Schools as Compassionate Institutions: Teachers, Families and Communities

While compassion primarily takes the form of an individual response to the suffering of others, it does not operate within a vacuum. As we have seen in various ways throughout this book, compassion is shaped, disrupted and informed by institutional processes and structures. That this is so requires us to consider the extent to which schools – and the teachers who work within them – promote or inhibit compassion through their general ethos, culture and practices. As the Framework for Character Education published by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham suggests, ‘character is largely caught through role-modelling and emotional contagion. School culture and ethos are therefore essential.’ These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.