Learning the thing nobody teaches.

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Education is very good at teaching children about the world. It is much less consistent at teaching them how to be in it. How to be with themselves, how to be with somebody else, how to disagree, how to repair what they have broken or even celebrate successes.

That gap is the entire reason this exists. (The sentence it grew out of is on the about page, if you're curious how it started.) A gap is just a space waiting to be filled.

A word about what this document is, because "curriculum" promises something it does not deliver. There are no lesson plans here. No worksheets, no assessment criteria, no scope and sequence. What follows is a model: a way of thinking about what a person is actually learning when they learn to understand somebody, and roughly when each part of it becomes available to them.

It is written for anyone who wants it. A teacher, a parent, somebody building their own version of this, and anyone working through it alone because nobody taught them the first time around.

Love is the one thing we were never taught. This is the attempt to work out what teaching it would actually involve.

What we mean by love

Not romance. Not being nice. Not feeling warm toward everyone you meet, which is not possible and would not be much use if it were.

Love here is closer to something you do than something that happens to you. A practice of relationship, made up of openness, acceptance, trust, understanding, acknowledgment, curiosity, presence, discernment, and respect for the inherent value of another person.

Two more belong on that list. Responsibility and commitment. Every item above is something you can do sitting still, watching someone carefully, feeling generous about them. None of them asks you to actually turn up on a Tuesday when it is inconvenient. And I do not know of anything worth having that does not ask for some sort of effort.

This is not an original position. bell hooks builds All About Love on a definition she takes from M. Scott Peck: love as the will to extend yourself for the purpose of nurturing your own or another person's growth. An act of will, Peck says. Both an intention and an action. Her own list of what love is made of includes care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment and trust (reading hooks' work is well worth your time).

This position arrives from other directions too. In Confucian thought the argument is that you do not become a decent person by deciding to be one. You perform the form, repeatedly, until the disposition catches up. Nel Noddings, writing about care in schools, makes a stricter version of the point: caring is not complete until the person cared for recognizes it and responds. It is a property of a relationship, not a virtue you can hold privately and count. Human interaction cements intention.

So the working definition is this. Love is not simply something we feel. It is something we learn how to practice, and the practice costs something. That cost is not a regrettable side effect. It is most of how you know the thing is real.

Why we think it can be learned

Because the pieces it is made of are things developmental psychology has been measuring for fifty years, and they arrive on a rough schedule, and they respond to what happens around them. We are gifted by our history.

A three year old cannot reliably hold in mind that you believe something false. By seven, most children can hold that you believe something false about what someone else believes. That is not maturation happening in a sealed room. It moves with how much a child is talked to about why people do things.

But I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where documents like this one usually start overselling, and the research is more interesting than the sales pitch.

The single most useful finding I came across is also the most inconvenient. For about forty years, the standard instruction for understanding another person has been to put yourself in their shoes. Imagine being them. Researchers ran twenty five experiments on this, with strangers, friends and spouses, and found that instructing people to take another's perspective made them less accurate about what that person actually thought and felt. It also made them slower and made them work harder. Most people expect it to help. It does not.

What did work was asking the person and listening to the answer. The researchers call it perspective getting rather than perspective taking, and the difference between those two words is most of what this framework is about. Separate teams working on political disagreement found the same thing from the other end: what durably changes someone's view of a group is hearing an actual person's account of their actual experience, and the "imagine yourself as them" part can be removed with no loss at all.

So the move is not imagine how they feel. The move is ask them, and listen well enough that you could say their view back to them and they would agree that is what they meant.

That is a smaller instruction and a harder one. It is also something a person can check they actually did, which almost nothing else in this territory is.

What this is not

Not a religion. It borrows from several traditions without asking you to believe any of them.

Not a political position. It is not designed to tell anyone what to think about anything currently being argued about.

Not therapy. It can build vocabulary and attention. It is not treatment and it does not replace someone qualified.

Not a be-nice program. Kindness without boundaries or self-respect is not the goal and is arguably the opposite of it.

Not a behavior management program. If the measure of success is quieter children, something has gone wrong.

Not a happiness program. Anger, grief, jealousy, fear, loneliness and confusion are not malfunctions. This is about learning to meet them, not to stop having them.

And one more, which I have thought about more than the rest. I do not want to indoctrinate anybody, and a framework about respecting difference that quietly installs one way of being would be self-defeating.

