[hr-education] Re: Theoretical framework, legal bases and history of HRE

Hola Pablo, and others,

I read with great enthusiasm your post.

I would argue you hit the nail on the head when you mention Aristotle and
the capacity for the human person to discern what is good and evil, right
and wrong, perfective and defective. This got me very excited.

I've been reflecting on human rights education and I am convinced that
unless a curriculum is infused with human rights education, it is deprived
of meaning. John Finnis and Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle and other natural
law theorists point out clearly the distinction between theoretical reason
and practical reason in Aristotle and Aquinas' philosophical anthropoloy,
and it is practical reason, which operates when we discern reflectively
about what should or should not be done, sought, pursues, that surfaces
practical and moral obligations. These moral obligations, which Aquinas
calls the natural law, translate philosophically into duties to promote
human rights. These obligations are directed at basic goods: goods and
ends (life, friendship, truth, beauty, play, religion etc) which form the
terminal goal of intelligent seeking, which give action their meaning
(ratio), and which any other human being is entitled to enjoy, their
right, their desert, to the extent that we can promote them.

Classrooms can teach a lot of logical and analytic 'meanings': concepts,
ideas, relations, data, but only human rights education weaves all these
into a 'meaning-ful' experience, that kind of meaning that attends the
directives of practical reason; that kind of meaning that answers the
question "what is the point of understanding all this, or of doing all
these".

Human rights education to me is an urgent calling: unless we surface and
insist that our thinking, our doing, our daily learning is aimed at
meaningful ends, has a point and to reinforce these ends as worth seeking,
we will end up with a whole generation who, like some relativists, think
that life and all that goes on is futile and pointless. Much (but not
all!) of our postmodern condition is a reflection of that loss of meaning,
and perhaps the neglect of ethical, human rights education is much to be
blamed. After the middle ages, with the losing sight of practical reason
in Hume (who affirmed only emotions) and Kant (who made practical reaon
into a kind of speculative reason willed into action) who have begun to
lose sight of meaning. Human rights education, it is my hope, will turn
that around.

Jude

 
Jude Chua Soo Meng, PhD, FRAS
Singapore


 
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