| The main purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate that consuming animals is an educational act that warrants sustained attention. The main question I address is: What does the consumption of animals have to do with the life of the educated person? I argue that we should learn more about the lives---which is to say, the deprivation, torment, and death---of the animals we eat. This sort of learning requires a fresh way to think about not only education, but also food, eating, and animals. I aim to illuminate the extent to which we are implicated in systems of immense suffering, and at the same time, provoke us to grow by questioning deeply-entrenched habit of consuming animals. This dissertation is a theoretical exploration that may or may not lead to dietary change, but that does, I believe, hold potential to change the way we think and act in the world.;In Chapter 1, I lay out the reasons why consuming animals is a rich subject for educational philosophy. Chapter 2 is a brief overview of the animal ethics literature to analyze the moral arguments for bringing nonhuman beings into the realm of human moral consideration. Clearly, eating animals is an ethical act and it is important to review who has said what about it. In Chapter 3, I explore John Dewey's conception of growth and argue that, for human moral growth, we should consider the habit of consuming animals. In Chapter 4, I shift the focus to (mis)education at the cultural level. I argue that it is important to understand the consumption of animals---as a problem of cultural miseducation---so that we are better situated to rethink and resist the cultural forces that shape the consenting attitudes underlying this fundamental act of consumption. Chapter 5 examines the educational significance of understanding animals-becoming-meat---that is, the agricultural and slaughtering practices that turn living, full-bodied animals into fragmented, edible pieces of meat. This chapter has a broader function, too, as I make a case for extending scholarly inquiry addressing consumerism and commercialism to (re)encompass production and labor. Animals-becoming-meat is a particular form of production and labor that illustrates and exposes the larger problems of distance, ignorance, and alienation in contemporary life; it also demonstrates how the foundational role of production is largely concealed and thus taken for granted in consumer society. I end with Chapter 6 where I argue that the most effective and transformative pedagogical means to understand animals-becoming-meat is to watch the process unfold, with our own eyes. Given the great extent that corporate agriculture goes to conceal the brutality behind its walls, I believe we must be unsettled with disturbing visuals of animals-becoming-meat. I argue that education should unveil the exploitive practices that remain deliberately hidden from public view---even if it is culturally taboo to do so. |
