at the age of 13 my grandmother went

from being a colonial subject of the

British M

to a citizen of a free India she was

barely literate had no possessions and

lived in a refugee camp she was one of

the over 12 million people forced to

migrate as part of one of the largest

human displacements in recorded history

one hot and dusty day a gentleman came

to the refugee camp where my grandmother

and her family were staying looking for

his surviving relatives since many

people traveling towards their new

nations had died along the way in

violence that was perpetuated by

fanatics both Hindu and Muslim in fact 2

million people died in the violent

partition of India and Pakistan and over

a hundred thousand women were raped or

abducted my grandmother was a beautiful

teenager and fearing for her safety her

family decided to take advantage of the

strangers visit to the camp and arrange

her marriage to him education hadn't

done much for my grandmother since as a

girl she wasn't allowed to go to school

for my grandfather however he had a high

school diploma and a couple years of

college and this allowed him allowed him

to land a job at an Indian company and

slowly inch his way up the ladder of

social mobility the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights adopted by

the United Nations in 1948 the same year

that my grandmother got married at the

age of 14 in shrines within it a right

to education for all children I learned

from my family history to value

education as the one thing that couldn't

be taken away

despite war forced migration or famine

while in college I became interested in

schooling as a fundamental human right

and began to travel internationally for

research and community service projects

as I visited worn down shacks and

shanties in places like Haiti India and

Zambia it was hard to believe the signs

outside indicating that these outposts

were in fact schools I want to also

mention that these countries also have

some of the finest educational

institutions the

cater to upper and middle class students

but I was most interested in the type of

education provided to the rural majority

what chances was schooling providing to

these children who similarly sought to

acquire the one valuable good that I

learned could never be taken away I

remember visiting a primary school

classroom in Tanzania there were over a

hundred children in a single classroom

with a single teacher hardly any of them

had shoes and multiple students were

held huddled around each textbook

memorizing content that might increase

their chances of scoring well on in a

national examination and that might

allow them to continue on past primary

education figures show that only 30% of

children in sub-saharan Africa are able

to attend secondary schools due to

limited capacity eclipsing the hopes and

dreams of the majority of students and

rendering them failures for no fault of

their own I began to wonder then though

education has been declared a right all

around the world and scores of children

have entered primary school in the past

couple decades what kind of education

could create the critical thinking the

active citizenship and the respect for

pluralism that might foster true human

and social development beyond

projections of economic returns this

question led me to explore more fully

the second part of the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights that affirms

