1. When implementing human rights learning strategies worldwide, the process followed in each location may be different, but the end point must be roughly the same.
2. In such a human rights learning (HRL) process, human rights (HR) are to be presented as ‘the’ alternative of hope. This, basically because the HR framework currently offers the most credible and coherent system capable of putting battered societies back together again so as to get them working anew along HR principles. The HRL process is to help people find what is inalienably theirs so they do not have to go begging for it. (It counters the “gim’me-help poor me” mentality).
3. In this context, HRL is about evoking needed critical thinking, about stimulating a more systemic analysis with a gender perspective and about raising pertinent political, economic, civic and cultural concerns –all this based on the holistic HR framework that invariably leads to action. (Shula Koenig)
4. Therefore, because HRL looks at the structural causes of HR violations, it will by necessity go hand in hand with political consciousness raising so that it can be readily used as a platform to inform a strategy and the needed tactical steps to reshape current power relations. Becoming an active practitioner of the HR framework gives her/him the chance of self-expression, of creating her/his own personal vision, of telling her/his own story.
5. The ultimate challenge in HRL is thus to make learners feel-the-power-of-HR by linking its principles with strategies and action plans.
6. As can be suspected, HRL needs to be launched widely and massively to reach the oppressed, the marginalized, the awakened-potential-allies, the indifferent, the complicit bureaucrats, and the active oppressors (so as to change their hearts and minds). They all have to see that HR is not yet another ‘approach’ to development. It is a worldview and an organizing paradigm here to actively oppose and replace the prevailing development paradigm.
7. It is said that the above conception of HRL changes the pedagogical focus from ‘teaching HR’ to ‘doing HR’. This Reader agrees. Therefore, priorities have to be retooled. Because of this, teachers must be willing and prepared, in the HRL process, to be transformed themselves –this importantly meaning they will have to become a part of the struggle for HR.
Because there is a time to build and a time to get out of the way*, as HR teachers, each of us has to be an insider and an outsider at different tactical times. But, often, to get started, we must go to areas where we are outsiders. (…the latter does not absolve us from also taking-on the challenge of promoting HR wherever we are local ourselves….).
*: We acknowledge that endings are always more difficult than beginnings… (Paulo Coelho)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org