Another's Shoes

I find the cognitive line of development very interesting, especially in the early childhood years. One of the key cognitive abilities that must emerge before a person can develop true compassion and empathy for other life forms requires the cognitive skill of taking on someone else’s perspective. Young children can’t do that, as some of Jean Piaget’s experiments showed:


Until Johnny reaches a certain age he doesn't have the cognitive capability to answer that question.

Another example:


Once again, until Johnny reaches a certain age, he can't answer the question.

But after a person does have that basic capability, a teacher can help push it into the beginnings of true humanness. I just love Robert Kegan’s description of a school teacher manipulating young minds into developing this skill in his book In Over Our Heads:

On this particular morning, as the students are engaged in a heated controversy, the learning goal on his mind has to do with the very way students listen to each other – or more precisely, the way they do not.
……
He lets the conversation/debate proceed, but he institutes one new requirement: before any speaker may make her point, she must restate the preceding speaker’s point with sufficient accuracy that the preceding speaker agrees it has been adequately restated. At first the students try to fulfill the agreement by restating the point in the straw man fashion they are prepared to attack. But they do not get the chance to attack, because, amid the laughter and hooting, the preceding speaker objects, requiring them to restate the opposing view in a nondistorting, noneditorialized fashion, however maddening it may be to do so.

….
The trick is that this unwelcome route, first seen as a mere means to an end, has the promise of becoming an end in itself, since the continuous consideration of another’s view in an uncooptive fashion, which requires a continuous stepping outside of one’s view, is a definite move towards making one’s own view object rather than subject and toward considering its relation to other views.

Wow! At 50 years of age, I still have trouble trying to step out of my own worldview enough to see another's worldview, without my own worldview's interference. I can only imagine a world where children get taught this skill early on.

Note: I felt inspired to write this after browsing a few blog entries in Donna's Mundane Little World. I have come to realize that children get really cheated when it comes to education in how to move from animal to human.