He asked how I knew they were inhumane. And so I described to him what I have seen myself: hundreds of thousands of chickens crammed into cages in typical egg factories and calves chained at the neck in tiny crates in modern veal factories. I talked about my studies with an observant rabbi who is a vegetarian because he insists not only in following the letter of the law (kosher slaughter was, at its inception, far more humane than typical slaughter of the time), but also the spirit of the law (which clearly rejected cruelty to animals). Only slowly did I seem to pique his interest. I gave him my card and encouraged him to learn more for himself.

Later, I reflected upon this man’s work. He is trying to do what he considers God’s work. He is attempting to deeply live according to his values. Yet, it is harder and harder to do this without an equally strong commitment to learning more, to bringing our inquiry to our choices and actions, to insisting upon greater understanding than what we are likely to obtain from our culture, whether observant Jewish culture or popular culture.

I hope that our brief interaction will spur him to learn more and consider how he can more genuinely live according to his religious beliefs. He mentioned that at his age, he might not pursue more knowledge in this area, but he hesitated as he said this. I like to think he will reconsider and open himself to new knowledge so that he might more fully live his values.

For a humane world,

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDx talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

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I’ve always been struck by people saying that they don’t want to know about a particular atrocity or cruelty or problem in the world. It’s not uncommon to hear this from adults (though rarely from youth). I think the motivation to avoid new knowledge stems from people’s desire to live with integrity. That might sound like an odd statement, but if you learn something that calls into question choices you make, and you really don’t want to change, then you’ll be faced with the unpleasant experience of living without integrity. Better not to know. Ignorance is bliss after all.

But I’m struck by this head-in-the-sand behavior because it’s foreign to me. I’ve always wanted to know. Even if I am unready or unwilling to make a different choice, I’d rather know and live with my discomfort than not know. I’d rather have the opportunity to live more closely aligned with my values.

Over time, though, I’m beginning to understand the disinclination to know. I do get tired of all the bad news, of learning about more problems, of facing my own lack of integrity. This fatigue is helping me understand those people who say, “Don’t tell me about _______. I don’t want to know.” And understanding is a good thing. It helps me build bridges and offer smaller invitations. It helps me teach more wisely and carefully and inspire baby steps toward knowing. It keeps me from being self-righteous, and helps me maintain some humility.

Still, even when I get tired, I know there’s no other path for me. Maybe I’ll take a brief respite from the myriad books and videos that expose me to the grave and horrible problems in the world, but not for long. There’s work to do, and I don’t know how else to live with myself or to live in this imperfect world that needs our good work.

What about you?

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDx talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

Image courtesy of Identity Photogr@phy via Creative Commons.

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The excerpt was from the end of Most Good, Least Harm in a section which offered a short summation about how to make choices that do the most good and least harm to oneself, other people, animals and the environment. The section was titled, “10 Principles for MOGO Living,” (MOGO being short for doing the most good and the least harm).

Personally, I would never have chosen the new title, “10 Easy Ways to Become a Better Person” for a number of reasons. First, I don’t teach about being a better person; I teach about making choices that do more good and less harm to ourselves and others. Second, the 10 principles are about choices that create a better world rather than better people. But despite the fact that the title could have been off-putting for a list about making MOGO choices, it was hard to believe the staggering outpouring of vitriol that followed. I have never been called so many names before, by people who know nothing about me other than from a short excerpt, taken out of context and given a misleading title, from a book I wrote that is meant to offer people ways to make their lives more meaningful while contributing to a healthier, more just, and more humane world.

The irony was that I’d already written a post for today. It was a short piece with links to several newspaper articles, one of which was the Wall Street Journal’s recent excerpt of Amy Chua’s new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which elicited massive amounts of hate mail itself. I’d read that excerpt, and I, too, felt hostile toward Amy Chua. Now I know better than to judge Amy Chua by an excerpt. I pulled my blog post and wrote this instead.

It can be satisfying to vent our anger, especially from the safety of our computer keyboards, but it is damaging, not just to the recipients of our anger, but to all of us. When we fail to dig into information deeply and explore thoroughly, and when our discourse becomes crass and cruel, we close doors to understanding and learning.

I’ve learned from this experience to be ever more careful about my responses to what I read in the news, and to try, ever more diligently, to be kind.

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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At the Institute for Humane Education, we identify four elements as key to providing quality humane education. They include:

1. Providing accurate information about pressing issues and challenges of our time.
2. Fostering the 3 Cs of curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking.
3. Instilling the 3 Rs of reverence, respect, and responsibility.
4. Offering positive choices and the tools for becoming a solutionary.

