Civic Pedagogies in Higher Education

Teaching for Democracy in Europe, Canada and the USA

J. Laker, C. Naval, K. Mrnjaus, J. Laker, C. Naval, K. Mrnjaus

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137355584
• eBook ISBN: 9781137355591
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

In this book, university teachers provide case studies illustrating methods employed to prepare citizens for meaningful participation in democracies, whether long-standing, young or emerging. Examples of practice from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and North America are included, along with reflections and advice for practice.

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Colleges and Universities Can Make a Difference: Human Rights Education through Study Visits of Human Rights Institutions

Peter G. Kirchschlaeger

Introduction

In our complex and continuously changing world, citizenship is gaining a growing importance in different contexts on a global level. Human rights can serve as a reference point to reflect on meaningful participation in democracies. Human rights education is crucial as human rights can only become reality if everyone knows about her/his rights. Only when men and women know about their rights, they can stand up for those rights and, in solidarity, for the rights of others. Only when people know about their rights, human rights will cease to be mere ideals and become reality.

In addition, human rights education is expected to support the handling of the complexity of today’s world. For example, the heterogeneity of today’s society builds a chance and a challenge at the same time for every individual. Human rights education can support the handling of heterogeneity and encourages exploring heterogeneity as a chance. It enables the opening of the horizon from the local, national or international to the global dimension (Khan, 2006). Its fundamental role is to empower citizens to defend their own rights and those of others. ‘This empowerment constitutes an important investment for the future, aimed at achieving a just society in which all human rights of all persons are valued and respected’ (Vieira de Mello, 2004). The idea of ‘empowerment’ means the capability to determine one’s own present and future with self-confidence and awareness of one’s own rights and to participate actively in the political decision process. Hammarberg emphasizes: ‘Educating citizens in their human rights creates an informed society which in turn strengthens democracy’ (2008).

Post-secondary/tertiary sector educational institutions can play a significant role in preparing citizens for meaningful participation in democracies. A formal recognition and expression of this contribution by colleges and universities can be found among others in the Second Phase of the UN World Programme for Human Rights Education and the forthcoming UN Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training.¹ The method ‘study visits of human rights institutions as method of human rights education’ is one possibility how colleges and universities can prepare citizens for meaningful participation in democracies.

Human rights as a positive achievement of human history

‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’ (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948). Human rights can be understood as a positive achievement of human history as the international community found a consensus in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and created and ratified a human rights system in the following years. This last point becomes even more relevant when the ‘Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen de 1789’ is understood (Bobbio, 1998) as a second stage – the implementation of the philosophical ideas of human rights on a national level – after the first stage (the invention of these philosophical concepts) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 as a third stage (beginning of the implementation of human rights on a universal level). I would add that the second stage – as the period of Enlightenment as a whole – puts an end to religious absolutism while the third stage limits the era of political absolutism. Both of them represent the beginning of a new intellectual ethos.

These facts give human rights education the chance to start with the positive achievement. This has to be done without neglecting the present human rights violations all over the world. Human rights education differs from other educational approaches and theories as it can build on this success story. Furthermore, human rights education is law-based. Its direct referral to the legal dimension of human rights is part of its core essence: these philosophical concepts are not ‘just’ theories and ideas but legal rights as well. This existence of a legal fundament is an advantage of human rights education. Law-based human rights education benefits from the fact that human rights can be claimed. Human rights are legal reality in all parts of the world. Obviously the implementation of human rights is at the same time facing challenges everywhere. Human rights legal mechanisms, instruments and human rights institutions show that human rights are not just an idea, but reality as well. Human rights education can benefit from this implicit potential of human rights.

Human rights and their three dimensions as fundaments of human rights education

At the beginning, a clarification of the idea and concept of ‘human rights’ is necessary: ‘Human rights’ are ‘rights’ and the approach of Peter Koller (1990) gives us a better idea about the latter term: a ‘right’ defines a normative position of a natural or fictive person in her or his relation to another person. A ‘right’ opens a person’s opportunities to act, it limits the sphere of action of a person, it builds a reason to act and embraces corresponding duties and gives a normative position a certain weight. ‘Rights’ are part of a system of norms. This system of norms can be legal or moral, and therefore the ‘rights’ can be legal and moral as well. The differences between ‘legal rights’ and ‘moral rights’ are that the first are defined more precisely with regard to their subject and the corresponding duties, they have a higher grade of formalization and they recognize the corresponding means of control and implementation. The second possess a wider horizon, as their sphere of validity (corresponding to the sphere of validity of their system of norms) is universal.

Every individual possesses human rights. Therefore they are ‘subjective rights.’ Human rights are those rights that belong to every human being, regardless of skin color, nationality, political convictions or religious persuasion, social standing, gender or age. Human rights protect the essential aspects of human life important for the protection of human dignity and the development of a human being. ‘Human rights’ are rights with a certain complexity because they are at the same time moral, legal and political rights. Human rights as moral rights are universal, egalitarian, individual and categorical, and they make legitimate demands with corresponding positive and negative duties (Kirchschlaeger, 2007, pp. 55–63). They are ‘weak rights’ because they are not enforceable but appellative, and the consequences of their violations are moral sanctions (like public shame) but not legal sanctions. Human rights in their legal dimension depend in their justification on the moral dimension of human rights because their legal justification is mostly limited to the boundaries of a national legal system which can be compensated by the moral dimension of human rights. Vice versa, human rights in their legal dimension cannot justify human rights in their moral dimension due to the limited validity of the first. Human rights in their moral dimension have to find their justification in the moral dimension. Therefore, at the end of the day, the justification of human rights can be realized legitimately only in the moral dimension. They depend on a moral justification. The moral dimension of human rights is very important because human rights can only be claimed without any limits when there is a justification of human rights independent from legal or political decisions by state actors. This justification must be a moral justification because it must convince everyone in the same way, that is to say, that it needs to be a universal moral justification which legitimates the concept that all men are equal and have the same rights.

