The Urgent Need for Comprehensive Human Rights Curriculum in U.S. Public Schools
What if I told you there was a document published in 1948 that declared healthcare, housing, and social security basic human rights? A document which declared the freedom to seek asylum in other countries and the freedom to change one’s nationality basic human rights; a document which declared equal access to the voting booth — universal and equal suffrage — a basic human right; a document which declared both the right to work and equal pay for equal work, without any discrimination of any kind, basic human rights. What if I told you there was a document published in 1948, just over 70 years ago, which declared freedom from discrimination of any kind for all human beings regardless of any distinction including demographic, national origin, citizenship status, or any other differentiation a basic human right? And the document did so using mostly inclusive, non-binary language to apply to every individual person. These issues should sound familiar to you because they still dominate our national political discourse 70 years later! The democratic primary debates this past week hosted by NBC in Miami were rife with discussion of these very same issues.
And what if I told you that a United States delegate to the United Nations was chiefly responsible for the drafting and adoption of the document and chaired the entire process after being unanimously elected by her fellow delegates to chair a commission made up of diplomats from every continent and almost every region of the globe?
Well, that document exists and it is widely recognized outside the U.S. as the foundation of international human rights law. The document in question is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the American delegate who led the entire process of bringing it into existence was none other than former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Do you think that information worth learning and teaching in our public schools? I certainly do. In order for our nation’s students to understand the plethora of human rights issues that effect them and people throughout our world — the world they will soon inherit — they need at least an elementary foundation in human rights education, which starts with teaching about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in high school history and government courses.
A Brief History of How the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Came to Be Written:
President Harry Truman controversially appointed Eleanor Roosevelt to be an American delegate to the first session of the United Nations General Assembly taking place in London in January 1946. The appointment was first seen as a symbolic gesture; a nod to the legacy of Truman’s predecessor and Eleanor’s late husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his vision for the United Nations Organization.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s fellow American delegates, notably long-term Republican senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan and future Eisenhower-Era Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, scoffed at the appointment and assigned Roosevelt to Committee Three, covering social, humanitarian, and cultural affairs, where she could “do no harm”. They believed that all the main issues discussed in the First Session of the UN General Assembly would be focused in the other committees, ones covering topics like international security, economic and financial issues, and administrative and budgetary protocols for the UN. Vandenberg and Dulles did not predict that the single greatest issue dominating the first UN General Assembly session was what to do about the millions of European refugees displaced by World War II, meaning the most significant American delegate in the First Session would be the one they just sidelined into Committee Three.
Eleanor Roosevelt represented the United States and the Western world in a debate on the floor of the General Assembly in the first weeks of that first session, up against Andrei Vyshinsky of the Soviet Union, over the rights of refugees. There was wide consensus that she won the debate and for her performance she was unanimously elected by the international delegates of the General Assembly to serve as inaugural chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
Roosevelt quickly set about on a mission to develop a comprehensive definition of human rights and to flush out the statement in the preamble of the Charter of the United Nations (adopted at the San Francisco planning convention the previous July) which stated one of the primary missions of the UN was “ to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small…” She was also heavily inspired by her husband’s “Four Freedoms” speech.
On January 6, 1941, in his State of the Union Address, FDR stated:
“ In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedoms of every person to worship god in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want…everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear…anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”
Freedom of Speech. Freedom of Worship. Freedom from Want. Freedom from Fear. Half a decade later, Eleanor Roosevelt made these four freedoms the foundation of the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Roosevelt also knew that for the declaration to have legitimacy as a document with principles that could apply to everyone everywhere in the world, it had to incorporate influences from all across the globe in the drafting process. Her team of delegates drafting the document included her deputy chair Chinese philosopher Peng Chun Chang, who brought Confucian thought to the UDHR; French law professor René Cassin, who brought knowledge of the French Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen de 1789 (Cassin would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in drafting the UDHR upon its 20th Anniversary in 1968); Dr. Charles Malik, a Lebanese philosophy professor and Christian theologian representing the Arab League; Canadian legal scholar John Peters Humphrey who wrote the first rudimentary draft of the document; Chilean judge and instructor of criminal and military procedure Hernán Santa Cruz (who made an early push for the inclusion of economic and social rights); Hansa Mehta from India: social reformer, educator, women’s rights leader, and student of Mahatma Gandhi, (Mehta was responsible for the non-binary language of the document — “all human beings” rather than “all men”; she argued that if it remained “all men” when the women of the developing world went home with the document, it would be applied to only men); and Alexandre E. Bogomolov, a professor at Moscow State University and one of the several revolving Soviet Delegates to the drafting committee who nonetheless made a lasting impact by firmly advocating for a freedom of religion article with no mention of any god or gods, making it open and inclusive of believers and nonbelievers alike; among many other international delegates.
Individuals, organizations, and governments, both formal and informal, from all around the world sent in suggestions, ideas, reports, etc. to inform and influence the drafters. The UDHR was drafted over the next two and a half years and adopted at the end of the third session of the United Nations General Assembly in Paris after midnight on December 10, 1948.
There were zero votes against the document, 48 votes in favor, and only eight abstentions (Six were from the Soviet Bloc: the Soviet Union/USSR, Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, Ukranian SSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland; The other two were Saudi Arabia, which would not affirm a document without reference to Islamic law, and South Africa, which was already violating the Declaration by forming the early stages of its Apartheid system).
The UDHR was to be only the first of a three step process Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to undertake regarding human rights: 1). Draft and adopt a Declaration defining human rights; 2). Draft and adopt legally binding covenants for the members of the General Assembly to commit to and adopt through the legislatures of their home countries; 3). Implement the principles of the UDHR and develop accountability for all of the above.
