Educating for Human Rights

Abstract

Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States, once said that America did not create human rights-rather, human created America. Any government might make the same claim whose founders strove to decentralize power and increase the control people had over their lives. Certainly, it is easy for the citizens of superpowers like the Soviet Union and the United States to believe human began with them. Therefore, it is even more important for citizens in those nations to know and understand the universal and inalienable nature of human rights. Such a human education might help prevent superpowers from exercising super rights over the less powerful. Obviously, such an idealistic goal collides with the reality that schools are designed to socialize students into the existing social structure. From the earliest grades, students are taught to respect authority and revere the nation's founders and their successors. Even if human are introduced at this early stage (the primacy principle), national definitions of human come first, with external and international definitions being introduced much later. Thus, in the United States, for example, most students are only taught about the US Constitution, and a substantial proportion of these students believe that the United States is the only country in the world with a written constitution. A more comparative approach would introduce the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in conjunction with the US Constitution. To date, neither the Soviets nor the Americans have made adequate progress on this front. Only within the last year has a bill been introduced in the US Congress to develop by the year 2000 a locally based program of human teaching and education and appoint a national human education advisor. Countries as diverse as Norway and Senegal have made more progress than the United States in establishing human education as a requirement in their nation's schools. To my knowledge, no such efforts have yet been made in the Soviet Union. Human education efforts by governments have lagged despite the strong endorsement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.