[hr-education] Re: Considering HRE as a distinct subject in school?

Dear Colleagues,

I am the head of the Information Centre on Children and Human Rights
Education in Belarus. We are dealing with children and HRE for the last
five years when our Ministry of Education started a new course "Human
Rights" for all primary and secondary schools.

I have classes on human rights at a gymnasium; as researcher in the field
of HRE appointed by our ministry I am responsible for teaching, promoting
human rights and finding new ways how to teach human rights, research what
kind of actions and activities will be interesting for our pupils, etc.

I think that HRE as a separate subject is the wrong way in teaching human
rights. As an optional course it is working in our reality of a transition
situation - we never had heard before (I mean in the former USSR because
it was a political issue) about human rights documents and teaching
children and human rights. I see that if we as human rights experts are
supporting our pupils and teachers well at school they could do extremely
interesting things. We evaluate school self-government systems and
encourage voices of children so the school administration can hear and
provide feedback on it (through volunteer service "Voice of Ombudsman");
we have school theatre and pupils are playing human rights stories for the
rest of the community -- peer education on children's rights is very
useful at school because all trained pupils are very active in school life
--; we are publishing a school newsletter dedicated to children's rights
issues at school and society at large; Youth Council (from reps form all
town schools) got the right to attend local administration meetings (just
to get the possibility to see how they are managing issues at the local
level and make their voice be heard); and a lot of other interesting
activities created by pupils with the help of teachers and administration.

We have volunteers for our child helpline (just to help children in need)
and we joined Child Helpline International-The Netherlands for getting
more aware about how such helplines are working abroad. Now more than 120
pupils are working on Internet projects with their peers abroad (you know
that our country is very isolated at the moment in Europe), so children
and HRE became part of our life and existence. We have a very exciting
project with a Vienna business school and connected two our schools with
them for sharing new pedagogical techniques, business teaching, European
Language Portfolio, etc.

We are very poor now after the collapse of the USSR (I remember the words
of our colleague from Africa about their situation but it is impossible to
imagine even for us how to live and survive under such conditions) but do
believe that if we want to live in peace and dignity, respect others and
ourselves we have to teach about human and children's rights, support our
pupils in exploring their rights in everyday lives, cooperate with our
colleagues abroad - because artificial isolation of our country with 10
million population is nonsense from the perspective of HRE.

With peace and love from Belarus,

Vladimir Kalinin



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