CHAPTERXV HUMANE EDUCATION AND CHARACTER FORMATION INTHE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTIJRY During the firsttwo decades of the twentieth century, humane advocates undertooksystematic effortsto institutionalize humane education on a national level. They pursued legislation for compulsory humane education, the formation of kindness clubs, outreach to youth organizations like the Boy Scouts, the creation of a network of professional educators, and the production of appropriate teaching materials. Despite some initial successes, however, the movement failed to establish humane education in such a way as to ensure and perpetuateits incorporation within educational systems. Very few of the programs animal advocates launched proved enduring in their impact. Only modest penetration of the schools occurred, and the burden of other responsibilities, especially municipal animal control, limited the amount of time and energy that organizations could devote to schooloutreach. The attempt to standardize and unifythe elementary and secondary school science curriculum subsumed elements of humane education and nature-study, its environmental counterpart, while rejecting many of their premises. At the sametime, an array of competing interests, promoting consumptive uses of animals, tooktheir programs into the schools, further displacing the kindness-to­ animals didactic. When a new generation of advocates sought to revitalize animal protection in the post-World War IIera, they had to virtually reinvent humane education as a field of endeavor. 573 S74 Nature-Study, Humane Education,and Youth Socialimion U:as Lawrence Cremin concluded, the period 1910-1925 was the heyday of the movement for humane instruction, the work undoubtedlyreceived a boost from the Progressive-erapreoccupation with youthful character. Between 1890 and World WarI, reformers of all kinds placededucation at the center of their programsof social betterment. The American educational order underwent massive expansion at all levels, and compulsoryattendance legislation drew hundreds of thousands of children into the schools. In part, this investment in education resulted from the many changes that industrialism had wrought. Increasingly, the school was asked to assume educative responsibilities that had once been bornewithin the domestic setting. In the industrial era, with the daily routine of both mothers and fathers centered outside of the household, many expectedthe school system to fill the breach. 1 Animal protectioniststried to keep pace with this development. From the movement's earliest stages, humane advocates concluded that the permanent success of their work depended on the interest and involvement of children. They investedtime and energy in organizing Bands of Mercy and in the distribution of literature promoting kindness to animals. By the early twentieth century, the instruction of children was an established priority of humane societies. The fate of humane educationat this time was bound up with that of nature-study, a consequentialtrend in Progressive era pedagogy. Many Americans looked to nature­ study to mitigate worries that children could not thrive in an urban society. They saw in 1 LawrenceCremin, TheTramfnDJMri?P of chc School: PmO§Sivism in AmericanEducation, 1876-1957(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 85-89. S1S it a means forpreserving the beneficialeffects of wildernessand natureas a hedge against the degeneracy of moderncivilization. Nature-study was partof the responseto anxietiesstemming from urbanization and industrialiution. The two fieldshad much in common. Nature-study's rise and decline-its principal organ Nature-Study Review was published between 1905 and 1923-exactly coincidedwith that of the movement for compulsory humane education. Both nature­ study and humane education promised ethical benefits, moral guidance, spiritual inspiration. healthy recreational alternativesto the penny-arcade or the poolroom, and healing affinitieswith nature. Both focusedon non-human nature for their subject matter. The two fieldsalso facedsome of the sameobstacles. Each was hampered by the inadequacy of teacher training in methods and content. 2 Each faced the challenge of correlation. the need to provide materials that incorporatedhumane and nature-study precepts into lessons concerningscience, composition, civics, reading, geography, history, art, music, when a specific time could or would not be set aside for them as discrete subjects.3 Finally, both had to contend with the more powerfultrend toward unificationand rationalization of the elementary and secondary science curriculum in the UnitedStates. 