Dr.Kukk with Scarlett Lewis, Senator Blumenthal, Senator Murphy, Congresswoman Esty and others at the announcement of the Jesse Lewis Empowering Educators Act.
The following speech was given by me on April 13, 2015 at the announcement ceremony of Senator Blumenthal (D-CT) officially introducing a bill into the United States Senate called the Jesse Lewis Empowering Educators Act, which mandates social and emotional learning (SEL) in all schools throughout the country. Jesse was the 6 year-old boy who saved 9 of his fellow classmates during the Sandy Hook shooting; his inner strength was beyond his years in terms of social and emotional learning. Scarlett, his mom, asked me to speak at the announcement ceremony. I am one of the original members of the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation’s Board of Directors, created a SEL curriculum called the Connected Five Cs™ and I am the founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity & Innovation. I started working specifically with Scarlett on SEL issues soon after Jesse’s heroics and before there was a Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation. Scarlett and I vowed to each other that we wouldn’t stop our efforts until students have had SEL be a part of their education from pre-Kindergarten through college; in essence, it was our vow to Jesse. The announcement press conference for the Jesse Lewis Empowering Educators Act represents only one step but imagine if the Act is the start of all of us stepping in unison…our children and society would become as strong as Jesse’s inner strength during that fateful day.
Speech for The Jesse Lewis Empowering Educators Act
13 April 2015
What if there was an idea that produced, at a minimum, a $7–11 return on every $1 spent and had been scientifically proven to help raise academic scores, improve dropout and school suspension rates, reduce the incidences of school violence as well as strengthen community cohesion, would you support the idea? Senator Blumenthal’s bill is about turning such an idea into reality and we are asking for your support and help in turning his bill into law. The Jesse Lewis Empowering Educators Act is not only named in remembrance of a boy with amazing inner strength but it also seeks to promote an idea that will strengthen our entire country: it is called social and emotional learning, also known as SEL.
Senator Blumenthal’s bill directly addresses a fundamental problem in education that has gone unaddressed for decades: a child’s education and a child’s development are out of sync. The Jesse Lewis Empowering Educators Act synchronizes educating with learning. It’s about time. We know, based on scientifically peer-reviewed research (specifically in the field of neuroscience), that SEL is the foundation upon which many aspects of cognitive development rest.
There have been serious consequences of not synchronizing educating with learning and our children have been the ones to feel the effects. For example, according to Northwestern University, there has been a 66% increase in ADHD diagnoses since 2000. In addition, there has been a 21% increase in reported bullying since we began statistically tracking bullying via the National Center for Education Statistics (since 2003). From the pharmaceutical counters of ADHD diagnoses to the psychological sessions of the bullying epidemic, our children have borne the brunt of the misalignment between educating and learning. However, please do not think that the effects and consequences end with our children; we as members of society bear the costs of an education system without a consistent and strong SEL component. The costs come in the form of increased incarceration, substance abuse and hospitalization rates just to name a few.
Children who have experienced strong SEL programs in their education have increased emotional, intellectual and even physical resiliency compared to children who haven’t had such an experience. These are not spurious correlations; we know what happens in the brain in terms of the peptide hormones and neurotransmitters that are released when children are experiencing a healthy SEL environment and when they are not.
This bill seeks to build resiliency within children so that they not only become strong and stable individuals but contributing and compassionate members of our communities. Shouldn’t we all want that? I believe we do but if you read a 2014 study by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, that is not what is happening. “Almost 80 percent of [middle and high school] students ranked [their own] achievement or happiness over caring for others.” The study goes on to state that “Any healthy civil society…depends on adults who are committed to their communities and who, at pivotal times, will put the common good before their own. We don’t seem to be preparing large numbers of youth to create this society.” The Jesse Lewis Empowering Educators Act is about preparing large numbers of youth for becoming—literally and figuratively—the pillars of our society.
The bill’s synchronization will help a new generation of Americans strengthen our country far into the future. Thank you Senator Blumenthal for this bill. Thank you Scarlett, Jesse’s Mom, for your unwavering devotion to improve education for all children. And thank you Jesse for inspiring all that is happening today.
Is compassion still necessary is akin to asking whether thinking is still necessary? While not everyone may practice thinking, thankfully most people believe it necessary. The same can be said of compassion. A world where most people are not compassionate would be a world without progress; for compassion is about holistically understanding the world around you so that you can find solutions to problems, thereby improving the quality of life. Compassion is necessary, especially if you want the world to progress. Even in a world full of compassion, it would still be necessary because compassion is like love; the more you use it, the more there is of it. In short, compassion will always be necessary just as thinking will be.
