When I first retired (from the classroom, not from working in education), I moved away from the school district where I had lived and taught. I’d been there for well over 30 years and had seen—up close and personal– the power of school boards to impact educational climate in a school district. I’d been watching through four decades of local policy-making— the good, the bad and the out-and-out malicious.
I’ve got stories.
And I’ve written about the town where I lived and taught. In spite of its flaws, it was usually a good place to teach, if the definition of “good” is engaged parents, talented colleagues and kids who were encouraged at home to achieve.
The quality of school board leadership occasionally faltered over that time—with most of the squabbling over how to get by while spending a lot less—but there were long stretches where the school board served as a benign and supportive presence.
That was then. The Board now has morphed into something Christopher Rufo would be proud of. There was the podcast by Board members, sharing private information about student discipline. There was the “gender-affirming” bathroom policy. The anti-trans and anti-Pride policies. And so much more.
But I was dumbstruck on hearing this little clip from a recent meeting.
Board member says: This gets into the weaponization of empathy, where empathy is taught as the highest goal, the highest order. Do we teach empathy to the effect where students disregard parental authority—and accept anything and everything? Do we teach kids that any kind of judgment is bad?
Wait. What? Who is he accusing? And what is the weaponization of empathy?
Too much empathy leads to kids defying their parents, evidently. The moral ambiguity of school confuses students. That’s their big fear?
As a long-time classroom veteran who spent the beginning of every year working diligently to get kids to respect their peers, and care for other people’s feelings and property, this struck me as downright stupid.
Of course, empathy builds learning communities. It was right there in the (evidently outgrown) school mission statement: “ …provide a positive environment for the development of productive and caring individuals of all ages.”
A social media convo developed around the clip, with commenters suggesting the end result of too much empathy was Doctors Without Borders or the Peace Corps.
Eventually somebody remarked:
It should come as no surprise that the Heritage Foundation has taken this term and used it as its own way of fighting against Social-Emotional Learning, and any other academic tools to help students.
If one of your school board members uses this term, they are in some way being educated by, or they are using talking points from the Heritage Foundation.
Then, the other shoe dropped. Aha. Weaponizing empathy is a Heritage Foundation thing, the concept of their plan, so to speak.
Click on this definition, from the Heritage Foundation’s own rhetoric. It’s pretty vile.
EdWeek asks: Can Trump Force Schools to Change their Curricula? The Trump team’s best weapon for fulfilling this culture war campaign promise may be an under-the-radar office at the heart of the agency the once and future president has pledged to dismantle: The U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights, which enforces laws barring discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion, and disability status.
That’s a lot of legal wrangling—and yes, I understand that bureaucracies can change, when their leadership changes.
But hey—if right-wingers get control of a school board, they can micro-manage a district, with thousands of students, turning it into a place where empathy—caring for and about their fellow students– is forbidden or scorned.
God help us all.
Teacher in a strange land 
The Heritage Foundation fears our schools may not crank out enough sociopaths to support their vision of once and forever Trumpocracy.
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Thank you for picking up on this issue. I’ve been teaching there for 21 years and have been working really hard to get the community to understand what we are up against. I wrote a series of posts leading up to the election promoting certain candidates and describing what might happen to our district if we elected the wrong people.
I was “rewarded” for my efforts by being doxxed by this board member’s wife, who is also a district employee because I uncovered that all three board members, all three board candidates and three of the spouses of these folks were all elected as precinct delegates here in our district. Feels a little coordinated, no?
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Erin, I am so sorry to hear this. I know the community well– lived there for 20 years, taught for 32. And it’s kind of the poster child for the divisive politics that are tearing good things (like a public school district) apart. Hang in there.
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I am going to play devil’s advocate.
The general commentary on this blog is good, but I want to provide a lens to reveal what it’s missing. I’m coming from a background in ethics, particularly in moral recognition.
My fellow lefties and progressives have a problem. We so fixate on empathy and tolerance that we usually abdicate moral judgment. That leaves a space for the “anti-empathy” crowd, generally right-wingers, to point out a truth. Lefties often aren’t better at moral judgment than just about anyone else; they hold a different set of cultural values and little more. And thus they don’t hold up well to arguments in those rare times when righties bother to deploy them. But that also means that my fellow progressives are vulnerable to righties that actually are thinking people, that actually have some good reasons to disagree.
I’m all about closing the gates on any opening that would give the “anti-empathy” crowd any valid reasons to object.
So, for instance, I want to stop hearing “love is love” as the only justification. That’s a subjective argument. I want to hear about autonomy, about the social construction of gender, familiar roles, etc (in a popularly available form). Let’s stop saying that people are born trans, as we also know that gender is a sociocultural construct and not a birthright. We need to stop hamstringing ourselves with specious arguments, or at least have them ready when someone with some logical ability shows up.
Maybe this post speaks to such a case. Maybe not. Either way, we could do better.
p.s. One doesn’t need socio-emotional learning per se if conservative cultural absorption is the presumed method of moral education … which is why it looks so wrong to the anti-empathy crowd.
