Cultivating sprouts of benevolence: a foundational principle for curriculum in civic and multicultural education

ABSTRACT

A central goal of civic and multicultural education is preparing young people to participate in deliberatively informed action on important social issues. In order to achieve this goal, educators need to cultivate young people’s innate but partial ‘sprouts’ of benevolence, which are rooted in feelings of empathy and compassion. Without a sense of benevolence, students are unlikely to be motivated to deliberate and take action on the needs of others. Consequently, curriculum related to public issues should begin by engaging students with knowledge of other people’s lives and concrete circumstances. By encountering rich and emotionally compelling accounts of the lives of others, students’ sense of benevolence can be extended beyond the people and situations they know best. This forms the basis for subsequent curriculum encounters with differing perspectives and worldviews, as well as with structural causes of social issues and potential implications of civic action taken to address them.

KEYWORDS:

• Civic education
• multicultural education; social studies; compassion; Confucianism

Civic and multicultural education take a number of forms in countries around the world, but a common goal across settings is preparing young people to take part in deliberatively informed action: to consider and act on what Parker (2003) has characterized as the central citizenship question of our time: ‘How can we live together justly?’ (p. 20).¹ In order to take part in such deliberations, students must be willing to act benevolently. That is, they must devote the time, energy, and resources necessary to consider the needs of others and to act on their deliberations. As Eastern and Western philosophers have long maintained, and as recent cognitive theory and research confirm, benevolence is deeply rooted in innate human feelings of compassion and empathy. However, such innate feelings are limited and partial; they are what the Confucian philosopher Mencius referred to as mere ‘sprouts.’ Educators, therefore, have a responsibility to develop these sprouts of benevolence so that they extend to people and issues that seem distant to students, because without such development, deliberatively informed action is impossible. Extending benevolence in this way requires content specifically designed to emphasise concrete and tangible depictions of the feelings and experiences of others. Although this cannot be the only principle for curriculum development, it is an indispensable beginning – and one that is largely ignored in most current civic and multicultural education.

Deliberation and Curriculum

Most civic and multicultural issues revolve around creating conditions that would enable all people to lead full and rewarding lives, including having the freedom and agency to make choices about how to pursue their own visions of ‘the good life’ (Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 1999, 2009). These include issues related to the provision and distribution of basic resources such as health, education, housing, and other material goods, as well as capacities for free association, freedom of expression, a role in societal decision-making, and other aspects of human dignity. Often, such issues involve difficult choices about how to prioritize the rights and obligations of different members of society, as well as how to maintain balance and harmony among groups and their potentially competing interests. Such choices can be particularly complex in multicultural societies, where the range of ideas, interests, and practices can be wide, especially when some groups have been marginalized and oppressed. Helping students make just decisions about societal issues, in conditions of unequal power relations, is one of the key challenges of civic and multicultural education (Banks, 2008; Parker, 2003; Hess & McAvoy, 2015).

Most approaches to civic and multicultural education explicitly or implicitly aim to prepare young people to play a role in influencing such issues, both now and in their lives in the future, whether through voting, other forms of direct political participation (e.g., lobbying, protesting, petitioning), or involvement in civil society (Ho & Barton, 2020). Yet recent scholarship emphasizes that schools must do more than teach students to reach individual decisions and then act on them. They must also give them experience with deliberatively informed action: public activities that are shaped by deliberative processes and collaborative decision-making (Avery et al., 2013; Hess, 2009). At the school level, for example, Banks (2009) has argued that students should be engaged in deliberative decision making about school governance and policies. Classroom studies, meanwhile, have illustrated how students can deliberate over broader issues of social policy. In the Republic of Macedonia, ethnic Albanian and Macedonian students deliberated hate speech laws and policies (Clark & Brown, 2014), while in Singapore, students deliberated over the Singapore government’s controversial LGBTQ policies and laws (Leviste & Ho, 2014).

This deliberative approach to civic participation has played a prominent role in both political theory and civic education in recent decades, and although there are many perspectives on deliberation, most highlight the importance of reasoning together, through dialogue, to examine and refine arguments related to a given problem and its possible solutions. These deliberations are important both because they have the potential to result in better solutions than those proposed by any individual or interest group, and also because they provide political legitimacy by allowing individuals and groups to assert greater control over decision-making (Dryzek, 2009; Habermas, 2006). Preparing for and engaging in this process of deliberation can help students learn how to collaborate with diverse others in order to find public solutions to shared problems.

Such deliberation is especially important – and difficult – when addressing issues related to multiculturalism. Most issues, whether local, national, or global, are affected by the perspectives and experiences of people and groups with differing values, needs, interests, and priorities. Students must therefore be able to approach these issues in an open-minded way that takes such diversity into account. In addition, young people are likely to be engaged with others who come from different backgrounds – whether within or outside school contexts, now or in their lives in the future – and thus they must learn how to discuss potentially difficult and controversial topics with those whose views differ from their own. As Parker (2008) puts it, students must learn how to ‘think, speak, and listen together, with and across their differences’ (p. 71), in order to decide on a course of action relevant to a shared problem.

