Humane Education is a field of study that draws connections between human rights, animal protection, and environmental sustainability. Humane Education prepares people to be solutionaries who are able to identify unjust, inhumane, and unsustainable systems and create solutions that enable people, animals, and nature to thrive.
The Four Elements of Humane Education
To ensure that people have the skills and experiences to be solutionaries, humane educators help others:
1. Acquire knowledge by preparing them to be enthusiastic and effective researchers who are able to obtain accurate information about interconnected local and global challenges and discern facts from opinion and conjecture.
2. Think deeply by developing their critical, systems, strategic, and creative thinking skills.
3. Make compassionate and responsible choices by fostering wonder and appreciation for the natural world; empathy for people and animals; and commitment to doing the most good and least harm.
4. Focus on solutions by providing opportunities to collaboratively engage in problem-solving; implement ideas; and assess and improve upon them.
Why Do We Need Humane Education?
In the United States, the current purpose of schooling is expressed in the mission statement on the U.S. Department of Education website:
to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.
Is this mission sufficient and appropriate for students whose future is threatened by global problems they will be required to address? Might they be better served by a more meaningful and comprehensive mission that includes learning to solve the challenges we face?
Humane education helps students put core values of kindness, empathy, generosity, responsibility, and integrity into practice and better prepares them to enter into a complex, globalized world as compassionate leaders and problem solvers rather than competitors.
At the Institute for Humane Education, we believe focusing on creating a more purposeful education system is one of the most effective levers for change available, as schooling is the root system that underlies all societal systems.
Humane education gives us hope for a more sustainable, just, and peaceful world!
What Work Can You Do As a Humane Educator?
There are many ways to be a humane educator and bring social justice, animal protection, and environmental sustainability issues to others inside and outside of classrooms.
Humane education offers an intersectional lens that can be applied to any field. While teachers and college professors can incorporate humane education into classrooms, curricula, and schools, there are other arenas for practicing humane education including:
- Through the arts, filmmaking, and technology
- Policymaking
- Advocacy and activism
- Outreach education for non-profit organizations and companies
- Through healthcare and social service initiatives
- Curriculum design, professional development, educational leadership, school start-ups
- Public speaking
- Pioneering new initiatives as a social entrepreneur
- Community outreach and organizing
- Programs and offerings for youth outside of school systems
- Adult education
- Coaching
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