Let me paint you a picture, you are 8 or 9, watching an episode of Jessie on the television and the episode comes to a break. The commercials start running and on comes a commercial for the ASPCA. For those of you who don’t remember this organization let me remind you. The commercial shows photo after photo and video after video of dogs in cages, sad and lost. Their big puppy dog eyes look at you as a female voice, full of sadness, begs you to donate to save shelter animals. You, an innocent 9-year-old, can’t watch the whole commercial without tearing up, your heart fills up with determination to adopt one of these sad dogs, you look over at your older sibling or parent, expecting them to be broken up over the issue, but they seem completely fine.

Why?

The answer is apathy, defined by Merriam Webster as lacking emotion, or interest. This is the emotion that makes global warming seem not as pressing, white rhino extinction a lot less concerning, and ASPCA commercials a lot less effective.

There has been a recent movement in schools to try and correct this, teaching empathy and teaching kids about different worldwide issues has become a huge focus in English and Social Studies classes. Unfortunately, it seems as if this has served to better teach kids apathy than empathy. Oftentimes when content surrounding world issues is presented to kids and teens it is presented in a lecture-type format, in which the teacher talks about the issue and the students listen. There’s nothing wrong with this format, but it often tends to devolve. A lecture about ocean pollution can very quickly turn into educators giving a seminar on how students should be so greaful for everything they have. And here’s where to real problem is, trying to teach apathy through lectures about being greatful is not effective.

This can make students grow to be resentful of certain topics, and more importantly it can make students apathetic about certain topics. Lectures like this can start as early as middle school and over this long of a time period students begin to simply not care about certain topics because they are constantly told that they have too. Additionally this constant wearing down of students emotions and what can sometimes feel, like manipulation, by schools and teachers can wear down any student eventually.

Teaching empathy is a lot easier said than done, some people wonder if it is even possible to teach a person empathy. Apathy is an issues that plauges our world, and I would hypothosize that more often than not, we are taught apathy in our very own schools.