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’ve been contemplating the next book I will write. One idea is to write a book about what’s wrong with our educational system and how we can fix it. That’s a cumbersome title for a book, so for now, let’s call it A Spectacular Education. I don’t pretend to know how we create schools and school systems that work for all children, how we fund such schools, or how we find the kinds of teachers and administrators who will make them spectacular, but I intend to find out.
I already know what schools should be for. To me the goal of education must become to provide the knowledge, inspiration, and tools for living healthy, sustainable, humane lives that contribute to a peaceful world. How we achieve this is the substance of my book-to-be, and my intention is to offer a variety of approaches and ideas which policy-makers, teachers, parents, and educational administrators can explore to create spectacular schools and healthy educational systems for the next generation.
I would love to hear your ideas. Do you know a school that works, teachers I should meet, administrators who are exceptional educational leaders, policy-makers who have vision and expertise, books or films I should read or see? Please share with me what you know and have experienced.
Thanks for your help!
~ Zoe
Filed under: humane education Tagged: | books, education, humane education, schools
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I just got a copy of Above All, Be Kind by Zoe Weil, and, after having read about a quarter of it, I can honestly say it is wonderful, full of insightful thoughts, and honest analysis. She speaks about the inconsistency between what we actually do, and what we want to do. How we wish to be kind, but perhaps sometimes we aren’t as kind as we would like to be. The point, she emphasizes, is to try, and to model humane behavior for your children by making humane choices in front of them. She speaks about our imperfections, about the difference between what we actually want to achieve, and what we actually do, but keep trying, because practice makes better. Her own examples bring to mind the choices I regularly face. Because my Mother had a stroke while she was quite young, and I had a much younger brother, I returned to America in order to help him through his teenage years, and attempt to care for my Mother, so I have been living with my parents for several years, only my ideals had grown somewhat different from theirs in the time that I was away from them, and when I returned, as a young adult, to the home of my youth, I was not the same as I was when I left.
When I returned I was different, and I was different from my parents, in many fundamental ways. Though my parents had always had a consciousness of environmental conservation, I became more careful in the time I was away, and so now, though my Father buys paper towels for him and my brother to use, I try not to use the paper towels because I don’t want to waste the paper, because when I do use the paper towels, that leads people to cut down more trees to make more paper towels. I am aware that there are paper towels made of recycled paper, but for the most part, I try only to use a hand towel.
But sometimes, like Zoe spoke about in Above All, Be Kind, I do get lazy, and compromise my values, wasting the paper towel. That doesn’t mean it’s over. That means I made one bad choice. I still know that my overall goal is to be environmentally conscious, and I simply try to make a better choice the next time around.
On another note, she also spoke about a gathering of Mothers who discussed their children’s various imperfections, and gave each other advice on how to help elevate their children. Their problems were typical of today’s youth. One girl who was much to young to understand or accurately deal with sexual behavior was dressing in too lewd a fashion, and another’s mind and behavior was deteriorating as result of playing too many video games, while a third was too fat but her mother was afraid to say anything about it because she didn’t want to spark an eating disorder. In each case, the Mother’s shared their woos, and then other Mother’s tried to offer constructive advice. In the end, one Mother gave the Mother with the fat child a book of more healthy recipes, and the Mother also began taking her children on outings which required exercise instead of allowing them to sit in front of the TV all the time. The Mother with the boy whose behavior was deteriorating explained to her son that video games affect the player’s behavior, long after he has actually stopped playing, and she believed, as many do, that playing too many video games was leading him to behave in an undesirable way, which is precisely what my Psychohistory teacher explained to us when he said that there are video games, being played by children and teenagers, and those same video games are used by the army to turn soldier’s into merciless killers. In other words, 10 year old boys are playing the same video games that the army intentionally uses to turn 18 year olds into compassionless, merciless killers.