J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only African-American Republican serving in the Senate, talks to reporters at the Capitol in Washington on Sept. 12 after he met with President Trump to discuss race and Mr. Trump's widely-criticized response to last month's protests and racial violence in Charlottesville, Va.

When Sen. Cory Booker, the Democrat from New Jersey, heard that his Republican colleague Tim Scott of South Carolina was meeting with President Trump to discuss racial issues in the wake of last month’s violence in Charlottesville, his initial reaction was: “God bless him for even trying.”

Like many in the African-American community, Senators Booker and Scott were both deeply offended by Mr. Trump’s statements casting blame on both sides for the tragic events that led to the death of one woman, and appearing to put white supremacists on an equal moral footing with those who oppose them. Mr. Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate – and a Trump supporter during the general election campaign – publicly accused the president of having compromised his “moral authority.”

So when Scott agreed to meet with Trump at the White House this week to talk through all this, Booker was admiring but not particularly hopeful. Still, he understood Scott’s motivation: “The more you know people who are different than you, the more that does ignite the capacity for empathy and compassion.”

It's true that personal connections have always been a powerful force in Washington. Friendships across the aisle can help pave the way for progress on some of the thorniest issues. For a president living in the White House “bubble,” having a diversity of voices around can be critical.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

President Trump speaks during a lunch meeting with Senate Republicans to discuss healthcare at the White House in July 2017. Among those seated with Mr. Trump are (from l.) Sen. Dean Heller (R) of Nevada, Sen. Tim Scott (R) of South Carolina, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) of Alaska.

But in the current highly charged, whipsaw political environment, achieving a meaningful shift in perspective – or even dialogue – on an issue as sensitive and emotional as race seems harder than ever. Indeed, a CBS News poll last month showed that while 82 percent of Democrats disapproved of the president’s response to Charlottesville, 67 percent of Republicans approved of it. Likewise, when a Fox News poll asked if Trump “respects racial minorities,” 82 percent of Republicans said yes; 92 percent of Democrats said no.

That divide might help explain why Trump would – all in a matter of days – hold a much-publicized meeting with Scott, sign a joint resolution of Congress condemning the violence in Charlottesville and white supremacists in general, and then double down on his original comments that “both sides” were to blame. As a result, an opportunity for greater understanding appeared to lead instead to more controversy.

On Wednesday, Scott came away from his Oval Office meeting “encouraged” by the president’s “attentive” listening. He told reporters he believed the president “got” his point that there can be no equivalence between white supremacists, with their centuries-long history of horrific treatment of minorities in this country, and today’s “antifa” – the violent anti-fascists confronting hate groups.

But that sense of connection would prove short-lived, as Trump just a day later reiterated his original comments, saying there are “bad dudes on the other side.” Since Charlottesville, Trump told reporters Thursday, “A lot of people are saying – in fact a lot of people have actually written, ‘Gee Trump might have a point.’ I said, you got some very bad people on the other side also, which is true.”

“Rome wasn’t built in a day, and to expect the president’s rhetoric to change based on one 30-minute conversation is unrealistic,” Scott’s office responded in a statement. His spokesperson said the senator was still pleased with the president’s commitment to diversifying his staff and supporting the senator’s “Opportunity Act,” which seeks to help poor and minority communities.

Scott's perspective  

During his meeting with the president, Scott made a point of sharing his personal story. As he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” last month, the president needs to have a “personal connection to the painful history of racism and bigotry in this country.”

Scott’s story is compelling. He and his siblings grew up poor in North Charleston, S.C., raised by a strong single mom who worked 16-hour days as a nurse’s assistant.

For a time, they lived with her parents in a tiny rental house on a dirt road. His grandfather, who never learned to read, picked cotton most of his life. When Scott drove him to vote for President Obama in 2008, he said he had tears in his eyes.

The young Scott nearly flunked out of high school, but was mentored by the owner of a Chick-fil-A franchise next to the movie theater where he worked. The owner hammered home the value of hard work and personal discipline. After college, Scott got into the insurance and real estate businesses.

Yet even now, after more than two decades in politics, he routinely gets stopped by law enforcement – a point he shared with Trump.

In a series of stirring Senate speeches on race in 2016, Scott described being pulled over by police seven times in one year, and being denied entry into congressional buildings even while wearing his member’s pin on his lapel.

“The officer looked at me with a little attitude and said, ‘The pin, I know. You, I don’t. Show me your ID,’ ” he said.

But while a story like this is undeniably powerful, many remain skeptical of its power to change Trump’s overall approach to racial issues.

“I don’t think it ever hurts for somebody to speak to the president about important issues like this,” says Ron Lester, a veteran Democratic pollster and an African-American. But he rejects the idea that the president’s divisive remarks can simply be attributed to a lack of contact with minorities. Trump “knows what he’s doing. He knows who he’s playing to” in his base of white supporters.

“Anybody who grows up in Queens and lives in New York for 70 years knows a lot of black people, knows a lot of Latino people, knows a lot of gay people,” Mr. Lester points out.

Knowing versus understanding

Over the years, Trump has counted a number of black celebrities and star athletes as his friends, from basketball talent Dennis Rodman, to boxing promoter Don King and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons (although in 2015, Mr. Simmons broke with then-candidate Trump over his so-called Muslim ban). The president’s housing secretary, Ben Carson, is African-American, as is White House aide Omarosa Manigault.

But while the president may have had plenty of contact with African-Americans over the years, that’s not the same as understanding them or their history. “There’s a difference between knowing black people and socializing with them. I think the president socializes with a lot of black people, but I don’t think they are his true friends,” says Raynard Jackson, a Republican consultant and head of a political action committee that aims to bring more African-Americans into the GOP.

