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During Senator Hillary Clinton’s speech Tuesday night, she mentioned education in the U.S. and said that during the campaign she had met “students passionately engaged in the issues of our time, from ending the genocide in Darfur to once again making the environment a central issue of our day.” For a moment I wondered if I really had heard what I thought I had heard. Why, this was an implied call for humane education! She spoke of these students in the most positive way, and the crowd at Baruch College in Manhattan where she was speaking roared their support.
The goal of humane education is to engage students in the issues of our time so that they are passionately committed, knowledgeable, creative changemakers. If Hillary Clinton has been meeting such students in her campaign, in enough numbers to earn their mention in this important speech at the end of the primaries, this means that humane education is reaching young people – whether through teachers, media, books, the Internet, and/or YouTube. And it means that humane education – although not named as such – has reached a threshold I’ve been working toward for over two decades.
Teaching a generation to be aware of the great challenges we face, motivated to make a difference, and with the tools to make healthy choices that create positive change for all is now part of our national awareness, if not our national agenda.
Making humane education part of every young person’s education has new wings. Let’s all take flight and watch this movement grow.
~ Zoe
Filed under: humane education Tagged: | humane education, presidential campaign, student activism
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I saw that as Hillary Clinton was giving her support over to Obama she thanked voters for putting about 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling. Ms. Clinton was, metaphorically, stating that change is something which comes about through careful, determined effort, slowly, gradually, over time.
There are people who think the insane situations in the world are hopeless, but that is only because they don’t understand that the world is slowly evolving, and the evolution exists because we are choosing to be the slow (but definite) evolution.
We are create the positive changes, one careful choice at a time. As Zoe Weil pointed out, Humane Education is integral to many, many students. It isn’t called “Humane Education” but that is most definitely what it is. My Mother, for example, has never heard of “Humane Education” but I very, very clearly remember her going into my own classrooms, several times in my youth, in order to give the class lessons in ecology and environmental conservation. She has no idea what “Humane Education” is, but she did train me to recycle, she did teach me that it would be to my advantage to buy paper or cardboard instead of plastic, by explaining that paper, cardboard, glass or aluminum are all much more likely to reintegrate into the ecosystem than plastic. Again, she has no idea what “Humane Education” is, but she has been teaching ecological preservation for as long as I can remember, creating one tiny crack in the ceiling at a time.
Every time you throw a glass bottle into the recycle bin, or intentionally buy glass instead of plastic, that is one step in the right direction, and all of those little steps add up.
In Israel, because I had been raised by my Mother, I used to save all of the plastic, glass and aluminum bottles, from everyone around me, and after I had saved dozens of them, I would walk several blocks to one of the few recycling centers in the area, because there was no door to door recycling in the area where I was. And every bottle I saved and brought to the recycling center, is one bottle that isn’t sitting in the garbage dump for a million years. Every bottle counts. Every choice counts. Every person counts.
Every single person has the ability to change the world, and every single choice we make changes the world, whether or not we like it, so choose to BE good, productive, Humane choices.