Abstract
The perceived role of humane educators is to engage the interest and natural attraction of children towards animals by providing learners with accurate information about animals and animal care, encouraging a sense of empathy and compassion towards all creatures and empowering learners to use their knowledge and enthusiasm to act on behalf of the animals within their community—and not only those who are non-human. The idea is that teaching children to treat animals with kindness and respect would encourage them to treat humanity in the same way, once they grew older and stronger. The problem with appeals to kindness and love for animals is that how one feels about what one does is logically distinct from the moral assessment of what one does.
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Notes
- 1.
Available online at: http://www.aallinstitute.ca/HumaneEducation/humaneed1.htm (accessed 14 December 2006).
- 2.
See also McGinn (1979: 88–91).
- 3.
This is my preferred use, primarily for reasons of etymological consistency: Gr. therios—‘animal’; philia—‘love of/for’ (see Horsthemke 2010: 172–175). Clark uses the term “zoophilia”, which has in recent years become associated with bestiality. The term ‘zoophily’, as used by an academic journal (the Journal of Zoophily) is not a suitable substitute either, because it now refers to animal-transferred pollination.
- 4.
Cole and Stewart (2014), in their analysis of ‘farming’ video games that were popular in the late 2000s, note that virtual farm animals happily offer their milk, eggs, flesh, wool and fur to serve and provide immense profit for players. Thus, not only is the prejudice of speciesism normalised within a broadly capitalist context but the violence inherent to animal agriculture is also obscured completely.
- 5.
Ironically, an “inconvenient truth” Gore ignores completely is industrialised agriculture’s substantial contribution to climate change, not to mention its harms to animals.
- 6.
This renders Humes’s argument (2008: 66, 70, 73) against humane education, generally, that it proceeds without a nuanced understanding of injustice and oppression within the human realm, off the mark. Even in its original or traditional form, humane education exhibited an explicit concern with and for human beings.
- 7.
Van der Merwe refers to the impassioned plea by Wikus Gresse, chairman of the parole board at Pollsmoor prison near Cape Town: “Teach people how to care”. As chief instigator of “The Bird Project”, which ranks among the most successful criminal rehabilitation projects in the world today, Gresse has firsthand experience of the healing power inherent in the practice of caring. The Bird Project enables prisoners to hand-rear lovebirds, cockatiels and parrots for ultimate sale to avid bird-keepers. Van der Merwe notes “the irony in prisoners receiving benefit from perpetuating the imprisonment of other species”, but she considers “the therapeutic value of learning to care” nonetheless remarkable. “‘If these people [the inmates], as youngsters, had been given the chance of humane education, of learning how to care – some of them would most probably not be here today’”, according to Gresse (quoted in Van der Merwe 2013: 281).
- 8.
Roux’s report stated that humane education should form a “vital part of the national curriculum for South African schools” to the “benefit of the education system as a whole”. Eugene Daniels (the then-head of the Safe Schools program), agreed: “What is education without values and morals? You can’t address crime and violence without looking into the hearts and minds of people” (Van der Merwe: personal communication, 13 May 2018).
- 9.
http://www.het.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=91&Itemid=188 (accessed 17 March 2009): “Of all the benefits the learners derived from this intervention, there was none as great as their development of self-esteem.” According to an educator involved in the project, “‘a sense of self-worth and pride in being human is diametrically in opposition to acts of crime and violence’” (quoted in Van der Merwe 2013: 282).
- 10.
In 2001 and 2002, at the instigation of the then-Minister of Education Kader Asmal, a decision was taken that the National Schools Curriculum should include human responsibility towards the environment. Out of this came the National Environmental Education Project (NEEP), and leading environmentalists were invited to give their input into the revision of the existing curriculum. Asmal then endorsed the inclusion of humane education as part of NEEP, which meant that the Humane Education Trust was also invited to give its input into NEEP. Van der Merwe worked with NEEP for two years on a voluntary basis, suggesting opportunities for the inclusion of humane education in the revision of the then-existing curriculum. In 2012, the new Schools Curriculum came into being in the form of the National Curriculum Statement and the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). There are numerous opportunities within CAPS, especially within the Learning Area of Life Skills and Life Orientation, for the teaching of humane education. The problem Van der Merwe has identified (personal communication, 13 May 2018) is that the vast majority of teachers not only have an insufficient understanding of the relevant concepts but also do not know how to teach them. The Trust attempted to rectify this by making available teacher guides. Unfortunately, beyond the inclusion of humane education readers, DVDs and teacher guides in the Department of Education’s official catalogue (libraries), there has been no other official support at all for the Trust’s endeavours, despite the Trust’s frequent attempts to engage the support of the various provincial Departments of Education.
- 11.
Apart from conducting workshops for teachers during the school holidays, the Trust has included a course for teachers among their Excellence in Leadership online courses. The Humane Education Trust is currently waiting for the South African Council of Educators to decide how many CPD (Continued Professional Development) points to allot this course for teachers (http://animalvoiceacademy.org/).
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Horsthemke, K. (2018). Humane Education and Theriophilia. In: Animal Rights Education. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98593-0_6
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