Mr. Jackson says it’s unfair that Trump has been labeled a racist. The president has simply “made the sin that most leaders made – they discounted a whole body of people’s feelings.”

Regardless of how the president’s words come out or are meant, they are interpreted based on the experiences of those who hear them. “In his mind,” says Jackson, the president “may not have said anything he thought was offensive. But to a whole group of black people, they are.”

More minority staff needed 

What Trump needs, says Jackson, is closer relationships with African-Americans who will give him honest, hard-to-hear feedback.

Scott says he discussed with the president the importance of “diversifying those in the echo chamber” by adding those who may “think differently” – particularly by hiring more minority staff members.

After all, small steps can sometimes lead to bigger changes. Scott often points to his own election to the US House from a district that heard the first shots of the Civil War – and where he defeated the son of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, a one-time segregationist – as first-hand evidence that change is possible.

As for restoring the president’s moral authority, that “will be based on America’s reaction," Scott says. "And it will take time.”

Susan Walsh/AP

Vice President Mike Pence (c.) answers a reporter's question on Sept. 10 during his visit to Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Washington to see the response to hurricane Irma. Standing with Pence are (from l.) Kysa George, the Private Sector Liaison, FEMA Office of Pubic Affairs, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.

After hurricane Harvey hit Texas ‒ and in the lead-up to hurricane Irma ‒ Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, made clear his feelings about discussing climate change in the context of the storms.

Such discussions about the role climate change might have played were “insensitive” and “misplaced,” he said, since all attention should be on helping people in need.

A host of critics – including the Republican mayor of Miami – disagreed.

But if climate change has become such a politicized topic that discussing its role in intensifying storms like Irma and Harvey is only likely to lead to more polarization and policy gridlock, there is another topic that is getting not just traction, but meaningful action across the political spectrum: resilience planning.

And increasingly, some experts are arguing there is good reason to decouple the two debates from each other. For one thing, not every disaster can be linked to climate change. Debating which storm fits under that umbrella, and which is simply a matter of typical weather fluctuation, does little to help communities cope with either type of storm. What's more, some of those experts hope that approaching such policy decisions through the less controversial lenses of resilience, risk, adaptation, and disaster preparedness can be a portal to the tougher – and more politically fraught – conversation about mitigation and carbon emissions. 

Stephen Yang/Reuters

Pastor Louicesse Dorsaint stands with his wife, Maria Dorsaint, on Sept. 12 in front of their church, Haitian United Evangelical Mission, which was damaged by flooding from hurricane Irma in Immokalee, Fla.

“If you start with resilience, there’s so much learning that takes place through that process,” says Michelle Wyman, executive director of the National Council for Science and the Environment, a Washington-based nonprofit that works to improve the scientific basis for environmental decisionmaking. A conversation about flood planning might start at a local level, she explains, and bring in existing data. “Without fully realizing it, you end up very often with an outcome that includes policymakers and community folks, can trickle up to the state level, and all of a sudden we’re having a climate discussion. It makes something that’s really complicated a little easier to digest.”

Bringing a global conversation home

One reason resilience is an easier – and less politicized – topic to take on is that it’s so concrete, and so local, says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. He says climate-change activists, in some ways, made a strategic mistake by refusing to discuss adaptation a couple decades ago because they didn’t want to give the impression that we could adapt our way out of the problem. They only wanted to talk about mitigation – how to reduce carbon emissions and change the direction of global warming.

“The problem is that mitigation is fundamentally a global conversation ... at a level the vast majority of humanity does not think about,” says Professor Leiserowitz. “Most of us are intensely local.”

The challenges that towns on the Gulf Coast face are fundamentally different from those challenges faced by communities in North Texas, or the Chesapeake Bay, or Northern California. At the community level, the politically charged and abstract discussion of causation matters less than the tangible effects of changing rain, flood, and weather patterns.

“For the Republican mayor of Miami Beach, this isn’t some abstraction. The streets of his city are flooding on perfectly blue-sky sunny days,” says Leiserowitz. “So he knows there’s a risk now, an increasing risk that on more and more days those streets are going to be flooded.”

Miami Beach, he notes, recently spent about $500 million to increase the resiliency of the city, elevating streets and installing pumps.

For Fairhope, Ala., devastating flooding in back-to-back years with hurricanes Ivan and Katrina prompted new, more resilient building practices, and an embracing of “fortified” building standards.

Moore, Okla., and Greensburg, Kan. – both nearly destroyed by tornadoes – are other frequently cited examples of cities that took on the idea of resilience and preparedness as they rebuilt.

“What turns an extreme event into a disaster is what happens to the infrastructure, and we can do a better job of planning,” says Jennifer Jacobs, an engineering professor at the University of New Hampshire and director of the Infrastructure and Climate Network. “There’s a lot of bottom-up effort going on from the citizens in a community saying, whatever the disaster is, or just something that causes them not to be able to get to work, they don’t find that acceptable.” Whether those disasters are tied to climate change often doesn’t matter to them, she adds.

A 'sea change' in disaster planning

Joshua Behr, a research professor at the Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center at Old Dominion University, has been working with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to generate hyper-local models – down to the neighborhood level – of disaster recovery times in the Hampton Roads region, an area that stretches from northeast North Carolina almost up to Washington, D.C.

In his modeling, he looks at the impacts, in particular, on vulnerable populations – those who are medically fragile, or low-to-moderate income, or elderly – and what sort of barriers they might have to evacuation, or to recovery after the disaster.

Such modeling, he says, has helped to identify policies – often with a relatively small investment – that can help such populations get to safety before a disaster and recover more quickly after one.

