I thought this was a hoax:

TAKING LESSONS FROM A BABY
The new issue of “Greater Good” profiles a Canadian program called Roots of Empathy that teaches compassion and parenting skills to children. The program’s key innovation is in designing its curriculum around the development of a newborn baby. Through the program, hundreds of newborn babies are paired up with local public school classrooms; the same baby visits the same classroom over the course of the school year. By watching “their” child develop physically and emotionally, the children gain a greater understanding of how to understand their own emotions and the emotions of others. Roots of Empathy has been rigorously evaluated by researchers, and they’ve found that the program not only improves participating students’ social skills but improves their academic achievement as well.

I would like to know where they find parents dumb enough to expose their newborn child to the many germs and illnesses that infest a school during the course of a year. At least the program is easy to implement:

The Roots of Empathy curriculum includes more than 600 pages of detailed lesson plans for helping children understand babies’ needs…

Wow, that is more than two Roots of Empathy lessons a day! I wonder how it is integrated into the academic curriculum:

For example, in math, her students calculate the cost effectiveness of cloth diapers versus disposables and discuss the environmental effects of choosing one over the other.

It is good to know that there is no environmental activism involved. This can’t possibly be a product of some hippie from the 1960s, right?

Although the program isn’t quite 10 years old, its origins go back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Gordon [the founder] taught junior kindergarten…

I am sold! See you in Canada.