Taking such action – and even taking part in the deliberations that inform it – requires benevolence: the willingness to make an effort to improve the circumstances of others by enhancing their ability to lead full and rewarding lives and by removing sources of harm and oppression. Although the process of deliberation may sound rational and abstract, it rests on an emotional commitment. Students must be willing, that is, to devote the energy necessary to engage in such deliberations meaningfully (including, for example, researching policy issues, considering multiple perspectives, and evaluating evidence); to be open to policies that may seem contrary to their own interests (such as income redistribution); and to take action in support of those policies (whether by engaging in public protest, influencing the legislative process, or attempting to guide actions within civil society).

The importance of benevolence for public action has long been recognized by both Eastern and Western philosophers. It was central to Aristotle’s understanding of ethics, and it has received perhaps its fullest and most profound treatment in the works of David Hume and Adam Smith, both of whom saw benevolence (and its basis in ‘sympathy’ or compassion) as a foundation of virtue and morality (Hume, 1738/2000; Smith, 1759/2009). The concept of benevolence or ‘humaneness’ (ren 仁) is also central to Confucian philosophy; it is regarded as a general foundational virtue that helps shape and guide all human relations (Li, 1994). Without benevolence, people have no reason to consider the needs of others or to move beyond their own individual interests. Given that civic and multicultural education aim precisely at helping students consider such other-oriented concerns, benevolence must play a central role in the curriculum.

Most curricula, however, pay little attention to developing students’ sense of benevolence, particularly in ways that would enable them to deliberate social issues. Civic and multicultural curricula often consist of an amalgam of tradition, nationalism, political mandates, and popular pressure, alongside an uneasy combination of attempts at promoting social justice or multiculturalism on the one hand and mimicking academic disciplines on the other. Meaningful and coherent curricula, however, must rest on core principles that clearly identify how to prepare students for deliberatively informed action. The role of knowledge is particularly important. Although curriculum scholars and other educators have devoted attention to civic skills in recent years, they have largely neglected the knowledge component of civic education (Parker, 2017; Deng, 2018). And while knowledge is not an end in itself – not a body of content to be learned – students’ engagement with such content is critical for enabling them to engage in deliberatively informed action. In particular, knowledge of other people and their circumstances is crucial for developing the benevolence necessary to consider and act on public issues.

Emotions, Compassion and Benevolence

The Role of Emotion in Reasoning

The benevolence necessary for deliberating social issues rests on the emotion of compassion.² Curriculum in civic education, however, devotes scant attention to such affective concerns. This is due, in part, to the legacy of an influential body of scholarship on justice, morality, and politics that downplays or ignores the importance of emotions, as though decision making related to ethics and public policy should be a purely ‘rational’ process unrelated to affect (Haidt, 2008; Krause, 2008; Marcus, 2002; Nussbaum, 1995; E. Thompson, 2001). Philosophers such as Kant and Rawls, for example, argued for a form of reasoning grounded in abstract and universal principles, largely unconnected to people’s desires and emotions. Similarly, Kohlberg’s (1981) once-influential theory of moral development held that the highest stage of reasoning involved adherence to universal principles and thus excluded emotional attachments (to family or community, for instance). As Thiele (2006) describes this view, emotions often have been portrayed as ‘unwelcome intrusions to the rational judgments of moral agents. They are impediments that cloud what otherwise might be more reasonable, unbiased assessments, evaluations, and choices’ (p. 164). Moral and political judgements, in this view, depend on impartiality, and this requires suppressing emotional attachments so that all people may be treated equally and dispassionately (Krause, 2008).

Although school curricula rarely are based directly or systematically on the work of philosophers or psychologists, civic education nonetheless tends to adhere to a similar view of public decision-making, one that focuses on principled judgement rather than emotional considerations. Human rights education, for example, emphasizes universal standards identified in international documents and covenants (Lohrenscheit, 2002; Starkey, 2012), while in countries such as the United States, history and civics curricula revolve around development of the nation’s legal and constitutional principles, as well as the consequences of those principles for public life (Hahn, 1999). And in many settings around the world, civic and multicultural education emphasize fair and equal interpersonal behaviour, the use of government policy to meet the needs of citizens, or both. Emotional considerations rarely play a role in such curricula.

In each of these examples, reaching conclusions about social norms and public policies becomes a matter of applying appropriate ethical, legal, or constitutional standards. Although educators may not draw on explicit philosophical foundations for their orientation towards such detached judgements, they are nonetheless likely to consider emotions either irrelevant or distracting to careful reasoning in the public sphere, and curriculum scholars in the field have provided little guidance for how to think about emotions in more constructive ways (Sheppard et al., 2015). Many teachers, in fact, avoid engaging students in discussion of controversial public issues precisely because they fear that these will inspire strong emotions, particularly feelings of nationalism or of inter-group prejudice – emotions which teachers usually are unprepared for and unwilling to address (Zembylas & Kambani, 2012). Deliberating social issues in schools, then, generally excludes emotion as an explicit and planned focus of attention (for exceptions, see Sheppard & Levy, 2019).

