This scientific work is comprehensive research of the issue of moral and ethical education of children that promotes cohabitation and comfortable coexistence of humans and living world an integral part of which they are, and the solution of which, to an extent, determines the future of the humanity. In this context, a special attention should be given to the issue of the relations between a human/child and an animal. This issue is very relevant nowadays. To understand its urgency and acuteness we need to look at its origins and backgrounds, achievements, best practices, and miscounts that followed it during the historical development. Building a relevant modern educational space requires drawing on historical and pedagogical knowledge, examination of its composition, structure, in other words, relating past, present, and future in the general movement toward solving the mentioned issues.
This paper is multidisciplinary, adjacent to several science dimensions, primarily, education, literature, law, as well as natural science, medicine, agriculture, in which animals are involved, to solve professional tasks.
Therefore, the choice of this historic and pedagogical topic for research, its multidisciplinary spurred the search, engagement, study, and classification of quite broad spectrum of source literature, as well as sources, the analysis of which allowed for wholesome, objective, and non-bias evaluation of the subject of choice.
The approaches chosen for the research with chronologic and history one being the primary, enabled us to trace the emergence and development of different concepts to develop humane treatment of animals by children, describe their conditioning upon many factors, namely, how these issues are viewed in the society, the role of public perception, the focus of educational process, and its contents, first of all, child’s age, reflection of the issues of animal life and behavior in children’s literature, the role of a trusted adult (a teacher, parents, children’s book writer, literature character) etc., in other words, look at the phenomena in the context of social and political factors. This is the approach that helped to see the succession and discontinuity in the development of this theme, its disappearance in some years since education fulfilled atypical for childhood tasks. Historiographic, hermeneutic, microhistory and biographical approaches were used as tools and implemented through such methods as analysis, synthesis, generalization, etc.
Scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact, that for the first time ever:
–selected as the topic was the genesis of developing value-based attitude toward animals as a dedicated pedagogical and educational problem, developed were the conceptual backgrounds and methodology of this phenomenon with the basis on sufficient source base which in its aggregate allowed for systematic and wholesome study of the processes for establishing and developing the framework of humanistic ideas with regard to treating animals using the tools of educational and cognitive as well as children’s literature, educational process, extra curriculum activity of the late ХІХ to the early ХХІ centuries;
– discussed was the further development of combination of moral and ethical, emotional, and value-based, as well as activity components, as the main prerequisite to teach children the importance of care and careful treatment to the living world and domestic animals, first of all;
– defined and described were the concepts that dominated in different years and decades: romantic and idealistic (for the youngest), and cognitive and sympathy (for the 20 oldest) (late ХІХ – early ХХ century); social-utilitarian-pragmatic (Soviet era), conscious-responsible-active (late ХХ – early ХХІ century), which, with time, set examples of attitudes that were different from those dominant.
The following was further developed in the research:
– discussing the ideas of humane treatment of all living that were voiced out in their pedagogical, literary and publicity works and epistolary heritage by infamous pedagogues and writers (I. Horbunov-Posadov, B. Hrinchenko, V. Sukhomlynskyi, K. Ushytskyi);
– classification, systematization and analysis of sources and problems of the research to which we included bibliographic catalogues as valuable resources for the discussion of the issue under consideration.
The following were clarified in the process of the research:
– conceptional and category framework (animal, living world, sympathy, compassion, responsibility, anthropomorphism, animalism, literature for children, promotional literature);
– role and significance of children’s literature and reading textbooks; popular scientific literature through the lens of environmental ethics, humanization of education, its moral and ethical potential in bringing up ethical attitude to living world.
