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Summer School - Advanced Course for Educators and Trainers on Human Rights Education: Acquiring the Scientific Foundations of the Universality of Human Rights

8-12 July 2002

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the milestone of peoples' political evolution. Peoples in fact, after experimenting various State systems, acknowledge democracy as the political tool for the implementation of the principles which where proclaimed in 1948. The heterogeneity that lays at the basis of political, economic and cultural conflicts strongly limits the application of such principles if each people believes that its own culture represents its identity and, as such, is unchangeable and irrenouncable. If this were true, there would not exist universal values and a true co-operation among States and among citizens would not be possible in the respect for human rights. In other words, it would not be possible the existence of individuals who are able to respect life in whatever form it takes place and to abolish, first of all in themselves, the mechanisms of discrimination and superiority over their fellow men which hamper solidarity, co-operation and consciousness. The word "quality" in this sense has to be considered according to criteria of conceptual values which define a didactic methodology that respects, at all levels, the person's potentials and universality and that is aimed to develop one's ability of criticism and self-criticism in order to decide one's being and becoming on the basis of a democratic co-existence.

These conceptual foundations "force" all State to put in motion concrete projects and take actions: otherwise, we would allow all negative and degenerative entities to destroy those values whose defense, protection and implementation are the election therapy for the world's evils and, at the same time, the main path to democracy.

The aim of this course is to provide educators and trainers with the scientific tools CEU/IPV have developed during twenty years of multidisciplinary research, tools which make it possible to stimulate the higher functions of the human brain so that the person becomes aware of, and responsible for, those values which are biologically inherent in each human being right from birth. Training aimed at developing a consciousness of these values is needed in order to allow educators to develop a truly effective approach that enhances self-awareness and self-management in students. This approach must be based on the concepts of dignity, freedom, justice and love, from which all rational and emotional aspects of human behaviour derive. This method, which has been widely experimented with excellent results, makes it possible to translate formal aspects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into human consciousness and behaviour. As is known, human rights are not notions to be blindly repeated, but rather are values that help women and men find their way through a jungle of conditionings, where truth is hidden and false values are produced. Science and the consciousness of human rights against demagogy, the arrogance of power of man over man, are the last hope to defeat juvenile apathy towards life and to create a new society that is capable of giving centrality to human dignity.

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