Review: "Nobody Left to Hate" by Elliot Aronson and "Dark Days"

Mal recommended “Nobody Left to Hate: Teaching Compassion After Columbine” by Elliot Aronson and I’m really glad I read it. Dr. Aronson spends the first half of the book setting the stage to help us get inside Harris and Klebold’s heads. High school is HARD and for these boys it was torture. Dr. Aronson doesn’t try to justify their actions but he does make sure that we remember how much fun our high school days were. For some of us it was hell. What I like about this book is that Dr. Aronson suggests a solution that attacks the root causes for adolescent feelings of alienation and the Lord of the Fly’s hierarchies that develop. With his graduate students Dr. Aronson has developed a learning technique called Jigsaw. The idea is to break the classroom into groups and the groups study a subject together. Each person get’s a specific part of the assignment to learn and report back their knowledge to the rest of the group. The groups have to work together because if they don’t, they will all fail. There is also a subject group made up of the person from each group that has been assigned the subject. This helps each student get a solid understanding of the material they need to present. Dr. Aronson’s testing indicates that this style of learning teaches the students to emphasize with the other members in their group (and improved academic performance). Creating a situation where the students see the value in each of the other students. Dr. Aronson explains this much better than I and for that reason you should read the book. Reading “Nobody Left to Hate” was very timely for me. I had just seen a news report on a study that found that until American students reach high school they lead the world in their knowledge. Then high school happens and the American students fall in the testing. If I remember correctly the US is ranked down around 6th from the top. I do remember that our students are no longer in the lead. This isn’t good for the US. If teaching emotional intelligence in school can make the high school experience pleasant and improve our children’s chances at college...then I say we need seriously consider the value of implementing either Dr. Aronson’s program or one similar in all US schools. High school should be remembered as the best time of our lives. Along the same lines, Mal and I watched the documentary “Dark Days” this weekend. The documentary is about a group of homeless folks who built homes in an empty underground train depot. If you want to talk about getting empathy for someone...I did. These folks did not satisfy any of the stereotypical images I have of the homeless. They were proud of the shacks they built themselves, they were honest about their situation, and I was really surprised at how hard some of them worked. That was the big one for me. One guy made money from collecting cans and on a good day he could make $70. But he went through a lot of garbage. Maybe if we, as a country, took Dr. Aronson’s suggests seriously and implemented a Jigsaw program in all of our schools we would have better success as a country. Helping our citizens learn to help each other and care seems a whole lot better than teaching them to hate.