The Power and Promise of Humane Education
Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times
Claude and Medea: The Hellburn Dogs
So, You Love Animals: An Action-Packed, Fun-Filled Book to Help Kids Help Animals
I just finished The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo. It’s a fascinating read, and I highly recommend it. The first half of the book describes Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment in which young male college students participated in a psychology study on the effects of prison life on prisoners and guards. Carefully selected, these bright young men had no violent tendencies and no histories of mental illness. Randomly assigned to be either prisoner or guard, within 24 hours the experiment had turned ugly. Several guards became abusive and cruel; most prisoners became impotent, powerless and despairing. I won’t go into detail here, but the take home point is clear: good people do evil things all the time, and they do so because of dangerous, inherently unstable and abusive situations and corrupt systems. Zimbardo discusses the Abu Ghraib abuses in this context – a perfect example of Zimbardo’s point – in which the perpetrators were dismissed too quickly as “bad apples” when, in fact, they had been perfectly good people in a situation and a system that brought out evil. The final chapter discusses how we can learn from these examples and inspire and motivate people to do good.
This is the very purpose of humane education, to raise a generation to actively, joyfully, consciously choose to do good and to fix corrupt, abusive, dangerous systems so that they will not relentlessly create evil. We’ve found that our 4 Element approach (1. Provide accurate information 2. Nurture the 3 Cs of curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking 3. Instill the 3 Rs of reverence, respect, and responsibility, and 4. Offer positive choices and skills for problem-solving) gives people the tools they need to make choices that are humane. If and when we raise a generation with these tools, cruel systems won’t thrive and good people won’t be compelled to do evil things. Instead, healthy systems will emerge and people will choose good as a matter of course.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | 4 Elements, Doing Good, humane education, Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo
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This is timely in light of the Virginia Tech. tragedy. Much coverage has explored why the shooter acted as he did, attempting to show that he was very different from “the rest of us.” At the same time, little has been offered as follow-up to an early mention I heard of his being bullied in high school because of his accent, looking different, etc. Might any of us subjected to such treatment have engaged in acts we would otherwise condemn? This seems a lesson of Zimbardo’s work.
While I don’t excuse the VA Tech shooter or minimize the horrific losses of the victims and for their families, perhaps there’s also a lesson here for us to spend less time dwelling on the evil in others and more time working on the current or potential cruelty in ourselves. How often do we do small or great harms in what we buy or say or do? Do we treat others in a way that might push them over the edge to hurt someone else, not because they are bad people, but because of circumstances to which we contribute?
One of the most important elements of humane education is that it not only helps us engage others in creating a humane world, but also asks us to consider the hard questions of what we’re really doing ourselves. Perhaps the Zimbardo study along with recent headlines can help us further commit to living consistent with the peaceful, just world we hope to see.
If you’re interested in every person’s capacity for being evil, and our equal capacity for being good, there are a couple other books out there that explore the line between the two and what causes good people to cross it:
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Steven Pinker
Obedience to Authority, Stanley Milgram (this is the famous experiment that Zimbardo modeled his prison experiments after – Milgram tested students to see how far they would go giving electric shocks to people they could not see, under orders from a higher authority).
I think the more we understand our own personal capacity for violence and cruelty, the more compassionate we can be in our lives.
[...] are flawed, and those flaws exacerbate individual frailty, making them even harder to overcome (see my post on the Stanford Prison Experiments and the book, The Lucifer Effect, for more on this). Governor [...]