A Case for Humane Education

Posted on September 30, 2011 by zoeweil
As my blog post today, I want to share humane educator, Tim Donohue’s, excellent essay in Independent Teacher, “A Case for Humane Education.” Here’s an excerpt; enjoy!:

Against a student’s slate of classes that includes Hamlet’s potential suicide, the Holocaust, entropy, La Biographie de Robespierre, and the rules of trapezoids, humane education allows students to connect with the world that the archetypal graduation speakers say they “will inherit.”

President Barack Obama promised five million new green-collar jobs would rise out of this challenged economy, where survival seems to depend upon sustainable practices. The unlikely “Blue Green Alliance” between United Steelworkers and The Sierra Club underscores this. According to Executive Director Dave Foster, “It’s not a question of jobs or the environment. It’s both or neither.” When problems are conceived in absolute terms, critical thinking skills give way to bipartisan ruts. Humane education involves the sort of integrated thinking that promotes such “win-win” alliances and allow the most good and cause the least harm.

A lesson on urban transportation, for instance, considers not only the health of the local environment, but also that of the people who are commuting. It considers the quality of life for those who live near streets with high traffic volumes and whether urban planners could introduce healthier modes of transit. It takes the immediate problem of the danger a child might have in crossing the street and asks this student to re-vision — literally, drawn on paper — a viable, safer model. This one lesson, then, can enlighten the student about a wardrobe of green collar options: urban planning, environmental justice, alternative energies, public transportation advocacy, or architecture. No matter how beautiful The Great Gatsby is, it can’t do this.

Read the complete essay.

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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Sam Chaltain and the Freedom to Learn

Posted on July 4, 2011 by zoeweil

For my blog post today, I want to share an excellent, thought-provoking TEDx talk by educator, Sam Chaltain, “The Freedom to Learn.” Take a look and then ponder your own stories of learning:

Sam has just joined our board of advisors at the Institute for Humane Education, and we’ll be working with him on an exciting learning and storytelling event on October 14 in Portland, Maine. Stay tuned for more!

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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No Independent Thought or Discussion Allowed in AP Class!

Posted on March 23, 2011 by zoeweil

A friend’s daughter is taking Advanced Placement (AP) World History. During class she and another student got into an engaged discussion about a topic they were studying that both had passionate feelings about and which both were prepared to discuss respectfully and knowledgeably. One had made a statement with which the other had disagreed and so voiced her opinion. The other was eager to take her on, his eyes lighting up with enthusiasm. But rather than allow the discussion to unfold and engage the rest of the class, the teacher responded by saying, “Whoa you two, okay. That’s enough of that.”

AP classes are meant to be the equivalent of college courses. Has it really come to this that there are teachers, especially at this supposed high level of learning, who will not permit their students to voice their opinions, engage in discussion, or even be permitted to think and speak in class about the very topics they are studying?

The dangers we face in the world stem from a combination of our lack of critical and creative thinking, along with our propensity for myopia and our deadening of our own compassion. The systems in place that perpetuate injustice, destruction, and cruelty cannot be shifted or changed if we are unable to assess them; yet schools have been relentlessly moving away from critical and creative thinking as they have focused more and more on covering material on which students will be tested.

It’s time to devise solid and meaningful assessments for critical and creative thinking, reasoning, and innovation. That is what our world needs from our graduates. And if we elevate these skills and develop good ways to chart our progress in conveying them, perhaps our children will finally be invited, encouraged, and made to think.

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 Scott Ogle via Creative Commons.

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Mark Bittman: “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others”

Posted on March 21, 2011 by zoeweil

I so appreciated Mark Bittman’s March 15 opinion piece in the New York Times, “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.” Our hypocrisy surrounding the treatment of animals is stunning, and Bittman’s essay makes the point powerfully as he recounts the ASPCA’s arrest of a teenage girl for killing her sister’s hamster (a felony) while the routine killing (following nothing short of torture) of billions of other animals in our society is not only legal but ubiquitous.

Bittman’s essay describes the sort of unreflective and hypocritical (as opposed to critical) thinking that prevents us from creating a society that is just and humane and healthy, and I would love to see this essay read in high school classrooms, followed by class projects that uncover various inconsistencies within their own schools and our society that require investigation and, hopefully, rectification.

Imagine what would happen if our students became these sorts of critical and creative thinkers.

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm
My TEDx talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

Image courtesy of meddygarnet via Creative Commons.

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Reflections on Competition in School

Posted on February 25, 2011 by zoeweil

An educational reformer whom I admire very much was kind enough to watch my TEDx talk, “The World Becomes What You Teach,” and provide feedback. While he enjoyed the talk, he had one quibble with it. I had suggested that instead of debate teams in schools (in which students are arbitrarily assigned one side or another of a fabricated either/or scenario and told to research, argue and win), we have solutionary teams, in which students still compete (because, as I said in the talk, we love to do that), to produce the most innovative, practical and cost effective ideas for solving entrenched challenges. This reformer felt strongly that competition, even for solving problems, would set kids against one another so that “one has to fail in order that another can succeed,” a major social problem as he sees it.

