What is humane education?

What is humane education, and why is the Solutionary Framework so pivotal for addressing our complex global issues? 

Humane Education is a field of study and an approach to teaching that draws connections between human rights, environmental sustainability, and animal protection with the goal of providing learners with the knowledge, tools, and motivation to identify and solve pressing local and global challenges – in other words to be solutionaries. 

Humane education is based on the premise that:

• a more just, healthy, and peaceful world is possible

• progress has been made in many arenas - from social and racial justice, to environmental awareness and laws, to respect and compassion for other species - and that we can and must continue to progress in our thinking and actions

• by transforming the root system underlying all other societal systems – education – we can prepare people to solve real-world problems of concern to them. 

The combination of fostering a solutionary mindset and teaching the fundamentals of solutionary thinking and action comprises our Solutionary Framework. There are many reasons why this framework is so important. First, we face potentially catastrophic problems. Climate change is not a future possibility; it is happening now. Biodiversity is in rapid decline, and we may lose half of all species on Earth by the end of the century. Non-human animals are abused and killed by the trillions annually. Nationalism, polarization, and a failure to cooperate and collaborate impede our ability to address and solve the challenges we face. 

Moreover, young people are expressing hopelessness and anxiety about the future at a time when we most need them to be enthusiastically engaged in building more sustainable societies. Youth need to address the issues they see around them, which means we need to teach about them, in age-appropriate ways, through humane education. We need to build the evidence-based hope that arises when problems are successfully solved through collaboration. 

Solutionary thinking comprises many forms of thinking but primarily critical, systems, strategic, and creative thinking. While these forms of thinking are not linear, critical thinking is the foundation upon which the others rest. Without the ability to conduct effective research and discern fact from opinion and conjecture, we cannot become good systems thinkers. Without the ability to understand how systems interconnect and lead to feedback loops, we cannot become good strategic thinkers, able to identify leverage points for change. And without strategic thinking, our creative thinking may not be as effective at innovating for positive change. Through our solutionary process, people learn to develop these different, connected thinking skills. 

Having gone through a robust, solutionary, investigative, and thinking process, the next step is to devise solutions and then implement them, assess them, improve upon them, and share successes and failures so that others can learn from one’s efforts. Through this framework, problems are solved, hope is buoyed, and anxiety diminishes, which reinforces action – a beautiful positive feedback loop! Without learning (through humane education) and acting (through the Solutionary Framework), we will be hard-pressed to successfully address and solve the challenges in our communities and world and build a future in which all people, animals, and nature can thrive.

Our work at Population Balance is centered on liberated and responsible family planning policies and practices that consider the well-being of the planet and all life on earth. You wrote "Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times". Can you tell us more about this book, and also your own experience with humane parenting? 

Every parent is their child’s first and longest-term teacher. I wrote Above All, Be Kind to offer parents what I'd learned as a humane educator so that they could be their own child’s personal humane educator. The book is divided into the early years, middle years, and teenage years because humane education looks different with different age groups. I suggest that parents aim to instill the three Rs of Reverence, Respect, and Responsibility in their child, with reverence (for nature, for animals, and for other people,) an emotion we cultivate in young children; respect, an attitude we cultivate and learn to practice in the middle years; and responsibility, a call to action we are prepared to shoulder joyfully in the teen years. 

I have to admit that there was some hubris in writing a parenting book when my son was only 9 years old, but I’d had enough experience as a humane educator to know that the practices I was suggesting worked in school environments so they should also work at home. Still, when my own child went through some difficult teenage years and rejected many of the habits that were part of our family culture - that were meant to reflect living humanely and sustainably -  I worried that my book and its prescriptions might not be legitimate or effective. But when he was in college and I praised him for being an outspoken and active advocate around issues of sexual assault on campus, he responded, “You taught me this all my life.” As an adult, he’s embraced virtually all of what he grew up learning from us, so I do believe that humane parenting – and by that I mean both parenting humanely and being your child’s humane educator – matters.

How do you think humane education intersects with the goals of just and sustainable family planning policies and practices, and a reduction of global population?

The goal of humane education is to prepare people to build a just, sustainable, and humane world. Our existing production, energy, food, and other systems, as well as current population, are unsustainable. To be clear, humans are an astounding species. That we are having this conversation through a machine called a computer and an invisible system called the Internet is mind-boggling. Our success as a species – measured by our ability to populate every corner of the planet and continue to grow our population – is unprecedented among mammals on Earth. But our success has come at a grave cost. We are living through the fastest extinction crisis in 66 million years. Earth is our home, where we evolved, and upon which we are utterly dependent. There’s no Planet B. And let’s remember, the rest of the living world is astounding, too!

If we can educate people to develop sustainable systems and reduce population, we can restore the damage we’ve caused, reduce the rate of species extinction, and all life can thrive. But if schools and communities fail to integrate humane education into curricula and community learning, and continue to use schooling primarily to increase GDP and create more consumers for products and more competitors in the global marketplace, it will be difficult to reverse the current trends. Simply put, we neglect humane education at our peril.