Professor Behr says he’s seen a “sea change” in how such disaster planning is approached over the past decade or two, going from involving just a small group of emergency responders to including all sorts of related groups: advocacy groups, nonprofits, hospitals, food banks. To some extent, he thinks social media – and the farther reach it gives to disasters – has helped that rise.

“There’s a sense of intimacy with these impending storms that wasn’t around 10 or 15 or 20 years ago,” he says.

Such planning can sometimes rely on scientific projections, like sea-level rise, that is politicized, Behr acknowledges, but says it’s helped to be transparent about the assumptions and different modeling approaches. In the past, he says people who were skeptical were sometimes shouted down in meetings and simply left.

“Now, those conversations are being more frank and real about the assumptions and uncertainties involved, and those voices are starting to come back to the table,” he says.

That language of risk – so central to any sort of resiliency planning – can be a noncontroversial and less partisan way to get into climate discussions, say many experts.

Everyone – from those in the financial and insurance sectors to farmers deciding what to plant – understands the concept of risk, and how to prepare for possibilities.

“That language and context of risk can get the [climate debate] out of ‘it’s going to blow up the world’ or ‘it’s not a problem at all’ and into the real area of gray where we all make decisions in our daily lives,” says Leiserowitz.

Leiserowitz is among those who sees a benefit to talking about resilience and disaster planning in a less polarized language, but also a danger in decoupling that conversation too much from the broader climate change debate. 

“In the end, our ability to adapt to the kind of changes we’re potentially facing is small,” he says. “At this point, we’ve dillied and dallied and dithered long enough.”

Jennifer Larsen, a soft-spoken Danish teacher, strides into the classroom undeterred. She tells the 12- and 13-year-old students to put away their cellphones and fidget spinners. Some continue to goof off. But as she starts her weekly lesson in “social learning,” which begins with a “check-in” to gauge how each child is feeling, they quiet down.

Ms. Larsen’s main lesson of the day involves taping two signs to different ends of the classroom with the words “I agree” and “I disagree.” She then reads a series of personal statements: “I want to be better at solving problems with my friend.” “When I get angry I want to hit someone.”

The students in the sixth-year class at the Møllevang school in Faxe, a municipality in rural Denmark southwest of Copenhagen, have answered these questions before. But that exercise was done anonymously: Their heads were down and they responded by raising their hands. This time they are told to move to a side of the room that best characterizes their answer, publicly staking positions that even some adults might find hard to be candid about.

“I have friends who help me when I’m sad or mad,” Larsen continues. The children shuffle around the room, but, in the end, only one boy stands at the “I disagree” wall. With a nervous laugh, he notes his solitary position. “But you are very honest – that is very good,” Larsen says. “It doesn’t mean you don’t have any friends.”

Sara Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

Fifth-year students in Roskilde, Denmark, take part in ‘klassenstime,’ during which students talk through problems with teachers.

As rudimentary as it is, the lesson in this kinetic classroom of students in hoodies and track pants is designed to teach social awareness and instill empathy – and in the process make Denmark and perhaps even Europe a more civil place to live. It is part of a mandatory course added to the curriculum in this municipality in the hopes of teaching students to care for one another at a young age, a quality that school leaders worry is being increasingly lost in modern society.

Around the world, the importance of empathy as a character trait is garnering increased attention in an age of rapid technological change that experts worry is breeding narcissism and physically cutting people off from one another. This is to say nothing of the polarized politics that has deepened a sense of “us” versus “them” in many Western democracies, including the United States. 

At its deepest level, encouraging empathy is seen as a step toward moving away from the ethos of individualism that characterized 20th-century societies toward a greater tolerance of other cultures in the interconnected world of the 21st century.

Numerous pilot programs are under way in the US to foster emotional intelligence in students, including an $11 million experiment in Kentucky called the Compassionate Schools Project. Other initiatives are taking root from China to Finland.

In Denmark, empathy has long been a part of the zeitgeist of the nation, taught and valued everywhere, from preschools to corporate suites. Many parents consider their children’s kindness in the classroom just as crucial as their math or science scores.

But here, too, pressure is mounting for the country to do more. Debates about immigration rage domestically and across Europe amid the refugee crisis and a wave of terrorist attacks. At the same time, access to the internet is increasing the chances of cyberbullying and the isolation of young people. As a new school year starts in Denmark, teachers and academics are refocusing attention on some of the country’s oldest methods of empathy education, and establishing new programs such as the one in Faxe, which they say is crucial to countering all the negativity and division.

Sara Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

Elina Sommer (l.) and Jane Sterup help solve social problems in the schools in Faxe, Denmark, and have come up with a ‘social learning’ course being studied in districts across the country.

“Empathy is very important for democracy,” says Mette Løvbjerg, Møllevang’s headmaster. “You can’t have a democracy that is functioning if nobody puts themselves in another one’s shoes.... If we don’t teach our children that, then we don’t have a democracy in 50 years. It’s under pressure already.”

Bullying, teen suicide, school shootings: these were the crises that generated some of the new thinking about educators’ responsibility for the emotional health of students in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Schools in the US and other countries urgently devised prevention programs, while a more ambitious movement took root. Known as social and emotional learning, it has spread rapidly, going from fringe idea to mainstream acceptance in the past decade.

SEL programs go much further than specific prevention campaigns. The curricula aim to help students navigate negative emotions, empathize with peers, foster more resilience, and stay calm and focused. Research has shown these skills not only correlate with academic achievement, they can also predict future success, in some cases more than traditional markers such as grades. One 2015 study published in the American Journal of Public Health followed kindergartners over almost two decades. Researchers concluded that those with greater social-emotional skills were more likely to experience “future wellness” in schools and jobs. They were less likely to become criminals or have serious substance abuse problems.

