[hr-education-na] Re: Rationale for Human Rights Education revisited

I believe that a human rights school can provide a well-defined pilot for
other pedagogical projects, but more immediately can provide a specific
place where activism can take place. In the existing public school system,
communities are diverse, parents are litigation-prone, political views are
strong, all over this country. For a classroom teacher to take on human
rights activism in any public school may prove risky for her/him, for her
job (especially since 9/11), for the learning process for her students. If
parents object to having their students required to participate in human
rights projects, a great deal of damage can be done for the whole class
through the conflict that can ensue. In schools where human rights groups
can form clubs there is no such conflict. But clubs can be
precarious--some of my college students tried to form human rights clubs
in their high schools that ended up dying quickly. In a human rights
school a self-selected community can develop that can work on human rights
without conflict, and can model a community based on human rights
principles. I think there is a strong need for this, just as magnet
schools have been created around the arts and other topics. I believe that
just as our values are inherited from the Enlightenment, from humanism in
general, human rights belong at the center of the curriculum in any
school, though the words "human rights" are rarely used these days. But a
human rights school can take that even further, mainly into daily
activism.

Mallika Henry


On 12/11/03 6:30:01 PM, felixdekatt@earthlink.net wrote:
>
> Having said all that, I wish to ask this group a question we are now
> preparing ourselves to answer in January:  Why create a human
> rights-themed school?  Why would such a school be any more effective than
> or unique from a regular humanities school, or a school which focuses on
> democracy?
>



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