Animal Rights Hall of Fame Inductee Zoe Weil Works Towards a Humane, Sustainable, and Healthy Society (Interview)

"In 1987, I found my life's work and discovered that this work had a name: humane education," says U.S. Animal Rights Hall of Fame, Zoe Weil. Zoe founded the Institute for Humane Education, a Maine-based educational organization dedicated to "creating a humane world through humane education."

Humane Education Includes 4 Elements:

- Providing accurate information about the issues of our time so that people have the information they need to understand the consequences of their decisions as citizens.

- Fostering curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking, so that people can evaluate information and solve problems.

- Instilling reverence, respect, and responsibility, so that people have the motivation to face challenges and to act with integrity.

- Offering positive choices that benefit oneself, other people, the animals, and the Earth, and tools for problem solving so that people are empowered to create a more humane world.

To expand on these ideas, I had a powerful conversation with Zoe Weil. The results are just below her video.

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Zoe Weil sez:

My Conversation With Zoe Weil

Planet Green: We're conditioned to look at something like a Hall of Fame induction as something one gets after their career is over. For the field you're in, well, I'd say the work is never completed. So, how did you feel about this honor and how might you use it to further your efforts?

Zoe Weil: It's true that the work of humane education—like all education—is never completed. But what I'm striving for is a new vision for education, a vision that redefines the very purpose of schooling. Humane education isn't simply a series of facts that we want to impart; it's a field of study and approach to teaching and learning that has as its foundation a belief that the very goal of schooling ought to be to provide all students with the knowledge, tools, and motivation to be conscientious choicemakers and engaged changemakers for a better world for all people, all species, and a restored environment. The idea behind comprehensive humane education is that our high school and college graduates will see themselves as informed citizens whose careers will create healthier, more humane, more sustainable and more peaceable systems no matter what professions they pursue. Since we will always be educating the next generation, we will always need this purpose embedded in teaching and learning. Our goal at the Institute for Humane Education is that humane education will become the normal way we go about educating, rather than being marginalized or something that visiting humane educators offer schools through assembly programs or a series of classes. Being inducted into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame came as a big surprise. I hadn't realized that my colleagues were noticing humane education! For so long I've been trying to convince my colleagues in the animal movement to embrace humane education as one of the most powerful (if not the most powerful) strategy for creating a humane culture, and still there aren't many organizations with significant humane education budgets doing this work. I've also been advocating for comprehensive humane education that interconnects human rights, animal protection, and environmental preservation, and this has been a stretch for those who have dedicated their lives and efforts in a more focused way on one of these concerns. There are many humane educators who narrow their focus even more to teaching about spaying and neutering and companion animal issues. The comprehensive vision that we hold at the Institute for Humane Education has not been the norm. That's why this honor has felt so profoundly validating. I hope that it will spur a big interest in and commitment to comprehensive humane education and its capacity to launch a truly humane and restored world. Imagine what would unfold if that happened.

PG: In such a profit-driven culture—a culture in which schooling is often nothing more than preparation for work—I can imagine you've met resistance to your methods and ideas. What have you learned from dealing with such resistance?

ZW: When I speak about our vision for schooling, I never encounter resistance. Just the opposite. People respond incredibly positively. It's as if they've been waiting for someone to say that schooling can be so much more meaningful and important and transformative than we've imagined it. Because I'm absolutely committed to ensuring that students learn the "basics," which I perceive as foundational tools for everything else, there's no argument that I'm mis-prioritizing verbal, mathematical, and scientific literacy. The lack of resistance I've experienced could be somewhat due to the make up of my audiences, but I've spoken to plenty of mainstream teachers and administrators. What tie these teachers and administrators' hands are laws and regulations and systems and habits that prevent much change from happening, not necessarily philosophical resistance. Here's an example: I was giving a two-hour assembly program for an entire middle school in a hot gym this past spring. The students were interested the whole time—which is quite a feat—but afterwards, the principal, who'd heard only a portion of the talk because he'd been in and out during the presentation, cancelled my next presentation at a nearby school because he said my talk was "too political."