Mark Greenberg, a leading researcher in the field of emotional development in schools who co-wrote the 2015 study, says these revelations changed perceptions in educational circles. “I think the whole issue of social and emotional learning as a central issue for education is growing dramatically in schools around the world,” he says. Empathy in particular has gotten increasing attention for a variety of reasons, he says, among them “the problems of hatred that we are seeing, and the [decline in] understanding others.”

SEL is not without critics. Some worry that it conflicts with the rigors of academia. Others don’t see the classroom as being the place to teach everything about human character. Still others, including Dr. Greenberg, say that while many programs – such as meditation – sound like a good idea, schools often don’t measure their effectiveness. 

Sara Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

‘YOU HAVE TO FEEL GOOD IN SCHOOL TO LEARN SOMETHING. FOR US, YOU CAN’T HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER.’ – Jonas Borup, Danish Ministry of Education

In Denmark, the tension between academics and well-being is less pronounced, even if it is growing. Developing the “whole child,” not just good students, is a mantra heard from the Ministry of Education on down. Teaching is understood to entail both uddannelse and dannelse, the first being the classical concept of academic training, the other the formation of good citizens and their ability to morally relate to the world.

“What comes first, academic skills or well-being? We can’t answer,” says Jonas Borup, who works on the inclusion team at the Danish Ministry of Education in Copenhagen. “You have to feel good in school to learn something. For us, you can’t have one without the other.”

Recently some academics in the US have proposed that schools should integrate such instruction into daily teaching, rather than offer weekly or monthly SEL classes.

In other words, do what’s de rigueur in Denmark. 

On a recent morning, first-year teacher Helle Eskesen at the Øster Farimagsgades school in Copenhagen receives a visit from a young student who has injured her eye. The girl tells her instructor she is concerned that other students will make fun of her because of the swelling. So Ms. Eskesen makes a quick decision: She calls a “class meeting” to talk it through to prevent any teasing.

Later in the class, the teacher spends time with each student before they break for recess, going over what activities they plan to do and ensuring that no one is left out. Both moves are classic Danish empathy education, moves fused into normal instruction and going beyond just holding an occasional class on the subject.

“It’s not Empathy 101 in Denmark,” says Jessica Alexander, an American writer who co-wrote “The Danish Way of Parenting,” which looks in part at how empathy is taught in schools, with Danish family psychotherapist Iben Sandahl.

Danish schools are staffed by “AKT” teachers (the initialism stands for behavior, contact, and well-being in Danish). Larsen, the teacher at Møllevang, is one. Like her, other AKT teachers often have their own classrooms, as well as the responsibility for addressing social conflict as it arises. They help students work together and engage those who feel lonely or left out.

Klassenstime further buttresses character education. It is an hour traditionally set aside for teachers to deal with the social side of their students. The concept has recently been revamped, but it is so ingrained in the culture that there is a cake named after it. 

Sometimes klassenstime works almost like mediation to tackle a problem. Girls and boys might be separated to deal with specific issues. Other times instructors teach emotional awareness with programs such as Cat-KIT, a communications tool to help students navigate many different situations – for instance, when a child gets angry during recess, says one of its founders, Annette Nielsen.

This kind of attention to children’s emotional needs – and their awareness of others – is widely supported in Danish society. “As a parent, I treasure much more that they’re good people ... than that they get high grades,” says Ms. Sandahl, who is also a former schoolteacher and has written a new book, “Play the Danish Way.”

By many measures, Denmark already excels at instilling emotional well-being. Since the European Union started ranking happiness in 1973 as part of its Eurobarometer surveys, Denmark has come out on top almost every year. Other polls rank Danes among the highest in the world in caring, freedom, health, and income. 

Sara Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

Sixth-year students Cilie Noddebo (l.) and Anne-Kathrine Hjarthjob both take the ‘social learning’ class in Faxe, Denmark, that stresses empathy and caring about others. They say the class fosters a unifying spirit. Danish society is being challenged by a surge of migrants from the Middle East.

Foreigners have been fascinated by the country’s culture, writing a multitude of books on everything from the ethos of hygge, which roughly translates into being together in a cozy manner, to its generous welfare systems to its flat corporate hierarchies. Christian Bjørnskov, an economist and leading researcher on Danish happiness, says he believes trust in others lies at the heart of the Danes’ sense of satisfaction. 

“The more you learn about other people, and are taught to respect them and tolerate the way they live, the more you trust others,” Mr. Bjørnskov says.

Still, Denmark is facing challenges that would sound familiar to American educators. The first is academic pressure. On tests administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that measure scholastic performance of 15-year-olds in mathematics, science, and reading, Denmark was coming in below its peers in northern Europe. What alarmed administrators was how much those from disadvantaged homes, including immigrant households, lagged behind. Bridging that gap was the impetus behind a far-reaching educational reform in 2014 that, among other things, made the school day longer by about an hour. The latest rankings show Danes scoring above the OECD average in all three subjects for the first time.

Some teachers complain that the latest reforms are still too academic in focus. They formally removed klassenstime as a subject set aside in the schedule, for example, though teachers have the autonomy to continue it during allotted “extra hours.” “Everything is now about what the students can do, and can’t do. Everything is measured,” says pedagogical supervisor Elina Sommer, who co-created the “social learning” program in the Faxe schools. “The soft values, like empathy, how to be social, well-being, it’s like they are faded out.”

The Ministry of Education counters that the reforms are aimed at improving academic performance and preserving the enduring focus on contentment and character. Mr. Borup notes, for instance, that along with the reform package the ministry implemented a national assessment of well-being for every class in 2015.

