I welcome this idea! More love would be a good thing, and we would rather make this change earlier in the life course.
I think implementation is hard. This is a big “if”:
if we could come up with a healthy, inclusive (but respectful of differing opinions), curriculum that -encourages/rewards- love but does not impose it
As Joseph said, it is difficult to assess educational interventions. When it comes to knowledge transfer we can be generally confident that education is helping—calculus classes increase students’ aptitude for calculus. But love?
Recent research suggests that mindfulness interventions in schools were much less impactful than hoped. I suspect that something like mindfulness works well if you opt in—and is much less useful if you didn’t ask for it.
To explore this idea further, I recommend looking for comparable values-based educational experiments that have been tried in the past (maybe something about attitudes to sexuality, or religious tolerance, or positive thinking, or even campaigns to instil hate). Did they succeed in changing values? If they failed, why did they fail? If they succeeded, what can we learn from them?
Extremist indoctrination campaigns clearly have an impact, to the point of getting member to self-sacrifice. Not the path i would want to explore.
While I’d like to -encourage- love and perhaps other related/close/universally accepted positive values (don’t steal, don’t murder/hurt others type things), I believe everyone should retain self-agency.
Basically, people -should- be free to -choose- to hurt others (or at least not benefit them) if they so decide, possibly incurring society’s wrath/punishment in the process depending on the degree of harm, as it is currently done (reform of prisons/legal punishments is another topic).
Let’s steer clear of 1984. Most people find helping others fulfilling to some degree. We ought to encourage that and make it an easy and early realization. Those that aren’t interested can drop out after going through the 101 if they so choose.
I posit that the cost of researching and developing/testing a curriculum to that effect would be minimal compared to the possible impact.
And yes it’s a big “if”, but we don’t have to get it perfectly right from the get-go.
I’ll be back in the Philippines in a few weeks, where i will be launching a sort of 360 housing/living/community program, aimed at the poorest of the poor/most excluded to provide safety, counseling, nutrition, health as well as education, life and professional skills etc. I’d love to have -something- like this to try out with those that join.
My experience is that the culture is -already- very Altruistic-oriented, if often un-efficiently so. I’d very much like for them NOT to lose that aspect of the culture if/when they join the capitalist bandwagon.
I think indoctrination (at least among adults) is actually surprisingly difficult. The psychologist Hugo Mercier was recently on the 80,000 Hours podcast to discuss why.
And the other thing which has had much more dramatic consequences is the idea of brainwashing: the idea that if you take prisoners of war and you submit them to really harsh treatment — you give them no food, you stop them from sleeping, you’re beating them up — so you make them, as you are describing, extremely tired and very foggy, and then you get them to read Mao for hours and hours on end. Are they going to become communists? Well, we know the answer, because unfortunately, the Koreans and the Chinese have tried during the Korean War, and it just doesn’t work at all. They’ve managed to kill a lot of POWs, and they managed to get I think two of them to go back to China and to claim that they had converted to communism. But in fact, after the fact, it was revealed that these people had just converted because they wanted to stop being beaten and starved to death, and that as soon as they could revert back to go back to the US, they did so.
I’d also echo others’ comments that I think testing a curriculum will be relatively hard. Even education programs with clear measurables (e.g. financial literacy programs, work-skills programs for former convicts, second language programs) often end up unsuccessful. It would be even more difficult to teach “love.” How do you measure how loving someone is and reliably teach it to others?
I welcome this idea! More love would be a good thing, and we would rather make this change earlier in the life course.
I think implementation is hard. This is a big “if”:
As Joseph said, it is difficult to assess educational interventions. When it comes to knowledge transfer we can be generally confident that education is helping—calculus classes increase students’ aptitude for calculus. But love?
Recent research suggests that mindfulness interventions in schools were much less impactful than hoped. I suspect that something like mindfulness works well if you opt in—and is much less useful if you didn’t ask for it.
To explore this idea further, I recommend looking for comparable values-based educational experiments that have been tried in the past (maybe something about attitudes to sexuality, or religious tolerance, or positive thinking, or even campaigns to instil hate). Did they succeed in changing values? If they failed, why did they fail? If they succeeded, what can we learn from them?
Extremist indoctrination campaigns clearly have an impact, to the point of getting member to self-sacrifice. Not the path i would want to explore.
While I’d like to -encourage- love and perhaps other related/close/universally accepted positive values (don’t steal, don’t murder/hurt others type things), I believe everyone should retain self-agency.
Basically, people -should- be free to -choose- to hurt others (or at least not benefit them) if they so decide, possibly incurring society’s wrath/punishment in the process depending on the degree of harm, as it is currently done (reform of prisons/legal punishments is another topic).
Let’s steer clear of 1984. Most people find helping others fulfilling to some degree. We ought to encourage that and make it an easy and early realization. Those that aren’t interested can drop out after going through the 101 if they so choose.
I posit that the cost of researching and developing/testing a curriculum to that effect would be minimal compared to the possible impact.
And yes it’s a big “if”, but we don’t have to get it perfectly right from the get-go.
I’ll be back in the Philippines in a few weeks, where i will be launching a sort of 360 housing/living/community program, aimed at the poorest of the poor/most excluded to provide safety, counseling, nutrition, health as well as education, life and professional skills etc. I’d love to have -something- like this to try out with those that join.
My experience is that the culture is -already- very Altruistic-oriented, if often un-efficiently so. I’d very much like for them NOT to lose that aspect of the culture if/when they join the capitalist bandwagon.
I think indoctrination (at least among adults) is actually surprisingly difficult. The psychologist Hugo Mercier was recently on the 80,000 Hours podcast to discuss why.
I’d also echo others’ comments that I think testing a curriculum will be relatively hard. Even education programs with clear measurables (e.g. financial literacy programs, work-skills programs for former convicts, second language programs) often end up unsuccessful. It would be even more difficult to teach “love.” How do you measure how loving someone is and reliably teach it to others?