PG: What did he mean by that?

ZW: When I asked specifically what was too political he mentioned certain words I used such as "war," "healthcare" and "illegal immigrants." The context for these words were the following: I had asked the students at the beginning of the presentation what the biggest problems were in the world, and one child said :"war." I agreed that yes, after all these thousands of years we still hadn't figured out how to solve our conflicts without war. I had discussed healthcare, not "Obamacare" or "Healthcare Reform," in the context of slaughterhouse workers—often illegal immigrants, which is where those words came from—who do not have insurance. Because slaughterhouse work is among the most dangerous work in the country, these people often wind up without treatment or in emergency rooms due to injuries. What's funny about this is that I could have said the exact same thing if I were very conservative politically, against healthcare reform, and eager to prosecute illegal immigrants or if I was very liberal politically, for healthcare reform and wanting to help illegal immigrants gain access to care. At any rate, what was fascinating is that the principal told me he agreed with much of what he heard me say but he was worried about blowback from parents. He feared for his job. I asked him to please talk to all the students, since he hadn't heard most of my 2-hour presentation, and ask them what they took away from my talk. My primary points were these: 1) Make connections between your choices and their effects and self reflect about what you learn 2) Model your message and work to change what you think isn't right 3) Pursue joy through service to others, and 4) Take responsibility for your actions. These are four of the seven keys to what I call MOGO, my acronym for doing the most good and the lest harm to ourselves, other people, animals, and the environment. The principal talked to the kids, and this is indeed what they had taken away from my talk. Apparently, there were no angry calls from parents. All this is to say that teachers, principals, superintendents are often fearful of controversy and repercussions and losing funding, and education suffers. We often do not teach for a higher purpose; we teach to tests and leave out the juicy, important topics and thus fail to engage our students' critical and creative thinking skills. I don't think that this principal was actually resistant to my ideas. His resistance came from fear.

PG: Fear motivates so many of society's less savory practices yet, as you describe, challenging those practices can be life-altering. What would you say to Planet Green readers who recognize some major problems but aren't sure how to utilize their gifts to help find new directions?

ZW: This may be the most important question people can ask themselves and I'm so glad you asked it! It's why I wrote the book Most Good, Least Harm and why we offer our month-long, distance-learning course, "A Better World, A Meaningful Life" at the Institute for Humane Education (which by the way is coming up in September). People yearn for a better world and they long to live a life of meaning, purpose, and joy. Sometimes the act of exposing ourselves to atrocities and pervasive problems is debilitating, causing despair rather than igniting action. But we can fix the problems in our world. We have the ability to solve our entrenched challenges. We can create a humane, sustainable, and healthy society. The way this will happen is when each of us chooses to be an agent of change and meld our passions with our talents. My book and our course help people do this: identify what's most important to them, hone in on their best skills, and direct their care toward the best possible avenues for creating change given their interests and knowledge. When we find this alchemy, we're golden. For many years in my early twenties I was a dilettante, unable to find my purpose and direction. When I discovered that I was a humane educator, everything fell into place, and I was able to combine my talents and vision in a way that suited me perfectly and helped create the world I yearned for. At the time, there was no path toward comprehensive humane education so I had to create it. Now there is a path, because we've developed one at the Institute for Humane Education, but the point is that each of us can create a new path for ourselves and for others to follow, and when we do, we discover so much purpose in our lives and we get to see the incredible fruits of our efforts unfold. In today's world, where there are so many interconnected problems, we are going to need solutions not yet imagined. Each one of us can be part of uncovering those solutions. In Most Good, Least Harm, I recommend using what I call the 3 I's: Inquiry, Introspection, and Integrity. Each of us needs to bring our inquiry to our myriad choices—what we eat, wear, buy; what we do for work; how we engage in democracy and activism, and so on. Then as we gain knowledge about the effects of our choices on ourselves and others we can introspect to discover where the confluence of that knowledge and our values lies. Finally, we can choose to live with integrity, that is, to the best of our ability, put our values into practice. Doing this has the power to change the world.