Content for human rights education
The history of human rights tells a detailed story of efforts made to define the basic dignity and worth of the human being and his or her most fundamental entitlements.
These efforts continue to this day. The teacher will want to include an account of this history as an essential part of human rights teaching, and it can be made progressively more sophisticated as students mature. The fight for civil and political rights, the campaign to abolish slavery, the struggle for economic and social justice, the achievement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two subsequent Covenants, and all the conventions and declarations that followed, especially the Convention on the Rights of the Child – all these topics provide a basic legal and normative framework.
The core content of human rights education in schools is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. These documents – which have received universal recognition, as explained above – provide principles and ideas with which to assess experience and build a school culture that values human rights.
The rights they embody are universal, meaning that all human beings are entitled to them, on an equal basis; they are indivisible, meaning there is no hierarchy of rights, i.e. no right can be ranked as “non-essential” or “less important” than another. Instead human rights are interdependent, part of a complementary framework. For example, your right to participate in government is directly affected by your right to express yourself, to form associations, to get an education and even to obtain the necessities of life. Each human right is necessary and each is interrelated to all others.
However, even taught with the greatest skill and care, documents and history alone cannot bring human rights to life in the classroom. Nor does working through the Universal Declaration or the Convention on the Rights of the Child, pointing out the rationale for each article, teach the meaning of these articles in people’s lives. “Facts” and “fundamentals”, even the best-selected ones, are not enough to build a culture of human rights. For these documents to have more than intellectual significance, students need to approach them from the perspective of their real-life experience and grapple with them in terms of their own understanding of justice, freedom and equity.
Teaching about and for human rights
Research has shown that some upper primary and secondary school students sometimes suffer from a lack of confidence that limits their ability to socialize with others. It is difficult to care about someone else’s rights when you do not expect to have any yourself. Where this is the case, teaching for human rights could require going back to the beginning and teaching confidence and tolerance first. We will provide exercises, at the end of our first part and can be used with any group and help to establish a good classroom climate, which is crucial for human rights education. These activities can be repeated (with suitable variations) to settle students into activities that require group cooperation. They can also foster the human capacity for sympathy, which is fragile and contingent but nonetheless real, and confirm the fact that no person is more of a human being than another and no person is less.
Already implicit above is the idea – that teaching about human rights is not enough. The teacher will want to begin, and never to finish, teaching for human rights. For this reason the largest part of this text consists of activities. These create opportunities for students and teachers first to examine the basic elements that make up human rights – life, justice, freedom, equality and the destructive character of deprivation, suffering and pain – and then to use them to work out what they truly think and feel about a wide range of real-world issues.
The focus of human rights education is not just outward on external issues and events but also inward on personal values, attitudes, and behaviour. To affect behaviour and inspire a sense of responsibility for human rights, human rights education uses participatory methodologies that emphasize independent research, analysis, and critical thinking.
Rights and responsibilities
For the basic principles of a human rights culture to survive, people must continue to see a point in defending them: “I have a right to this. It is not just what I want, or need. It is my right. There is a responsibility to be met.” But rights stand only by the reasons given for them and the reasons must be good ones. Unless people have the chance to work out such reasons for themselves – and where better than at school? – they will not claim their rights when they are withheld or taken away, or feel responsibility to defend the rights of others. We have to see for ourselves why rights are so important, for this in turn fosters responsibility.
It is, of course, possible to proceed the other way around: to teach for human rights in terms of responsibilities and obligations first. But again, teachers will want to do more than tell students what they ought to be doing. To bring these ideas alive, they will create opportunities for students to truly understand and accept such social responsibilities. Teachers and students will then have the principles and skills required to resolve the inevitable conflicts of responsibilities, obligations or rights when they arise.
Because these points of conflict can also provide useful insights, they should be welcomed. They make the teaching of human rights dynamic and relevant. Conflict offers the sort of learning opportunities that encourage students to face contrasts creatively, without fear, and to seek their own ways of resolving them.
Teaching and preaching: action speaks louder than words
The fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child have virtual global validity and applicability is very important for teachers. By promoting universal human rights standards, the teacher can honestly say that he or she is not preaching. Teachers have a second challenge, however: to teach in such a way as to respect human rights in the classroom and the school environment itself. For learning to have practical benefit, students need not only to learn about human rights but to learn in an environment that models them.
This means avoiding any hypocrisy.
At its simplest, hypocrisy refers to situations where what a teacher is teaching is clearly at odds with how he or she is teaching it. For example: “Today we are going to talk about freedom of expression – shut up in the back row!” In such circumstances, students will learn mostly about power, and considerably less about human rights. As students spend a good deal of time studying teachers and can develop a good understanding of teachers’ beliefs, a teacher who behaves unjustly or abusively will have little positive effect. Often, because of a desire to please, students may try to mirror a teacher’s personal views without thinking for themselves.
This may be a reason, at the beginning at least, for teachers not to express their own ideas. At its most complexes, hypocrisy raises profound questions about how to protect and promote the human dignity of both teachers and students in a classroom, in a school and within society at large.
The “human rights climate” within schools and classrooms should rest on reciprocal respect between all the actors involved. Accordingly, the way, in which decision-making processes take place, methods for resolving conflicts and administering discipline, and the relationship within and among all actors constitute key contributing factors.
Ultimately teachers need to explore ways to involve not only students, school administrators, education authorities and parents in human rights education but also the whole community. In this way teaching for human rights can reach from the classroom into the community to the benefit of both. All concerned will be able to discuss universal values and their relation to reality and to recognize that schools can be part of the solution to basic human rights problems.
As far as the students are concerned, negotiating a set of classroom rules and responsibilities is a long-tested and most effective way to begin. Teaching practices that are compatible with basic human rights provide a consistent model. In this way a sports or mathematics teacher, for example, can also teach for human rights.
Dealing with difficult issues
Sometimes controversial and sensitive subjects come up when students begin to examine human rights. Teachers need to remain constantly alert to student discomfort and potential disagreement. Teachers should acknowledge that human rights necessarily involve conflicts of values and that students will benefit from understanding these conflicts and seeking to resolve them.
Sometimes teachers meet resistance to human rights education on the ground that it imposes non-native principles that contradict and threaten local values and customs. Teachers concerned about resistance from administrators should meet with them in advance, share goals and plans for the class, and explain about the United Nations human rights framework and related educational initiatives (such as the UN Decade for Human Rights Education). Encourage administrators to visit a class – they may themselves benefit from human rights education!
