Putting human rights on the curriculum

All over the world, school children learn national and global history, religion, science, and social studies, among other subjects. But what about human rights? How can human rights be integrated into these subjects, fit for children in primary and secondary schools, and tailored to their national context? A new guide by the Danish Institute for Human Rights might have the answer. A strong curriculum, including human rights education, is key to ensuring that future generations understand their rights and respect and uphold the rights of others.

Therefore, the Danish Institute for Human Rights has developed a new guide to help support other national human rights institutions in their work to embed human rights into national education programmes. The guide presents a step-by-step approach to the different phases of HRE curriculum development, suggesting sample curricula on human rights along the way.

Making a complicated task easier

Globally, national human rights institutions (NHRIs), such as the Office of Public Defender of Georgia, work to promote and protect human rights, and have unique insight into and knowledge of their national human rights situations. But as Medea Gugeshashvili, head of the Human Rights Education Department of Georgia’s Public Defender’s Office puts it, "It is one thing for us to have a unique knowledge of the human rights situation in our country, but it is more complicated to know how to infuse human rights in the general education system."

Gugeshashvili sees the guide’s potential for making her office’s work on integrating human rights into Georgia's educational programmes somewhat easier, saying it will help in developing new learning materials and setting clear goals for human rights education:

"Currently, the Public Defender’s Office is cooperating with the Pedagogical Faculties and other higher educational institutions to integrate human rights issues in future teacher educational programs. The guide will help us develop the educational materials – define the purpose of the human rights education, identify relevant issues to integrate in the programs and define the outcomes that future teachers have to obtain as a result of their instruction on human rights issues," says Medea Gugeshashvili.

Moving away from traditional education

In other countries around the world, Ministries of Education are starting to move away from more traditional, textbook-centred and teacher-directed education, solely driven by content, towards outcome-based education, where there is an increased focus on whether the students are actually learning. Rather than having students memorise and recite human rights conventions and articles, the goal is to increasingly equip them to analyse and apply human rights knowledge. Curriculum is therefore planned around specific goals and outcomes. Defining clear learning outcomes – the knowledge and skills students should acquire at the end of their education – is key in the curriculum development process. From now on, with the new guide, this part of the process will be made easier as far as integrating human rights is concerned:

“The guide opens new possibilities to assess how the Georgian national curriculum is organized. In other words, it enables us to evaluate how developed the curriculum is in that sense. The core issue in this process is whether the curriculum can be classified as an outcome-based or content-based one," says Medea Gugeshashvili.

The guide has been made with support from the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) and is now available online.