3.3.5.1 Sympathy

This is a very broad and far-reaching term. It rests upon experience and imagination and involves the ability to live, at least temporarily, someone else’s life.

Sympathy is fundamentally vicarious. Properly to sympathize with children a man must re-live in memory his own childhood or he must have the power of imagination to see things through their eyes.

Many a teacher has condemned pupils for doing what to them was perfectly normal. We too frequently persist in viewing a situation from our own point of view rather than in going around to the other side to look at it as our pupils see it.

It is no easy matter thus “to get out of ourselves” and become a boy or girl again, but it is worth the effort.

Along with this ability at vicarious living, sympathy involves an interest in others.

Sympathy is a matter of concern in the affairs of others. The rush and stir of modern life fairly seem to force us to focus our attention upon self, but if we would succeed as teachers, we must make ourselves enter into the lives of our pupils out of an interest to see how they conduct their lives, and the reasons for such conduct.

Coupled with this interest in others and the imagination to see through their eyes, sympathy involves a desire to help them. A man may have an interest in people born out of mere curiosity or for selfish purposes, but if he has sympathy for them, he must be moved with a desire to help and to bless them.

And, finally, sympathy involves the actual doing of something by way of service.

President Grant liked to refer to a situation wherein a particular person was in distress. Friends of all sorts came along expressing regret and professing sympathy.

Finally a fellow stepped forward and said, “I feel to sympathize with this person to the extent of fifty dollars.” “That man,” said President Grant, “has sympathy in his heart as well as in his purse.”

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