Nobody Left to Hate: Teaching Compassion After Columbine [Hardcover]

Elliot Aronson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2000

On April 20, 1999, the halls of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, reverberated with the sound of gunshots as two students, highly armed and consumed with rage, killed thirteen students and wounded twenty-three before turning the guns on themselves. It was the worst school massacre in our nation's history. Can we prevent a tragedy like this from happening again?

In Nobody Left to Hate, one of our nation's leading social psychologists argues that the negative atmosphere in our schools -- the exclusion, taunting, humiliation, and bullying -- played a major role in triggering the pathological behavior of the shooters. At the very least, such an atmosphere makes school a degrading experience for most normal students.

But it doesn't have to be. Nobody Left to Hate offers concise, practical, and easy-to-apply strategies for creating a more supportive, stimulating, and compassionate environment in our schools. Based on decades of scientific research and classroom testing, these strategies explain how students can be taught to control their own impulses, how to respect others, and how to resolve conflicts amicably. In addition, they show teachers how to structure classes to promote cooperation, rather than competition, without sacrificing academics. On the contrary, education is usually greatly enhanced.

For parents, teachers, or anyone concerned with what is happening in our schools, Nobody Left to Hate provides a simple and effective plan of action that will make their children's school not only a safer place, but a more humane place of learning.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"What a great idea to apply social psychology to the schools of today...Aronson's knowledge of social psychology, his research, and experience on cooperative learning in schools, and his rhetorical gifts make him the perfect person to write this book." -- Dave Myers, Professor of Psychology, Hope College, and author of the textbook Psychology

"Wonderfully written. Lucid, energetic, and engaging. The topic is of huge interest and importance... [Aronson's] optimism and empathy come through loud and clear." -- Susan Engel, Director of Program in Teaching, Williams College, and author of The Stories Children Tell

From the Back Cover

"Americans are too ready to blame individuals for social problems like youth violence. Elliot Aronson brings to bear the power of social psychology to help us understand why a negative school environment can push vulnerable kids over the edge and how restructuring that environment can bring them back into the fold. At a time when many people in public life are offering quick fixes and punitive strategies based upon faulty analyses of the problem, Aronson offers a road map for changing the social environment of the school from competition and nastiness to cooperation and acceptance. Bravo!"
-- James Garbarino, PhD, author of Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them and Professor of Human Development at Cornell University

"Dr. Aronson has written an important book. It has the potential to change how the public, and policy makers in particular, think about the Littleton tragedy and how to make our schools safe havens where the joy of learning is the focus--not the fear of violence. There is no question that Aronson is in a position to be an authoritative voice as the leading social psychologist of our era--a scientist with an extraordinary record of accomplishment and a communicator par excellence."
-- Len Saxe, Ph.D., Professor of Social Welfare, Brandeis University

"Aronson's brilliant social psychological analysis of the Columbine High School massacre offers us the mind to understand this mindless violence and the heart that could prevent it from erupting again. . . . Nobody Left to Hate offers a root cause solution based on decades of scientific psychological research and wise theory by the author and his colleagues--change the structure and values of our nation's classrooms to make them more equivalent to an ideal home atmosphere."
-- Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Stanford University

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 194 pages
• Publisher: W H Freeman & Co (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0716741326
• ISBN-13: 978-0716741329
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #471,492 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Elliot Aronson is a social psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Stanford University. He has previously taught at Harvard, the University of Texas and the University of Minnesota. As a researcher, he is best known for his groundbreaking research on social influence and persuasion as well as for the invention of the jigsaw classroom (a strategy for reducing prejudice in public schools).

He has written 22 books including The Social Animal, Age of Propaganda (with Anthony Pratkanis), Nobody Left to Hate, The Adventures of Ruthie and a Little Boy Named Grandpa (with his 7-year-oldgranddaughter, Ruth Aronson, and Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me (with Carol Tavris).

Aronson is the only person in the 120-year history of the American Psychological Association to have received all three of its highest awards: For Distinguished Research, Distinguished Teaching, and Distinguished Writing. In 1981, he was named Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.

Among his other awards are the Gordon Allport prize for his contributions to inter-racial harmony and the William James Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Psychological Science (2007). Recently, his peers named him as one of the 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th Century.

