Human Rights and Education

In this article, commissioned for OSI's 2005 Education and Open Society Conference, Abbas Rashid argues for the need to provide and deepen an enabling context for human rights education in the following ways:

• raising consciousness about multiple identities;
• reclaiming the past for retrieving traditions of humanism, plurality, and engagement;
• being more aware of society’s resources of culture and memory that are often ignored in the discourse of modernity;
• recognizing that in the attempt to change attitudes and mindsets we may have to go beyond providing information and even analysis;
• working on innovations that will generate greater interest and response;
• focusing on understanding the worldview and perspective of those whose attitude and practice we seek to change so that the message addresses their concerns and has a greater chance of being internalized.