At the Institute for Humane Education we train people to be humane educators who are able to teach about interconnected global issues in ways that promote conscientious choice-making and engaged change-making for a humane, sustainable, and peaceful world. Our students take courses covering Culture, Consumerism and Media; Environmental Preservation; Human Rights, and Animal Protection. They learn about grave threats, pervasive manipulations, and forms of exploitation and cruelty that are shocking. The purpose of all this learning isn’t just to become more aware, but to become a humane educator who creates positive change. Classroom teachers incorporate pressing global issues into their curricula; filmmakers produce educational videos or public access TV shows; writers pen essays, books, and blogs; parents launch programs focused on raising humane children; entrepreneurs put the knowledge to use in new companies and projects that are humane and educate the public.

One of the challenges each faces is to communicate their knowledge in ways that awaken and empower their audiences, and the “dance” comes as each student exposes her or himself to dark and frightening realities and simultaneously seeks to be an inspired and inspiring communicator who elicits enthusiastic participation in ethical choice- and change-making among audiences.

These days, it seems that few are engaging in such “dances,” at least in the U.S. Instead we are witnessing ever greater polarization, hateful and blaming, rather than solution-oriented speech, and more and more either/or scenarios instead of nuanced efforts at creating practical answers to problems and engaging positive acts.

In order to create healthier and more humane systems, such polarization must be abandoned, and for those who are newly exposed to atrocities, this is particularly difficult to do. Learning about the growing trafficking of child sex slaves, the alarming and escalating rate of species extinction, and the horrific cruelty perpetrated on ever more billions of animals in factory farms is hard to handle without succumbing alternately to rage and despair. When rage becomes the vector for sharing this information and seeking change it rarely succeeds, however, and when despair takes hold deeply or inexorably, it often results in apathy instead of action (even though, as Joan Baez wisely said, “Action is the antidote to despair.”).

Thus the humane educator – someone who willingly exposes her or himself to painful knowledge in a committed effort to educate for a better future – must learn a special dance: the dance of communication that awakens people’s compassion, elicits their creativity, and engages them as solutionaries while still educating them about terrible and frightening issues.

It’s a dance that begins as we each self-reflect, explores what motivates and engages us (and, conversely, what turns us off or shuts us down), and from that introspection nurtures a style of communicating that is at once direct and soft, heart-wrenching and empowering, pointed and nuanced.

No easy task for humane educators, or anyone who wants to create a peaceful world.

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

Image courtesy of Haags Uitburo via Creative Commons.

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Filed under: changemakers, humane education, Institute for Humane Education, MOGO (Most Good), social justice, third side thinking | Tagged: balance, changemakers, communication, despair, distance learning, either/or, empowerment, global issues, humane education, inspiration, social justice, third side thinking | 1 Comment »