Kendriya Vidyalaya Schools to Incorporate PETA’s Humane-Education Programme

Through our humane-education programme, Compassionate Citizen, PETA is offering a lesson in compassion for schoolchildren attending over 1,000 Kendriya Vidyalaya schools. After meeting with a representative of PETA India, the deputy commissioner of Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan issued a notification to all its schools across India asking that they integrate the programme into the official curriculum via languages, science, social studies, environmental and values education curricula. As of 2010, over 1 million children were attending Kendriya Vidyalaya schools.

Compassionate Citizen is designed to teach 8-to 12-year-old children to be kind to animals and has been endorsed by the Animal Welfare Board of India and the Central Board of Secondary Education. PETA has distributed the educational resource materials in English and Hindi to all Kendriya Vidyalaya schools.

It is well documented by psychologists, sociologists and law-enforcement officials that violence towards animals by children is often an early warning sign of future acts of violence towards humans.

Compassionate Citizen consists of a teacher’s guide, reproducible activity sheets, a reading unit and a 28-minute video – all devised to help students use their reading and reasoning skills to examine the complex lives of animals, how our relationship with them has changed over time and how to respond when animals are in trouble. PETA has provided Compassionate Citizen free of cost to more than 98,000 schools. The programme is available in English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam and Telugu and can be made available in other languages if needed.

To get a free copy of the material, write to PETA at [email protected]. For more information, please visit CompassionateCitizen.com.