June/July
2006
Inspiring Education
The Satya Interview with Zoe Weil
|
How can we be inspired in a world where it is nearly
impossible to eat, wear, watch, read or do practically anything without
having to worry
about the ethical, political, economic and cultural ramifications?
Inspiration takes a back seat to agonizing about how and out of what
our shoes were
made or how much forest was clear-cut to make our toilet paper.
Zoe Weil, co-founder and president of the International Institute for
Humane Education (IIHE), believes humane education is the answer. Humane
education embraces
the endless list of challenges facing the world and helps us create positive
solutions. The basic tenets of humane education are providing accurate information,
fostering curiosity, creativity and critical thinking, instilling respect,
reverence and responsibility, and offering positive choices that benefit
oneself, other
people, the Earth and animals. With this program, people are inspired to “care
deeply, assess critically, create freely and choose wisely.”
The author of Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging
Times and The Power and Promise of Humane Education (both from New Society Publishers),
and the soon to be released Most Good, Least Harm: The Key to a Better
Life and a Better World, Zoe is creating positive change. From beautiful rural Maine,
Zoe Weil took a moment to speak with Maureen C. Wyse about the inspiration of
humane education.
How did you become involved with humane education?
In 1987, I taught summer classes at the University of Pennsylvania to seventh
and eighth graders. My course on animal issues was the second most popular
course offered. Many students actually became activists. One day I talked about
product
testing on animals and that night a student made homemade leaflets. The next
day during lunch break, he stood out on a Philadelphia street corner handing
them out. Some other students went on to form a Philadelphia area student activist
group, and they invited me into their schools to speak. It was at that point
I realized I’d found my life’s work. I had stumbled upon what I consider
the most effective way to create change. I had done the typical forms of activism—letter
writing, protesting, leafleting—but nothing had ever been so profoundly
effective as when I taught a group of young people.
What inspired you to found the International Institute for Humane Education?
I was doing humane education in the Philadelphia area for many years when I
created the program called Animalearn. We went into schools in the greater
Philadelphia
area to discuss environmental and animal issues. Then we hired instructors
to go to schools in other cities. We were reaching about 10,000 students annually,
but there were very few of us doing this work. So I created a certificate program
to train other people how to be humane educators and eventually became affiliated
with Cambridge College to offer a Master of Education program—the only
one of its kind in the U.S. It’s a way of making change that people hadn’t
thought of.
What’s the message? How do you motivate people to analyze their
everyday decisions?
Basically humane education assumes that everybody has the capacity to live
according to a deep set of values and to make positive choices in their lives.
Young people
can make positive choices and can grow up to be people who live with integrity,
honesty and compassion. That’s the premise humane education is built upon.
The humane educator basically believes that the way to do this is to give people
information, critical thinking tools, a big dose of reverence, respect and responsibility,
and the ability to problem solve and make positive choices. Humane educators
never tell anybody what they should do, but rather inspire them to live according
to their own values—to make conscious choices about who they are going
to be and what they are going to do in the world.
Your mission and that of the Institute embodies all realms of being: social,
diet, clothing, environment, animal, etc. How do you make these connections to
students?
The bottom line for IIHE is that human rights, animal protection, environmental
preservation, media literacy, and careful and compassionate globalization are
all connected. For example, we might look at a product like a can of Coke or
a cheeseburger and analyze what its effects are on ourselves, other people,
other species and on the environment. And then try to determine what choices
we can
make that are the most humane and most positive. Students begin to become very
creative and global thinkers. They learn to do the most good and least harm
to everybody while not seeing any specific issue in isolation from the others.
It’s
a very exciting and different approach than we are used to getting in our society.
How do you educate kids with little access to the more humane choices that you
advocate in the classroom? For example, when you ask kids to investigate their
Nikes what other options do you equip them with?
