There is a universal thread that runs through recent big ticket issues such as BLM, Everyone’s Invited, modern slavery, transgender rights and even deforestation: a simple lack of kindness.
Would there even be a need for activists to campaign half as much on these issues if we all just applied an overarching rule of kindness, tolerance and respect when dealing with others?
And as these debates rage in recent months, I have been asking myself, where did that kindness go, if it ever existed?
Perhaps living in isolation during the lockdowns unintentionally caused some wider suffering because of an increased sense of indifference towards the plight of others?
Or maybe there was a brief spate of moral amnesia regarding social norms caused by a lack of contact with others and a narrowing of social reference points?
“Some children spend much more time with YouTube and TikTok influencers than their own parents.”
And there is the Internet. Influencers are the new gods – or at least the people who underwrite them are. Some children spend much more time with YouTube and TikTok influencers than their own parents and families during the holidays, weekends and at night.
Take some time out to do some research — it only takes a moment for a pre-teen or teenaged person to give you a tour of the types of people who are filling our children’s headspace on the internet. The content seems to promote indifference, shamelessness and a certain moral separation from others – almost of a Nietzschean “superman” flavour.
The power of this “new” system for children to receive moral guidance emanates from the fact that we are not watching the same content as our children.
And so the influencers can say pretty much anything to our children and we, as parents, will never know what our children are consuming because the sentiment is hidden within hundreds of hours of content.
“The brightest, loudest, most shocking wins the day.”
Moreover, teachers and parents struggle to “better” this hyper-consumerist environment and are left trying to live and teach in an environment that seems to the children grey, lifeless and boring.
What content they see is driven by its “popularity”: the brightest, loudest, more shocking wins the day — more views, more likes, more influence. The content has to become more and more extreme to break the algorithms and end up on our sons’ and daughters’ screens.
Needless to say, the system – also laced with a good dose of faceless internet trolls – is toxic. And we are feeding it to our children and teenagers, or they are feeding it to themselves.
A friend told me her son had been told by teenagers that if he shares stories at senior school of pupils bullying each other or of unkindness with adults, he would be targeted himself.
This was when the concept of Kindness Activism was conceived. A group of 12 girls and boys run a group called the Kindness Council at Cottesmore School. This group discusses and establishes initiatives promoting kindness, empathy and tolerance.
“We would hope for a quiet defiance against unkindness and an understated support of kindness.”
The same week we conceived the idea, I had also been talking to a particular environmental activist, who has an interest in the Amazonian rainforest. Environmental activists don’t sit there worrying in the safety of their own drawing rooms. They actively do things to promote what they believe – they are active participants in a solution to a problem.
I want Cottesmore children to go to their senior schools and thrive in everything that they do. I want them to make wide groups of friends and to have a broad set of interests. I would like them to be kind, to work hard and to have fun. I also want them to stand up against unkindness if they come across it.
That may mean quietly being an activist. We would never want to espouse overt moral one-upmanship or encourage the display of moral superiority; we would hope for a quiet defiance against unkindness and an understated, almost unspoken support of kindness.
It was vaguely implied in a conversation fairly recently that Cottesmore is perhaps too kind an environment. The conversation dwindled quickly as it dawned upon the adult in question that their tacit idea of “allowing a bit of bullying” or “readying children for unkind behaviour” was absurd.
Rather than my preparatory school preparing its girls and boys for unkindness, intolerance and bullying in the world, let’s prepare them for Kindness Activism and a future generation of people who will display defiance against these unpleasant and unkind behaviours.