Human Rights Education Can Be Integrated Throughout the School Day

Childhood Education, Spring 2005 by Stomfay-Stitz, Aline, Wheeler, Edyth

Peace educators can indeed stand up and cheer in response to the awarding of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize to an African environmental activist and advocate for human rights. Wangari Maathai was honored as founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, which works to bring democracy and human rights to central Africa. In 1991, she was arrested and imprisoned because of her protests against projects that would have cleared great expanses of forest. Only a campaign by Amnesty International helped free her from prison. Maathai earned a degree in biological sciences from Mount St. Scholastica in Kansas and a master's degree at the University of Pittsburgh. She is now Kenya's assistant minister for environment, natural resources, and wildlife ("Nobel Prizes," 2004).

ACEI continues to call our attention to the children of war, child soldiers, and refugees from the war-torn parts of the globe. ACEI also has taken on an advocacy role on their behalf. We should applaud these efforts for human rights. Research by Dennis Banks (see Online Resources), however, indicates that few state departments of education have actually mandated human rights education in their schools. Clearly, individual teachers will need to take responsibility for the integration of peace education and human rights education.

ACEI's representatives to the United Nations, Lynn Staley and Eileen Bayer, issued a call to our membership that we cannot ignore. They ask: "Are we educating our children to be active advocates? Are we integrating global education and peace education into our curricula? Are we facilitating classroom projects whereby children help children?" They are collecting stories of any efforts by our membership to take on these responsibilities (Staley & Bayer, 2004).

On the bright side, progress has been made in fulfilling a basic right for children-the right to an education. In recent years, large groups of children in several African nations (Kenya, Malawi, Lesotho, Tanzania, and Uganda) were able to enter schools after their governments ended the requirement that parents pay a fee for their children's education. As a result, millions of children have showed up at their schools, resulting in 1st-grade classes of 100 children in some areas (Dugger, 2004).

By integrating human rights education and peace education into the daily fabric of our school day, we have the potential to take first steps toward the integration of human rights education. Here are a few ways that you can begin:

* Display a poster on the Declaration of the Rights of the Child or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (see Online Resources for availability). Print it on a poster, so children can read it by themselves. Read from it frequently. Explain a portion of it to the children each day. Perhaps it can be interwoven into your morning message or class meeting at the start of the school day.

* Find a project that children can participate in-one that would be tangible to them. For example, the online resources of past columns have highlighted the work of young peacemakers and activists, namely Gregory Smith and Craig Kielburger, who have created their own organizations to aid child victims of injustice and violence. Numerous peace-based organizations for children offer activities in human rights and concrete projects to aid other child victims. These groups can perhaps locate a school where a pen pal system may be possible, creating ties to a distant school and showing the real faces of real children helped by their efforts. This would give them a firsthand introduction to the roles of "advocate" and "activist" (see Online Resources).

* Expand your children's global awareness by using a world map. Show them places where different newsworthy events have occurred. If children have immigrated from different regions, add a gold star with the child's name on the map, showing the child's country of origin (Morascini, 2004).

* Teach conflict resolution, modeling how to use it when a problem becomes evident. Read from the model often, asking individual children to reread it when they are heading into a potential problem area (Wheeler, 2003).

* Clip articles from the newspaper and read them to the children each day. Concentrate on events that have been solved without violence.

* Use lesson plans expressly created for human rights education, such as those found in The Fourth R, a newsletter published by Amnesty International (for grades 4-12).

* Reinforce the school's policy to "reduce, reuse, recycle," involving the children in sorting out materials used in class or other areas.

To sum up, teaching human rights education may begin in small places, our own classrooms. We may feel alone, but we can take heart in the memorable words of Eleanor Roosevelt, in a 1958 speech before the UN, that still ring true today:

Where after all, do human rights begin? In small places, close to home-so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet, they "are" the world of individual persons. . . Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning elsewhere.