Until recently, encouraging social cohesion has been relatively easy in Nordic societies, which have long been far more homogeneous in terms of culture, religion, and income than most countries. Yet immigration, especially as migrants poured into Europe in 2015, has caused more dissension. Newcomers from the Middle East in particular have become a flashpoint, giving a boost to the anti-migrant Danish People’s Party that has hardened political rhetoric across the board. 

Last year Danes stunned the world with the adoption of a controversial “jewelry law,” which allows authorities to confiscate cash and goods from refugees and asylum-seekers to fund their integration costs. The law has sparked the kind of incendiary rhetoric that has characterized immigration debates in the US under the Trump administration and in Britain after a majority there voted to leave the EU.

It’s also brought new tensions to classrooms.

At the Hedegårdenes school in Roskilde, west of Copenhagen, one-third of the 400 students, from the first year of school through the ninth year, come from immigrant backgrounds, and another third from what administrators call troubled homes. The school has received 50 Syrian refugees as well. As a result, says Thomas Brinch, vice principal, “the work with empathy is more important than ever.” 

“The kids need to treat each other with respect no matter where they are from, what their religion is.” But it’s also important, he says, that children from other countries learn how to fit into Danish society. 

Schools see empathy as a way to deal with another challenge as well: the saturation of social media. The impact of technology on young people’s behavior is being carefully monitored in Denmark, simply because it is one of the most connected countries in the EU, says Camilla Mehlsen, who writes about education and technology (and whose 9-year-old has an iPhone). According to EU Kids Online, an international research network, 81 percent of Danish children use the internet daily, compared with an average of 60 percent in Europe overall. 

Social media is the subject of klassenstime on a recent day in the classroom of Ida Nielsen, a fifth-year teacher at the Hedegårdenes school. The class has drawn up social media user guidelines together and is now discussing what they mean in practice. One of the first rules sounds simple enough: Don’t say anything mean.

But it leads one boy to question if that just applies to people, or whether they may make negative statements about not liking longer school hours. Another asks if they are allowed to say mean things about Donald Trump in relation to climate change, after he pulled the US out of the Paris climate accord. “But he is also a person, too,” another classmate counters.

Such discussions are crucial, says Ms. Nielsen, when asked about the pressures to devote time to academic learning during the day. “This is their lives,” she says. She also sees fostering well-being as a way to clear space for academics. “It sets you free to learn stuff,” she says, “if you don’t have a lot of conflicts and problems all the time.” 

Students are given a lot of freedom. In Nielsen’s class, one youngster chooses not to sit at his desk at all. Elsewhere students drape legs over chairs. In a first-year class at another school in Copenhagen, one boy says he is feeling angry so he tells his teacher he is leaving the room – and does cartwheels down the hallway for a few minutes.

It would be easy to conclude that it is the students who rule the schools. But Mr. Brinch, Hedegårdenes’s vice principal, disagrees. “They have to feel comfortable to learn,” he says. “Sometimes they need to take a walk. Adults, we like that, too.”

Still, some Danish educators think the country isn’t doing enough to encourage empathy and well-being. 

In Faxe, teachers recall a group of sixth-year students a few years ago who were part of what became known as the “hell class.” Students often booed each other and hurled insults. Jane Sterup, who works as a special educator and pedagogical supervisor with Ms. Sommer, was called in to sort it out.

She instituted new forms of communication, started the daily “check-ins,” and tried other exercises to promote tolerance and respect. “There was no more booing,” says Ms. Sterup. 

Today those efforts have evolved into a mandatory course for second- and sixth-year students and is being adopted as a requirement by all schools in the area. Sommer and Sterup are sharing their lesson plans with other districts across the country as well.

Students, for their part, don’t seem to mind the character training along with the reading and writing, either. “It teaches us to be together in a good way,” says Cilie Noddebo, a 12-year-old emerging from Larsen’s “social learning” class. 

Still, not everyone embraces so much emphasis on students’ souls. Sterup says some parents have told them the lessons they’re imparting belong at home. “They say, ‘that is the parents’ problem, not the school’s problem.’ But the problem is in school, so it is our problem,” she says. 

The two have been called “old-fashioned.” That’s just fine with them. 

As Sommer puts it: “Let us be together, like humans, to have hygge time, to talk, play games, not always be with a phone or an iPad, not always think about studies, tests, academics, career. Just be together.”

Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

Chrissy Metz arrives at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Grants Banquet at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on Aug. 2, 2017, in Beverly Hills, Calif. Ms. Metz is nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama for her role in the NBC hit "This Is Us," in which she plays a character struggling with her weight.

Sonya Renee Taylor has complicated feelings about the NBC series, “This Is Us.”

She was thrilled to see that one of the show’s main plotlines centered on Kate, a woman whose complex relationships with family, food, and love are exquisitely portrayed by Chrissy Metz. Nothing like that had been produced – would even have been possible – in the 1980s, when Ms. Taylor was growing up. “There were not bodies that looked like mine on television,” she says.

But the fact that Kate’s story revolves largely around her misery over her weight doesn’t sit well with Taylor, a performance poet who runs a company called The Body Is Not An Apology and advocates for what she calls radical self-love.

“Hooray, there’s this fat woman in a lead role,” Taylor says, “but when do we get over the idea that fatness is the worst thing that can happen to you?”

Taylor’s conflicted reaction to Kate’s character speaks to a broader, but equally discordant, discourse around body and beauty norms, and the portrayal of weight in Hollywood. There’s no doubt that film and TV have begun to respond to audiences’ desire for characters, especially female characters, larger than a size zero – or six or 12. That’s clear in the bankability of Melissa McCarthy; the development of shows and films with plus-size leads, like “Patti Cake$”, “Dietland”, and “Dumplin’”; and Ms. Metz’s nomination at this Sunday's Emmy Awards for her role in “This Is Us.”

