Source: Bigstock

Sometimes it really is cruel to be kind, as the old adage almost goes. If so, then our current Western #BeKind culture must be amongst the very cruelest societies ever to have existed.

Kindness is now even henceforth to be taught in our schools as a “transferable skill.” This can’t end well. Back when I taught in an English all-girls’ high school, we had a weekly lesson called PSHE, or Personal, Social and Health Education, a pointless non-subject joke. I didn’t even bother to actually teach it to my own form group, letting them do more useful things like read books, inject drugs, sleep, or play strip poker every week instead. Nobody ever even noticed. Or cared.

However, one day, we had an unavoidable full-school PSHE “Emotional Literacy Day,” in which the word “Literacy” should really have been “Incontinence.” “Memory Trees” were stuck up on walls, for which children were ordered to write the names of their favorite dead relatives upon sheets of colored sugar paper to act as leaves, then sit there with their eyes closed and meditate publicly for several minutes upon the lingering and agonizing death of their elderly grandmother from dengue fever or whatever. The entirely predictable result? Dozens of hysterical weeping schoolgirls, aged 11–16, all across the building.

“Sir, it’s like they’re being taught to become mentally ill,” one of the older 18-year-old Sixth Formers accurately observed afterward. She should see what’s going on in our schools now, fifteen years later.

Sympathy for le Diable
From this September, students aged 3–11 across France will face compulsory weekly lessons in empathy, ordered by the newly outgoing PM, Gabriel Attal, following a spate of widely reported suicides of bullied children. Supposedly, this would prevent any repeat tragedies by educating potential future tormentors about the unpleasant effects of their actions upon their victims.

Yet this is based upon a clearly false premise: that said bullies are so emotionally dim they don’t know the effect their actions will have upon their persecuted prey anyway. Of course they do! That’s why they do it. They’re sadists, that’s all. If Monsieur Attal really doesn’t know this, then he’s the one in true need of emotional education here, not les enfants under his care.

Nonetheless, the Republic’s teachers are now to be issued with comprehensive 62-page guides to “cognitive, emotional and social skills,” helpfully informing them what difficult-to-imagine concepts like generosity, faithfulness, and friendship might be. It is now profoundly essential that infants are instructed what the key seven emotions of joy, love, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and surprise mean: That it is now deemed necessary for the State to teach a child what “love” means certainly fills me with emotions 4, 5, and 6 there, although not necessarily emotion 7 anymore.

“How does your body feel when you experience this emotion?” teachers are exhorted to ask their young charges whilst telling them to imagine they are deeply in love with one another. That’s certainly one way to teach the class what the word “fear” really means.

Once successfully pushed into a state of severe emotional distress, the kids in the class are then to be instructed that they can formally empathize with their classmates’ tragic plight by taking turns hugging one another, “but only if the classmate agrees to it.” This is, after all, the age of #MeToo when every innocent human action can now be subject to a subsequent inflated legal case for no good reason. No wonder our young are becoming so emotionally disturbed.

If you really want to teach French students to gain genuine worthwhile empathetic insights into the minds of others, why not get them to read Madame Bovary, like in the good old days?

Primrose Empaths
Empathy lessons aren’t all just risible quackery, though: They’re now actual science; a study from Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education has proved it. A U.K.-based company called Empathy Studios has been pushing “thought-provoking films” about foreigners to schools worldwide, whose staff then instruct their tiny captives to “engage in approximately 30 minutes of activities and discussions about the issues raised”—the main issues raised, I think, being “Aren’t all foreigners lovely?” and “Isn’t diversity amazing?” The current 2024/25 program, perhaps made with U.S. border-wall controversies in kind, “profiles five individuals from Mexico, including a Paralympian, a dancer, and a women’s rights activist” but not, oddly, a Sinaloa cartel drug-lord or the Juarez Ripper.

Empathy Studios explains such teaching allows kids to develop “the skill to understand others and the ability to create space for someone to reveal their authentic self while reserving judgement.” That’s not always a good thing, though, is it? U.K. serial killer Peter Sutcliffe’s “authentic self,” for example, was that of a total lunatic who thought he was on a holy mission from God to murder random street prostitutes with hammers. I think it’s perfectly legitimate for him to be weighed in the moral balance and found wanting, myself.

Or maybe not, because, according to the findings of Dr. Helen Demetriou, “a specialist in empathy education” at Cambridge University: “Teachers rated students’ empathy, behavior and other characteristics on a scale of 1 to 10 before the program began, and 5 and 10 weeks later. The average empathy score rose from 5.55 to 7, while average behavior scores increased from 6.52 to 7.89.” Wow! How many PSHE lessons would it have taken for Peter to have realized slaying whores was just wrong, I wonder.

