- This topic has 5 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 4 years, 4 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Kindness and Kinship
Kindness Disparaged
Kindness and Survival
The Trouble with Kindness
Kindness and the Common Good
‘Surface acting’
Self-righteously pious
Kindness definitely needs rescuing.
Thinking about the reviews into poor care and patient safety investigations, duty of candour etc etc. There is too much emotion around by leaders about incidents. This, on surface, seems to be an act of kindness in that, shock, horror, this must never happen again. However, the leaders do not take the risks needed for intelligent kindness when the review is telling them, e.g that the poor care was due to lack of value of staff, lack of value of elderly which has led to care homes being dumping grounds for the too difficult category of elderly care.
The difference in taking an approach of listening to all, no blame, no defensiveness but throwing out the rule book for commissioning long term care, I feel that is intelligent kindness.Kindness is not a side issue: it is the GLUE which holds us all together.
Kindness evokes mistrust – what are your underlying motives? What are you expecting in return? Are you pursing self-righteous piety? “Doing it for the ‘likes’” in the parlance of the youth…To be kind is to be bold.
Social Darwinism appears to be the antithesis of intelligent kindness – yet our interdependency and the reciprocity of kindness lies at the centre of ‘evolution’ as a species.
So far, this all brings to mind a conversation I had many years ago in the playground. There was some unseemly competitiveness around reading levels of various 4/5 year olds. In one (dominant) camp were the ‘why isn’t the teacher pushing, stretching my child? They have been stuck on level 11 for weeks!’ Continual improvement, ascending the reading tree, staying ahead of others…
..the other camp were the ‘once you can read, you can read, there are no medals’ brigade. It was lonely. It mattered more, I proposed, that the whole class could read something, so they could all move on at the same rate next year; that quality of teaching in a class where all could access the written aspects of curriculum would allow more time for the teacher to ‘teach’. SO yes I’d rather the teacher spent time sweeping along those who were almost there, than devoting time to the front runners. Who cares how far ahead that group are…its keeping others from falling behind which will ultimately impact the class progress.
SO where are we as a society? What state is our ‘health literacy’ in? And where does this fit with intelligent kindness?
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.