that education shall be directed to the

full development of the human

personality and to the strengthening of

respect for human rights and fundamental

freedoms the initiatives that seek to

develop these values are called by many

names

social justice education peace education

and more literally human rights

education these efforts are taking place

across the globe and seek to align the

content the pedagogy and the structures

of education with peace and human rights

principles the idea is to teach about

peace and for peace such that education

becomes a tool for individual and social

Tran

formation the good majority of what I've

taught would have researched and would

have written about for the past 12 years

has centered around these efforts and

students experiences within them

I believe peace and human rights

education efforts are worth our time our

support and our scholarly attention

here's why Fathima was 18 years old and

in the 12th grade when I interviewed her

in the southern indian state of tamil

nadu fatima is one of four sisters in

her family and as the eldest she was

supposed to be killed in the practice of

female infanticide that her community

believed in her grandmother intervened

to stop her death and fatima was then

sent to live with that grandmother who

subsisted on very meager wages as a

sweeper at a local school

fatima had some contact some contact

with her mother but her father was an

alcoholic and had left the family and

she didn't know where he was she grew up

doing many domestic chores and barely

staying in school due to her family's

need for her labor in the sixth grade a

non-governmental organization or an NGO

introduced a three-year course on human

rights to her school training teachers

who would then offer a class on human

rights twice a week for three years in

the sixth seventh and eighth grades the

textbooks provided by the NGO were more

interactive than the other subjects in

the conventional Indian curriculum and

of most interest to fathom and her

classmates was that there were no exams

fatima noticed changes in her teachers

after they went to the human rights

training they stopped beating the

children as a form of punishment they

took more interest in theirs in their

students lives and they started showing

up to schools more regularly on any

given day in India an average of 25% of

teachers are absent for no good reason

so the fact that they started showing up

more was indeed notable in Fatima's own

words she states I started learning

about human rights in grade 6

my first thought they're giving more of

us of giving us more of a burden with

yet another subject and more books but

the teachers were so different after

they started teaching human rights human

rights teachers talk nicely to us they

don't scold us they don't beat

they encouraged us to try new things and

cultivate different talents like dance

poetry drama and singing and everything

other subject teachers just teach their

subjects and they beat us all so they

put the pressure of other people on us

but the human rights teachers release us

from that so I thank God for the

introduction of human rights through

this course I started writing poems

about women's rights and children's

issues and my human rights teacher

encouraged me to send it to the

newspaper when I was in the eighth grade

they liked it and even published it I'd

never ever thought that something like

that would happen

my grandmother can't read but I showed

it to her in the newspaper and she was

so happy I kept writing poems and made a

collection of a hundred and twenty-five

of them my teacher encouraged me to put

them together in a book and even got

donations from the other teachers and a

discounted rate from the publisher

they're putting all the proceeds of the

book into a bank account in my name so

that I can go to college I can't imagine

what my life would have been if this

human rights class would not have been

there I thanked my teachers and the NGO

for introducing it in our school when I

grow up I would like to do a lot more in

the field of Human Rights Fatima is now

in college and even gaining notoriety as

a budding poet and then there is Swati

who was 13 years old who I met in a

rural village in the eastern Indian

state of Orissa when I interviewed her

the year prior when she was in the sixth

grade her parents told her that they

were pulling her out of school to get

her married the economic circumstances

were such that they couldn't afford

another mouth to feed and they had found

a family not demanding too much dowry so

it seemed like a good opportunity Swati

was studying human rights and did not

want to leave school to get married at

such a young age she took a friend and

went to the police to report what was

going to happen to her getting married

before the age of 18 without consent the

asking and providing of dowry and being

pulled out of school before the age of

14 are all illegal actions in India the

police however told Swati just to listen

to her parents and not to make trouble

with their human rights textbook in hand

and referring to the phone number

of state Commission's and NGOs listed in

the inside cover swathi demanded that

the police take some action scared that

maybe she would report them to her

teacher or to the NGO that might have

contacts in the State Capitol

the police were convinced to talk to her

parents and encourage them to delay her

marriage and let her stay in school

since then SWAT these become a leader of

her human rights Club at school she

attended a statewide training for young

human rights defenders and she plans to

finish school and teach other people

about children's rights in both swati's

and fathima's eyes I see the hopes and

aspirations of my own grandmother whose

dreams were curtailed by conflict and

inequality the human rights education

course that these young women were

taking allowed them to dream beyond at

least in the short-term what social

structures with their families and what

their gender seemed to have in store for

them the powerful message that we all

have the same rights that we all deserve

the same guarantees allowed these young

women to view themselves as part of a

larger global community in which their

access to limited resources need not

translate into an unequal citizenship we

can keep demanding education for all as

many international efforts have done but

it's really important to consider

education for what the authoritarian

leader of Zimbabwe who is accused of

tremendous violence Robert Mugabe is

also one of the most educated men of his

generation holding multiple higher

education degrees many of the leaders of

the Khmer Rouge who authored the

Cambodian genocide were highly educated

individuals in that society scholars

have shown that schooling and textbooks

have contributed to stereotypes that

sparked ethnic and religious violence in

places like the Balkans

Rwanda and the Middle East here in the

United States we keep hearing examples

of school shootings and violent bullying

in educational institutions across this

country

so if schooling on its own is not a

asiye and can be a positive or a

negative force then the infusion of

peace and human rights concepts into

education can instead orient the process

towards the brothel broader social good

as noted Brazilian education scholar

Paulo Freire II has said education

either functions as an instrument to

bring about conformity or it becomes the

practice of freedom the means by which

men and women discover how to

participate in the transformation of

their worlds peace and human rights

education is an opportunity for learners

to critically analyze the conditions

that surround them pursue participatory

dialogue and ultimately engage in the

practice of freedom in and with the

world around them it was a chance that

my grandmother was denied and that no

future generation should be thank you