, from the perspective of those with privilege and power, may be regarded as a kind of necessary condition, but is never going to be sufficient for valid motivation. As a result, the four compassionate angers are different ways of feeling compassion for the suffering of the other. For example, those with impersonally oriented compassion and anger may take for granted that such an unequal power relationship between a privileged person who feels compassion and another person who is the object of compassion cannot help but exist. In contrast, those with political compassion and anger do not feel and think that way but rather see their feelings and emotions as a historical cause for improving justice and equality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeasik Cho

Jeasik Cho is an Associate Professor of the Department of Curriculum & Instruction in the College of Education at Texas Tech University. He received his doctorate degree from The Ohio State University in curriculum theory, qualitative research/evaluation, and teacher education. He has a new book, Evaluating Qualitative Research (Oxford University Press, 2018), and has published many research articles in areas of curriculum, teacher education/multicultural education, and qualitative research. His current research interests include compassion-based curriculum theory in post-pandemic multicultural education, culturally relevant metacognition, inclusion/accessibility/success in higher education, and so on.

Jeong-Hee Kim

Jeong-Hee Kim is Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas Tech University. Kim’s research centers around various onto-epistemological underpinnings of curriculum studies, focusing on the philosophical notion of Bildung, an edifying way of developing and cultivating the self. Currently, Kim is engaged with interdisciplinary curriculum-making, which connects the field of curriculum studies with other disciplines such as engineering, veterinary medicine, and the arts and humanities. She received the 2017 Outstanding Publication Award for her book, Understanding Narrative Inquiry (2016) from AERA’s narrative research group, which is also translated in Chinese.