2/20 – Asia’s First Compassionate Curriculum for Children

To mark 20 years of ACTAsia, we’re running a series celebrating 20 wins across the organisation’s history – 20 Years, 20 Wins. This instalment turns to perhaps one of the most significant: ACTAsia’s award-winning, groundbreaking Caring for Life education programme for children. 

 

Before Caring for Life, there was no course like it anywhere in the world; nothing that combined critical thinking and emotional intelligence into a single sequential curriculum that taught children, in a structured and sustained way, that people, animals, and the environment are all part of one connected world. ACTAsia built the first multi-year curriculum built to protect people, animals, and the environment. In many countries, children have long been taught how to relate to others with care as part of school life through subjects like PSHE(Personal, Social, Health, and Economic education) in the UK, where citizenship, empathy, and animal welfare sit alongside maths and reading on the timetable (a North American equivalent would be Health Class and Social Studies). In China and across much of Asia, no equivalent existed. Compassion might be encouraged at home, but it was not yet taught as its own subject, with a curriculum, structured lessons, and measurable learning outcomes.

Caring for Life was ACTAsia’s answer to that gap, and it remains one of the organisation’s most foundational wins. Built in the organisation’s early years, CFL for children laid the groundwork upon which much of ACTAsia’s later education work would grow from.

Building Caring for Life

Caring for Life, known as CFL, is a six-year course designed for children aged 6 to 12, spanning the full length of primary school. It was the first programme of its kind in Asia: a structured, sequential curriculum teaching children that people, animals, and the environment are all connected, rather than treating each as a separate topic.

The course is built on the United Nation’s (UNESCO) Four Pillars of Education – Learning to Know, Learning to Do, Learning to Live Together, Learning to Be – and translates that framework into 60 lessons delivered across the six primary years. Each year builds on the last, so that by the time a child finishes the course, they have moved through a full progression of ideas about how to live thoughtfully alongside other people, other species, and the natural world around them.

That structure is part of what makes CFL so foundational. Designed from the outset as a complete course, it was never a single lesson plan, quick workshop, or short-term intervention.  Rather, it was built for the kind of lasting, sustainable change ACTAsia has always worked toward. 

What Children Learn

CFL’s 60 lessons cover three connected strands: citizenship, animal welfare, and the environment. Students learn what it means to be a responsible member of their community; how to recognise and respond to the needs of animals; and how human choices affect the natural world around them. The connections between these strands are deliberate. A child learning about animal welfare in one lesson might explore, in another, how that same sense of care extends to people, or to the environment they share with both. Rather than teach three separate subjects, the aim is to teach a framework for thinking: that care for people, animals, and the planet are one and the same. 

Where ACTAsia’s Education Work Still Begins 

Twenty years on, Caring for Life is still where all of ACTAsia’s work with children begins. Later initiatives – from rural outreach programmes to Earth Day lessons – have built directly on the structure and thinking first put in place by CFL, and its philosophy reverberates throughout all of our work. Many of ACTAsia’s most significant wins haven’t been single moments of recognition, but groundwork laid that continues to shape everything that has come after. Caring for Life education for children is testament to this. 

That approach would go on to earn recognition from the United Nations (a story we will pick up later in the series).   

20 Years 20 Wins 

As the second of ACTAsia’s twentieth anniversary wins, Caring for Life is one part of a story that is still unfolding. 

 

Get Involved 

If you are inspired by Caring for Life and ACTAsia’s wider work in education for children and want to get involved, consider donating today. Support from the community helps bring the course into more classrooms across China and the region.

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