Paulo Freire is useful here and his answer is not the comfortable one. He says education is never neutral, and that the teacher who claims to have no position is the more dangerous one, because the influence is still there and now it is hidden. His safeguards are practical: the content comes out of the learner's own life rather than the teacher's, and the teacher has to be genuinely open to being changed by the exchange. If the conclusion is fixed before you start, you are just depositing opinions with better manners.

Elizabeth Ellsworth taught a course built on Freire's method and wrote about how it went wrong anyway. Her paper is called Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? and her finding is that "dialogue" quietly assumes a safe, equal, rational room that does not exist, and the people with less power in that room pay for the openness. I would rather have her objection in the document than discover it later.

There is an older version of this restraint. The Confucian rule of reciprocity is stated backwards from the one I grew up with: do not impose on others what you yourself do not want. Not do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The negative version does not ask you to assume your preferences are theirs. Given what I said above about imagining your way into other people, that asymmetry seems like the safer instruction.

The rule that keeps this honest

All of that is caution. Here is the structural answer, and it is the one thing in this document not to change.

Teach the capacity. Never the conclusion.

The capacity is noticing what you are feeling. Asking somebody what they actually think. Telling the difference between a rule that protects a person and a rule that is only habit. Staying in a hard conversation past the point where leaving would be easier. Going back to somebody after you have hurt them. Those are all things a person can get better at, and not one of them contains an answer.

The conclusion is what you ought to feel about your father. Whether that friendship is worth keeping. Which of your beliefs are the wrong ones. Who has earned your patience and who has not. None of those are this framework's to hand out, and any version of it that starts handing them out has stopped being about understanding and started being about compliance, or even control.

The test is simple enough to apply on a Tuesday afternoon. If a session ends with everybody agreeing about something, look again. If it ends with people better at finding out what somebody else actually meant, and still disagreeing, then something is working as intended.

How to read these

Seven stages. Each one says what is happening, what becomes possible, what it costs, what not to expect yet, and where I am not sure. That last one is the part I would read first.

The ages are the weakest part of this document and I want that said before you read a single one of them. They are averages, and averages hide people. In any group of eleven year olds you have something like four or five years of physical maturation sitting in the same room. Children in Australia, America and Japan pass the same understanding-other-minds tasks at noticeably different rates. And children in Iran and Australia arrive at the same understanding in a different order from each other, which means even the sequence is not fixed (is that in itself the first lesson?).

Treat the ages as a rough sense of when a thing tends to become available, not as a schedule anyone is behind on.

One more thing about the arc itself. We have described this elsewhere as running from kindergarten through PhD, and I am going to correct that here rather than keep saying it. There is no PhD level. Past about thirty, the evidence for anything that works like a ladder falls apart. Wise reasoning turns out to have almost no relationship to age, and one person's wisdom varies more from Tuesday to Thursday than it does from their neighbor's. A ladder implies you can be behind and implies somebody is standing at the top. Neither is true. I am telling you about a place I have been, not a place I live.

Roughly 3 to 5

Before school. Noticing.

What is happening

A child is working out that other people have insides. Not as a concept, as a discovery. It comes in gradually rather than all at once. Across a hundred and seventy eight studies the odds of a child passing the standard test roughly triple with each year of age, which is a curve, not a door opening.

Their words for feelings are also far fewer than we tend to assume. At four and five, children asked to describe emotional situations produce somewhere around four or five distinct emotion words, and nearly forty percent of what they say is just good or bad. An emotion wheel with twenty terms on it is not a tool for this person.

What becomes possible

• Noticing that a feeling is happening at all, and that it came from somewhere.
• Saying what another person can and cannot see.
• Going along with a reframe an adult offers, in the adult's words.
• Practicing all of it through play, which is the actual method at this age and not a break from the method.

What it asks of us

An adult who stays steady while the child does not. That is the whole price and it is higher than it sounds, because it has to be paid at the exact moment it is hardest.

Not yet

Reading emotions off faces as the main route in. Children get to emotions through what happened and what followed, not through expressions. Ask what happened before they cried, not what their face is doing.

Where I am not sure

Naming a feeling is widely said to calm it. The good evidence for that is in adults, in brain scanners, and the researchers behind it list "does this work in children" as an open question. There is an association in young children. There is no experiment I could find showing that naming the feeling causes the settling. I am keeping naming in because it is the raw material for everything later, not because it soothes anyone.

Roughly 5 to 8

Early school. Naming.

