Education

What is humane education?

Humane education is broadly defined as the teaching of compassion and empathy for all living beings and respect for the natural spaces in which they live. OAA promotes humane education in Ohio communities to enhance the human-animal bond and develop the link between kindness to animals and nurturing healthy relationships with others.

Teaching children humane education is critical for the development of social-emotional learning. The Ohio Department of Education has developed Learning Standards to teach learners to be good citizens, and humane education is a valuable way to nurture many essential prosocial skills in future generations of citizens. These skills go beyond caring for animals. Through humane education, we foster important life skills such as respect, responsibility, morality, and care for others. Our society needs strong, empathetic leaders who can drive change, and we believe this is possible through the inclusion of humane education in curricula from a young age.

Please review our comprehensive library of education resources below for lesson plans, books, teaching tools, and much more to learn how you can incorporate humane education in your home, classroom, library, and community. Stay tuned for more exciting opportunities as we continue to grow our education program in the coming months!

Humane Education Resources

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More Information

  • Humane education encourages cognitive, affective, and behavioral growth through personal development of critical thinking, problem solving, perspective taking, and empathy as it relates to people, animals, the planet, and the intersections among them. Education taught through the lens of humane pedagogy supports more than knowledge acquisition, it allows learners to process personal values and choose prosocial behaviors aligned with those values.

    Academy of Prosocial Learning, 2024

  • Humane education teaches kindness, develops empathy, and cultivates compassion toward animals, people, and the natural world. Students gain the knowledge and tools to make more informed and socially responsible choices that counteract real-world problems.

    Why does humane education matter?

    • Reduces violence by addressing the troubling link between violent acts towards animals and interpersonal violence.

    • Harnesses young people’s natural fascination and affinity with animals as a foundation for building compassion, respect, and social and emotional learning. 

    • Strengthens academic engagement and has measurable impact on increasing prosocial behaviors of students.

    HEART, 2024

  • Humane education is a field of study that draws connections between human rights, animal protection, and environmental sustainability. Humane education prepares people to be solutionaries who are able to identify unjust, inhumane, and unsustainable systems and create solutions that enable people, animals, and nature to thrive.

    The Four Elements of Humane Education:

    To ensure that people have the skills and experiences to be solutionaries, humane educators help others:

    1. Acquire knowledge by preparing them to be enthusiastic and effective researchers who are able to obtain accurate information about interconnected local and global challenges and discern facts from opinion and conjecture.

    2. Think deeply by developing their critical, systems, strategic, and creative thinking skills.

    3. Make compassionate and responsible choices by fostering wonder and appreciation for the natural world; empathy for people and animals; and commitment to doing the most good and least harm.

    4. Focus on solutions by providing opportunities to collaboratively engage in problem-solving; implement ideas; and assess and improve upon them.

    Institute for Humane Education, 2024

  • Children trained to extend justice, kindness, and mercy to animals become more just, kind, and considerate in their relations to one another. Character training along these lines in youths will result in men and women of broader sympathies; more humane, more law-abiding, in every respect more valuable citizens. Humane education is the teaching in schools and colleges of the nation the principles of justice, goodwill, and humanity toward all life. The cultivation of the spirit of kindness to animals is but the starting point toward that larger humanity that includes one's fellow of every race and clime. A generation of people trained in these principles will solve their international difficulties as neighbors and not as enemies.

    US National Parent-Teacher Association Congress, 1993

“Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.”

— Bradley Miller