Non-human animals in Finnish worldview education textbooks

Abstract

Education plays a key role in ethical development, and worldview education emphasizes ethical questions. Ethical discussions within education about the treatment of non-human animals are urgently needed. In Finland, worldview education is a compulsory subject, introduced to students from the first year of school. In this study, we turn to Finnish educational material on worldview instruction groups for Lutheran, Orthodox and Islam religion and for the secular subject Culture, Worldview and Ethics for grades 1-2 to ask how non-human animals, and the relation between humans and non-human animals, are portrayed. The article provides a Finnish perspective on animal ethics in worldview education. Through discourse analysis, we examine how humans’ relations with non-human animals are presented in educational materials. We find a dominant discourse of human-animal separation, where humans are portrayed as capable of thinking and feeling, in contrast to non-sentient animals. Non-human animals are presented as utility animals that supply human needs, being used for labour and for food, constructing the consumption of non-human animals as food as natural. We discuss the challenging intertwined discourses of care, protection and utility of non-human animals and call for a stronger focus on animal ethics within worldview education.