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Teaching Child Rights:
In pre-school and lower primary education, teaching for human rights is aimed to foster feelings of confidence and social tolerance –that form the basis for the whole culture of human rights.
Following are some strategies that can be employed in the classroom in order to ‘teach’ children their rights and inculcate an environment conducive to tolerance and responsibility towards other individuals.
Role-play is considered as the most effective way of transmitting the significance behind child rights and human rights in general. Making up and enacting real life scenarios, and making children think about how to react to a given situation leaves more of an impact then just telling them what the right thing to do is. If the role-play can be followed up by an interactive discussion on what the children felt or thought while acting out their parts, it will help them retain the lessons learnt even more.
Close references should be made to the universally recognized United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and the United Nations Conference on the Rights of the Child and the principles and ideas that they contain. A healthy discussion or even an informative lecture on the Rights of Children that this Declaration contains would be a good stimulus. This way, they will be able to recognize the rights that exist, at least on charter, and develop a sense of what their ‘rights’ are supposed to be.
Stories are invaluable in teaching any kind of lesson. Young children can learn lessons and morals and remember them vividly if they are associated with a much-loved character in a well-told story. Such stories can be obtained from centers publishing resource material for children, from parents and grandparents or simply by using one’s imagination.
The teacher can carry out a self assessment activity with the students in which they decide whether they are treated fairly or not. This will not just raise self-awareness of rights; it will also work as an evaluative tool of sorts for the school. The teacher can come up with self assessment questions pertaining to the rights of the children as a responsibility of the school, the teachers and other students as well. The questions can then be thrown at the class, and the students asked to think about their responses. Children can be given the option to ‘agree’, or ‘disagree’ on whether or not their rights are fulfilled.
Whichever method teachers adopt to inculcate child rights awareness in class, they can only instill the importance of respecting each others differences and basic rights in class when they are not just ‘preaching’. If the teacher advocates a set of principles, he or she must be following them as well. Methods of teaching human rights in class might differ, because education systems differ widely. However, lack of hypocrisy in teaching human rights demands that the teacher upholds the rights of the child, and involves the students in the process of setting rules in the classroom that respect the rights of individuals.
Convention on the Rights of the Child :
The Convention applies to everyone, whatever their race, religion, abilities; whatever they think or say, whatever type of family they come from.
Children have a right to an education. Discipline in schools should respect children’s human dignity.
Education should develop each child's personality and talents to the full. It should encourage children to respect their parents, and their own and other cultures.
All children have a right to relax and play, and to join in a wide range of activities.
The above are only few of the rights in the convention.
Source:
“Convention on the Rights of the Child”,
Office of the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights,
www.ohchr.org
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Faiza is a LUMS graduate and currently
working for Sindh Education Foundation (SEF) in the RCC: ECD Programme.
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