That’s a really good question. In one of the activities we do, “Choices,” we
have cards that have a choice on either side. One side might say a pair of Nike
sneakers and the other side might say a pair of fair trade sneakers. But those
aren’t the only two choices, so you might have another card that says hand-me-down
sneakers and another that might say thrift shop sneakers. The idea being that
if we want to live lives that are humane and conscientious, we have to look at
all of our choices. Those with money have different choices than those without,
while those concerned with certain issues might make choices more conscientiously
about those issues than others they may not care much about. The idea is to provide
a variety of choices and then to elicit from students—in age appropriate
ways—their own ideas about how they can solve them. A student might say, “Hey,
I want a pair of Nikes, I like them best of all,” but he may also write
a letter to the CEO of Nike expressing how he feels. That’s a whole other
way of being engaged, not just how we spend our money, but how we use our voices.
In completing our April “Food For Thought” issue, I felt
as if there was nothing I could eat due to the hidden realities of food production.
Do you
ever get a sense of futility, especially in teaching young people being raised
in a materialistic, wasteful and, in a lot of ways, a compassion-less society?
I get frustrated at times, but it is pretty rare for me now. Nobody can be
perfect. There is simply no way to eat the perfect diet or live the perfect
lifestyle—it
doesn’t exist. There is no one answer. It will always vary from person
to person, place to place. So the question is, “How can we choose what
will do the most good and the least harm based on our life experiences, where
we live and what our resources are?” I think the goal is to do the best
you can as an individual and not let anybody or any group prevent you from
doing that.
How can people be effective agents for change? How do you open the eyes of someone
not in a classroom?
Probably the biggest inspiration for me is a quote. Gandhi was asked by a reporter, “What
is your message?” He responded, “My life is my message.” And
when I read that, I was floored by the truth of that statement and how universal
it is. If Gandhi’s life was his message, that meant my life was my message,
your life is your message, and everybody who reads this interview, their life
is their message. We are all potential humane educators in how we live our
lives. That also means that what we say and what we do must be aligned. One
of the things
that distresses me is how ineffective blaming, judgmental and angry activism
is, especially when one is hoping to influence positive change. While Gandhi
was critical of institutions and behaviors, he did not judge individuals. He
was always trying to set an example, and communicate positively in a nonviolent
way.
Where do you envision humane education to be in the future?
My goal is for there to be the same number of humane educators in schools as
math teachers, and that humane education will be taught as its own subject just
like science and language arts. My other big goal is that every teacher will
be, in effect, a humane educator. Whatever the subject, teachers will incorporate
meaningful education about how we can be good local citizens, good global citizens
and good people.
You’d think the humane switch would be an easy one to make, with
people just tweaking things slightly and incorporating more humane education
methods.
It is that simple. Right now, unfortunately, there are serious challenges to
the education system on many levels. School isn’t currently designed
to develop contributing citizens for a better world. But there are people creating
schools to solve some of these challenges and make education more meaningful.
It seems like sometimes you find yourself at a point of contention,
in that your views and those within humane education go full circle compared
with those
who
simply cannot reconcile different issues, i.e. animal rights activists who
ignore sweatshop labor, environmentalists who aren’t vegetarian. How
do you reach out to people in seemingly disparate movements?
My goal is to build bridges between movements and help people realize connections.
We are all drawn to particular passions and interests. And when we have a strong
concern for a particular issue, it becomes even more difficult to be aware
of all the other issues, even those that connect to the ones about which we
are
passionate. But that is beginning to change. Animal activists are seeing the
connections to environmental and human rights issues. Satya is a perfect example—a
magazine that drew connections between all of these issues before anyone else
was doing so. You know, I am looking forward to the day when Satya is a major
publication with a huge distribution and people are picking it up the way they
pick up Time magazine.
What is most inspiring to you?
I am constantly inspired when anybody acts generously or kindly. Most recently
Joey Cheek, the speed skater who won the Olympic gold medal and then donated
everything, the entire award, to help Sudanese refugees in Darfur. That sort
of thing inspires me all the time. That’s when I tear up and feel like
the world is good. That’s when I feel like all of us together can change
everything.
To learn more about humane education, contact www.IIHEd.org or (207) 667-1025.
Zoe Weil’s new children’s book, Claude and Medea Book 1: The
Hellburn Dogs, about 12 year-old activists who rescue dogs from a laboratory,
is currently being posted, chapter by chapter at www.lanternbooks.com.
The book will be available in print after the web series is complete.
|
|
|
| © STEALTH TECHNOLOGIES INC. |
|
