Article - The Goals of Humane Education
Dr. David Selby
If you read a lot of the literature on humane education from different countries, the claims made for the field are incredible. Developing kindness and compassion for animals will lead our kids to love, kindness and compassion for human beings. International peace and understanding will emerge from the basis of kindness and compassion for animals. Claims are made that kindness and compassion to animals through education is a very important route to developing gender and race and ethnicity equity.
What my research has tended to find is that there is a difference between the claims that are made and the actual teaching and learning practices. The claims are good and valid and important, but a lot of the humane education materials almost treat those goals as an act of faith, that they'll automatically happen. That's one of the points we really have to address. If we have these claims, how, in clear, step-by-step terms, do we actually meet those big goals we're laying out for our field?
In my own sense, there are basically four goals of humane education. First is developing a biophyllic ethic - a life-loving and life-affirming ethic. Our work is about creating a life-lovingness and that means a huge number of things. It means kindness and compassion and consideration to animals. It means respecting the inherent rights of natural environments to exist and recognizing the intrinsic value of animals. It means recognizing the importance for every human being of self-worth and self-esteem.
There are a number of reasons self-esteem is important. It's needed to develop academic and social confidence in kids. Two writers, Cumfield and Wells, came up with the poker chip theory of education. Your level of self-esteem is like a game of poker. The more self-esteem you have, the more poker chips you have in the game of learning and the game of life. And the more poker chips that you have, the more you're prepared to put in and risk in the social and educational learning process. There's an incredible amount of research linking self-esteem to altruism. If you have low self- esteem, not only will you not like yourself very much, but you'll tend to displace this dislike of self onto others.
To what degree are we not building up altruistic attitudes in kids toward animals and the environment because we have not worked on self-esteem? There's a lot of work that shows self-esteem linked with pro-social attitudes. People with high self-esteem are more generous, more caring, more nurturing There's evidence too that people with high self-esteem are far more prepared to confront injustice of various kinds. People who involve themselves in a participatory sense in movements for social change tend to be people with high self-esteem. If we're going to change people's attitudes towards animals and work for change in the condition of animals, part of our humane education approach must be one of building self-esteem.
Humane education is also about interconnectness. Half the human problems come because of the western cultural tendency over the last three hundred years to separate things. There's us and them, local and global, masculine and feminine, reason and emotion, body and mind, human and animal. A humane ethic is saying that these things cannot be separated. We must see them as profoundly interwoven and intermelded. I think this is one of our main goals.
A third goal of humane education is to clarify values and perspectives. Where do we stand on the issues? What are our perspectives? How do we come to terms with indigenous groups and non-western groups in society and their positions on animals?
And finally, I think we are about democratic principles and processes. Humane education is about a new kind of learning environment or classroom environment in which there is far more interaction between people, far more chance for kids to speak of their own authentic feelings and experience. Authenticity is humane. Humane education moves from the traditional vertical relationship toward what I call a horizontal relationship between learners in a community which is marked by interaction, discourse, dialogue, mutual respect and mutual evaluation. That's very much part of what I think the concept of humane education should be about.
