In the final weeks of the summer term, my five-year-old daughter came home each day with updates on the eggs that they had at school: how they’d all hatched, what they’d been named, how a “cheeky” one tried to run away during her turn handling them. But shortly before term ended, she told me it was their last day. “I asked where they’re going. Miss says they’re going to a farm,” she said contentedly.
Chick-hatching programs are a common summer term project in primary schools. More than just a chance for children to watch and handle cute and fluffy chicks, they offer a hands-on way to learn what an egg really is and how it fits in with a bird’s life cycle. Judging by the reactions of fellow parents, these programs are typically regarded as a delightful educational opportunity. But there is good reason to regard these programs as morally troubling. To begin with, conditions in schools are often poor. Eggs might not be turned properly during incubation, leading to disabilities. And the noisy classroom environment and frequent handling can be highly stressful for newly hatched chicks. Importantly, the chicks frequently have nowhere suitable to go afterwards, since rescue centers and farms are often full. Male chicks are particularly difficult to rehome—the British Hen Welfare Trust receives at least three calls a day asking for help to rehome unwanted cockerels. As a result, many of the male chicks end up being slaughtered.
This animal welfare case does, by itself, justify scrapping classroom chick hatching. But I want to suggest there is an additional set of reasons why we should be troubled. These programs are not only bad for animals; they are also bad for children, in part because they pull against the educational mission of schools.
While schools do so much more than this, a core aim of schooling is epistemic: It aims to impart knowledge and understanding. Schools also seek to cultivate epistemic skills and virtues, such as intellectual curiosity and habits of honest, rational enquiry. Chick-hatching projects frequently pull against these epistemic aims. Children will learn some facts, for sure. But others are kept off-limits. Rather than being encouraged to be curious about the ongoing life of these animals, the students and their questions about what these individuals’ future lives look like are discouraged or shut down through comforting half-truths (such as the one that my daughter was given).
For even if these chicks really do “go to the farm,” the image this phrase evokes for most children is unlikely to resemble reality. It is the idyllic farm of picture books, where chickens wander freely around a spacious small farm and live happily ever after. Farms like these cannot survive as businesses, and those that do exist rarely have room to absorb unwanted classroom chicks, especially cockerels. One underlying motivation behind education’s epistemic aims is that they enable children to live autonomous lives: to have the ability to make good, informed choices about how to live. But if we cultivate myths about the way that humans treat nonhuman animals, this obscures the realities of the practices in which children are participating, reducing children’s abilities to act autonomously.
This also sits uneasily with the trust that ought to characterize teacher-student relationships. Teachers are among the most important epistemic authorities in children’s lives. Schools are usually places where curiosity is rewarded and met with the truth. But my daughter’s question was met with an answer that was (at least partially) deceptive. Now, it might be that on rare occasions, deception on the part of teachers is justified. Sometimes it is in the child’s interests not to know something (at least temporarily, at this age). Perhaps some facts about sex or humanity’s dark history are like this. Or it might be that a teacher’s complicity in deception is justified because there are epistemic benefits to students independently disabusing themselves of false beliefs. Jeff Standley has suggested that the myth of Santa Claus is one such example. But neither of these exceptions apply here. It is in children’s interests to be able to make autonomous decisions about how they relate to animals, and it is in all of humanity’s interests to be able to live more harmoniously with other species. Nor is this a good candidate for an exercise in independent discovery: We know that adults continue to remain in ignorance about the lives of farmed animals. (To make matters worse, this case is unlike some student questions, which appear awkwardly from nowhere. This topic was actively brought into the educational space by the teacher, and so it seems particularly perverse to deceive children here.)
Rather, this deception seems like part of a wider preparation for being a lifelong user of nonhuman animals. By shutting down an important question about what the rest of the chicks’ lives will look like, it teaches children that this is what we should do when the hard questions about human use of animals arise. In this sense, schools are teaching children how not to know. This strategic ignorance is, after all, one of the ways of dealing with the cognitive dissonance that arises for many people because they have moral concern for animals while also using them in ways that harm them or end their lives prematurely. Again, this is worrying epistemically: Schools should be encouraging children to become more (not less) rational, and that includes holding consistent sets of beliefs.
