The nineteenth-century United States witnessed significant developments in not only public education more broadly, but also public “humane” education initiatives. Even before such humane education initiatives developed later in the century, however, earlier educational materials for children often featured lessons of kindness towards animals, in particular household pets. These materials established discourses about how to be “human,” and “humane,” that depended upon animal figures and that simultaneously promulgated discourses surrounding race, gender, and species. Scholarship has yet to fully uncover the extent to which a developing "humane" discourse remained central to developments in education in the nineteenth-century United States as well as how child writers responded to what they were taught. In this talk, I consider widely-circulating educational materials that developed definitions of "humane" behavior that would be consolidated later in the century, and I show how child writers responded to elements of this developing discourse; these child-authored materials range from private journal entries to school compositions to marginal notes and commentary in their schoolbooks. Attending to these materials, I argue that we have much to learn from child writers in the nineteenth-century United States, as they creatively gestured towards new ways of being “human,” and “humane,” in relation to animals that frequently departed from the hierarchical orders they were expected to maintain--orders that worked to propagate particular kinds of violences under the cloak of kindness. 

Karah Mitchell is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Mizzou; she earned her PhD in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2024. In her current project, Primary Lessons: Animals, Children, and Human(e) Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, she investigates how materials written both for and by children generated, consolidated, and sometimes questioned “humane” values that continue to shape animal and human lives today. She is also currently at work on an article on Henry David Thoreau’s writings about education for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau.