[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the challenges we face to make human rights learning an activity of the highest priority. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].
The challenge for academia: out-of-date curricula
1. For decades, scientific methods, tools, and technologies have been applied in human rights (HR) practice. But, you see?, students seeking a degree should (but do not) have opportunities to see how their field can impact HR –both positively and negatively. For this, students will need experiential education opportunities that they seldom get. Most universities do not see active engagement in HR as central to their mission. Many university departments are enthusiastic about HR education, yes, but do not apply that to real-world advocacy and activism, because it is seen as ‘too political’. The reality thus is that few professionals have been able to transfer their passion for HR into full-time (or even part-time) careers.
2. Very few scientific bodies provide direct scientific and technical support for HR organizations. This reinforces the status-quo sought by those in/with power and thus ensures that many communities are left without access to the kind of HR knowledge they need to better and more actively engage in the protection. Promotion and fulfillment of these rights including the rights of mother earth. Breaking this status-quo will require incentives and action that reward scientific contributions to HR, especially when professionals are to take concrete actions that avoid them being complicit in the HR violations happening on a daily basis. (Theresa Harris)
Thinking out loud
3. Most of our lives are spent learning what other people have told us to learn so that change has occurred relatively slowly. Is this one of the causes of our inability to effectively diagnose and respond to increasingly rapid and negative global changes? For sure, we have not met the challenge. The reasons are multiple, but generally reflect a narrow-minded view of disciplines that originates from a conservative academic leadership that taught us and from the lack of a collective ability of traditional academics to recognize the importance-of and to react-to the negative impacts of globalization. (William Bertrand)
4. The key dilemma in HR education thus is: While it is plainly in the interest of the underdogs to be liberated, it is not in the interest of the ‘topdogs’ –in terms of the perks they get from the prevailing system of dominance; they benefit handsomely from them, and are thus happy to perpetuate the status-quo.
5. I now recognize that the model of topdogs oppressing underdogs is too simple. Instead, it should be understood that both are oppressed and dehumanized, in different ways, by the prevailing social and political structure. Liberation does not come simply from wining-over or slaying the oppressors. The challenge is to find a way to free ourselves, all of us, from the oppressive situation. So, the topdogs too, need to go through a stage of gaining a new consciousness that allows them to see the great costs to them and to the underdogs that the dominant system imposes. …In comes HR learning.
The challenge outside academia: A massive campaign of human rights learning
–It happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory (or HR values) and can apply it (them) without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles; but, beware, even those they not always assimilate correctly. (Friedrich Engels)
6. It is not until after potential claim holders in the community out there (not excluding students) more fully understand the reality of the controlling situation they live-under that they can and will take action to become free and to change the HR-violating social system itself. So, what will this imply?
7. Human Rights Learning ought to include at least these tasks:
- Demonstrating the true nature of the social structure.
- Examining explanations of dominance. (Facilitators must not simply present their own favorite theories and participants must never be coerced into adopting particular views). The task is not to reach the correct answer, but to assure that the participants play a constructive and critical role in the formulation of their own answers.
- Examining justifications used to validate and rationalize dominance. (Arguments and actions to delegitimize such justifications must be discussed).
- Destroying the rationalized myths behind domination. (False information, false explanations, and biased justifications need to be closely examined and not simply dismissed as chance errors or misjudgments. It should be appreciated that some myths, e.g., that ‘hard work will lead to wealth and success’, regardless of participants’ origins, are deliberately perpetuated).
- Examining individual actions. (Participants are to be asked to locate their own respective positions within the current social structure and how it affects them, their families and their communities).
- Replacing values. (Old values, especially those relating to materialism, consumerism and to personal security, need to be replaced with other values. This is actually part of the formation of a new consciousness).
- Working to invent and to find new social structures to replace the current ones including the needed new courses of action. (This new consciousness ought to ultimately lead to the search for new forms of social organization and new lines of action and mobilization).
8. Four caveats before I leave you
- A successful HR pedagogy (of the oppressed) is dangerous to the teacher, precisely because, at the same time, it is seen as dangerous to the system. (adapted from Paulo Freire)
- If participants are treated liked potted plants, they will act like potted plants.
- Those who do not learn to stand up for their rights at an early age are less likely to stand up for HR in the larger world. And even if they do not use the term, they are learning about human dignity. (George Kent)
- It is always a much easier task to educate claim holders uneducated on HR than to re-educate the mis-educated. (Herbert Shelton).
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
[Posthumously dedicated to Shulamit Koenig]