Human rights as legal rights are subjective rights of individuals in a legal system such that they can be implemented within the legal system. Human rights are ‘legal entitlements of individuals against the state or state-like entities guaranteed by international law for the purpose of protecting fundamental needs of the human person and his/her dignity in times of peace and war’ (Kaelin et al., 2004, p.17).

Human rights as political rights are an element in public political discussion which cannot lead to legal consequences but can have political significance.

The understanding of human rights with their three dimensions, for example, makes obvious how relevant the clarification of the understanding of human rights is for the concept of human rights education as acknowledging the complexity of the three dimensions of human rights has consequences for the human rights education approach.

Human rights did not ‘fall from heaven.’ They are not the ‘absolute truth. Human rights need to be justified to everyone concerned with human rights. Robert Alexy recognizes that the existence of human rights depends exclusively on the possibility of their justification. Human rights need to be justified to everyone concerned with human rights (Alexy, 1999). The reasons why every human being is a human rights-holder have to be discussed.

The necessity of a reflection of the justification of human rights is also provoked by the different forms of relativism which human rights are facing today. Human rights and their essential claim of universality are doubted in the actual philosophical discussion about human rights after Georg Lohmann (2008) in three ways: (1) a cultural-relativistic way: Its core message is expressed controversially by Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore: ‘I find parts of [the American system] totally unacceptable: guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, unbecoming behavior in public – in some the breakdown of civil society. The expansion of the right of the individual to behave or misbehave as he pleases has come at the expense of orderly society. In the East the main object is to have a well-ordered society so that everybody can have maximum enjoyment of his freedoms. This freedom can only exist in an ordered state and not in a natural state of contention’ (Zakaria, 1994, p.111); (2) a specific cultural-relativistic way which sees in the particular and partial emphasis of the individual freedom-rights a contradiction of the claim of universality of human rights (Lohmann, 2008, p. 50); (3) a critical relativism based on skepticism related to the small potential of realization of human rights and differences within this potential between the three categories of human rights. These cultural-relativistic criticisms on human rights and related theoretical approaches like Jacques Maritain’s ‘overlapping consensus’ (Taylor, 1999, p.124), further developed by John Rawls (1993), its critical reflection by Charles Taylor (1999), Abdullah Ahmed An-Na’im’s approach of ‘cultural mediation’ (1999), Yasuaki Onuma’s ‘intercivilizational approach’ (2001) and reactions and alternatives to those approaches like the one of Otfried Hoeffe (1999) have to be discussed accurately to establish a human rights culture.

This philosophical discussion leads to an awareness of the constant challenge of a legal and a political reality which does not realize and does not respect human rights completely and its relation to the moral obligation and responsibility of oneself to enhance the implementation of the human rights of every individual in one’s sphere of influence. The theory leads to practice ...

Juergen Habermas (1994) and others link the reason why a human being is a holder of human rights to a national legal system in which human rights become part of the fundamental rights of the constitution through a democratic process. In the framework of internal logic of a legal system the legal subjects acknowledge each other as holders of these rights. At first sight, legitimating human rights through a process to which every human being has a right to seems to be convincing. But this approach is undermining the universality of human rights because human rights can than only exist within a particular legal system of a particular legal society. Human beings who are not citizens of this particular legal society remain without human rights. I agree with Georg Lohmann (1999, 2002) who has pointed out that human rights gain weight and power when they become part of a particular legal system, for example, of a national legal system through a democratic process, as they are then enforceable by law more directly and democratically legitimated. Human rights open a global horizon and start locally at the same time. In 1958 Eleanor Roosevelt said, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948:

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

The perception of violations of human rights in one’s own living context is leading to recognition of one’s own responsibility for the cause of human rights and of the self-understanding as a global citizen with her or his responsibility for the realization of human rights.

At the same time, human rights run the risk of reduction of their universality through the particularization as parts of a national legal system. As mentioned beforehand while discussing the idea and the concept of human rights, justification models within the moral dimension can include this essential aspect of human rights that every human being – even living in a place on the planet where she or he doesn’t benefit from a legal system respecting human rights – has human rights.

On a practical level, the process of an establishment of a global institutionalization of the implementation and protection of human rights – in parallel to the integration of human rights within national legal systems – is necessary.

Human rights education

Human rights education starts, of course, from an understanding of ‘human rights’ as discussed above. The three dimensions of human rights – moral, legal and political rights – and the three categories of human rights – subjective freedom rights, rights to political participation and rights to social participa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction – Civic Pedagogies in Higher Education: Teaching for Democracy in Europe, Canada and the USA
• 1 Colleges and Universities Can Make a Difference: Human Rights Education through Study Visits of Human Rights Institutions
• 2 CommUniverCity: Building Community in the Silicon Valley
• 3 Negotiating Change in Romanian Tertiary Education: Volunteering and Democratic Citizenship
• 4 Democratic Citizenship and the University Curriculum: Three Initiatives in England
• 5 Standing on Guard? History, Identity and the Quandaries of Citizenship Education in Canada
• 6 Student Designed Deliberative Forums as a Pedagogical Method
• 7 Learning to Participate: International Experiences of Service-Learning and Community Service Programs
• 8 The Personal Is Pedagogical: A Microcosmic Conversation on Democratic Education
• Index