People rarely reason in such dispassionate ways, however. An extensive body of empirical evidence documents the variety of ways that affective states influence higher-order cognitive processes such as interpretation, judgement, decision making and reasoning, including about topics related to social and political issues (Blanchette & Richards, 2010; Brader & Marcus, 2013; Damasio, 1994; Neuman et al., 2007; Thiele, 2006). These influences are both complex and situation-dependent, and they frequently precede conscious reflection – that is, people feel first and reason second, rather than the reverse. Sometimes feelings of anxiety, for example, lead people to increase their estimates of the likelihood of future negative events and interpret situations in more threatening ways, as well as motivate them to avoid risk (Blanchette & Richards, 2010). In political decision-making, however, anxiety (but not fear) leads people to be more open and deliberate in their judgements, and to seek out more relevant information, with less confirmation bias (Brader & Marcus, 2013). With regard to social issues generally, emotions often result in sounder and more logical conclusions (Blanchette & Caparos, 2013; Immordino‐Yang & Damasio, 2007). A number of studies, for example, have shown that intense emotions, rooted in personal experience, lead people to reason more logically about content related to their experiences, and to be less distracted by superficial aspects of a task. Emotions thus cannot simply be ignored in the way that some philosophers hope. As Thiele (2006) notes, ‘By repressing rather than acknowledging emotional states, one becomes their unwitting servant’ (p. 189).

While educators would benefit from an understanding of the variety of ways in which emotions influence judgement, the most critical role for emotion in the curriculum lies in its ability to motivate students to engage in the deliberations of a democratic society. Deliberation means considering how to bring about a desired world, and that necessarily involves caring about something – whether wealth, family, friends, the environment, freedom, or other material realities or abstract ideals. Without such desires (or what Hume called ‘passions’), there would be nothing to deliberate; when we discuss what the world should be like, we focus on those things we care about (Krause, 2008). Emotion, then, is crucial to deliberative reasoning. As Thiele (2006) notes in summarizing research on affect and reasoning, ‘Rational judgment in moral and political affairs simply cannot arise in the absence of emotion. Affect gets reason off the ground and subsequently directs its operations’ (p. 166).

Emotional attachments are especially important in order to motivate action, because deliberation does not simply involve speculating about some ideal state of the world but deciding what should be done to bring that world about. Such action cannot depend solely on abstract reasoning, because reason alone cannot motivate action or establish norms that we agree to live by; overly rationalist paradigms of deliberation suffer from what Habermas calls a ‘motivational deficit’ (Habermas, 2001, p. 35; see also Haidt, 2001; Nussbaum, 1995). Feelings of strong emotional arousal, on the other hand, motivate people to become more engaged in politics, including participating in forms of collective action such as protests and social movements (Brader & Marcus, 2013). Thiele (2006) argues,

As Aristotle observed, reason can do nothing by itself; it must be combined with desire to induce action. The judgments that precede and inform action find in emotion their motivating and sustaining force. Reason requires emotion to stimulate its use, to recruit and direct its abilities, and to execute its command. (p. 176)

To take deliberatively informed action, that is, we must have attachments that compel us to follow through on any ‘rational’ conclusions (Blackburn, 1998; Krause, 2008; Williams, 1986).

Social educators have not been oblivious to the role of emotions, because their presence in classrooms – particularly when discussing controversial social issues – is inescapable. But most often, they have viewed emotions as something to be tamed, controlled, or repressed, in order to proceed with what is often considered the ‘real,’ emotion-free work of learning (Sheppard et al., 2015). A number of authors have pointed to the motivating power of emotion to engage students in learning, especially when confronting people and experiences that differ from their own lives (e.g., Rosiek, 2003; Zembylas, 2016). Some studies have found that reactions to the lives of others can inspire students to want to learn more, and even to apply what they have learned to issues of immediate relevance (Brooks, 2011; Thomas-Brown, 2010). Even such positive assessments, however, have suffered from a lack of clarity about how emotions are conceptualized (Sheppard et al., 2015). Moreover, most studies have focused on how instruction may lead to a variety of emotional responses, rather than on how curricula can make use of specific emotions to enable students’ learning, and particularly their deliberation of social issues.

Compassion: the Foundation of Benevolence

The emotion of compassion is especially important when we consider how to draw upon and develop the benevolence necessary to meet the needs of other people – the central concern of public deliberation. Benevolence would be impossible if people’s affective concerns were limited to self-interest or idiosyncratic desires. To be part of a public means precisely to transcend self (and even family and friends) in order to make decisions that benefit a larger public (Parker, 2003). Yet this transcendence also rests on a foundation of emotion, rather than dispassionate reasoning. Mencius maintained that benevolence does not result from rationally accepting universal rules of behaviour, for it would be possible to accept such rules without acting on them (Nivison, 1980) – an observation borne out by modern empirical research (Haidt, 2001). Similarly, Rorty (1993) argues that few people are motivated to treat others fairly solely by appeals to the concept of a universal human nature, because it is too easy to ignore such injunctions or, in extreme cases, to exclude others from what counts as truly human. This, Rorty argues, is why discrimination, violence, human rights abuses and even genocide are so common.

