Perversion of Compassion (Social-Emotional Learning: Part III)
As professional educators, we see the stark realities our students face: the gnawing hunger of poverty, the instability of homelessness, and the silent scars of abandonment and abuse. We perceive these inequities and injustices, and in our attempt to be solicitous, we often commit a fatal error: we engage in inappropriate empathy, a perversion of compassion.
Compassion is not merely a feeling of pity or shared suffering. It is a discerning sensitivity to authentic distress, coupled with a proactive, courageous, and appropriate desire to alleviate that suffering. It requires the capacity to understand, to imagine, and to empathize with another's experience, but crucially, it does not mean lowering or removing standards, enabling harmful behaviors, or excusing a lack of effort. True compassion seeks to empower, to uplift through rigor, and to provide the tools for an individual to overcome their challenges. Genuine compassion is the intelligent application of care, rooted in the understanding that long-term flourishing often demands short-term discomfort and unwavering accountability.
Instead, social-emotional learning has enacted a system-wide victimization of children distributed through inappropriate empathy. We've redefined what it means to be a victim, expanding its reach so wide that the term becomes hollow. There is an unspoken, system-wide belief that because students experience unjust, inequitable, or traumatic events, they are somehow excused of all expectations. This dangerous mindset is a direct consequence of social-emotional learning indoctrination, and it is ultimately the catalyst for the collapse of the entire public school system.
Social-emotional learning was intended to uplift the down-trodden and underprivileged, the traumatized and those from broken communities. It was believed that if teachers were educated on racial inequities and social biases, trauma and cultural sensitivity, signs of abuse, suicide, and depression, and the benefits of building relationships, then student success would increase. Essentially, teachers would understand students, students would like and respect their teachers because the teacher had taken time to build relationships, unwanted behaviors would cease, meaningful instruction could occur, and academic achievement would be accessible to all, even those with the most challenging backgrounds. Social-emotional learning is genuinely a beautiful theory, and one I supported and believed. But it is complete fucking horseshit in practice.
Inappropriate empathy is what creates disastrous public school policies like promoting students to higher grade levels without mastery of prior grade-level content. Schools and districts have determined that it is more harmful for a student to be retained to master skills and meritoriously graduate than it is to continuously promote them with minimal transfer of skills or knowledge. School leaders say things like, "Well, it’d be much worse for the student if they had to repeat a grade and were cast outside their current social group. Research shows…" No, motherfucker. You know what’s worse for a student? Being illiterate. That’s fucking worse.
But it doesn’t stop at academic outcomes. Inappropriate empathy has actively eroded the boundaries of acceptable conduct at school, and thus society. It creates classrooms where extreme behaviors are permitted to fester. Teachers are routinely subjected to egregious delinquency and outright criminality: verbal abuse, physical altercations, horrific threats, damaged property. Our inappropriate empathy has inadvertently signaled that student disruptions will be met with tolerance, not consequences.
Inappropriate empathy is the justification of the indefensible. It’s a flimsy excuse for our collective cowardice and our unwillingness to demand more from our students and our profession. We are, in essence, loving our students into a state of perpetual disadvantage, crippling their futures in the name of false compassion. This isn't just about academic failure — it's about undermining the very foundation of self-worth and genuine preparedness for life beyond the classroom. This isn't empathy — it's abdication. It’s a systemic betrayal, cloaked in the language of care, and it ultimately leaves both students and the public education system in ruins. We’ve become so terrified of causing discomfort that we’ve wholly embraced dysfunction. This isn't just a misstep — it's a moral failure and shameful professional negligence.