It’s just as clear that Hollywood maintains petite as standard size. Leading roles – indeed, most roles – still go to actors who are far thinner than average. (The National Center for Health Statistics estimates the average American woman is just under 5 foot 4 and weighs 168.5 pounds.) The weight-loss-as-victory narrative is still a primary plotline for both plus-size characters and actual celebrities. And the likes of actor Jennifer Lawrence and model Cara Delevigne still say they’re told they’re too fat.

Suzanne Hanover/Universal Pictures/AP

Melissa McCarthy (from l.), Ellie Kemper, Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig are shown in a scene from "Bridesmaids."

The tension reflects a peculiar cultural moment. While the body positivity movement is coming into its own both on- and offline, messaging around the “right” shape and size continue to dominate popular media. It’s a moment that academics and advocates alike say calls for a kind of societal self-reflection – an occasion to ask ourselves what we value most in our culture and how we’d like those values represented in the media we consume.

“Hollywood can be a way of humanizing and creating empathy. It can be very powerful,” says Abigail Saguy, a cultural sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the 2013 book, “What’s Wrong with Fat?” The question is whether the industry and its audiences are willing or ready to change the conversation around fat and body image.

“I’m not sure how strong that desire is yet,” Professor Saguy says.

***

In one of her first scenes on “This Is Us,” Kate stands in front of a scale in her underwear. She pulls off her earrings, takes a deep breath, and steps onto the edge. And then she tips backwards and falls. It’s Kate’s rock bottom: sitting on her bathroom floor, ankle aflame, miserable in her own body.

“She has this kind of epiphany,” Metz explains in an interview on YouTube. “‘My life is passing me by, and how do I fix it? If my self-worth is attached to my weight, let me focus on this in order to change my life and the trajectory of where it’s going.’”

To some, the scene is resonant. “Most people affected with obesity are pictured in a very stigmatizing, biased way … and play into those stereotypes of fat means stupid or lazy,” says James Zervios, a founding member of the Obesity Action Coalition, a nonprofit that works to empower people with obesity and provide access to care and resources.

While weight loss drives Kate’s decisions through the show’s first season, she is also more than her size; she’s funny and charming and smart, and her on-again, off-again relationship with Chris Sullivan’s Toby is almost too adorable. It’s a powerful departure from caricatures like “Fat Monica” from “Friends,” who is treated as a joke until she becomes thin, or the bumbling Klumps in “The Nutty Professor” series, Mr. Zervios says.

Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

Justin Hartley (from l.), Chrissy Metz and Sterling K. Brown who star in the TV show "This is Us" attend the 2017 Winter Television Critics Association press tour on Jan. 18 in Pasadena, Calif.

But to others, Kate personifies a principal and problematic narrative for the fat person in Hollywood: In order for a character of size to be worthy – of attention, of love, of dignity – he or she needs to want, or be trying, to lose weight. His or her other attributes become nothing but add-ons to that singular defining goal.

“When the only stories you see outside of the sassy fat friend are people who are dieting and miserable with their bodies, it makes you feel that’s the way all fat people are,” says Sarah Hollowell, a self-professed “fat writer lady” of essays, poetry, and young adult fiction. “You start to feel that the only part of your story that matters is when are you going to be skinny.”

***

For most of human history, fat was considered a sign of wealth and strength. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, as the food supply increased, that elites in the West began to cultivate an aesthetic that hinged on thinness and, particularly for women, delicacy. “It became low-class and immoral to be fat,” says Emily Fox-Kales, author of “Body Shots: Hollywood and the Culture of Eating Disorders.”

Then 20th-century medical professionals linked negative health effects to excess weight. By the time former US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop declared obesity a public health crisis in 1996, Western culture had done a complete about-face about fat: The goal became to shed it at all costs, and bodies that continued to carry it merited derision.

Popular media reflected and perpetuated those attitudes. While there were exceptions, such as the 1980s hit, “Roseanne,” fat characters usually were the butt of the joke or reviled villains – think Jabba the Hutt or Danny DeVito’s Penguin in “Batman Returns.” In other cases, fat was portrayed as punishment. The trailer for “Fattitude: A Body Positive Documentary” features a clip from “Scooby-Doo” in which Daphne – the svelte, red-haired sleuth – is transformed into a chubby version of herself. “Now you have brought the curse down upon yourself!” a voice booms, as Daphne screams.

“Her curse is she has to be a fat lady. Her curse is she has to look like me,” feminist critic and author Lindy West says in the documentary. “And I’m supposed to show that to my kids and have them internalize that narrative?”

This isn’t to say that weight has no bearing on health, notes Saguy at UCLA. But a person’s value shouldn’t rest on how fit they are. Plus, the double whammy of hostility from the medical community and pop culture creates a feedback loop that is neither helpful nor accurate, she and others say.

“There is no study that says someone who has been fat shamed is healthier than someone who isn’t,” says Kjerstin Gruys, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her recovery from an eating disorder inspired her to shun mirrors for a year – and write a book about it. “Any time the solution is ‘these people need to know that they’re fat and it’s a problem,’ you’re creating inequality and shame and neither of those things predict good health outcomes.”

***

As polarizing as Kate’s character in “This Is Us” has been for body positivity advocates, the role is nonetheless a marker for gradually changing views around size and weight. Among those preceding her are Ms. McCarthy’s Sookie St. James in “Gilmore Girls,” Nikki Blonsky’s Will Rader in ABC’s “Huge,” Rebel Wilson’s Fat Amy in the film series “Pitch Perfect,” and Gabourey Sidibe’s Becky in the Fox hit “Empire.”

