The Minister of National Education Gabriel Attal has just announced the deployment of empathy courses in 1,000 schools from January 2024 to combat school bullying. A practice which is based on the effective Danish method and which could be generalized to all schools in France at the start of the next school year.
Accelerate in the fight against school bullying. Gabriel Attal decided to change gear regarding the empathy courses mentioned last September: “What I can announce to you today is that it will not be 100 schools but 1,000 schools in January 2024 which will welcome these times dedicated to learning about difference, tolerance, kindness, otherness,” he declared on RMC on Sunday December 17. These empathy courses could allow “to respect the difference of others, the culture of appeasement when there is a conflict, to pacify things” also indicated the Minister of National Education this weekend. It now remains to refine the contours of this new discipline, in the testing phase since 2022 in around thirty nursery schools in Ile-de-France.
Empathy courses will be taught by a speaker or teacher trained in this new practice. Scenarios will be offered to students and the teacher will be able to show illustrations to provoke discussion and reactions. Everyday scenes that force students to put themselves in their classmate’s place and to realize each other’s possible reactions will be offered to them. This method also encourages them to verbalize their limits and indicate to other students when they have been crossed, while consoling those for whom the activity is more delicate.
The empathy courses will last one or two hours during the week depending on the specific needs of the classes for the 1000 schools concerned in January 2024. Several organizations will be tested before establishing an optimal formula. If the list of the 1000 test schools has not been communicated, we know where these courses will be given in September 2024: it’s very simple, they will be given in all schools in France from the start of the 2024 school year, from kindergarten onwards . The higher program council was tasked by the government with making a proposal on the time that should be devoted to this new discipline in the long term. These empathy courses could be generalized to all kindergarten classes at the start of the 2024 school year, before affecting elementary schools.
The Scandinavian kingdom has developed an empathy course model for around twenty years. It’s called “Fri for Mobberi” (freedom from harassment). According to 20 Minutes, “it is aimed at children aged 0 to 9 and is provided in 60% of nursery schools and 45% of elementary schools”. The aim of this course is to make students aware of the words of others.
Concretely, empathy courses turn out to be workshops where schoolchildren experience behavioral situations in the form of games. “It is essential that adults are present to guide children and show them what strategy to adopt in situations that could escalate,” Charlotte Helbo Lund, an advisor to Danish schools specializing in bullying, told Le Monde.
In Denmark, school bullying has seen a significant decline in twenty-five years according to Le Monde. In 1998, a third of students aged 11 and a fifth of those aged 15 reported being victims. By 2020, this figure had fallen to less than one in ten. Likewise, the number of students who admitted to bullying other children fell by almost half, from 50% to 3%. An example on which Gabriel Attal and France intend to follow in an attempt to significantly reduce harassment in the country’s schools.
