ABSTRACT
Th e responsibilities of all citizens in a democratic society are inseparable from the responsibility to promote human rights. To fl ourish, both democracy and human rights require people’s active participation. Human rights education includes learning the skills of advocacy-to speak and act everyday in the name of human rights. (Flowers & Rudelius-Palmer, 1998)
Human rights are both inspirational and practical. Human rights principles hold up the vision of a free, just, and peaceful world and set minimum standards for how individuals and institutions everywhere should treat people. Human rights also empower people with a framework for action when those minimum standards are not met, for people still have human rights even if the laws or those in power do not recognize them. (Costain, 1998)
Let’s face it: Th e attempt to set curriculum standards governing public education has always been something of a problem. At its core is a question of what lessons we will teach and how we will teach these lessons, questions which became critical following the integration of the public schools in the 1960s and 1970s. Education in the 1950s, still conducted in segregated classrooms, was meant to foster “American” values, a unifi ed and unifying belief in the democratic traditions of our country, of the rule of popular opinion and the curiously exclusionary eff ects of a democratic culture so conceived. Brown v. Board acknowledged the baleful eff ects of this segregated educational system and initiated, if nothing else, a rising self-consciousness that would, in time, succeed in “novelizing” the romance of America’s master narrative, as Bakhtin might say, opening at least a little space for diverse voices and points of view. Th e legacy of the Brown decision, the attention it paid to segregation and the attempts to dismantle segregation or ameliorate its eff ects, is a long and complicated story which is still unfolding. Th e creation of more diverse classroom populations following Brown can be tied, in one way or another, to a number of disparate eff ects: to the development of “learning styles theory” and theories of multiple intelligences intro-
duced to account for the perceived diff erences in the abilities and achievements of diff erent groups of students; to the declines of education’s eff ectiveness noted in A Nation at Risk, which the current No Child Left Behind legislation is still attempting to solve; to the development of “more inclusive” multicultural curricula, on the one hand, and the English-only/anti-bilingual language initiatives pushed forward in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts, on the other; to the culture wars, in general, and the specifi c battles waged over curriculum standards for the teaching of U.S. history; to outcomes-based education and the attempts, oft en through the use of standardized tests, to assess the eff ectiveness of instruction.