What is happening

Vocabulary roughly doubles across this window, from four or five words to about seven. Around five or six a child can generate their own reframe of a situation rather than borrowing yours. By seven or eight they can be told to reframe something and actually feel better for it, which is a different and later skill than being able to produce one.

Somewhere around seven or eight, something else starts that matters more than any of it. Children have been comparing themselves to each other since they were four. What changes now is that they begin using the comparison to decide what they permanently are. Not "I did worse at that" but "I am the one who is bad at that." That is the hinge this whole stage turns on.

What becomes possible

• Naming more than good and bad, and noticing that two feelings can be present at once.
• Holding that another person believes something that is not true, without needing to correct them immediately.
• Telling the difference between a rule that protects somebody and a rule that is just how things are done here. Children make this distinction reliably from about four, and it is worth naming out loud for them.
• Separating what they did from what they are, if an adult keeps making the distinction in front of them.

What it asks of us

Being told the truth about your own behavior by somebody who clearly likes you. Both halves are required. Either one alone does something else.

Not yet

Using any of it under pressure. A child can do this in a calm room with a trusted adult and lose all of it in the playground twenty minutes later. That is normal and is not a failure of the lesson.

Where I am not sure

How much of the trait-thinking that starts here can be headed off, and how much is simply what happens when a child gains the cognitive equipment to rank things. I suspect an adult can change the terms of the ranking more easily than they can stop the ranking.

Roughly 8 to 11

Middle childhood. Comparing.

What is happening

The equipment for understanding other minds is basically installed by now. Most children pass the recursive version, the one where she thinks that he thinks, at around seven. From here on, the problem is not capacity. It is whether any of it is available when a person is upset, embarrassed, or in front of an audience.

Meanwhile the comparison machinery is running hard. There is a well replicated finding that equally capable children rate themselves lower when they are in a higher-achieving class. Same child, same ability, different room, different self. This is not a small effect and it gets stronger through adolescence.

What becomes possible

• Noticing that you are ranking yourself, and asking whether the ranking is true or just the room you happen to be standing in.
• Understanding that you can be completely wrong about why someone did something.
• Repair. Actually going back to a person afterwards, which is a skill and not a feeling.
• Holding "I did that badly" and "I am not bad" at the same time, which most adults I know still struggle with.

What it asks of us

An adult willing to say both of those sentences in the same breath, and to not soften the first one to protect the second.

Not yet

Doing this reliably when it matters most. See the next stage, where it gets harder rather than easier.

Where I am not sure

Whether repair can be taught directly, or whether it is only ever caught from watching an adult do it badly and then come back and do it properly. I have not found good evidence either way.

Roughly 11 to 14

Early adolescence. Belonging.

What is happening

This is where the honest answer stops being about what to teach and starts being about who else is in the room.

The strongest result I found in this whole age band was not a lesson. In fifty six schools and twenty four thousand students, researchers picked a small number of socially connected students, at random, and had them take a public stance against conflict. Disciplinary reports of student conflict fell by about thirty percent over a year. Nothing was taught to anybody. What changed was who was visibly seen to hold the norm.

Alongside that, there is decent evidence that taught anti-bullying programs get steadily weaker from about thirteen or fourteen and may stop working altogether. An adolescent being told what to think by an adult is a different transaction than a nine year old being told the same thing.

One correction while we are here. Self-esteem does not collapse at puberty. Across three hundred and thirty one longitudinal samples it rises through childhood, goes flat between about eleven and fifteen, then rises again. What increases is not misery, it is volatility.

What becomes possible

• Noticing a group deciding something, and deciding separately.
• Asking a real question instead of assuming. This is the first stage where perspective getting can be practiced properly, because they have the words for it.
• Being the person who says the unpopular thing, occasionally, if someone they respect has done it first.

What it asks of us

Standing slightly outside the group at the exact age when the group is the most important thing in the world. This is the most expensive thing asked for anywhere in this document, and it should not be asked for lightly or alone.

Not yet

Doing it without cover. If you want an eleven year old to hold a position, the useful question is not how to teach them the position. It is who else they can see holding it.

Where I am not sure

Whether the thirty percent result transfers out of American middle schools and into anywhere else. Programs evaluated outside the country that built them consistently do worse, sometimes to the point of doing nothing.

Roughly 14 to 18

Adolescence. Choosing.

What is happening

Reasoning capacity reaches roughly adult levels around sixteen. The ability to hold onto that reasoning while excited, frightened or watched arrives later. That gap is real and shows up across eleven countries.

