Roots of Empathy PART 1

MARY GORDON was interviewed by JUDITH NELSON at the Spirit of Humanity Forum in Iceland in 2019. In part 1 she shares her worldview on the importance of empathy in human relationships and how it forms the foundation for the program she runs in schools on developing empathy in schoolchildren, called Roots of Empathy.

- JUDITH NELSON

Q: Thanks for joining me, Mary. Can I ask you first about empathy, as your work is especially with empathy? Can you tell me a bit more about your work?

Well, my understanding of empathy is the ability to feel with the other person, not just to understand how they feel, but also to have the capacity to feel with them. And I think that empathy is the number one attribute of being human, and we have too little of it in the world, and it’s a shrinking commodity. But I also focus on empathy because when you have cruelty, when you have racism, when you have violence, when you have genocides, when you have any of the big horrific things in the world, the common ingredient is the absence of empathy.

My work is informed by that conclusion, which I came to a long time ago, and also the conclusion that empathy develops in the first year of life, in the loving relationship between parents and babies. And so, our work is about increasing empathy in childhood. And we do that by bringing the relationship between parents and babies, during the first year of the child’s life, into the classroom.