Prior to giving my TEDx talk, I thought a lot about whether to suggest solutionary teams or just focus on solutionary clubs, courses and approaches in school. A very competitive person myself, I rejected competition for a long time. I found it personally damaging as a child, getting physically ill before both tests and gymnastics meets. I very purposefully sent my son to an elementary school that did not have grades, in large part because I didn’t like the idea of learning being conflated with winning and losing (which grading essentially promotes).

Yet I remember when my son yearned for competitive sports and learned from both the losing and the winning. Both experiences were important for him. Winning gracefully and practicing good sportsmanship helped him become a better person, just as losing gracefully and striving against tough odds helped him persevere and try harder. I also remember when he asked his 8th grade teacher to give him grades on his work so that he could understand, beyond the narrative, where his work stood on some comparative scale.

We humans are competitive, that’s certain. We are also cooperative. Is there room for competition in education? My vision of solutionary teams is primarily cooperative. Students will work together to come up with solutions to problems. Yes, they will then compete with other teams, and yes, one team will win and the other lose (or they will sometimes tie), but will this be damaging? Or will it perhaps inspire greater cooperation, critical and creative thinking, and commitment the next time? Will it prepare these students for a world in which competition – like it or not – exists side by side with cooperation, the great ideas and innovations becoming the de facto “winners” in both the world of ideas and of the marketplace? It may. Would it be enough to promote solutionary clubs and courses in school, or would these not generate the kind of enthusiasm reserved for competitive sports, marginalizing what I think should be a centerpiece in school: creative work for a better world?

I’ve come to believe that losing need not be damaging, and competition, though adversarial, need not be hostile. But, I am cognizant of the dangers of introducing a new form of competition into a system already permeated with what I consider to be an overly and damagingly competitive structure. I welcome your thoughts on this. What can we gain through carefully constructed solutionary teams within our schools? What do we risk? What are the best solutions to responding to our competitive-loving natures? Should we advocate for solutionary clubs alone, or both solutionary clubs and solutionary teams, the choice being up to the students themselves?

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

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The World Becomes What We Teach

Posted on February 21, 2011 by zoeweil

For my blog post today, I’m sharing an essay I wrote that was published on Common Dreams.org, a progressive news site. Here’s a short excerpt:

 

“Rather than offer unconnected academic disciplines, imagine if each year of high school covered a single overarching issue, such as Sustenance, Energy, Production, or Protection. Teachers with expertise in different subjects could provide students with the skills to conduct research into current systems and articulate new viewpoints, understand and use scientific and mathematical equations and methods to solve systemic problems, and draw upon history, politics, economics, psychology, sociology, and geography to analyze, assess, propose and create new or improved systems. And the arts, relegated to the chopping block because of budget cuts, could find new life as vehicles for expression of visionary ideas.”

 

Read the complete essay.

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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The World Becomes What You Teach: Transforming Our Education Systems to Graduate Solutionaries for a Better World

Posted on November 23, 2010 by zoeweil

What is schooling for? Why aren’t we taking advantage of the power of education as a preventative tool? Why are our schools full of debate teams and clubs, but no “solutionary” teams to inspire and empower students to work to solve real-world challenges in and out of school? Why do we continue to educate our students only to become verbally, mathematically and technologically literate, so that they continue to perpetuate unhealthy, destructive and inhumane systems?

These are some of the questions that IHE President, Zoe Weil, explores in her latest essay, published in the Fall/Winter 2010 issue of Green Horizons. Here are a couple of excerpts:

“Too many of us are spending our lives desperately trying to put out the fires of destruction, oppression and cruelty, but what if we were to invest a bit more of our time on prevention? Education is prevention. Education is the key to understanding the connections between our personal, career, and civic choices and their multitude of effects. Education is the avenue by which we become informed, passionate lifelong learners able to solve complex problems. Education is also the way in which we dispel our self-righteousness and cultivate our humility in the face of uncertainty.”

“…What if our curricula revolved around overarching themes, such as food, shelter, energy, protection, or transportation — all necessary components of life and all largely produced or carried out in unsustainable, unhealthy, and inhumane ways? What if core competencies in language arts, social studies, math, and science focused on these themes, and students brought their new skills and learning to bear on relevant issues of our time to come up with ideas that would make such systems healthy and just?”

“…I believe that as a society we are not striving for worthy enough goals for our children. We are not meeting their great potential with meaningful enough education. We are failing them, not only because they are not all learning to read, write, and do arithmetic, but also because they are not learning to apply these foundational tools toward critical purposes. The truth is that we may well be preparing them for a future that is more degraded, dangerous, and unhealthy than our own.”

