What is Humane Education?

Humane Education is a field of study and approach to teaching that draws connections between human rights, animal protection, and environmental sustainability with the goal of preparing people to be compassionate, dedicated solutionaries, able to identify unjust, inhumane, and unsustainable systems and create solutions that enable people, animals, and nature to thrive.

Humane education:

  • is based on the premise that if we comprehensively transform the root systems that underlies all other societal systems – schooling – we can prepare generations of students to find answers to the challenges we face.
  • helps students put core values of kindness, compassion, generosity, responsibility, and integrity into practice in a complex, globalized world in which even our small daily choices affect people, animals, and ecosystems across the planet.
  • cultivates critical, systems, strategic, and creative thinking. 
  • is itself humane: engaging, inspiring, meaningful, and relevant to students’ lives and futures.

Humane education is the best hope for a sustainable, just, and peaceful world.

Watch Zoe Weil’s first TEDx talk, The World Becomes What We Teach, for a vision of how humane education can change the world for the better.