Compassion and Education

Andrew Peterson is a colleague from the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues in the University of Birmingham, and he approaches this treatment of compassion from the point of view of virtue ethics and flourishing. It is a very thorough book and will be of interest not only to educators, but also general readers and moral educators in particular. Various chapters look at compassion as a moral virtue, the emotional and practical aspects of compassion, compassion and the self, then teaching about compassion and schools as compassionate institutions. The chapter on emotions analytically compares compassion with pity, sympathy and empathy. The discussion on compassion and the self goes back to Rousseau as well as Aristotle's notion of self-love and more modern ideas; here the author could have included the work of clinician Paul Gilbert, with his book The Compassionate Mind, which emphasises the importance of the first two years of life in wiring our responses. I also appreciated the emphasis on suffering and fragility as part of the human condition, and hope that many schools take the important message of this book on board.