Read the complete essay (pdf).

(Published by IHE Staff)

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Class Desks as Office Cubicles

Posted on October 25, 2010 by zoeweil

In response to my blog post, “What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For? How We Educate Our Children,” educational visionary and activist Kirsten Olson shared this:

“Yesterday my husband was observing an elementary classroom in a nearby state. The children in this room, aged 7-8, were sitting in desks lined up in rows, and the teacher had used her own money to buy cardboard shields that the children had to place around themselves at their desks. The shields were high enough so that you couldn’t see anything around you, or anyone around you, and you couldn’t interact at all with anyone. Behind their shields, the children were completing worksheets on blending ‘gr’ sounds and ‘tr’ sounds. The children were to sit behind their shields for their entire ‘literacy block,’ and they use these shields for all seat work (math, social studies), every day. They would be graded on their worksheets.

The teacher calls the children’s desks ‘offices.’”

If only this were a joke. If ever there were a more obvious example of how some schools really have as their primary goal preparing students to be compliant workers doing the tasks demanded of them without thought, without interaction, without creativity, without innovation, here it is. And it’s a travesty.

Let’s consider for a moment the world these children are growing up in: a warming planet where species are becoming extinct at dangerous and tragic rates; an overpopulated world where a billion people go to bed hungry and don’t have regular access to clean water; a world rife with strife where war and genocide touch every continent but Antarctica; potential peak oil creating an energy crunch we’re unprepared for socially, politically, and economically, and much more.

Lest I sound like a prophet of doom, let’s also consider some other aspects of our world: a technological wonder where information is at our fingertips connecting our minds and discoveries in nanoseconds; abundant food – enough to actually feed our billions; dramatic increases in life expectancy in developed countries over the course of a mere 100 years.

In a world with such looming catastrophes and such extraordinary opportunities the last thing our children should be doing is sitting at cubicle-like desks filling out worksheets day after day. Their world desperately needs them to be educated, able to think critically, creatively and cooperatively to build a healthy future relying upon the great and amazing strides their forebears have already achieved and solving the problems those same forebears, often unwittingly, caused. They will never learn this doing worksheets behind cardboard screens.

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

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Thinking in School?

Posted on October 11, 2010 by zoeweil

In a recent Huffington Post essay, Eric Maisel presents an argument for adding thinking to school . His idea is simple. Carve out 45 minutes each day for students to ponder big (age-appropriate) questions, write down their thoughts, and present them if they wish.

I like this idea, and I would take it further. Readers of my blog know that I believe that the purpose of schooling ought to be expanded so that we are educating for a future of solutionaries, people who think critically and creatively as a matter of course so that they contribute to new systems that are healthy, just, and sustainable. What if these 45 minute sessions also built upon one another? The questions to ponder could be ones crucial to the health and well-being of the students, their school, their community, and their world. Each day would invite the students to think even more deeply and creatively so that by the end of a week or a month, groundbreaking ideas may have emerged. Imagine the sense of accomplishment. Imagine the sense of competence. Imagine the sense of personal strength and capacity. And imagine the good ideas that would be generated that could be incorporated into the kids’ lives and the well-being and health of their communities and even their world.

One of the questions Maisel suggests is this: “For seventh graders, a big question might be, “How do you decide if you should or shouldn’t support a war that your country is engaged in?”

What if the next day, the question was “Why do so many human cultures resort to war rather than non-violent means of solving their conflicts?”

And the next: “What other means to solving conflicts can you think of?”

And the next: “How could people be persuaded to trade weapons for other forms of conflict resolution?”

And so on.

Mohandas Gandhi managed to think of the idea of non-violent resistance when faced with the seemingly impossible quandary of “persuading” the British to leave India. And this idea managed to take root and work. What ideas and thoughts generated by our youth might come to solve entrenched challenges we face?

I would take this 45 minute thinking class another step further as well. I would make it 75 minutes, and I would imbue it with the kind of gravity with which we present math and science and language arts (and it would incorporate these in relevant ways anyway). Students would ponder their questions long after class, doing research as necessary, so that their thinking was grounded in facts and knowledge. They would take their own ideas seriously because the school and their teachers would consider this period the most important part of school – the time when all of the basics come into play for the great purpose of utilizing their brilliant and creative minds for good.

Imagine that.

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

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William Deresiewicz: We Need a World of Thinkers and Visionaries

Posted on September 24, 2010 by zoeweil

The American Scholar printed a speech at West Point by William Deresiewicz, titled “Solitude and Leadership” — an interesting and seemingly oxymoronic pair of words. Speaking to some of the brightest, most hard-working future “leaders,” Deresiewicz made an impassioned plea for people who think for themselves, arguing that what we need most at this point in history are people with vision. I’ve been writing in this blog about critical thinking for some time. Deresiewicz said it all perfectly. Do read this speech.

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm

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