Note how masterfully Sam Richards, in just 19 minutes, manages to employ the first three elements, while leaving viewers pondering their choices and their roles in addressing some of the challenges we face. What I particularly appreciate, as a humane educator, is that the entire talk, entitled “A Radical Experiment in Empathy,” is aimed at evoking the compassion that can lead us toward critical and creative thinking and problem-solving for a better world.

This is such an important talk which everyone should see, and a incredibly useful tool for teachers exploring complex, challenging, and critical issues in classrooms.

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, The Power and Promise of Humane Education, and Above All, Be Kind

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About ten years passed and suddenly this “applied kinesiology” was everywhere and friends of mine swore by it. I’ve learned not to be surprised by such things any more. We people believe all sorts of unsubstantiated things, constantly suspending our critical thinking. Much of the time there is no real harm done, and because our minds and bodies are so intertwined, believing that a practitioner will help us increases the likelihood that we’ll be helped measurably. But I worry about a populace that so readily believes nonsense and passes it off as fact, and I feel strongly that educators must be among the best critical thinkers because, more than anyone, teachers shape the future.

There is a desperate need for good critical thinking among the generation poised to solve – or not solve – the complex challenges before us. So this is my plea to teachers: teach your students to be critical and creative thinkers above all else, and refuse to let yourself be duped. Model the critical thinking your students need to possess themselves.

(For those who want to see a demonstration that debunks applied kinesiology, take a look at this YouTube video.)

For a thinking populace,

Zoe Weil, author of The Power and Promise of Humane Education and Most Good, Least Harm

Image courtesy of critical thinking asylum via Creative Commons.

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“If we bring ethics into the curriculum – and we should – we must take pains to ensure that we do so in a morally unobjectionable manner. This requires us to distinguish clearly between espousing the universal, general principles of morality shared by people of good will everywhere, and the very different manner of defending any particular application of these principles to actual life situations as conceived from a particular standpoint (liberal, conservative, radical, theistic, nontheistic, American, Russian, and the like.”

This is such an important point, whether written 1,000 years ago, 20 years ago, or 20 years hence, and it represents such a fine line to walk as an educator. Every one of us has a bias. Even if our bias lands us squarely in the mainstream and is perceived as moderate, it is still a bias. None of us is immune to the culture that shapes us, the opinions we hold dear, and the particular ideologies that embody our values in day to day life. It may appear that we have no bias if we find ourselves in the proverbial middle, but this is false. This is why Richard Paul’s quote above is so well-articulated, and so important for educators in general, and for humane educators who teach about the interconnected issues of human rights, animal protection, and environmental preservation in particular.

The universal principles of morality that Paul mentions would include such values as generosity, kindness, compassion, integrity, honesty, courage, perseverance, and wisdom and would exclude such things as cruelty, corruption, exploitation and abuse of others, deception, and so on. But what one person considers cruel may be different from what another considers cruel; and one person’s perception of exploitation may be another person’s perception of opportunity. How can the humane educator – whose goal it is to explore ethical issues, invite positive change, and encourage innovative ideas for a healthy world – balance her own vision of what that world looks like with what a particular student’s differing vision might be? How can the humane educator teach about ethical issues while painstakingly avoiding indoctrination?

Here are some ideas:

• Choose one of these two approaches: Either be honest about your biases and explain their origin and your thinking OR choose to remain utterly impartial in discussions and encourage students to think critically, whether they are articulating your own position or one that you do not share. My personal approach is to be up front about my biases. The truth is that I am choosing texts that provide a point of view, and not choosing other texts. I may try to “balance” the reading, but there is a bias in my choices. Invite your students to critique you and your choices.
• Be stalwart in your commitment to require those who share your views to be vigilant in supporting their perspective. And be open, receptive, and ready to learn from good critical thinking that leads to different positions. Further, be willing to being persuaded. Be as ready to change and grow from what you learn from your students as you hope they will be open to changing and growing because of you.
• Agree on fundamentals. Invite students to generate a list of humanity’s best qualities and narrow these down until your class is in agreement that these are indeed fundamentals. Bring back all discussions about systems to whether and how they uphold these fundamental values. Be prepared for complexity and apparent contradictions. Remember physicist Niels Bohr’s statement that the opposite of a great truth is often a great truth.

All education has the potential to veer into indoctrination, not simply education about ethics. Be vigilant. Our world needs more critical and creative thinkers, not more believers.

Zoe Weil, President of the Institute for Humane Education and author of The Power and Promise of Humane Education and Most Good, Least Harm

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But I’m struck by this head-in-the-sand behavior because it’s foreign to me. I’ve always wanted to know. Even if I am unready or unwilling to make a different choice, I’d rather know and live with my discomfort than not know. I’d rather have the opportunity to live more closely aligned with my values.