There is good reason, however, to think that compassion is deeply rooted in human nature. Certainly empathy – the capacity to understand and even share the feelings of others – is innate (De Waal, 2009; E. Thompson, 2001), and it is these shared feelings that supply the ‘raw material’ for compassion: Having the ability to recognize others’ feelings enables people to see that their welfare is at stake in a given situation (Thiele, 20,006, p. 184). But compassion – caring about others’ welfare – also seems to be innate, even if its manifestation is socially situated. Mencius observed that all people feel compassion for kin, other humans, and non-human animals (Tu, 1985; Van Norden, 2009, 2017; Wong, 1991). His example of the natural distress and alarm felt by a person when seeing a child about to fall in a well illustrates this principle of a heart that cannot bear to see suffering – an ‘unbearing heart’ (Tu, 1985, p. 101) or ‘heart that is not unfeeling toward others’ (Van Norden, 2009, p. 20) (不忍人之心 bu ren ren zhi xin). Over two millennia later, Adam Smith made the same claim. He began The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759/2009) by observing:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. (p. 13)

Contemporary theory and research in cognitive psychology and related areas suggests that these philosophers were right: A concern with the welfare of others is a foundational element of human psychology, one rooted in the importance of mutual assistance as a response to evolutionary challenges of survival (Haidt, 2008).

And just as this compassionate concern is innate, so too is the benevolent action that results from it. When we care about others, we are motivated to take actions that enable them to enjoy pleasure and avoid pain (Blackburn, 1998; Haidt, 2001). Mencius maintained that all people have an innate tendency towards benevolence (仁 rén) – as well as towards righteousness, wisdom, and propriety – and that to be benevolent means more than simply feeling compassion. It means recognizing the suffering of others and acting accordingly, so that feeling, reasoning, and behaviour come together in a unified whole (Van Norden, 2017). For Mencius, compassion makes benevolent action seem right and its performance seems natural (Nivison, 1980). Similarly, Gilligan (1987) argues that as moral agents, people are concerned not only with recognizing the needs of others but with acting on that recognition; the basic moral question within a ‘care perspective,’ she maintains, is thus ‘How to respond?’ (p. 23).

Hauver’s (2019) study of civic practices in elementary school shows the applicability of this principle in practice. She found that students were willing to take part in civic deliberation only if they cared about the issue at hand. Only those students who perceived that something was unfair, or that it affected themselves or those they cared about, were willing to participate actively in discussion. Moreover, among those who did participate, their empathy towards others was the strongest predictor of their willingness to persist and take action, and the stronger their attachment towards others, the more committed they were. Their civic commitments and deliberative decisions were not simply abstractions (although they involved systematic and abstract reasoning); they depended on a sense of personal responsibility towards those they cared about. It was students’ feelings of connection that decentred them and allowed them to focus on the needs of others. Of course, as Hauver points out, the ability to take action is constrained by power relations, and engaging in civic action depends on judging the risks associated with that action. Yet without the commitment that comes from compassion, such assessments will never be made in the first place.

Extending Benevolence as a Principle of Curriculum

If benevolence is indispensable for reasoning about social life, then any curriculum that prepares students to deliberate societal issues must devote attention to developing the compassion on which benevolence rests. This requires careful consideration of what formal educational programmes can, and cannot, do. Compassionate responses cannot simply be taken for granted, yet neither can schools create compassion, or develop general and universal compassionate feelings. The role of schools is narrower, but no less important: Curriculum must help students extend their innate sense of compassion to new situations, ones which they might not take seriously without formal instruction. Such instruction depends, crucially, on knowledge: Only by learning about the circumstances of others will students come to feel compassion and, it is to be hoped, deliberate with a sense of benevolence. Such knowledge cannot consist only of abstract generalizations or statistics, though; it must provide compelling insight into the lives and circumstances of other people.

Clearly, compassion is not universal, even if it is instinctive. In fact, it seems to be in short supply. This is because our instinctive compassionate responses begin in the most minimal way, and according to Hume and Mencius, these responses initially privilege those who are closest to us. We typically care more about our family than our neighbours, more about our neighbours than strangers, more about those within our country than those outside it (Krause, 2008; E. Thompson, 2001). To become fully benevolent, this partial and particular concern must be further developed. ‘An innate compassionate impulse,’ Wong (1991) says of Mencius’ position, ‘is not compassion in the full sense’ (p. 35). Mencius referred to virtuous tendencies as mere ‘sprouts’ (duan 端) that must be nurtured and cultivated if they are to achieve maturity (Van Norden, 2009). Nurturing these sprouts must be the first task of curriculum.

To be more fully benevolent means to extend compassion beyond the situations and contexts in which it occurs most easily, and to act on the basis of that expanded compassion. This perspective is consistent with contemporary cognitive theory, which holds that the developmental trajectory of moral judgement proceeds ‘from crude, global judgments, articulated using a small number of innate moral intuitions, to highly sophisticated and differentiated perceptions, beliefs, emotional responses, and judgments’ (Haidt & Joseph, 2008, p. 389). Like other Confucians, Mencius believed that this development requires learning and reflection. Through socialization and instruction – guided by classic texts and teachers – people can learn to extend their incipient but inconsistent feelings of compassion to settings whose similarity is not immediately evident to them (Van Norden, 2017).

If a benevolent person, as Mencius argued, is ‘pained by the suffering of others and takes joy in their happiness’ (Van Norden, 2009), then the first principle for selecting curriculum content is that it must help students understand people’s concrete circumstances: the realities that lead them to feel joy or suffering. Mencius suggested that the extension of sentiment involves coming to see similarities between contexts in which someone already feels compassion and those that are more distant (Van Norden, 2017). For Confucius as well, the foundation of benevolence lay in proceeding by analogy from what was nearest to what was further away (Analects VI:30; Chin, 2014). Once these similarities were recognized, Mencius believed, people could not help but act in a benevolent manner. The later Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming (1472–1529) interpreted Mencius’ view as involving a unity of knowing and acting: ‘There never have been people who know but do not act,’ Wang argued; ‘Those who “know” but do not act simply do not yet know’ (Tiwald & Van Norden, 2014, p. 267). For Hume as well, benevolence depends on information. He maintained that only by knowing about the situations of others can we develop regard for their feelings (Krause, 2008).