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Empathy for the Devil ?
It’s not that they lack a capacity for empathy — they’re just very selective who gets it — look all the tolerance they extend to Trump and his fellow travelers
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Jonathan Haidt makes similar distinctions, in The Righteous Mind, Conservatives and liberals (his bifurcation) have different value profiles, but neither is right or wrong. The empathy argument, I would think, falls on Haidt’s care/harm spectrum, where liberals advocate for different recipients of empathy than conservatives do.
You pulled the camera out, to show that differing perspectives on empathy might be reasonable.
This was, however, a very specific circumstance– a school board (whose mission statement, for what it’s worth, stated clearly that it was in the business of developing “caring” individuals). And one of the leaders of that board suggested that too much empathy was causing children to betray their parents, and stripping children of their right to judge others.
There are, of course, plenty of conservatives who see empathy as mush, the kind of weakness that makes victims out of people who deserve whatever negative consequences they got. But the context, when trying to ascertain right and wrong, matters. He’s talking about schoolchildren, and he is suggesting that they might be misled, and find themselves unable to judge others, if exposed to too much empathy.
If I may— that’s no way to run a classroom, or a school. If he wants an empathy-free family or wants to run a shark-tank competitive company, fine. But the only way children can learn is if they feel safe. An empathy-optional school setting would be a terrible place to work, or go to school.
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When did being empathetic mean a judgement free environment? Caring about each other does not imply ignoring problem behavior and giving free passes. I have no idea what the weaponization of empathy looks like or what the alternative is that is being advocated.
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From the Right’s point of view, empathy is seen as subversive. Caring about others, seeing things from another’s viewpoint…all subvert allegiance to the all powerful STATE.
It is a risk they don’t want to take, especially with children just getting their moral founding. Teaching CEI-inspired content and values in the schools (Conformity-Exclusion-Inequality)will ensure continued control of the levers of power.
All fascists know this.
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More thinking on empathy. Worth the read: https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/2024/11/25/americans-are-angry-we-need-to-learn-empathy-opinion/76494433007/
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There is certainly very little that is humane about the current system!
According to the NYT article linked, roughly 2/3 of all the kids admitted in this way work full time jobs and struggle to stay awake in class. The companies that hire them like their inexpensive labor and turn a blind eye to any lack of documents; they never get fined for any violations of child labor laws.
Why must they work? If they don’t pay off the large debt to the smuggler who arranged for the teen or pre-teen to come to the US, their family might simply be murdered.
“The growth of migrant child labor in the United States over the past several years is a result of a chain of willful ignorance. Companies ignore the young faces in their back rooms and on their factory floors. Schools often decline to report apparent labor violations, believing it will hurt children more than help. And H.H.S. behaves as if the migrant children who melt unseen into the country are doing just fine.
“As the government, we’ve turned a blind eye to their trafficking,” said Doug Gilmer, the head of the Birmingham, Ala., office of Homeland Security Investigations, a federal agency that often becomes involved with immigration cases.
Mr. Gilmer teared up as he recalled finding 13-year-olds working in meat plants; 12-year-olds working at suppliers for Hyundai and Kia, as documented last year by a Reuters investigation https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immigration-hyundai/; and children who should have been in middle school working at commercial bakeries.
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This is Dickensian!
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[…] Weaponizing Empathy and other Heritage Foundation Rhetoric for School Reform: […]
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[…] are growing up in schools where their neighbors on the school board worry about “weaponizing empathy.” Where men at the highest levels of government power are uninformed bullies, careless in their […]
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Thank you for this thoughtful and timely post. It pairs powerfully with what I’ve been reading in Reinventing Critical Pedagogy as Decolonizing Pedagogy: The Education of Empathy (2021). That piece argues that real empathy in education isn’t about feel-good gestures or superficial care. It’s about engaging with students’ lived experiences, naming systemic injustice, and committing to justice-oriented teaching.
Your point about how groups like the Heritage Foundation twist empathy to support regressive policies is spot on. As the article says, true empathy asks educators to listen across differences, reckon with historical harm, and resist assimilationist pressures. It’s not about saving students but standing with them.
Thanks for continuing to call this out and push for a more honest and justice-focused vision of education.
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“It’s not about saving students but standing with them.”
Says it all. Empathy is not value-free, allowing harmful interactions in an effort to ‘understand’ or accept every belief. Some things– racism springs to mind– are always wrong. Empathy allows harmful behaviors to change.
In the classroom, what this looks like is listening to students on both sides of a conflict. There’s been a lot of discussion re: Restorative Justice practice, with some believing it lets misbehaving students off the hook. But the truth is the opposite. You can’t change minds and behaviors without listening to students first.
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[…] was sickened to read that the Cromaine Library Board (like, unfortunately, the Hartland School Board) has now been co-opted by right-wing morality scolds. Serving on library boards—like school […]
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