Teaching about Global Human Rights for Global Citizenship
uestions like these are easily articulated by most students in the United States because from an early age they frequently receive socially diffused rights messages in virtually every aspect of their lives. The United States has been described as a highly legalistic society or a polity of laws, not people. That tradition is indeed one of the hallmarks of the U.S. democracy. Television and film media illustrate that claim, awash as they are with references to laws, statutes, adjudication, and police work. Because young people, particularly adolescents, are great consumers of those visual texts, they imbibe a general understanding of, and perhaps even a taste for, this national legal fixation. The same is true for classrooms, with rights and litigation issues taking precedence over all other civic ideas, according to Avery (2002). Much of what constitutes formal rights education in the United States is focused on study of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, emergent case law, and criminal or civil procedures. Although U.S. students are somewhat conversant with rights discourse in the national context, familiarity with global human rights, and the local-nationalglobal connections implicit therein, is lacking (O’Brien 2000; Stone 2002). A recent nationwide survey of human rights education curricula revealed that twenty states include human rights content in state-level curriculum documents, social studies standards, or assessments of social studies learning. The scope of the human rights content studied varies from state to state, however, because human rights concepts and content are often subordinated to or embedded within more pervasive subject fields, such as history, government, civics, study of the Holocaust, and genocides (Banks 2002). Students who only study rights and litigation in the United States, without considering rights in other national and global contexts, are left with a series of misunderstandings, not the least of which is that the United States has few, if any, violations of human rights or that people living in other societies have few, if any, rights. As two students in Cornbleth’s (2002) study noted, “We’re free here . . . not like other countries,” and, “in some countries, the government tells you what to do, and you have to do it. Here we have a choice of how we want things” (529). Perhaps more telling is the infrequency of use of the term human rights in textbooks, curriculum documents, and educational discourse. As O’Brien notes, “the concept of human rights is not yet part of the culture as it relates to issues inside the U.S.” (O’Brien 2000). That may be because the very notion of human rights necessarily transcends national boundaries, a paradigmatic shift not easily accepted by nations with long-standing legal traditions. Because the period between 1995 and 2004 has been declared the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education, we believe it appropriate to address this apparent curricular imbalance. Certain questions can lead students toward a richer understanding of global human rights, and they might include the following: