Media Library

Speeches

HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATION - THE FOURTH “R” 

Address by the President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, to the Third International Meeting of the International Confederation

Your invitation to address this Third International Convention of Principals, held here in Boston, was irresistible. The theme "Leadership for Global Learning" reflects the overall goals of the ICP which has 21 member countries and is, I understand, inaugurating a reciprocal observer arrangement with the European Secondary Heads Association (ESHA) of which Ireland is a member. You represent a resource as educators of immense significance. You are, in effect, the teachers in our global village, and I am reminded of the lines from Oliver Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" on the village master:

"And still they gazed, and still their wonder grew

That one small head could carry all he knew"

Collectively you represent a powerful instrument for change, as the 1996 Report of the NASSP "Breaking Moulds: Changing an American Institution" makes clear.

I must make it clear straight away that I am not an expert in education, but from my background as a human rights lawyer I have had a particular interest in human rights education. Soon I will take up a particular responsibility on behalf of the U.N. in this field. Hence my focus today on human rights education as constituting "The Fourth "R" - the fourth pillar of education along with reading, writing and arithmetic.

Perhaps no single idea born in the second half of the twentieth century has proved to be more powerful and the carrier of more hope, than the idea of human rights. The United Nations organisation made the promotion and encouragement of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all "without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion" one of its permanent objectives in 1946 and member states, which had joined then and have joined since, accept continuing obligations to work with the UN to achieve that objective.

Two years later in 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document, which is the foundation of the international human rights movement, proclaims in language which has never dated, a catalogue of human rights for our times, which the drafters offered as a "common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations". The source of the human rights and freedoms set out in that Declaration is that of human dignity and the justification for giving such emphasis to human rights is the belief, proclaimed by the Declaration, that it is "the inherent dignity and equal rights of all members of the human family, which is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world".

Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration and there will no doubt be much written and said in taking stock both of the positive and the negative developments in the efforts to achieve universal respect for human rights over the half century that has elapsed. One positive development has been the translation of the ideals of the Universal Declaration into international agreements which are binding on states in international law. The best known of these treaties are the two United Nations International Covenants, which together with their protocols and the Universal Declaration, make up the International Bill of Human Rights. These Covenants have been accepted by the majority of states in the world. That does not mean that the right and freedoms guaranteed in theory in these conventions - civil, cultural, economic, social and political, are enjoyed in practice. Working for human rights now is about trying to ensure that such agreed rights are fully respected and enforceable in every country.

Education remains crucial to the achievement of that objective; the General Assembly of the United Nations has proclaimed a Decade for Human Rights Education, 1995-2004. A comprehensive Plan of Action for the Decade was also approved by the General Assembly. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has been given responsibility for the implementation of the Plan of Action. The objectives for the Decade include the building and strengthening of human rights education programmes, including in schools, universities, professional and vocational training programmes, and institutions throughout the world.

Education is itself proclaimed as a human right in the Universal Declaration. It was envisaged by the drafters of the Declaration as one of the key means where the new post-war ideals of human rights and freedoms might prosper and have effect. The Preamble to the Universal Declaration called on every individual and every organ of society, "keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, to strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms". This message is reinforced in Article 26 of the Declaration when it identifies the objectives of education as being "directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms."

The Declaration envisages education at all levels both in formal schooling and outside of the school. Many innovative and important programmes of education have been developed for both informal and formal sectors in different parts of the world. Education at the second level is one vital part, therefore, of the overall goal of universal education in human rights.

The importance of human rights education in schools and its relationship to the overall purposes of education of the child is set out most fully in the best known of the international human rights instruments - the Convention on the Rights of the Child, or the Children's Convention.

In that Convention the States agree that education of the child should be directed to "the development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their full potential." (Article 29). Other objectives include the development of respect for the child's parents, his or her cultural identity, language and values, for national values and respect for civilisations different from his or her own, as well as the development of respect for the natural environment.

The Children's Convention also prescribes as an educational aim, "the preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin". Such objectives reflect human rights values and are underpinned in the Convention by the inclusion as an aim of education, "the development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and for the principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter".

These provisions in the Children's Convention, which has now achieved almost universal ratification, clearly and firmly establish education on human rights as a key objective of young people's education in all parts of our world. But I believe much more needs to be done by Governments and by educators to integrate that objective in the school curriculum. One goal of the UN Decade for Human Rights Education is to ensure that by its end schools in all countries will have incorporated their own human rights education programmes into their schools, for which the requisite local teaching and resource material will be provided through the help of Governments and international donors.

Human Rights aim to protect the inherent dignity of the human person, to develop understanding, tolerance and respect for others. All rights bring with them responsibilities - to ourselves, our families, our friends, and, further, to those we do not know and will never meet. If those are some of the aims of human rights, then the role of education in protecting those rights, and identifying those responsibilities, must be to teach children about the world in which they live and the people with whom they share that world. Within that broad framework more specific issues can be addressed by human rights education: why is our world as it is? What is my place in that world? And, perhaps most important, how can I change that world?

It might be said that such education deals only with global issues that are remote from children's lives. But the world in which we all live works on many, interconnected levels - local, national, regional and global. A key aim of human rights education is to provide our children with a thorough understanding of how they fit into the world at every level, and how decisions and actions taken at one level affect themselves and others. Human rights education, along with other subjects, begins with providing a grounding in what we know and what is closest to us - our family, local community and our school. In all of these spheres, we have both rights and responsibilities to ourselves and to others. In the family, we have a duty to respect our parents and siblings; in our community, we have the right to take part in the life of that community, and the duty to allow others to do so; in our school, we realise our right to education and, as the Children's Convention implies, a duty to exercise that right.

The same principles of learning about our rights and responsibilities apply at other levels, and may start to include teaching about democracy at local, regional and national levels, our right to vote and our duty to exercise that right so that we can have a say in the decisions that affect us.

Only with a proper understanding of how the world is and how the world should be, can we achieve one of the most basic and universally accepted tenets of educationalists everywhere as acknowledged in the Convention on the Rights of the Child: education should prepare children for life. Human rights education, then, stands alongside and equal to more traditional subjects as a vital means of enabling children to enjoy opportunities and fulfil their potential. This is the true significance of the Fourth "R" - the fourth pillar of education, along with reading, writing and arithmetic. The goal is to make young people in this increasingly interdependent world socially literate as well.

Human rights education does not stand alone as this fourth pillar. As a subject in which the teaching of justice is inherent at every level, human rights education also relates to other so-called 'adjectival educations'. Here we speak of development education, peace education, environmental education and citizenship education. Many educational materials look at only one of these areas, but the time is now right to recognise that these are all fundamental to a balanced curriculum.

Just as the different levels of our world are interconnected, so are the subjects that seek to describe and explain that world. The Declaration of the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, speaks of democracy, development and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms being "interdependent and mutually reinforcing." Education for the children who will be adults in the next millennium should surely reflect this thinking, not only by placing human rights education firmly in the curriculum, but also by recognising the links between human rights education and other subjects.

Why is human rights education at second level so important? Human rights education, at second level, is a vital component of the wider strategy that requires us to teach respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all. As the UN Plan of Action for the Decade for Human Rights Education stresses, there is a real need for human rights education in schools, but also in the wider society: training for the police, military, judiciary, civil servants and government officials among others, is a requirement of the international standards.

Education at second level provides the foundation on which this more focused education can be built, and therefore the task in secondary schools is to ensure that the foundations are firm.

Second level education is often the last chance we have to reach all our children and instil in them the principles of human rights. Once those children have left school, they are unlikely again to be together - they will disperse to university, to home, and to work. Their horizons will broaden, and their responsibilities grow, but they will almost certainly never again sit in a classroom, open to learning, and the opportunity to provide them with the proper foundation in human rights may be gone. For all the work that may be done in providing human rights and other education in the non-formal sector, schooling still provides by far the easiest means of educating people to know their human rights and their responsibilities.

There is a consensus among educationalists that effective teaching in such subject as human rights development education or environmental studies requires more than the transmission of information. Effective teaching needs also to develop skills and change attitudes, for example, the pupil's skills in critical analysis of information, in recognising the validity of different view points, skills in coming to one's own conclusions and skill in recognising possibilities for future action.

These points have been summarised as objectives for development education in a recent joint publication for use in schools in both Britain and Ireland, in concepts which are wholly applicable to the human rights curriculum. The authors identify six core dimensions of development education: a justice dimension, a global perspective, an action dimension, the use of participative methodologies, the linking of local and global understandings and actions, and developing imagination, vision and values. (75/25 Development in an Increasingly Unequal World (1996) published by the Development Education Centre Birmingham).

There exists an immense variety of experience in both the North and the South of the world, accumulated by teachers, that can be shared. The Decade for Human Rights Education is intended to encourage the exchange of experience within and between countries in human rights education, including curriculum ideas and teaching strategies. Nothing would consolidate more the Decade's efforts to make human rights education universal and continuing than the co-operation of teachers in the exchange of ideas and programmes in their schools.

Schools in Ireland, North and South, have come to be particularly sensitive to the need to develop in pupils, through both educational and community based programmes, a respect for others and an understanding of what the practice of tolerance and mutual respect entails. These programmes may not be termed human rights education but they encompass all the values on which the idea of human rights is based.

Since 1989 the Northern Ireland curriculum has provided for the inclusion of two cross curricular themes (Education for Mutual Understanding and Cultural Heritage). Teachers involved with these programmes are aware that effective education must be relevant and also must empower pupils in the educational process, giving them the capacity to make choices.

The importance of these goals and skills have been acknowledged in Northern Ireland. EMU has rightly been praised for its holistic approach, integrated at all levels of compulsory schooling through all school subjects and supported through practical projects and cross community contact.

As President of Ireland I have had numerous opportunities to visit schools in inner city areas, in the suburbs and in rural areas. I have been struck by how imaginatively teachers have used the commemoration over the past 3 years of the Great Potato Famine of 150 years ago to encourage projects relating to justice and peace, both within Ireland and internationally. And last September a new programme "Civic, Social and Political Education" (CPSE) was introduced in the Junior Cycle, for ages 12 to 15, to prepare students for active participatory citizenship.

The Decade for Human Rights Education is already underway but it is not too late to become engaged in it. As someone who will very soon have responsibility for encouraging its continued implementation, it is an opportune time to encourage teachers and principals of schools to get behind its objectives. The Plan of Action in fact appeals for the active engagement of professional associations, including teachers organisations, to increase their involvement in making the objectives of the Decade succeed.

The human rights ideal represents a global civilisational gift which we can pass on to the future generation now in our schools. Born out of the horrors and wars of our century, it draws upon all world cultures and constitutes a building block for a world in the next millennium based on the value of the human dignity of every person, as well as on the values of freedom, justice and peace in an interdependent world.