You will have heard that the brain is not finished until twenty five. I am not going to use that, because it does not survive contact with the evidence and the researchers most associated with it have said plainly they do not know where the number came from. Nothing measurable finishes at twenty five. Use the behavior, which is well established, and leave the brain scans out of it.

What is worth knowing is what adolescents are actually motivated by, which is status and respect among people they care about. Not a deficit to be managed. A lever.

What becomes possible

• Asking somebody what they actually think, and being changed by the answer. The whole practice, done properly, for the first time.
• Disagreeing with someone without deciding they are stupid or wicked.
• Telling somebody something true about your own experience, especially something that cost you. Across fifteen studies, personal experience earns respect across a disagreement in a way that facts reliably do not.
• Noticing what you are choosing, and that you are the one choosing it.

What it asks of us

Finding out you were wrong, in front of people, and saying so.

Not yet

A settled identity, and no honest framework should promise one. Only about a third of people have arrived at anything like a resolved sense of themselves by twenty two, and that share is still under half at thirty six. Open ended "who am I really" questioning without anywhere to land is associated with distress rather than growth, so if you are running this with teenagers, do not leave the question hanging as a virtue.

Where I am not sure

Everything about how this interacts with sex, intimacy and consent. The clearest finding in that area is a negative one: abstinence-only teaching does not work and has documented harms. What works better works modestly, mostly on attitudes rather than behavior, and fades quickly. That section needs writing by somebody who works in it. It is deliberately missing here rather than guessed at.

Roughly 18 to 25

Early adulthood. Committing.

What is happening

People start choosing who they are going to be around, and discovering that choosing somebody is a much smaller part of it than they were led to believe.

There is a study I keep coming back to. Researchers pooled forty three long-running datasets, over eleven thousand couples, and used machine learning to find what actually predicts how good a relationship is. The strongest predictors were things like whether you feel appreciated, whether you believe your partner is committed, how conflict goes. What your partner is like, described by your partner, added almost nothing.

It is much less about who you picked than about what you do in there.

What becomes possible

• Saying appreciation out loud, on purpose, when it would be easier not to bother.
• Staying in a difficult conversation past the point where leaving would be more comfortable.
• Commitment as something you do repeatedly rather than something you declared once.
• Noticing your own part in a recurring argument, which is the hardest single item on this page.

What it asks of us

Turning up after it stops being interesting. That is the cost, and it is the entire cost, and almost nobody wants to hear it.

Not yet

Certainty. About the person, the work, the direction, any of it.

Where I am not sure

Whether any of this is teachable in advance or only recognizable afterwards. Relationship education for young people moves beliefs a little and behavior barely at all. Large government-funded programs for adults produced small real improvements in how couples treated each other and no change whatsoever in whether they stayed together. Make of that what you will. I am still making something of it.

One caution on the label. The idea that eighteen to twenty five is a protected period for exploring is a description of wealthy countries, and the person who named it says so himself. If you are working two jobs or raising a child or holding a family together, being told this is your time to find yourself is not encouragement. It is a taunt.

25 onward

The long part. Practicing.

What is happening

Less than anybody hoped, and it is better news than it sounds.

Wise reasoning has close to no relationship with age. Measured across sixty eight research projects, the correlation is near zero. When researchers followed adults day by day, the variation in how wisely one person reasoned from one day to the next was larger than the variation between different people. It behaves like a state you are in, not a level you have reached. And in one comparison, young Japanese adults reasoned about social conflict as wisely as old Americans, so even the trajectory is cultural rather than natural.

Personality does drift, slowly, in a generally kinder direction. Emotional life genuinely does get steadier with age, though that advantage disappears under stress that is severe and will not end. Adults can be trained, with modest effects, over months.

What becomes possible

Everything above, still. Deliberately. That is the finding, and I want to put it plainly, because it is the most useful sentence in this document:

Getting older gets you nothing. Practice is the whole of it.

Which means nobody is behind, nobody has missed the window, and nobody is finished. It also means there is no version of this where you have arrived and can stop.

What it asks of us

Doing it on a day when there is no teacher, no class, no one watching, and no result you can point to. For the rest of your life. This is the most expensive stage and it is the one with the least support built around it.

Not yet

Not ever, actually. There is no PhD. We have used that phrase and it was the wrong picture. There is no top of this, no graduation, nobody qualified to certify anybody else.

Where I am not sure

Most of it. This is the least studied stretch of the whole arc and the one most confidently written about elsewhere. Nobody should write this section from the position of having arrived, and this one is not written from there.