By treating the chicks as fascinating while they are useful for teaching but allowing their fate to disappear from view once the term is over, schools implicitly communicate something about the moral status of nonhuman animals: Their interests matter only insofar as they serve ours. That outlook reflects human exceptionalism: the assumption that human interests matter far more than those of other animals. What makes this particularly concerning is that research suggests children do not naturally begin from this perspective. Psychologists have found that younger children are more likely to judge relationally, physically, and phylogenetically distant individuals as worthy of help or protection, suggesting they have more, rather than less, expansive moral circles than adults. Findings that young children often extend moral concern to animals far more readily than adults suggest that human exceptionalism is socially acquired rather than innate.
What should we make of these findings? Many people think it is another important part of the educational enterprise to socialize children into moral norms. While it would be disrespectful to promote values to adults, because these might conflict with their existing moral convictions, it’s unproblematic in the case of children, because they lack fully developed moral outlooks. While I’ve helped myself to this assumption too, it sits uncomfortably with the research I just cited. Children aren’t “empty vessels” waiting to be filled through moral education. At least on this topic, children often possess genuine, deeply felt moral commitments. They worry about whether animals are frightened, lonely, or safe. They ask where they are going and whether they will be alright. They feel a natural obligation to care for, not harm animals. (If you haven’t watched the viral clip of the boy realizing this and resisting eating octopus, you should!). And while it’s true that most of these children can’t articulate these concerns into a fully comprehensive moral outlook, many adults can’t either.
This is a different sort of worry from that which other philosophers have raised in this area, which tend to concern children’s future integrity. Daniel Butt, for example, has argued that bringing children up on meat-based diets might make it more difficult for them to later, as adults, align their actions with their beliefs. My point is that, at least in this case, there seems to be something problematic going on for the children now, too. If we’re at all interested in respecting and further cultivating the limited moral agency that children have, schools shouldn’t be trampling roughshod over these beliefs. Children’s existing compassion towards other species could be built on, examined, and refined through honest reflection, rather than schools socializing children’s moral commitments away by implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) telling them they are wrong or unimportant.
The case against chick-hatching projects should be taken all the more seriously given that there are readily available alternatives that can deliver the same (or similar) epistemic goods. Perhaps the biology-related learning objectives might be achieved through the use of webcams or a 3D chick life cycle kit. Or, if an aim was to nurture children’s love of animals and nature, this might be achieved by a trip to a local forest or animal sanctuary.
If schools are going to do these projects, there are better ways to approach them than simply inviting children to embrace the cute. That framing is itself problematic: As scholars within the emerging field of “cute studies” have argued, cuteness is not simply an innocent aesthetic. It can encourage us to view animals as passive, manipulable objects for our own enjoyment rather than as beings with lives and interests of their own. Rather, schools must ask: What sort of relationship with animals are they trying to cultivate? What other ways-of-being with animals are there? Many traditions, including a range of Indigenous and other non-Western perspectives, have different, humbler ways of understanding and relating to Nature, often recognizing how enmeshed we are with our environment and valuing relationships of reciprocity with other species. Rather than children taking turns handling these animals, children could simply take turns observing. They could be invited to ask questions that help with truly attentive observation. How are the chicks different from each other? How do they relate to each other? In what ways are they like humans? Do they do anything better than humans?
These can be genuinely open questions. But it seems unlikely that asking them will lead children to conclude that these chicks are of no moral significance. If children then recoil from the truth about what happens next, perhaps that tells us something important—not about children’s values, but about our own.
Christina Easton
Christina Easton is Assistant Professor in the Ethics of Non-violence at the University of Birmingham. She is a moral and political philosopher, with particular interests in education, animals, and moral risk. Before academia, she taught philosophy and religious studies in secondary schools for eight years.