The host of Tipping Point Radio’s The Mastermind Show, Craig Meriwether, recently interviewed me for a specific program called “Is Compassion Still Necessary?” Craig and I discussed a wide range of issues as they relate to compassion such as politics, education, neuroscience, parenting, economics, religion and even video games. I hope that you’ll take a 45 minute ‘mindwalk’ about compassion with me and Craig: Click here to listen to the show.
If you are into any aspect of neuroscience or simply a zombie, this is one of the best weeks of the year: it’s Brain Awareness Week (March 16–22, 2015). Brain research, especially over the last decade, has provided unique and helpful insights into problems and questions in many areas and disciplines including computer science, economics, education, philosophy, politics, psychology and robotics. An area of neuroscience research with the potential to profoundly change the way we think and interact in society (from classrooms to living rooms to boardrooms) is the work being done in labs focused on understanding the difference between compassion and empathy. The compassion-empathy difference is more than semantic; the consequences are pragmatic. The distinction is real and so is its effect on society: knowing the difference can help individuals build resiliency and avoid burnout as well as turn “empathy gaps,” which have recently made headlines, into junctures for local community and national strength.
Compassion and empathy are not synonymous. Empathy is feeling the same emotion as someone else and compassion is feeling kindness towards another person. Where empathy is about stepping into the shoes of another to understand and share their feelings, compassion is about acquiring a 360 degrees understanding of the suffering or problem that a person is experiencing and taking action to resolve it. Compassion is a two-step process of understanding and acting but empathy is only one step and it is about emotionally absorbing the feelings of another.
Our brain knows the difference between compassion and empathy even if we aren’t aware of it. Tania Singer, director of neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Lepzig, Germany has used MRI scanners to show that compassion and empathy “are two different phenomena associated with different brain activity patterns.” When we think compassionately we “light up” the same regions of the brain as love but empathetic thinking lights up regions associated with pain.
The neuroscience effect of having compassion at the forefront of our thinking is positive for each of us as individuals and for our communities. The effect, in very basic terms, is that when we think from a compassionate mindset, we release the peptide hormone oxytocin, which then activates the neurotransmitters of dopamine (brain reward) and serotonin (anxiety reduction) contributing to happiness and optimism—two characteristics that contribute to success.
Compassion’s strength as a power source for fostering communal as well as individual success is that it is not only derived from the same neural networks as love but it is centrally focused on the concern and care for others. When empathy is used as the source for helping another, the central motivation is to alleviate your own pain and stress. And that egocentric motivation is, I believe, one of the keys for understanding why burnout occurs much easier when we think empathetically. Emotionally absorbing another’s feelings, which empathy entails, is physically draining and can make you feel metaphorically stuck in quicksand. Compassion, on the other hand, keeps the emotional quicksand at a distance by using a more cognitive understanding of a person’s suffering when attempting to alleviate the pain: understanding without absorbing. We have confused compassion fatigue with empathy fatigue and that confusion has been reflected repeatedly in major media outlets over the last few months. If our society’s caregivers (i.e., nurses, paramedics, doctors, social workers, police and fire personnel, etc…) could learn how to harness the power of compassion, they would be helping themselves just as much as they are helping others. Their resiliency is an important source of our community strength.
Research has clearly shown that compassion can be taught and learned. Envision a world in which economics, education, medicine and even politics are infused with more compassion. Practicing compassion in politics would not only help Congress to act but act constructively. Imagine politicians who do more than say “I feel your pain” (empathy) but actually understand and do something about it (compassion): we would have more politicians who act with principles rather than for principal. Our modern political world could reflect the words of President Lincoln: “Republicans are for both the man and the dollar; but in case of conflict, the man before the dollar.”
Let’s fill in life’s empathy gaps with the compassion two-step. Let’s ride the neural networks of compassion to stronger and more resilient communities. While Dr. Singer and others are researching “whether it is possible to transform people’s empathetic reactions into compassionate action,” shouldn’t we just simply create waves of kindness that our neural networks naturally want to ride?
(NOTE: This piece is based on an entry I made last year on the difference between compassion and empathy with more emphasis on how neuroscience and social science interact in honor of Brain Awareness Week.)
BOOKS & ARTICLES:
Cognitive Neuroscience Society, “Feeling Others’ Pain: Transforming Empathy into Compassion,” (June 24, 2013).
Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh and Jeremy Adam Smith (eds.), The Compassionate Instinct (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010).
Jason DeParle, “Our Kids, by Robert D. Putnam,” The New York Times ( March 4, 2015).
Nicholas Kristof, “Where’s the Empathy?” The New York Times (January 24, 2015).
Nicholas Kristof, “How do we Increase Empathy?” The New York Times (January 29, 2015).
Kai Kupferschmidt, “Concentrating on Kindness,” Science (September 19, 2013).
Helen Y. Weng, et. al., “Compassion Training Alters Altruism and Neural Responses to Suffering,” Association for Psychological Science (May 2013).
Paul Zak, The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity (New York: Penguin Group Inc., 2012).
Teachers are the artists who help us paint who we are and the astronauts who help us explore the people we become. Teaching is a profession that explores and experiences, in the words of The Outer Limits intro, “the awe and mystery that reaches from the deepest inner-mind … to the outer limits.” Teachers mold our minds and help us reach for the stars. The best educators know that there is an art to teaching and science, especially neuroscience, is just beginning to help us understand how great teaching creates inspired learning.
My talk for the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation’s 2014 workshop for teachers titled “The Science of Artful Teaching” explains how and why great teachers are both artists and astronauts. The talk, which is part of my Inspiring Teachers Talks (The IT Talks), weaves together research in neuroscience, education and even cosmology to show educators that what and how they teach literally and figuratively paints and sculpts their students’ brains and futures.
If you are willing to explore the cosmos, the brain and be “blinded by science” all in an effort to understand the power and influence of a teacher, then “The Science of Artful Teaching” is for you.
Here’s my talk.
When turtles cry, butterflies swarm. From the sea turtle to the yellow-spotted river turtle of the Amazon rain forest, turtles shed tears. Their tears are not of sadness or joy but tears of cleansing and strength. While the biological reason turtles cry is to remove excess salt from their body, their tears are used by butterflies for sustenance. Butterflies drink the tears of turtles. The tears provide salt in sodium scarce regions where butterflies live. Nature has a beautiful way of weaving compassion into the fabric of life and we could learn a lesson or two from such beauty.
When we see another suffering, we should swarm to help. Helping others helps strengthen your community and even yourself in ways that science is just revealing. In terms of community building, Milena Tsvetkova and Michael Macy concluded in “The Science of Paying It Forward” that “the next time you stop to help a stranger, you may be helping not only this one particular individual but potentially many others downstream…We conclude that observing an act of kindness is likely to play an important role in setting a cascade of generosity in motion.” Research by scholars such as Shawn Achor, Jonathan Haidt, Dacher Keltner and Paul Zak shows that when we help others we release hormones such as oxytocin that increase our own happiness while decreasing stress and anxiety.
A dear friend of mine with whom I work closely with, Scarlett Lewis, has turned her tears for her youngest son, Jesse, into strength for tens of thousands of people. Instead of cocooning herself from the world after she lost her 6 year old Jesse in the Sandy Hook tragedy, Scarlett initiated and is leading a movement to weave “nurturing, healing and love” into schools and businesses across the country (her foundation of which I am a member of the board of directors is called the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation). From school children in Hawaii to prisoners in Massachusetts and teachers in Connecticut, I’ve watched Scarlett provide hope to people who had fallen into the compassion and empathy gaps of our world. Her struggle through loss has nourished resiliency in others. Her tears are symbols of strength to many who have become the butterflies of her life’s work.
We’ve all known about butterfly kisses and their symbolism for tender love, but turtle tears (new to many of us) are symbols of strength when sadness appears and resiliency seems scarce. Learning about the butterfly’s dependence upon the tears of a turtle leads me to wonder: would there be any butterfly kisses without turtle tears? Our tears in life can always be turned into streams of strength and beauty if we choose to follow the turtle.
Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage (New York: Crown Business, 2010).
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh and Jeremy Adam Smith (eds.), The Compassionate Instinct (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010).
Douglas Main, “Must-See: Amazonian Butterflies Drink Turtle Tears,” LiveScience (September 11, 2013).
Milena Tsvetkova and Michael Macy, “The Science of Paying It Forward,” The New York Times (March 14, 2014).
Paul Zak, The Moral Molecule: How Trust Works (New York: Penguin Group Inc., 2012).
9/11 is a day when memories of patriotism and compassion come to life. The world witnessed not only the compassion of first responders rushing into burning buildings to save lives but the patriotism of young men and women volunteering to enter the armed services. It was a day where two values that are sometimes contradictory to one another became blended to such an extent that their combination created a moment in history where the world, however briefly, became one; an iconic symbol of that moment was France’s Le Monde headline that read “We are All Americans.”