What this cannot do

This section exists because a framework that only lists what it can do is selling something.

It cannot compete with material conditions

Poverty causally affects children's mental health, and giving families money causally improves it. When casino revenue lifted a group of Native American families out of poverty, their children's conduct and oppositional symptoms fell to the level of children who had never been poor. Anxiety and depression did not move, which is worth knowing too. No curriculum has ever done anything remotely like the first part. The most credible estimate of what school-based social and emotional teaching achieves is around three months of additional progress on a proxy measure, on evidence the reviewers themselves flag as substantially produced by the people selling the programs.

Anything in this document should be understood as something you can do while conditions are what they are. Not instead of changing them.

It cannot promise confidentiality to a child

This one is sharp and I would rather say it than have somebody find out the hard way. If you ask children what makes them feel unsafe, some of them will tell you something serious. The good news is that asking is not the danger. A Cochrane review covering twenty four trials and nearly six thousand children found that these conversations may increase disclosure, and found no evidence at all that they increase children's anxiety or fear. The disclosure half of that is the weaker half. The anxiety half is solid.

The danger is entirely in what happens next. Children whose disclosure is handled badly report despair, stop seeking help, and learn not to trust adults, which can leave them in the situation longer. And in a school, an adult is legally obliged to pass a concern on. They cannot keep it.

So be honest at the start. The adult in the room is not a confidant, and pretending otherwise is where most of the documented harm comes from.

If you are running anything from this document in a school, you need your safeguarding lead identified before you begin, not after.

It cannot prove it worked

There is a measurement problem here that I find genuinely funny, in a bleak way. When students in high-performing schools rate their own self-control, they rate it lower than students in weaker schools, because they are judging themselves against tougher company. Being in a better environment makes you score worse.

The same trap sits under this entire framework. If it works, people will notice their own relational failures more clearly than they did before, and will rate themselves lower afterwards than they did at the start. A before-and-after survey would show it failing. I cannot claim self-reported improvement as evidence this works without admitting that self-reported decline would have been evidence of the same thing.

How this could go wrong

Kindness at scale has harmed people before

In the Cambridge-Somerville study, boys were randomly assigned to receive friendly mentoring, tutoring, summer camp and medical care, sustained over years. Everything a warm, caring intervention is supposed to be. Thirty years later, at a median age of forty five, forty two percent of the men who had received all that had a seriously bad outcome, against thirty two percent of the men who got nothing. More contact and more counselors made it worse, not better. Half a century of reanalysis has not produced an agreed explanation.

That study belongs near the front of anyone's thinking about this, which is why it sits near the front here. Good intentions, warmth and a well-written framework do not protect anybody from causing harm.

It could become a masking curriculum

This is the risk that worries me most, because it turns the whole thing inside out.

Almost every behavior a framework like this might praise (making eye contact, reading the room, warmth of expression, reciprocity, sharing at the right moment) describes one culturally specific way of being social. For autistic people, producing that performance on demand is called masking, and it is associated with burnout and worse mental health.

Eye contact in particular is not a social skill. Finnish and Japanese participants show much the same automatic physical response to being looked at directly, then judge what it means quite differently: the Japanese participants rated a direct gaze as angrier, less approachable and less pleasant. Rubrics that score enthusiasm and engagement are scoring a regional preference for high-energy positive feeling that is not shared everywhere.

So: do not score these behaviors. A framework built on respecting difference that grades children on how well they perform one culture's version of warmth has become the thing it was written against.

It could teach people to feel worse

There is a real distinction between feeling with somebody and feeling for them, and they are not the same training. In one study, empathy training increased people's negative feeling and lit up the circuitry associated with sharing pain. Compassion training, on the same distressing material, reversed that and increased positive feeling instead, using a different network entirely.

Teaching people to absorb other people's pain is a way to burn them out. It is not the goal here and the difference should be taught explicitly.

Related: in a review of a hundred and twelve trials of classroom emotional and mindfulness programs, about nine percent reported harms. Among the highest quality studies it was closer to a third. The better the study, the more harm it found, which tells you the harm is being missed rather than being rare. The children most likely to be harmed were the ones already struggling.

The strongest objection to the whole idea

Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes argue that teaching children to inspect and report their inner lives produces what they call a diminished self: a person who has learned that difficulty is mainly an internal emotional event and that qualified adults exist to manage their feelings. They think the harm is not in any lesson but in the accumulated form of that teaching.