Over time, though, I’m beginning to understand the disinclination to know. I do get tired of all the bad news, of learning about more problems, of facing my own lack of integrity. This fatigue is helping me understand those people who say, “Don’t tell me about _______. I don’t want to know.” And understanding is a good thing. It helps me build bridges and offer smaller invitations. It helps me teach more wisely and carefully and inspire baby steps toward knowing. It keeps me from being self-righteous, and helps me maintain some humility.

Still, even when I get tired, I know there’s no other path for me. Maybe I’ll take a brief respite from the myriad books and videos that expose me to the grave and horrible problems in the world, but not for long. There’s work to do, and I don’t know how else to live with myself or to live in this imperfect world that needs our good work.

What about you?

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm

Image courtesy of Identity Photogr@phy via Creative Commons.

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I thought this approach to the news was marvelous, but in my work at the Institute for Humane Education, I don’t feel like I can personally take any sort of hiatus from the news, much as I sometimes I long to. The endless and relentless exposure to catastrophes, problems, challenges, atrocities, etc., is dizzying and sometimes numbing. There is no way do to enough and more often than not, outside of educating, I end up doing little.

But most people do not need to listen to the news all the time in order to do their work and be a good citizen, and in fact, they might be a better, more helpful and engaged citizen if they listened less often and responded with more engagement when they did.

If you find that you are becoming numb to the bad news that bombards you, perhaps you should try Gregg’s experiment. Maybe it’s time to pause and replenish and then come to the news with attention, compassion, wisdom, courage, and commitment. Try it for a week. See what happens. Can you maintain a commitment to do something to make a difference each time you do expose yourself to the news. Are you a better citizen this way? I welcome your thoughts and responses.

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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Most of us tend to believe what supports our worldview and disbelieve what does not. To me, this may be one of the most dangerous impediments to positive change and growth, and watching people parrot opinion disguised as fact dashes my hopes again and again that we can truly create a peaceful, sustainable world.

I recently watched a film on YouTube produced by the New Left Media that showed clips of interviews with people attending Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally earlier this month in DC. The perspective of the producer is clear, and we all know how editing can cast interviewees in a negative light, promoting the agenda of the director. A film produced by a “New Right Media” of a left-leaning rally would probably be as equally unflattering to the interviewees as this film was.

Even knowing that the producers had an agenda, there is no way to fully distort the words of the interviewees. Glenn Beck has said on Fox News that Obama is a racist, but at least one person at the rally refused to believe this. Yet this same person readily believed myriad other things that Glenn Beck and others say to him, reinforcing his worldview.  And sadly, don’t most of us do this regardless of our politics and beliefs?

This post is not meant to condemn any ideology or group; rather, it’s meant as a plea to all of us to commit ourselves to the hard work of thinking critically, of believing nothing until we have ascertained its truth, of hearing many perspectives and refusing to accept the “truth” of TV soundbites, especially when they come from opinion pundits rather than reporters and when they simply reinforce our own worldview.

There are many problems in the world, many atrocities happening as I write these words, a planet in the process of warming, species becoming extinct at alarming rates, yet there is nothing that makes me despair as much as a populace that willfully refuses to think critically.

The greatest hope for our future lies with a generation that has been taught critical and creative thinking as the most essential tools for problem-solving. That generation will not come about, however, if we ourselves refuse to embrace these skills and if we continue to deny it the greatest path for a healthy and peaceful future.

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and The Power and Promise of Humane Education

Image courtesy of critical thinking asylum via Creative Commons.

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But this does not mean that education is by its very nature indoctrination. We mustn’t confuse education with schooling, because they are not synonymous. Education happens all the time, through interactions, mentoring, reading, apprenticeships, observation, and simply living. Of course it also happens in school where specific subjects are taught and we gain new skills and knowledge. Schools can be places where indoctrination takes place in a wholesale fashion, as when it serves a specific ideology and seeks to produce graduates who have specific beliefs, rather than simply a breadth of knowledge and skills. And schools can also be places where indoctrination is subtle but still pervasive. But schools do not have to be places of indoctrination. Certainly, we are all enculturated in school, but this is not the same.

The definition of indoctrinate is this:

in·doc·tri·nate vt
to teach somebody a belief, doctrine, or ideology thoroughly and systematically, especially with the goal of discouraging independent thought or the acceptance of other opinions

School can and should be one of the very best places to encourage independent thought, critical and creative thinking, and broad understanding of and appreciation for a multitude of perspectives. Rather than reject schooling as indoctrination, as some are doing, we need to be developing and promoting schools that are committed wholeheartedly to exposing students to a variety of viewpoints and providing them with the most important tools for their future: problem-solving, and critical and creative thinking along with a deep commitment to living lives that contribute to a healthy world.

Zoe Weil
Author of The Power and Promise of Humane Education and Most Good, Least Harm

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