“If developing an altruistic bent is so important, then how do you think we can develop and promote this attitude in others, especially our young ones?” I asked.
He sat there silently looking at me for a while. Then his gaze shifted to his coffee mug. He picked it up, held it in both his hands – as if to warm his palms with its heat. Then he slowly took a sip and placed the mug back on the table at his side. It was as if he was moving in slow motion. Then he looked at me and said, “It is comparatively easy to sometimes control or modify another person’s behavior, to some extent. But altruism is not merely a set of behaviors. It is an attitude and a bent of character, and there is no short-cut or a sure-shot method to transform attitudes and character.”
“Are you implying that there’s no clear way to teach our children to be altruistic?” I asked, clearly disappointed.
“You are a parent as well as a teacher. I’ll share with you an interesting observation that I generally have about parents and teachers: What I have observed is that when a parent or a teacher comes across a piece of information that is valuable, they immediately start talking about how they can teach it to their children and students.” He said.
“What do you find to be wrong with that?” I asked, a little irritated this time.
“There’s nothing wrong with that, as such. Firstly, it is based on the false assumption that teaching will always result in learning. We tend to ignore the fact that ‘learning’ does not necessarily result from teaching – even good teaching – alone. More than good teaching, ‘learning’ requires the interest, curiosity, attention, comfort, and developmental appropriateness on the part of the learner.
“Secondly, I think that if we find something to be so valuable that we would immediately like our children and our students to know about it and make it a part of their character, then before anything else, we should make it a part of our own character. Without this transformation in ourselves, there’s hardly a chance of effecting a transformation in anyone else.” He said with a hint of a sympathetic smile on his face.
“Are you saying that if we are not altruistic ourselves, we should not teach it to others?” I asked.
“No. What I am saying – and it does not relate only to altruism, but to all those moral qualities that we aspire to see in our young ones – is that if we want to develop these moral qualities in others, the first step is to be fully committed to developing these qualities in ourselves.” He said.
January 8, 2020
(Dubai, UAE)