Teaching compassion through drama

"Why don't we teach our children compassion?". 

Roshi Joan Halifax asked this question in the TED talk I posted about last week, implying that we don't do enough to teach our children compassion.

On reflection, I think we do more to teach our children than we generally give ourselves credit for. This teaching is not called "compassion class". It is called drama. For instance, my daughters attend a very popular theater workshop in our neighbourhood. The faculty that they develop through theater is compassion; they learn to get into someone else's skin.

I didn't learn drama as a child, but I did attend a couple of corporate leadership workshops, in America, that were built around acting technique. The idea is - learn to act, get into the other's skin, understand others more completely, communicate better, discover yourself, discover your own authentic leadership voice, and therefore ride away into the golden sunset of promotions and profits - which sounds awfully naff, but was actually quite helpful.