I had intended to begin my blog less confrontationally, with a little bit about myself and what I do. But the lead article in the Review section of the New York Times, "A Child's Wild Kingdom," by Jon Mooallem got me so incensed I've thrown caution to the winds. So here goes:
There are many features of Mooallem's piece that bothered me, including its various inconsistencies. But the thing that really got to me was his reliance on a 1983 study -- yes, one study done 30 years ago -- to support the notion that "Kids under the age of 6 especially 'were found to be egocentric, domineering, and self-serving.'" He goes to in a vein that make these young tikes sound like potential mass murders, wishing to get rid of any creatures that irk them.
Get real. I thought this sort of stuff went out with saddle shoes. Don't we all know that young kids have tremendous capacity for empathy, a capacity that makes them the opposite of egocentric? In my work conducting philosophical discussions with young children, I have been impressed with their ability to feel another's pain. Consider the controversial picture book, The Giving Tree. When we ask young children -- second graders -- to say if they thought the boy did something wrong in taking so much from the tree, the children respond in different ways, but always with empathy. If you go to teachingchildrenphilosophy.org/wiki/video and watch the lower of the two videos, you will see two second graders from the Martin Luther King School in Springfield, MA, discussing this very issue. The girl empathizes with the tree, saying that she shouldn't have given away her whole self. The boy counters that, without the wood from the tree, the boy in the story would have had nothing: no house, no wife, no kids. Two kids with different opinions, each of them based on a strong sense of empathy.
From a philosophical point of view, the video shows that empathy is not sufficient for developing a complete account of ethics, for the impasse reached by the two students establishes the limits of empathy. And it also shows, that young children are not "more 'exploitative, harsh and unfeeling'" than older kids and adults. Shame on the Times for continuing the use of an outmoded and vicious trope that sees children as vicious beasts whose only chance at salvation is the civilizing influence of adult norms of behavior.