On this day of remembrance and in honor of all those who have fallen in pursuit of their patriotism and compassion, I am making a clarion call for bringing compassion into patriotism. The mixture of patriotism and compassion creates a sum far greater than its two parts; for compassion eliminates the negative factor of patriotism (exclusiveness) while multiplying its positive factor (inclusiveness). The combination (a new form of being a ‘compatriot’) unites rather than divides.
Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, has written a well-known and in-depth essay about the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of patriotism. She writes: “Patriotism is Janus-faced. It faces outward, calling the self, at times, to duties toward others, to the need to sacrifice for a common good. And yet, just as clearly, it also faces inward, inviting those who consider themselves ‘good’ or ‘true’ Americans to distinguish themselves from outsiders and subversives, and then excluding those outsiders. Just as dangerous, it serves to define the nation against its foreign rivals and foes, whipping up warlike sentiments against them.”
The difference of simple patriotism versus patriotism with compassion is the difference between ISIS (The Islamic State in Iraq & Syria) and ISS (The International Space Station). While ISIS excludes to horrific extremes, ISS is about taking inclusiveness to new heights. Where members of ISIS consider themselves patriots of a particular cause without compassion (extreme exclusiveness), astronauts of ISS represent a patriotism that transcends geographic borders and single-minded causes; they represent all humanity (expansive inclusiveness). Compassion, in essence, mitigates the weakness of patriotism (its exclusiveness of facing inward) by enlarging its strength (its inclusiveness of facing outward).
The evolutionary history of human beings is an inevitable walk toward an inclusive patriotism where compassion for all human beings is the norm rather than the exception. We keep taking steps toward making such a norm a reality but some who feel as though it is a purely “Utopian dream” and antithetical to their beliefs such as ISIS are only delaying and not stopping the rise of humanistic patriotism. 
Deems Taylor (seen here), a composer and essayist from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and commonly referred to as “the Dean of American music,” addressed the idea of the broadening of patriotism in 1917 (near the end of World War I) when he wrote the following words in the New York Tribune Sunday Magazine:
“It is all a matter of what we mean by patriotism. We are all patriotic, but not always for the same thing. We have stopped thinking first about our state, or our town, or our neighborhood, and are putting the United States first. If we would only do that a little oftener we wouldn’t have to insist that this is the finest country in the world; other people would tell us so. Patriotism is a loyalty to something bigger than our immediate interests, and the history of the world is the history of the broadening of patriotism, the widening of the field of men’s loyalties. Cavemen were loyal to their families. Then they came out of their caves and formed tribes, and were loyal to those. The tribes settled down in villages, and the members of one village would defend it to the death against members of another. The villages became clans, and men were loyal to those. The clans united and became little kingdoms, or states, or duchies. Late in the Middle Ages the little kingdoms and duchies became fused into bigger ones, and men found that they belonged to nations. The great war came, and the nations of Europe split into great camps. Half the men in Europe were loyal to one side and half to the other. Now we are talking of a League of Peace after the war, in which whole nations will be patriots. For they will be loyal to something bigger than they are. Some day, I think, some day very far in the future, we are going to be world patriots; we are going to be loyal to the human race. But that, of course, is what people call a Utopian dream.”
My clarion call is really a call to modernize the definition of compatriot from one focused on being a citizen of a country (exclusive) to another that recognizes each person as a citizen of the world (inclusive). It is similar to President John F. Kennedy’s famous call in his 1961 inaugural address where he stated “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man” (we seem to forget that second line more than we remember it). Are we not more than citizens of a state but aren’t we also citizens of the world?
The world’s reaction to 9/11—as highlighted by Le Monde—showed that we have compatriots in every corner of the globe. The definition of compatriot should not be limited to just the people who share a country but it should include all who share in humanity. We are all compatriots of this world, shouldn’t we all be patriots of the human race? On this day, where so many sacrificed for the common good, let’s not ever weaken our patriotism by turning inward with hate and exclusion; rather, let’s honor our fallen heroes by strengthening our patriotism by looking outward with compassion and inclusion. Let’s honor those who sacrificed and continue to sacrifice for the common good by not limiting who can be part of the common good.
ARTICLE & BOOK:
Martha C. Nussbaum, “Teaching Patriotism: Love and Critical Freedom,” Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 357 (The Law School at The University of Chicago, July 2011).
James A. Pegolotti, Deems Taylor: Selected Writings (New York, NY, Routledge, 2007).
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