This is a new measure in the arsenal of the fight against school harassment. Sunday December 17, the Minister of National Education, Gabriel Attal, confirmed its desire to set up empathy courses inspired by Denmark in French schools.
Already mentioned in September for 100 schools from the start of the January 2024 school year, these courses will ultimately concern nearly 1,000 establishments. “Times dedicated to kindness, to otherness,” he said on RTL Sunday. These empathy courses should make it possible to learn “to respect the difference of others, the culture of appeasement when there is a conflict, to pacify things”, he added.
Learning from “early grades”
For the start of the 2024 school year, Gabriel Attal announced, during the presentation of his government plan, in September, the integration of empathy lessons into school programs “from early grades” and in primary school. The Minister of Education wants to extend the system to all schools for the start of the school year in September 2024. During the experiment, “several organizations” will be tested. In some schools, empathy lessons will last an hour. In others, it will be two hours a week.
The principle: create caring communities of children from which no member can feel excluded and where harassment therefore normally has no chance of intruding. During these lessons, students are invited to share their emotions through fun activities, particularly with card games, stuffed animals, etc.
A method straight from Copenhagen
At the beginning of September, the French Minister of National Education went to Copenhagen to observe “empathy lessons” given in schools. In Denmark, they were launched in 2005, using the method “Fri for mobberi” (“freed from harassment”). The program is followed in 40% of nurseries, 60% of nursery schools and 45% of elementary schools. The Education League reports that in Denmark “70% of professionals find that children are more caring towards each other” after working with the method “Fri for mobberi”. Additionally, the program has also been implemented and proven effective in Greenland, Estonia, Romania, Iceland and, more recently, Norway and Belgium.
In 2021, a senatorial fact-finding mission on school bullying also noted: “In Denmark, empathy courses are compulsory from 6 to 16 years old, one hour per week, since a law of 1993; France remains as marked by a significant delay in the development of a culture of empathy.