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and
has served as President of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology as well as President of the Western Psychological Association

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A hateful place, July 23, 2000

By 

Paul Chance (Seaford, DE USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nobody Left to Hate: Teaching Compassion After Columbine (Hardcover)

Someone has said that every complicated problem has a simple solution-- and it is wrong. Barbers, editorial writers and other purveyors of simple solutions have said that school shootings, such as the one at Columbine High School in Colorado, can be prevented by posting the Ten Commandments, reinstituting school prayer, or kicking out "weird" students. Eliot Aronson, a prominent social psychologist, offers a more sophisticated analysis of school violence. He reminds us that in American high schools, bullying, sarcasm, threats, humiliation, physical abuse, and social isolation are commonplace. It is an atmosphere in which even favored students must tred lightly or risk exile. The shooters are nearly always those who have been pushed by their peers to the outside. Educators seldom contribute to this hostile environment directly, but they often do little to change it.

Aronson suggests some concrete steps that can be taken. In particular, he advocates that part of the school day be set aside for cooperative forms of learning. Aronson devised one form of cooperative learning, the jigsaw method, for the express purpose of reducing tensions in the process of teaching regular subjects. The jigsaw method requires students who are not members of the same clique to work together for their mutual benefit. It has been found to reduce tensions and improve the social status of "outsiders." This is NOT group therapy or social engineering; it is a way of teaching regular content that helps bring students together.

Whether cooperative teaching methods will substantially reduce the frequency of school violence is uncertain. But Aronson has at least put his finger on the central problem, the fact that our high schools are places that generate hate. I think every high school teacher and parent in the country should read this book. We need to get past the simplistic solutions. (For more on this book, see my review in the September, 2000 issue of Psychology Today.)

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good introduction to Aronson's work, July 26, 2001

By 

S. "mediaddict" (Jamaica Plain, Morocco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nobody Left to Hate: Teaching Compassion After Columbine (Hardcover)

On one level, this book is a wonderful advertisement for the jigsaw classroom system and the benefits it can affect in schools. It also does a decent job of pointing out how many of the currently offered solutions to problems in school are really treating symptoms (violence, depression), and not the underlying causes (an overemphasis on inter-student competition). On another level, this book can serve as a very, *very* basic introduction to social psychological theory, almost like a case-study novella.

While this book is good for people looking for a quick and simple exploration of what those involved in the system can actually *do* to help make the school system a better place, the social psychology theory surrounding the ideas is explored to better fruition in his books 'The Social Animal' and 'Age of Propaganda'. Of course, those books are both more expensive and considerably longer than this slim, small volume. But if the ideas presented here spark your interest, I can highly suggest the other two books, and 'The Social Animal' in particular fleshes out the social psych theories that underlie 'Nobody Left To Hate'

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Saving our School Children, July 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Nobody Left to Hate: Teaching Compassion After Columbine (Hardcover)

This is a great book. It is perhaps the most important book I have read in the past five years. Elliot Aronson, an internationally renowned social psychologist provides us with a brilliant analysis of the causes of the epidemic of lethal violence in our schools and with some tried and true solutions to the problem. Eschewing the simple solutions like metal detectors and posting the Ten Commandments, he goes right to the heart of the matter--arguing convincingingly that in order to reduce violence in schools we must deal directly with the poisonous atmosphere of exclusion, taunting and bullying. We must not only teach reading, writing and arithmatic, we must also teach, cooperation, compassion and empathy.

His solution: We can achieve all of these things while, at the same time, improving academic performance. This can be done by employing the jigsaw method of instruction. This is a strategy which places students in small cooperative learning groups where students must cooperate with one another in order to learn the day's lesson. In the course of working together, they learn to respect one another, care about one another--even if they are from different background and different ethnic groups.

Twenty-five years of careful scientific research in dozens of scools shows that jigsaw works!

If all schools used the jigsaw at least some of the time, there would never be another Columbine tragedy. The jigsaw technique can be used by any teacher. Detailed instructions are available free on the Internet.

Nobody Left to Hate is must reading for teachers, parents and concerned citizens. The book is a delight to read: it reads like an exciting novel and it teaches like a master teacher.

Thank you, Professor Aronson for a remarkable gift!