The Importance of Knowledge

The arguments articulated by Eastern and Western philosophers point to the central importance of knowledge in the curriculum. Curriculum content must engage students with knowledge of others’ circumstances, because without such knowledge, their benevolence is likely to be limited to those who are close to them, either spatially or in terms of social status and identity. Hauver (2019), for example, found that children’s ability to empathise during civic deliberation depended on their own experience with similar situations – such as food insecurity or bullying – that they had been part of or witnessed first-hand. Similarly, Torres (2019) found that elementary students who had learned about other cultures became more open-minded and resistant to stereotyping. In order to act benevolently, students need to understand a wider range of situations than they may have experienced themselves, and engaging students with such knowledge is one purpose of the curriculum.

The need to help students understand the circumstances of others reflects the complex relation between knowledge and emotion. Although some emotional responses are instinctive, and in many cases precede conscious reflection, their further development depends upon societal contexts. Schools are one of the most important of such contexts, and by teaching students about how others experience the world, the curriculum may be able to extend students’ innate emotional responses. Knowledge does not create compassion (or the benevolent actions that result from it) but it can enable people to extend that compassion to new people and situations. People are still free to choose whether they act benevolently or not; clearly there are some people who know about others’ suffering and take no action on it. But without knowledge, this choice is impossible. Only if people have some insight into the feelings and experiences of others – others who may be distant from them in one way or another – will they be able to extend their compassion in ways that motivate them to seriously consider their needs and how to act on them. Rather than distinguishing knowledge and emotion (and ignoring the latter), curricula must recognize the inextricable role that knowledge plays in developing emotional responses, and the motivating power of emotion to act on knowledge.

The kind of knowledge needed to extend emotional responses must centre on the concrete and tangible situations and emotional experiences of others. This differs from the knowledge found in most formal curricula, which typically emphasize legal principles, statistics, generic groups of people (‘citizens,’ ‘immigrants,’ ‘minorities’), and other generalizations. Although such abstractions do play an important role in the curriculum, when they are removed from the human stories they represent they are unlikely to motivate students to feel compassion (Choo, 2018; Fisher, 1995; Hatano & Inagaki, 1993; Levstik, 1986). As a result, such generalized information cannot be the starting point for curriculum designed to engage students in deliberation of social issues. Instead, in order to help students understand the feelings of others, curriculum must begin by engaging students with knowledge that consists of words, images, stories, and sensory experiences that convey others’ realities in emotionally compelling ways. Hume (1738/2000) noted that anyone’s happiness or misery can affect us ‘when brought near to us, and represented in lively colours’ (Treatise 3.2.1; p. 309). It is these lively colours that we must strive for as the first principle of constructing curriculum – stories of love, friendship, aspiration, and hardship.

Portraying the lives of others in concrete and emotionally compelling ways has long been a task of drama, novels, and oral stories. Bruner (1986) maintains that the lifelike form of such narratives is a fundamental means for ordering experience, and Nussbaum (1995) argues that literary works are particularly well-suited for engaging with the lives of others, because they aim to recognize common human needs – those that ‘transcend boundaries of time, place, class, religion, and ethnicity’ (p. 45). She suggests that imaginatively entering into the worlds of other people – particularly those who are disadvantaged – is indispensable for the moral capacities necessary in civic life. The interest that a reader or audience member takes in fictional lives is bound up with their ‘compassionate concern for “men and women like themselves” and the conflicts and reversals that beset them’ (p. 54). Only when people recognize that others are suffering in a way that they or their own loved ones might also suffer will they be moved to take action. Following Aristotle, she argues that the very form of novels and drama ‘constructs compassion in readers, positioning them as people who care intensely about the sufferings and bad luck of others, and who identify with them in ways that show possibilities for themselves’ (p. 66). This is the kind of knowledge that enables sprouts of benevolence to be cultivated.

In civic and multicultural education, literary works such as realistic fiction for adolescents can play an important role in providing students with concrete knowledge of the lives of others, but perhaps even more important are nonfictional narratives and other accounts. These can include journalistic representations, personal narratives, photo or video documentaries, and other sources and experiences that convey others’ circumstances in emotionally compelling ways. Compared to abstract statistics or generalizations, students’ compassionate responses are much more likely to be stimulated by seeing other people, hearing their voices, reading what they have written, engaging with the art they have produced, and even interacting with or meeting them when possible. Although any account is a partial and incomplete construction, rather than a mirror of reality, students are likely to find accounts that are produced by participants themselves, or that draw directly from their words and use their images, to be more compelling than works created by the imagination of others.

