Empathy as an educational tool

Abstract

World Health Organization indicates life skills as essential abilities that allow individuals to pursue their life goals and to work within the social contexts. According to our theoretical proposal, among these skills, such as problem solving, and decision making, coping with stress, etc., empathy assume a lead role in the overall development of the individual, starting from early childhood, with speciic attention to the increase in emotional skills. Our analysis highlights the importance of this concept within the educational relationship: We develop the notion of empathy inspired by Buber’s Dialogic Communication heory, Rogers’ heory of Personality and Baron-Cohen’s research on Empathy: these contributions emphasize the role of this concept as an educational tool and its importance for early childhood education. Empathy is deined as an element of the quality of the relationship itself and is necessary in interpersonal relationship deined, also, as an educational one. According with Rizzolatti heory of Mirror Neurons, We hypothesize that adults’ empathy induce corresponding reactions in preschoolers, even if not all caretakers are aware of its importance in conditioning other individuals, and its role within relationships.