Teaching Human Rights aims to serve as a user-friendly tool for human rights education and a multi-coloured umbrella covering a number of basic human rights areas. It offers practical advice to teachers and other educators who want to foster human rights awareness and action among primary and secondary school children, including suggestions for developing learning activities. It is not meant to place an extra burden on an already overloaded curriculum but to assist in infusing human rights issues into subjects already taught in schools.

There has been much research into how children and young people develop judgements as they grow. Not every class member may be able to grasp fully every human rights principle: pressing students to understand right from the beginning may pre-empt the honest expression of what they think or feel and may even halt further progress. This booklet assumes that all human beings benefit from the chance to explore rights issues, and that by the age of ten years or so, students given such a chance have a capacity for lively and profound reflection far beyond that usually expected. The suggested activities require few extra materials. Instead they call on the richest resource all teachers have to work with – their students and their experiences in everyday life.