Refugee Issues: an Illustration

Deliberations over public policy issues related to transnational refugees illustrate the importance of using students’ innate compassionate responses to extend their sense of benevolence towards other people, situations, and contexts. Throughout human history, people have been displaced from their homes due to war, violence, disease, or natural disaster. Such movements have significant social, political, economic, and environmental repercussions, as existing societies experience heightened levels of cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity and must deal with meeting refugees’ basic needs and developing policies related to both short- and long-term assimilation of, and accommodation to, new arrivals. These issues are complex and complicated, and as a result, refugee movements have led to extensive political controversies, as well as humanitarian efforts, in Europe, North America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. The scope, complexity, importance, and permanence of issues related to refugees makes the topic one that should be part of any civic or multicultural education curriculum, so that students are prepared to take part in meaningful deliberations about how best to respond locally, nationally, and internationally (Smets, 2019).

Yet as popular political discourse makes clear, many people approach refugee issues without benevolence (Augoustinos et al., 2018; Chattopadhyay, 2019; Kirkwood & Goodman, 2018), and when information about the issue focuses only on governments, politics, demographics, and the economy, there may be little reason to feel the compassion necessary to activate benevolence. Moreover, appeals to human or constitutional rights, or to universal standards of human dignity, clearly are insufficient to overcome many people’s strong affective responses, grounded in their own fears and identities. Referring to the more general problem of compassion for those whose backgrounds are different than one’s own – particularly in situations of ethnic conflict – Rorty (1993) asks, ‘Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?’ He rejects the idea that such a question can be answered with rational and impartial reasoning, or that personal connections and feelings of kinship are irrelevant. He argues instead:

A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins “Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers,” or “Because she might become your daughter-in-law,” or “Because her mother would grieve for her.” (p. 133)

For Rorty, rational appeals to the rights possessed by abstract individuals will not always be sufficient to motivate benevolence. Instead, we must begin with appeals to shared feelings and common bonds.

In educational settings, then, the starting point for content related to refugee issues must be words and images that convey emotions and experiences. These must explore what has compelled refugees to leave their homes; the hopes, fears, and dreams they have for themselves and their families; and their experiences along the way and in their new homes. Not generic or abstract refugees, created for the purpose of a textbook, but real people, with real experiences, ‘in lively colours’ (Hume, 1738/2000, p. 309) so that students can see them as individuals ‘far from home, among strangers’ (Rorty, 1993, p. 133). Hearing about the love of refugee parents for their children, their fear for their safety, and their determination to provide a stable life and a brighter future is the content necessary to cultivate students’ sprouts of compassion. Unless students have a basis for expanding their natural compassion, they are unlikely to approach refugee issues with the sense of benevolence that public discussions require.

There are many educational resources to engage students with such content, such as fiction and non-fiction books for children and adolescents, news articles and reports (especially those designed for young people), podcasts and audio recordings, documentaries and other video productions, and in some areas, meetings and interviews with refugees. Each of these sources can provide individual and collective narratives dealing with emotionally compelling topics such as family separations, the difficult choices refugees face, their experiences of prejudice and exploitation, and physical and emotional trauma. (For a collection of resources related to refugees on the southern border of the United States, see Cohen & Wieck, 2019). Students’ natural sense of empathy will only be activated if they engage with these kinds of sources, so that they have the knowledge necessary to develop compassion. Serious discussion of refugee issues and a willingness to support the policy mechanisms necessary for responding to them, meanwhile, depend on the benevolence that arises from compassion. It would be pointless to try to engage non-refugee students in discussions of such issues if they have not yet extended their sense of benevolence to refugees.

Providing rich narratives of the lives of others, though, is not equivalent simply to telling stories of suffering – the ‘long, sad, sentimental’ takes that Rorty advocates. Sadness does seem to be particularly important in promoting reasoning, by inducing more careful and systematic processing of information. Blanchette and Richards (2010) suggest that negative moods signal that something is wrong, and that careful thought is required to address it (whereas positive moods signal the absence of a problem, leading to more superficial reasoning). And many educators have focused on addressing ‘difficult knowledge,’ which Britzman (1998) characterizes as ‘the experiences and the traumatic residuals of genocide, ethnic hatred, aggression, and forms of state-sanctioned – and hence legal – social violence’ (p. 117). In this view, students should not only learn about such trauma but also be transformed by it as they experience their own internal, psychic trauma. Few school curricula, however, are likely to countenance confronting students with their own psychic trauma – for both pragmatic and ethical reasons – and few teachers have the psychoanalytic training that this approach requires.

Moreover, the lives of refugees – and of people caught up in any social issue – are not defined only by suffering and trauma. The kinds of resources discussed above also address caring and protective family relationships, the cultural wealth and contributions of refugees, their hopes and dreams, and their personal and political agency. Promoting human flourishing is not only about protecting people from violations of their dignity and security but also about enabling them to lead fuller lives in a variety of ways. Students can be motivated to care about others not only through stories of danger or atrocity but also by hearing about their hopes for themselves, their families, and their communities. The desire to express onself more fully, to spend more time with family, to enjoy a cleaner environment, and so on, are not found only under conditions of oppression.

Contextualizing Benevolence

Because the principle of extending students’ benevolence through compassionate responses represents such a radical change from most existing curricula, this principle could easily be misunderstood, or applied in misleading and even counterproductive ways. In order to provide a starting point for civic education, the idea of cultivating sprouts of benevolence must be contextualized with regard to the purpose of civic and multicultural education, other curriculum content, local circumstances, and the perspectives and agency of people who are the subject of students’ deliberations. To begin with, it is important to recognize that this curriculum principle is not meant to create either compassion or benevolence. Expecting schools to create such fundamental traits would be an overwhelming task, if it were possible at all. Moreover, if Eastern and Western philosophy, as well as current cognitive theory, are correct, it may not even be necessary, for people seem to have an innate tendency towards compassion, which most cannot help but act on in benevolent ways. The role of curriculum, as we have emphasized, is to extend these instincts – a much more realistic task.

