Adapted from Difference is Not Deficit by Bibi Pirayesh.
One of the great byproducts of the current culture wars we find ourselves in, specifically around education and teaching, is that so much of what has always been an implicit part of the culture is suddenly now being explicitly spoken. While we may want to disregard groups like Moms for Liberty, for example, as fringe, it is important that we realize they are giving voice to deeply held beliefs about fundamental concepts around schooling and parenting in America. When we hear them explicitly say that they don’t want their children to learn empathy, or that “not every human is deserving of my child’s empathy,” we need to look beyond just the fights over the programs they are opposing and think about what this says about our culture. The tendency is to disregard these voices as unbelievable or sociopathic, but the fact is, this has been the culture and the goal all along. It is not a coincidence that billionaires in our government today refer to empathy as a “civilizational bug” (Wong 2025). You cannot kill and take land and then enslave and build a country if you have empathy. Lack of empathy is a cornerstone of American success and exceptionalism. In this way, Moms for Liberty or Elon Musk are actually quite right. They are earnestly sounding the alarm that if we begin to cultivate empathy, if we begin to humanize the other, if we let go of our sociopathy and become human ourselves, we will lose the country as we know it. This is not just a legitimate concern but an absolute truth.
I have watched as children’s faces have shifted to disbelief when they hear me agree with their version of the story, their point of view, their “complaint” and “defiance” for which they are usually labeled everything from lazy and sassy to insubordinate and mentally ill. I have watched some burst into tears. No one can know the stories children tell themselves, the conclusions they make about their own part in the dysfunction around them, until you say one true thing like “It’s okay that you can’t read that” and you watch a child become unglued and put their head on your shoulder, a practical stranger, and cry, sobbing as they realize that maybe it is okay, maybe I am okay, maybe I’m not bad because I don’t know how to read, maybe I’m not dumb, maybe I’m not the reason my parents fight or my teacher is frustrated and the million other things they connect their own “badness” to even without an adult suggesting it. In that moment, the act of listening to their story, of sitting with them quietly as they cry, shifts the very core of their being. This is where empathy is not a passive feeling but an active practice.
The Necessity of Reflection
How do we as educators embrace empathy in a system that teaches us to be objective and detached, while helping raise children who are to later operate “successfully” in this system? The first step is deep self-reflection. Many find tools such as journaling or meditative practices helpful in sitting with their experiences, fears, and assumptions. Even a simple practice of asking ourselves, once a week, or in any given interaction, when we have been empathetic or, conversely, when we’ve closed ourselves off to others’ experiences, can be a powerful way to gauge how we are engaging with our students. Other teachers have told me they benefit from participating in book clubs aimed specifically at helping classroom teachers. Books like The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer (2017) or The Empathy Effect by Helen Riess (2025) offer practical insights into how we can develop deeper empathy within ourselves and our classrooms (other educators who write on the subject of empathy include bell hooks [2003], Gloria Ladson-Billings [2009], Bettina L. Love [2019], Kevin Kumashiro [2009], José Luis Vilson [2014], Carla Shalaby [2017], and many more). I personally find that therapy, specifically critical therapy (Gaztambide 2021), a modality that synthesizes relational psychoanalysis and critical theory, has helped me in learning how to be better at being with an other. When combined with somatic practices like grounding, breathwork, and movement, such an approach can help us actively engage in how we want our students to engage with us, allowing ourselves to be the model, and more importantly, putting ourselves in their shoes in the power relationship. Any of these approaches and many others can help us cultivate the vulnerability required for empathy and show us how our own self-awareness directly impacts our capacity to understand our students.
In the classroom setting, radical empathy means creating an entire classroom culture in which both students and teachers can feel safe to share their experiences, to be heard, and to listen. This can only happen when we model what it looks like to acknowledge feelings and accept challenges.
Today, in the name of empathy, we sometimes confuse understanding with excusing. This doesn’t mean that we expect less of our students or excuse harmful behavior or avoid accountability. True empathy doesn’t lower expectations, in fact it requires that we hold them accountable as responsible members of the community we are building together. Radical empathy, therefore, must be collective, and it must also be active. It is not enough to cultivate empathy as individuals. hooks’ famous admonition that “love is an action, never simply a feeling,” (2000a) is a call to action to build networks of support that transcend our own lives and even our classrooms and schools. If groups of educators can come together to learn how best to teach math, so too can we come together to uplift one another and push back against systems that are indifferent to our collective well-being.
Embracing radical empathy is not just about teaching our students to be better, more compassionate people, nor about trying to do that in our own personal or professional lives. Rather, the call is to push back against a culture of dehumanization that has long been at the core of American success and cross over to a way of being that values connection over control and humanity over hierarchy.