It’s a load of subjective nonsense. There’s no such thing as an “empathy score,” is there? What, does Scrooge get a 0 and Mrs. Jellyby a 10 or something? Yet, in the utopian view of Empathy Studios’ founder, Ed Kirwan, a former science teacher from London, such magic on offer from his firm can ease all social problems, even those needlessly caused by diversity in the first place: “I think the social unrest [re: massive recent race riots] we have seen in Britain [this summer] shows how urgently we need more empathy across society. It won’t solve everything, but it is the foundation for solutions, and it starts with education.” Quick, parachute him and his videos into the Gaza Strip, it’s the Arabs’ only hope!

In Kirwan’s view, “Empathy is the number one human skill we need to develop for the future.” Personally, I’d much rather we taught kids the far more abiding value of rank cynicism instead. We could begin by exposing them to certain more egregious aspects of Kirwan’s own utopian PSHE course and demonstrating why they are profoundly naive.

Sympathetic Magic
Kirwan was quoted by the BBC as boasting that “The program’s success lies in teaching students to celebrate difference, which changes their wellbeing and behavior.” But “celebrating difference,” taken too far, is not empathy but ideology (or even pathology). What if those who are different from you absolutely hate you and actively wish to kill and destroy you?

How much does Kirwan have in common with people like the British race rioters of earlier this summer that he mentioned? Clearly they do not celebrate or value diversity, because to them, “diversity” means not mariachi bands and exciting new forms of fajita, but Pakistanis gang-raping their daughters or Libyans bombing them to death at pop concerts. Nonetheless, such rioters are certainly “different” from Mr. Kirwan. Will he therefore find time to celebrate their varied outlook on the world too?

Accessing the company’s material online, I find Empathy Studios boasts that one happy outcome of their lessons is that a sense of “global citizenship” amongst students begins to increase, due to exposure to video-clip information about “gender equality, disability, mental health & cultural celebrations.” This produces something contradictory-sounding called “Empathy For Myself.” Which is what, exactly? A weird kind of self-pity and self-regard, or “self-compassion,” that manifests as children ostentatiously proclaiming that they care about those less well-off than themselves (so long as they’re the right kind of unfortunates, naturally).

It produces statements “acknowledging privilege” in children like the following: “I’m lucky to be in a school where all genders are allowed to go to school.” In that case, you’re lucky not to be going to school in Afghanistan, then. But Afghanistan is a different culture, isn’t it? Which you’re supposed to automatically empathize with. After all, “Industry research has made the case that exposure to other cultures prompts people to re-evaluate their perspectives & assumptions about self & others.”

But what if certain other cultures, like that of Afghanistan, are simply inferior to our own? Just don’t think about it. “I am really proud to be from my home country (Romania),” one child says. If that had been “Great Britain” in brackets there, would she still have been cited triumphantly in the PR pap?

Horns of Africa
This isn’t neutral “empathy” for others, this is left-wing dogma, pure and simple, being poured into children’s ears under the misleading label of “kindness.” It would be just as easy for someone non-woke like me to create equally biased right-wing PSHE material aimed at inculcating empathy for victimized white native British people at the hands of nefarious non-white foreigners, for example.

Instead of propaganda videos about brave Mexican Paralympians with so few limbs they can act as their own toboggans, I could show my old PSHE class a film about “Sarah,” a then-16-year-old white British schoolgirl at an all-girl’s school just like them, who, back in 2013, was taken to a room in a dingy hotel in Manchester’s “Curry Mile” district—so called because walking through it makes unaccompanied young women uncontrollably shit themselves—where she was gang-raped several times by diverse black Somali males, before having her phone and money stolen. Supposedly, they did this to celebrate Eid! A shared meal usually suffices; but then, I suppose that’s precisely what “Sarah” was to them.

In court, the rapists stuck one finger up and blew mocking kisses at the girl’s watching parents whilst, outside, their mothers, in traditional Somali dress (big black bin bags with face holes cut into them) held banners saying “[There’s] No Justice for Somalis.” Why not? Perhaps because Somalia, being such a marvelously diverse and different culture, is a place where, according to a 2014 report from Human Rights Watch, “Here, Rape Is Normal.” So, from their sacred cultural perspective, their sons weren’t really breaking the law at all.

In the English city of Bristol, meanwhile, such subjects perhaps actually are on PSHE curricula, with teachers from 2014 onward briefed to warn girls to watch out for signs that local Somali drug dealers and pedos might be setting them up for lives as forced underage prostitutes or sex slaves, with abuse taking place of local children in flats, parks, and disabled toilets in shopping centers—disabled cubicles being the only ones large enough to comfortably commit a schoolgirl gang rape in. Nonetheless, warned concerned Bristol police, they were aware public knowledge of such trends “could prompt hate attacks” against valuable vibrant local non-white communities. How very empathetic of them.

Close your eyes, girls, and imagine this happening to you and your little sister! How does this make you feel? Sorry for the real-life white victims? Wrong answer, class—they’re not the ones the State wants you to feel empathy for anymore!

Empathy lessons? I’m sorry, I just have no sympathy for such things, I’m afraid.