Even the task of extending benevolence is highly contextual, though, and thus this is a principle for selecting content, not a prescription for specific knowledge that would apply in all settings. Like any emotion, the expression of compassion is socially constructed and situated. It is closely bound up, for example, with a range of individual and group characteristics, including religion, nationality, gender, race or ethnicity, and personal experience (cf. Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002; Rolón-Dow, 2005, A. Thompson, 1998), and these differences have implications for curriculum. For example, students in predominantly Buddhist countries, where compassion is a central feature of religion and public life, may find it easier to make connections to distant others than would students in settings in which individualism or emotional distance predominate (although we know of no research yet that would support this supposition); more time and attention might need to be devoted to compassion in settings in which it is less common. In regions of cross-community political violence, meanwhile, even students who feel compassion for members of other communities may have difficulty extending benevolence to them, given the cultural and societal forces that stand in their way (for reviews of related research, see Minow, 2002; Salomon, 2011), and so these practical realities will have to play a significant role in deliberation.

Moreover, it is important to remember that this principle is directed towards engaging students with the knowledge that would enable them to take deliberatively informed action on social issues. The purpose of cultivating students’ spouts of benevolence is not to motivate them to help build a home for the underprivileged, but to deliberate and take action on governmental and non-governmental policies that would best serve the housing needs of local (or distant) communities. Compassion and benevolence are not ends in themselves, and they do not serve primarily to promote more positive atmospheres in schools or motivate students to help others (by donating to charity or volunteering in local service agencies, for example). These individual and interpersonal characteristics – cooperation, service, charity – are important, but students’ commitment to them derives from a wide range of influences, such as role models, authority figures, family and community values, structural and practical opportunities, and the informal and implicit curriculum of the school. Although schools should develop positive values, relationships, and communities, the practices and curriculum content necessary to do so are of a different nature and scope than the knowledge that needed to deliberate and act on matters of public policy.

The focus on public issues highlights another critical feature of curriculum: It must be directed towards students’ engagement with specific topics, not general feelings of compassion or benevolence. Reasoning invariably is bound up with the specific task at hand, and background knowledge plays a critical role in how people understand and respond to a task. Any individual can think in more sophisticated ways about some topics than about others, due in large part in their knowledge of that topic (Kintsch & Kintsch, 2005; Schneider, 2011; Wellman & Gelman, 1998). The context-specific nature of human thought also applies to the civic realm, for people may differ in their compassion or benevolence towards issues that at first glance seem similar. In Northern Ireland, for example, Unionist students who are willing to sympathetically consider the political positions of Nationalists in the early twentieth century may nonetheless resist seemly analogous perspectives held by Nationalists in the 1980s (McCully et al., 2002). Although they may not consider remote events as threatening to their identities and contemporary commitments, more recent events have a contemporary relevance that leads them to perceive them in very different ways. Civic education curricula are thus unlikely to produce young people who, across the board, are more sympathetic (Rorty, 1993), more ethically cosmopolitan (Choo, 2018), or who have a ‘rich and well-balanced emotional register’ (Thiele, 2006, p. 192). Rather, what curriculum can do is enable students to extend such sensibilities in specific instances. Benevolence is not a universal feeling that applies across topics and groups, as though once students are ‘inoculated’ through a lesson on the suffering of others, they will approach any new topic with similar feelings. Their sprouts of benevolence will have to be cultivated anew with each topic.

Perhaps most importantly, extending students’ sense of compassion is not the end point of curriculum, but only the beginning. Zembylas (2016) notes the drawbacks of a ‘superficial, voyeuristic approach’ (p. 1155) – sad stories that move others to pity but that remove agency from sufferers, ignore material and structural conditions that lead to suffering, and ultimately fail to motivate action. Accounts created by journalists and other outsiders, no matter how sympathetic to the subjects of their attention, may nonetheless fail to convey important perspectives and may even misrepresent the nature of people’s lives. As Hauver (2019) notes, applying our own lenses to the experiences of others may lead to inappropriate, and even harmful, actions. She argues that this danger may be compounded in instances in which we feel compassion for others, because that compassion may lead to a false sense of relationship, which in turn obscures others’ own subjective experiences. Indeed, if we identify too strongly with others, we may simply project our own hopes and fears onto them, as though they are no different than ourselves (Thiele, 2006). Like the best literary creations, the depictions that students encounter in schools cannot portray others as objects or caricatures but must capture their complex inner worlds and their ability to deliberate and take action in the world (Nussbaum, 1995).

