Nationally, some question whether such attempts at social engineering are appropriate for the classroom or should remain the purview of parents, churches and youth groups outside of school hours. “Who could be against teaching empathy?” said Michael Petrilli, a vice president for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group in Washington. “But there’s a laundry list of seemingly important activities that, when added together, crowd out the academic mission of our schools.”

But Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, said that teaching empathy can seem “artificial or hokey” to some students, but over time can foster a school culture that encourages learning over social distractions. “I don’t know if you can teach everybody to be empathetic,” she acknowledged, “but you can raise awareness.”

Empathy lessons are spreading everywhere amid concerns over the pressure on students from high-stakes tests and a race to college that starts in kindergarten. The Character Education Partnership, a nonprofit group in Washington, said 18 states  including New York, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska and California  require programs to foster core values such as empathy, respect, responsibility and integrity.

This year, Los Angeles is spending nearly $1 million on a nationally known program for its 147 middle schools, called Second Step: Student Success Through Prevention, which teaches empathy, impulse control, anger management and problem solving. In Seattle, seven public elementary schools are using a Canadian-based program, Roots of Empathy, in which a mother and her baby go into the classroom to explore questions like “What makes you cry?”

Within the charter network KIPP, which stands for Knowledge Is Power Program, some schools are focusing more on empathy, with lessons about the Holocaust, role-playing and a “values jingle” sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells.”

And on Long Island, Weber Middle School in Port Washington inducted 300 students  nearly one-quarter of the school  into the Weber Pride club this year as reward for gestures like sitting with a new girl at lunch or helping a panicked classmate on the rock climbing wall.

At Public School 114 in the South Bronx, where David A. Levine, author of “Teaching Empathy,” has been running workshops since 2006, the principal, Olivia Francis-Webber said that the number of fights had dropped to fewer than three a month  from one to three a week  and disciplinary referrals were down to about five a month from nearly 20.