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Education for Human Rights in Times of Peace and Conflict

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Abstract

Fernando M. Reimers and Connie K. Chung discuss how violent conflict relates to education. They argue that the relationship between education and conflict need to be understood through a developmental perspective. Such a perspective would lead to appropriate programming during the evolution of the conflict. A key focus would be on teaching human rights as a way to educate for peace and thus restore peace and governance. They review some current practices in education in situations of violent conflict in order to illustrate how human rights education is an essential component of educating children and youth to resolve conflicts in non-violent ways and to accept a civil order ruled by law.

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Notes

  1. There are many resources to support Human Rights Education, including those produced by UNESCO and other UUNN Agencies as part of the UN Decade for Human Rights Education between 1995 and 2004 and by the ongoing UN's World Program of Human Rights Education. For example, UNICEF is supporting the development of ‘child friendly school programmes’ that attend to the social and emotional learning needs of children including providing contexts that are inclusive of all children and where their basic rights are respected. See for example: http://www.unicef.org/lifeskills/index_7260.html and http://www.unicef.org/lifeskills/files/CFSchecklist.doc.

  2. To prepare this section we examined the education situation and the situation of children in the countries that experienced political violence during the last 20 years as reported by the Center for Systemic Peace (Marshall, 2008). We obtained information on the conditions of children and schools from Epstein and Limage (2008).

  3. Personal communication of Professors Bar-On and Adwan and presentation at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on 4 May 2007 see also http://www.vispo.com/PRIME/ and http://www.justvision.org/en/profile.

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Discusses how violent conflict relates to human rights education

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Reimers, F., Chung, C. Education for Human Rights in Times of Peace and Conflict. Development 53, 504–510 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2010.82

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