An additional curriculum principle, then, would require that students not only learn about others from an outsider’s standpoint but also that they listen to the perspectives of those involved. Sen (2009) argues that such ‘distant voices’ (p. 108) are necessary to improve the quality of deliberation. We tend to take our own perspectives for granted, and this can blind us to the needs of others; listening to those with different backgrounds and experiences can enable us to move beyond our conventional ways of seeing the world and thus ‘may help us achieve a fuller – and fairer – understanding’ (Sen, 2009, p. 131). This is true in part because those affected by an issue are likely to bring relevant information to bear on deliberation – information that may be lacking in other sources. Small farmers in West Africa, for example, can provide insight into the impact of trade policy on their lives, and unemployed parents in Chicago or Appalachia can illuminate the impact of welfare requirements on their wellbeing, in ways that others might not. It is also important for students to recognize that those who seem ‘distant’ may be directly affected by their decisions, and thus deserve to be part of their deliberation (even when this only involves listening to their voices rather than engaging with them directly). Without taking the perspective of all those who are affected into account, we engage in what Sen (2009) refers to as ‘exclusionary neglect’ (p. 138).

Still another curriculum principle would engage students in considering the structural forces that influence the social issues they are deliberating, as well as the potential consequences of the actions they decide on. One danger of focusing too exclusively on compelling emotions and experiences is that it can draw attention away from the causes or those circumstances, or inspire simplistic solutions that do not account for what is known about social and political forces. Feeling compassion and aiming to act benevolently carry no necessary implications for what actions should be undertaken, or what policies should be supported, even if we have listened to the voices of those affected. Does compassion for refugees mean providing material assistance, granting asylum, reducing the likelihood that they will undertake dangerous journeys, or correcting the conditions that led their movement in the first place – and how could these be accomplished? Deliberating these questions depends on a different kind of knowledge than that which inspires benevolence. It requires understanding what causes migration, the geographic and political dimensions of human movement, and the short- and long-term effects of a variety of policy interventions. This is the abstract and general knowledge crucial for deliberation of social issues, even though it cannot be its starting point.

Focusing on such structural forces requires moving back and forth between the concrete and the abstract, the specific and the general. One of the advantages of literary forms of representation is that rather than treating people as isolated individuals, they situate them within rich and detailed contexts and thus invite speculation on the relation between people’s lives and their social settings (Nussbaum, 1995). Curriculum, too, must draw connections between the circumstances that inspire benevolence and the broader social forces that have created those situations. In part, this would involve treating specific topics as cases of general phenomenon. Even though learning about Rohingya refugees, for example, cannot make students more compassionate about all social issues – nor even all refugee issues – studying the topic should not be limited only to developing their understanding of the situation of one specific population. Rather, it should provide insight into the material and emotional consequences of displacement and migration (e.g., discrimination, separation of family members, lack of security or a recognized home) that are broader than any one instance.

Conclusions

In order to engage in deliberatively informed action on social issues, as members of democratic and multicultural societies, students must have a sense of benevolence towards others. Such benevolence arises not from adherence to universal rules of morality but from feelings of compassion that are rooted in empathy, as many Eastern and Western philosophers have long stressed, and as recent cognitive theory and research confirm. Yet while compassion may be an innate quality of human psychology, its application in given instances requires cultivation: Students must engage with the concrete and tangible knowledge of people’s circumstances that will enable them to understand and care about the issues they face. This is not a matter of developing generalized ‘capacities’ for compassion or benevolence but of helping students extend their responses – cultivating their sprouts of benevolence – with regard to specific topics. Although this is the first principle for curriculum in civic and multicultural education, it is not the only one. In order to avoid interpreting social issues solely through their own frames of reference, students must also come to understand other people’s perspectives on the issues they face and how to respond to them. Students must also gain experience contextualizing specific social issues and policies with regard to broader and more general structural forces and explanations, so that they develop a more comprehensive understanding of how to address a range of social issues.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Hana Jun for her careful assistance during manuscript preparation. A portion of this work was completed while the first author served as a visiting professor at Uppsala University.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keith C. Barton

Keith C. Barton is Professor of Curriculum & Instruction, and Adjunct Professor of History, at Indiana University. His research focuses on history education, human rights education, and curriculum studies, and he has served as a visiting professor in Singapore, Northern Ireland, New Zealand, and Sweden. He is the author, with Linda Levstik, of Teaching History for the Common Good, Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools, and Research History Education: Theory, Method, and Context.

Li-Ching Ho

Dr. Li-Ching Ho is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include global civic education, multicultural education, and environmental citizenship education. Dr. Ho is a co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Global Citizenship and Education, and her work has been published in journals such as Teachers College Record, Journal of Curriculum Studies, and Cambridge Journal of Education.

Notes

1. In this paper, we use the term ‘civic and multicultural education’ to refer to any formal attempt to prepare students for participation in the public life and decision-making of diverse, democratic societies. Depending on context, this may refer not only to subjects labelled Civic Education, Social Studies, Civics, or Multicultural Education, but also History, Geography, and other social sciences (particularly when oriented towards the nature and origin of contemporary social issues), as well as areas such as Human Rights Education, Peace Education, Ethnic Studies, and Moral Education, along with curricula focused on specific contemporary social issues.

2. Several key terms related to this topic are used in multiple and inconsistent ways, by both scholars and the general public. For the purpose of this paper, empathy refers to the capacity to recognize and understand (and even to feel) the emotional states of others; compassion refers to a feeling of concern that derives from empathy – not only understanding another’s emotional state, but caring about it (sometimes used interchangeably with care, sympathy, or even pity); and benevolence refers to a dispositional state based on compassion: the willingness to take action to address the needs of others.