We Are Not Teaching Empathy
Originally published in Farrago Magazine
‘This subject will teach you life skills’, seems to be the go-to line for many English tutors and teachers to reluctant VCE kids. As a casual member of the former group, I’ve recently been prompted to ponder the promise of analytical skills, communication skills, media literacy skills and (new!) empathy skills (?) that glimmer beyond the horizon of the study design.
This year, a change in the English curriculum sees the addition of a ‘crafting texts’ unit, which asks students to write about themes such as conflict, protest and connection to country in creative writing form. The students I tutored were encouraged to research different protest events in history and write from the (fictional) perspectives of people involved.
At first, it appeared like a productive change from a curriculum that was largely literature-based and seemed rather removed from real life application: Putting more of an emphasis on creative writing whilst involving real world issues could mean that students would, somewhat, be forced into relatively further awareness of politics and society. It was when I had to actually teach the unit, however, that I started to feel a bit… off about it.
I think it would be unfair to claim that high school students don’t care about world issues. (It would also be untrue). The problem more so lies with the gamified structure of VCE, which inevitably pushes kids to funnel their learning into study score points, filling as many rubric boxes as possible to optimise study scores. Students writing pieces about overseas issues may adopt racist accents to fulfil ‘character voice’ points. Serious events get aestheticised and romanticised — reduced to scenes and themes for students to exploit in their pretend-speeches and narratives.
It bears a lot of similarities to critiques of the American college application letter — the culture surrounding which has been observed to pressure applicants into sharing their suffering for a compelling ‘backstory’ (‘trauma porn’).
My friend Shriya, who is a first-year student at UC Berkeley, recounts social media being a factor that influenced approaches to admissions essays:
“There’s the aspect of it that’s the dissemination of information — there are a million-and-one TikTok tutors now, who will guide you through every aspect of the admissions process; oftentimes, I have heard them explain that a well-written explanation of hardship can redeem a poor GPA or a lack of extracurriculars.
But then there’s the other aspect of it, the virality, the clout, that bleeds into the typical inspiration porn territory. A lot of people heard that essay about the letter “S,” where this lovely girl talks very sincerely about not having both of her parents around, and how arduous that was for her throughout her childhood. Unfortunately, I think that a lot of people seized onto the appeal of the “sob story” — and the plethora of acceptances she received after sending out that essay — and have started milking every aspect of their lives to create this pity-laden narrative for their college applications.”
Interestingly, she tells me about the ‘flip side of this… when students who really haven’t struggled very much try their hardest to wrangle themselves into a sob story’:
“I grew up in a rather affluent, fairly white community — which is not to say that everyone’s life is perfect, but rather to say that I saw a lot of kids with perfect lives capitalise off of the fact that other people’s weren’t. As in — I’m wealthy, but this experience made me realise how the other half lives. (Eyeroll). This was when I realised racism existed for the first time. I built a home in Haiti. I went on a mission trip to Tijuana. I knitted a billion socks for the NICU. I played violin at the senior citizens’ home. If they didn’t have their own trauma, they often resorted to capitalising off of others. I’m not saying that they were necessarily terrible people for having done that, but I think the paradigm that forces 17-year-olds into this dramatisation of their life stories is, indeed, a pretty terrible one.”
I think it’s pretty clear to see how the local study design change could move in the same exploitative trajectory, considering the instructive documents themselves don’t include anything that could possibly prevent it. Despite the categories ‘Country’ and ‘Protest’ being so inherently linked with the experiences of marginalised groups and individuals, there’s no section at least warning educators about issues of cultural sensitivity. The way I’ve now seen the curriculum being interpreted makes me realise how easily the assessment could fall into the trap of conveying to students: ‘Pick the most tragic incident you’ve heard of… Now pick a victim to imagine being.’ Not only does it sensationalise the suffering of others, it also waters down the integrity and political dynamics of these events and experiences.
From my experience, students tend to be armed with a nearly-all-encompassing sense of self awareness regarding their roles in the VCE rat race — or so they’d like to think, anyway. I’d like to think that from this new unit, they’d be learning new skills, and maybe — possibly — opening their minds, but if they are, it would definitely not be from pretending to learn empathy.