I do not think they have proved it. They assert the mechanism rather than testing it, and they treat all emotional content in schools as equally suspect. But they predicted that the big national programs would not work, and the big national programs did not work. England's largest attempt at this reached over eight thousand pupils and not only failed to improve anything, it left pupils trusting and respecting their teachers less than before. I would rather hold their objection open than pretend it has been answered.

What would show it isn't working

If a thing cannot fail, it is not a claim about the world. Here is what I would count as this failing.

• Children get quieter and more compliant. That is the commonest way something like this gets judged a success, and it would mean it had turned into behavior management.
• Nobody ever disagrees with it. Agreement that never follows any resistance is not evidence of anything. If no one using this has ever pushed back and changed my mind, it is functioning as flattery.
• People perform the vocabulary. Children who can say the right sentence about feelings and cannot do the thing have learned a dialect, not a practice.
• The people already struggling get worse. This is the documented pattern in comparable programs, and it is the specific thing to watch for rather than the average across a group.
• Anyone starts masking harder. Especially autistic children, especially where an adult is pleased with the improvement.
• It gets easy. If the practice stops costing anything, it has quietly become something else.

If you are a parent

You have the advantage here, and it is not close. Almost everything in this document works better one to one, in ordinary time, without a timetable. You also cannot be made to do it on a Wednesday at 2pm, which turns out to matter.

Three things, if you only take three.

Ask rather than guess. When your child is upset about somebody, the instinct is to explain the other person to them. Ask what they think the other person was doing instead, then ask how they would find out. You are teaching the move that the research says actually works, and it costs you nothing but the urge to be useful.

Separate the act from the person, out loud, every time. "That was a cruel thing to say" and "you are not a cruel person" in the same breath, without softening the first to protect the second. From about seven or eight, children start converting what they did into what they are, and your sentences are the raw material.

Let them see you repair something. Get it wrong, notice, go back, say so. I have no evidence that repair can be taught directly. I suspect it is only ever caught.

If you are a teacher

I know what I am asking, and I know the state of the profession I am asking it of. More than three quarters of education staff in the UK, seventy seven percent, report symptoms of poor mental health caused by their work, and overall wellbeing in the profession is the lowest it has been since these figures began. Adding emotional labor to that is not a neutral act, and I am not going to pretend it is.

So the honest version is this. Do not run this as a program. The programs have been tried at national scale, repeatedly, and they do not work.

What has the best evidence in a school is not a lesson at all. It is visibility of who holds a norm. If a few students who others actually listen to are seen taking a position, that moves more than a term of teaching does. Your job in that version is closer to noticing who those students are than to delivering content.

And two firm ones. Do not grade any of this. The moment it is scored it becomes performance, and the children who will perform it best are often the ones paying the highest price to do so. Know who your safeguarding lead is before you start a conversation that might surface something, and do not promise a child confidentiality you are not permitted to keep.

If this is for you

Most of what is written about this assumes you are delivering it to somebody younger. You might just be doing it for yourself. That is a legitimate use of it and this section is here because it is.

The whole ladder collapses into one instruction at this end, and the research is unusually clear about it. Age will not do this for you. Nothing arrives. The only thing that moves is practice, and practice is available at any age, which is the good half of the same sentence.

If you want somewhere concrete to start, start with the one move this whole framework rests on. Pick a person you are sure you understand. Ask them what they actually think about something you assumed you knew their position on. Listen until you could say it back to them in a way they would accept.

Most of the time you will find you were slightly wrong. That is the whole exercise, and it does not stop being the exercise.

Take it and change it

This is meant to be taken. Copy it, cut it, argue with it, fill it with your own lessons, translate it, use it somewhere I have never been and would not understand.

One request, and it is the same principle the framework is about. If you use an idea from a tradition that is not yours, go to the people inside it rather than to the summary. I have tried to do that here and I have certainly not done it perfectly. There is a version of this document that lists ten beautiful concepts from ten cultures and understands none of them, and that version would be doing the exact opposite of what it claims to be about.

The more useful move, I think, is to show people disagreeing. Scholars argue about whether ubuntu subordinates the individual to the group. They argue about whether Confucian ideas about relationship can sit alongside feminist ethics of care. Those arguments are more instructive than any of the concepts sitting quietly on their own, because watching people disagree well is the thing we are trying to learn.

If you find something in here that is wrong, I would like to know. That is not a politeness. Given what this document says about agreement that never follows any resistance, being told I am wrong about something is close to the only evidence available that any of this is working.