2 Mrs.Beulah Gronland; .. Humane F.ducation and theTeacher," Our Dumb Animals (hereafter ODAI 44(Oct. 1911), 82; and AnnaB. Comstock.Handbook of Nature-Study(Ithaca: Comstock Publishing, 1927), vii-viii. 3 Oncorrelation, see Comstock, Nature-Stucb:, 16.20;and Bun Jay Tice,Humane Education: Whatto Teachand How to Teach It (Providence: RhodeIsland Humane F.ducation Committee, n. d.). 2. 576 In part,the nature-studymovement was a productof Romanticism, that late eighteenth-centuryaesthetic sensibility that exalted the natural as an inspiration to individual feeling and emotion. By the mid-nineteenth century, Romanticism had given nature new meaningand value, as a defining element of middle class identity in western industrial societies. Nature-study'sproponents believed that individuals living in an urban industrial society could not do without nature's ennobling and healing effects.4 ln their regard for wildlife, humane educationand nature-study were often similar. Professional nature-study educatorsusually disdained such pursuits as hunting and trapping. One of them, Anna Comstock, anticipatedthe day when men-properly educatedthrough nature-study-would"enjoy nature through seeinghow creatures live rather than by watching them die."' Nature-study also encouraged the combinationof humane sentiment and ecological sensitivity with practical work or assignments. 6 However, while both humane education and nature-study had romantic antecedents, and demonstrated a strong imaginative sympathy with nature and with non­ human animals, there were important differences. For one thing, there was a more utilitarian variant of nature study, linked to the interests of agriculture. Cornell horticulturistLiberty Hyde Bailey, an influential figurein Progressiveera rural policy, espoused a neo-Jeffersonianvision of country life as regenerative of the nation's moral 4 JoamFrylauan and OrvarLofgren , CultureBuilders: A HistoricalAorhro_pology of MiddJe­ Clw Life(New Bnamwick: Rutgers University Press, 1987). s AnnaB. Comstock."What Nature-Study Does for the Child and for theTeacher," Nature Study­ Review 7 (May 1907), 133-34. For a concurringview, seeGuy A. Bailey, .. Nature-Study and H�." Nature-Study Review 13 (Mar. 1917), 90-92. 6 "Omaha'sObject-Lesson in Bini-HouseBuilding." ODA 49 (June 1916), 3-4. 577 and material greatness. Bailey believed that the schools could spur that revitalizationby encouragingan enhanced appreciation fornature. In the 1890s, Cornell became a center forthe development of nature-study. The state of New York, hoping to temper the , enthusiasm of farmers children formigration to the city, supportedthe program.7 The utilitarian perspective concerninganimals was evident in statutory language and teaching instructions concerning humane education in some states. According to one bulletin, The purpose[of humaneeducation) is to contributeto the highestand mostenduring happiness of the humanrace. The temporarydesires and pleasuresof the inferior animals are to betaken into consideration,rather in viewof the effect of their recognitionupon human character, than from the standpointof the positiverights of the animals themselves. The only right anything possesses is theright to beuseful. The economic or utilitarianvalue of animalshas thus been emphasizedthroughout the course.8 While their own texts sometimes invoked utilitarian arguments as part of the rationale for animal protection, humanitarians chafed at more extreme examples of objectificationthat reduced the usefulnessof animals[to) a sonof inventoryof their physicalparts and a minute delineation of the ways which ingenious man hasfound to turnthem to his own account . A child by this means is brought to look at a live cow or horse notas a sentientcreature which thinks,and suffers, and haspreferences ... but as a temporarilyanimated collectionof knife-handlesand spoons.and leather, andglue, and beef. and milk.9 More significantly, advocates of humaneness tended to emotionalize the objectives and the content of nature-studywork, sometimes sanctioning and encouraging textual material not so easily indulged by others. Strongly religious arguments foranimal care, stories of animal fidelity and sagacity, and certain anthropomorphic tendencies at times ' E. Davenport.1be Relationof Nature-Studyand Agriculture in ElementaryRural Schools," Nature-StudyReview S (Apr. 1909),10 I. Onmotives for state support.see Comstock, Nature-Study, v-vii. 8 State Normal School, San Diego, Bulletinon HumaneF.ducation (Sacramento: 1906),4. 9 ..Notes," Journal of Zoophily[I have lostthe citation.) 578 distinguishedhumane educationfrom nature-study and fromthe professional science education curriculum that replaced them both by the 1930s. Such perceived credulity offended science and nature-study educators, some of whom openly disdainedthe humane movement's instructional material. The author of one history of elementary school sciencesingled