None of these characters are perfect. Rather they are at times tortured, ambitious, and vengeful, as well was funny, silly, and in love. And that’s precisely the point, says Lindsey Averill, co-creator of “Fattitude.” 

“The representations we need are not representations that are specifically saying only positive things about fat bodies,” she says. “The representations we need are those that actually represent the lives of fat people.”

For now, at least, there’s yearning for more. August saw the release of “Patti Cake$,” which follows Jersey native Patricia Dombrowski in her quest for rap glory. Newcomer Danielle Macdonald, who plays Patti, will also star in the 2018 film “Dumplin’,” based on the novel by Julie Murphy about a self-proclaimed fat teenager who enters a beauty pageant in her Texas hometown.

Ms. Murphy, who grew up almost avoiding books and movies with fat people in them because “I knew what I was going to get,” recalls the first time she saw the 2015 film “Spy.” The movie featured McCarthy sporting a dark trench and a sleek dark hairstyle.

“It was like a moment when you catch your breath and you see someone who looks like you, and you don’t realize how much you’ve wanted that and needed that until it happens,” Murphy says. “I hope Dumplin’ can be that moment for somebody.”

Next year will also see the release of the AMC adaptation of Sarai Walker’s novel “Dietland,” which examines society’s disdain for fat women through the eyes of Plum Kettle, the 300-pound assistant to a teen magazine editor. “I had been really reluctant to sell the TV and film rights to 'Dietland’,” Ms. Walker says. “I was like, ‘No way is this going to be Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit.’”

She says she was surprised – and pleased – when executive producer Marti Noxon handed her a screenplay that stayed true to the story she’d written. “When I read the pilot, I had tears in my eyes,” Walker says.

Taylor, the poet, says these are reasons to celebrate, even though a broad acceptance of size is “far slower moving than some of our other awakenings around bodies.”

Still, she says, “The more we’re willing to tell stories that are filled with rich, diverse people, diverse bodies, who have rich, diverse experiences that are both awesome and awful, hard and triumphant, the more we begin to see that reflected in our world.”

The black limo pulled up in front of the Princess of Wales Theatre as throngs of screaming fans positioned themselves for the big moment. The passenger door opened and out stepped – Judi Dench. The 42nd annual Toronto International Film Festival, which screened 255 feature-length movies in 11 days, hosted many celebrities – George Clooney! Angelina Jolie! – but I found it oddly comforting that Dench, indomitable in her 80s and appearing here as Queen Victoria in “Victoria and Abdul,” should also rate the selfie treatment.

This year’s festival, it was announced beforehand, had 20 percent fewer films than last year. Apparently distributors and the press had been complaining that too many movies were getting lost in the shuffle. Not that I noticed much difference. The glut is, as usual, exhilaratingly overwhelming, the lines just as long. I saw close to 20 films, often three a day. More so than in previous years, it seems, the festival is front-loaded with Oscar bait. Increasingly Toronto has become the equivalent of the fall fashion line for Academy Award contenders, some of which already have distributors and release dates.

At least three such films – Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!,” a gruesomely effective horror thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence; Stephen Frears’s charmingly pokey “Victoria and Abdul”; and Jolie’s powerful “First They Killed My Father”–  actually opened in theaters while the festival was still running. Their appearance here served little other purpose than to provide Oscar cred.

The opening night movie was “Borg McEnroe,” or, as many festivalgoers dubbed it, “the other tennis movie” – the other one being “Battle of the Sexes,” starring Emma Stone as Billie Jean King and Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs. (To add to the pileup, the US Open was being televised during the festival.) The Björn Borg in “Borg McEnroe” is played by a Swedish actor, Sverrir Gudnason, whose long locks are on full display. Shia LaBeouf, who was on his best behavior in Toronto, with no public tantrums, is bad boy upstart John McEnroe. It’s a serioso sports movie. Watching it, you’d think winning Wimbledon was tantamount to suiting up for D-Day. “Battle of the Sexes” is peachier but also preachier.

Courtesy of A24

Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Kimberly Prince star in 'The Florida Project.'

The big-ticket movies – the international film festival prizewinners, or those aiming for the Oscars – crowded the lineup early on. A few  of these films had already been unleashed and reviewed at the recently concluded Telluride Film Festival, or in Venice, the end of which overlaps the beginning of Toronto. As I ticked off one highly-touted movie after another, I felt flummoxed in more than a few instances. The “buzz” at Toronto is a mixture of hype and holler and often bears little relation to the actual quality of the films. Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” which won the top prize in Venice, is a cold-war fantasia about a mousy mute, played charmingly by Sally Hawkins, who romances a water creature (think the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but artier) being held captive in a military facility. As more than a few of my colleagues kidded, “It’s ‘E.T.’ with sex.”

Ruben Östlund’s “The Square,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May, was another head-scratcher. Östlund previously made the terrific “Force Majeure,” and sections of his new film, which is about the bizarre travails of the director of a tony Swedish art museum, are first-rate. But this is also an otherwise realistic movie in which a character, with no explanation given, is seen co-habiting with a gorilla. Call me literal-minded, but might we know the reason why?

Alexander Payne’s “Downsizing” has a great premise and begins promisingly. In order to rescue the environment, Norwegian scientists have devised a way to shrink humans to about five inches in height. A suburban couple from Omaha, played by Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig, decide to take the plunge and join the expanding corps of the miniaturized living out their dreams in the comforts of a little-people community called Leisureland. But about halfway through, Payne shifts gears and the film turns into an eco-apocalyptic tract. He downsizes the film’s best possibilities.

Two filmmakers made their solo directorial debuts: Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” in which she does not appear, is about a high school upstart, self-nicknamed Lady Bird and played with antic energy by Saoirse Ronan, who aches to flee her stultifying life in – horrors – suburban Sacramento, Calif. It’s an audience favorite that is rather too adept at punching all the right buttons. George Clooney’s “Suburbicon,” about a black family that moves into an all-white suburban neigborhood, has a script co-written by Joel and Ethan Coen and stars the everpresent Matt Damon. It’s a bewildering mash-up of Coens-style film noir nastiness and a tract on racism in 1950s America. Aaron Sorkin’s “Molly’s Game” is about the real-life Molly Bloom, a Colorado cocktail waitress and former skier played by Jessica Chastain in her best ice queen mode, who becomes the empress of illegal high-stakes poker games in New York and Los Angeles. Few screenwriters are as adept at scenes in which characters vehemently tell each other off, but the wall-to-wall gabble proves exhausting after a while.

Jonathan Blanc/Courtesy of The New York Public Library

The entrance to the New York Public Library - from the documentary 'Ex Libris: The New York Public Library.'

So what did I love at Toronto? Frederick Wiseman’s almost-3-1/2-hour documentary “Ex Libris: New York Public Library,” is yet another in this astonishing director’s roster of great movies about social institutions. But to characterize his film in that way is like saying “Citizen Kane” is a movie about politics. “Ex Libris” gets inside the workings of a great American resource and the many people whose lives are touched by it. It’s not only an ode to the New York Public Library and its many branches. It’s an ode to New York itself. It even comes with a message of sorts, never more timely, when a library director declares that “access to information is the fundamental solution to inequality in our times.”

Best by far of the narrative films I saw was Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project,” a lyrically discursive movie about a run-down motel and its run-down inhabitants near Disney World. Willem Dafoe plays, with great grace, the motel manager, but the remainder of the cast members are almost all nonactors. Baker, you may recall, once shot an entire feature, “Tangerine,” on iPhones. (Even more remarkably, it was terrific.) The movie features a remarkable roster of child actors, headed by the 7-year-old Brooklynn Prince, who gives one of the best performances I’ve ever seen from one so young. At his best, Baker rivals François Truffaut in his ability to get inside a child’s perceptions.

Florida, of course, was on many people’s minds in Toronto, even more so because the festival is a crucial gathering place for Miami’s film industry. The real world has a sneaky way of intruding on the hoopla. Real-world horrors are the basis for Angelina Jolie’s “First They Killed My Father,” based on the bestselling memoir by Cambodian refugee Loung Ung, who was 5 when, in 1975, the Khmer Rouge overthrew Lon Nol’s military rule and turned Cambodia into a killing field. She lost both her parents and two of her seven siblings. Jolie read the book and befriended Ung, who served as a co-producer on the film and who appeared onstage after the gala screening, seeming impossibly, inspiringly happy. I spoke afterward with Jolie, who told me that “one of the first things the Khmer Rouge did was kill the artists, and this is a testament to the power of artists.” She went on, “We had to show the horrors, but the film is not about horror. I made it for Cambodia, as a kind of thank you, a love letter.”

Oh, and what of Judi Dench? I met her, too. Sorry I didn’t get her to pose for a selfie with me, but, you know, she’s Judi Dench. Plus she’s playing Queen Victoria. I asked her what that was like, to play the queen for a second time. (The first was in “Mrs Brown.”) “Well,” she said, with her usual directness, “she’s just a human being, isn’t she?”

Reuters

94 of 900NORTHKOREA-MISSILES/ A woman peeps through a barbed-wire fence decorated with ribbons bearing messages wishing for the unification between the two Koreas near the demilitarised zone separating the two Koreas in Paju, South Korea, Sept. 15.

A common predictor of war is whether enough people expect one. A new Gallup poll, for example, finds 58 percent of Americans support military action against North Korea if economic and diplomatic efforts fail to end its nuclear threat. That figure is up from 47 percent in 2003. Such polling, however, is enlightening for two reasons. It presumes the public might have a say on whether a conflict breaks out. And it focuses more on the possibility of warmaking than on peacemaking.

A bias has long existed in international affairs to look at the likelihood of a conflict breaking out, a sort of fear-based model of analysis that presumes peace is merely the absence of war and that people can be led by fear. Much of the analysis thus looks at “negative drivers” for war, such as a country’s economic and social fragility or a national leader’s desire to stay in power. Experts on North Korea, for example, debate the worst aspects of the regime in Pyongyang, such as its irrational behavior, and whether those factors will lead to nuclear conflict.

The reverse type of analysis receives far less attention. “There is little data and evidence on positive drivers, or ‘positive interrupters’ or ‘resilience,’ ” states the Institute for Economics & Peace in a new report about methods used to assess the risks of war. This bias toward negative factors results in missed opportunities for peace, the report concludes.

It was because of such bias that the United Nations acted in 1981 to designate International Peace Day, which will again be celebrated on Sept. 21. (In 2001, the General Assembly voted for the day to be used for cease-fires.) The annual celebration presumes peace is not only attainable but that it is an activity that should include everyone, not only politicians and diplomats.

A global momentum to focus more on peacemaking made a big step last year when the Security Council and General Assembly embraced the concept of “sustaining peace” in many UN initiatives. One of the universal goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is to “promote peaceful and inclusive societies....”

In addition, the UN’s new secretary-general, António Guterres, came into office this year saying everyone must be mobilized for peace and preventive diplomacy. He proclaimed that war is not inevitable and that conflict prevention will be the priority of the UN.

He might also have said that the best predictor of peace lies in having enough people expect it. That confidence, if better researched and highlighted, could result in a tangible reality for people in countries presumed to be on the verge of conflict.