Unfortunately, due to the increasing hyper-focus on the Cold War and the degradation of the diplomatic relationship between the Soviet Union and the West in the late 1940s and early 1950s, only step one was completed in Eleanor Roosevelt’s lifetime. which in and of itself was a tremendous achievement.
Step two came later, in the 1970s, when the Carter Administration became a signatory on both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, the two biggest international laws derived directly from the UDHR; the first of which was ratified by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. The Reagan Administration became a signatory on the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 1987, adopted by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994. In total, of the 18 binding international laws derived directly from the UDHR, the United States has signed 9 of them and adopted 5 of those into our laws by an act of Congress.
Step three, implementation and accountability, depends on every one of us. It is clear that we cannot depend on U.S. governmental support to protect, defend, or even refrain from outright violating human rights in 2019. We need to build a more secure future for human rights at home and abroad but that can only begin with a foundation of human rights education in our public schools.
My Journey with Human Rights History is Both Academic and Deeply Personal.
I first learned about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights back in community college as a history major taking a U.S. History survey course covering 1865-present. I learned about the UDHR not through a lesson taught to the whole class as part of the course curriculum, but in an individual project which required me to read the autobiography or memoir of a notable American; I chose Eleanor Roosevelt’s and what I learned from her about human rights and her role in defining them and holding up human rights principles for everyone in the world changed my life and irrevocably shaped my worldview.
The subject of Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has shaped my entire academic career to date. Shortly after reading Eleanor Roosevelt’s autobiography and giving my presentation in class, I was asked to be the keynote speaker at Truckee Meadows Community College’s Women’s History Month event, dressed as Eleanor Roosevelt in a “living history” performance. Being an historian-in-training, a theater nerd, and a then-closeted transgender woman, I was thrilled!
After being awarded TMCC’s Regents’ Scholar of the Year Award (the Nevada equivalent of higher ed valedictorian, looking at a combination of academic performance, campus leadership, and community service), I was awarded a transfer scholarship from Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, which I chose because their history department encourages students to design their own senior capstone thesis with original research and provides students ample resources, advising, and mentorship to make their projects outstanding. One year into my time at Stetson, I was awarded a Stetson Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) grant which allowed me to travel to Hyde Park, New York and visit the archives of the FDR Presidential Library where I worked exclusively with the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Collection and obtained over 400 documents and over a dozen audio files pertaining to the drafting and adoption of the UDHR. My finished paper, “Eleanor Roosevelt’s ‘Most Wonderful and Worthwhile Experience’: Leadership as Chair of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, 1946–1948” won Stetson’s History Manuscript of the Year Award. I presented my research at over half a dozen conferences including the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Spokane, Washington in 2015. I graduated Magna cum Laude from Stetson University in 2016 with my Bachelor of Arts in History, and minors in Gender Studies and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (all of which combined were used to better my thesis). I plan to make human rights history the focus of my graduate work when I begin the pursuit of my Ph.D. within the next two years.
However, my interest in human rights history in general and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically goes far beyond a mere academic pursuit. The first article of the UDHR states, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” The UDHR makes dignity the foundation of all other rights.
As a transgender woman, my dignity is disregarded in this society every single day of my life. From problems with legal documents (due to my preferred name being different from my legal name), to harassment and even violence on the streets, to employment discrimination when I lived in states like Florida, which does not protect the equal rights of people like me, I face attacks on my dignity every day.
I also grew up in extreme poverty where health care, food, shelter, clothing, etc. (all listed as basic human rights in Article 25 of the UDHR) were treated as luxuries that we often could not afford rather than human rights. As so often is the case, my poverty chased me into adulthood when I had to take out lines of credit because I could not afford to survive on my own after leaving my parents’ home (not by choice).
Therefore, I have a deep investment, both an academic one and a more significant personal one, in whether our society starts to learn, understand, advocate for, and uphold human rights.
Just learning about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent human rights declarations and covenants empowered me to seek and build a better world. Learning about human rights can and will empower students, especially the most marginalized students, to take an active roll in the leadership of their society. Eleanor Roosevelt and the other drafters of the Declaration laid the framework for us in 1948. The single most important step toward upholding universal human rights we can take as a society is to educate about them.
What We Can Do to Uphold Universal Human Rights Close to Home and Build a Better Society
So what can we do to begin to promote human rights? It has to begin with our schools. Too often we look at human rights issues as solely political ones and spend far too much time debating about what does and does not constitute a right. Those arguments were had in the late 1940s and have been expanded upon in the decades since. We cannot rely solely on our political system to protect and defend human rights as it is not stable enough to create lasting change. What is done by one administration can, with more or less ease, be undone by the subsequent administration. We cannot only focus on the next election; we must also focus on the next generations. It is time we build a foundation of human rights education in our society so we can stop debating about semantics and start the hard work of fixing the deeply rooted human rights problems throughout our society and building a better, more just, and more equitably prosperous future for humanity.
High school U.S. History classes too often focus solely on what notable Americans (always overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male) have done in isolation; international relations are only discussed in reference to allies and enemies in World Wars. Not discussed is what Americans have achieved in cooperation with people from other nations, often in the aftermath of those wars, to address the transnational problems that lead to the wars in the first place. United Nations history is the place to discuss the intersection of U.S. and modern World histories. Moreover, these lessons will encourage students to think critically about how people from vastly different cultures can work together to achieve mutual goals, making them better citizens and global partners in the 21st Century.
High school World History classes far too often end at 1776 or earlier. They might venture into the 19th century and talk about the Victorian age of Britain. Good luck finding one that discusses the 20th. This does a great disservice to students as the nations of the world have only grown more and more entwined in the last 75 years. Only teaching the U.S. perspective on these events to students can result in harboring a false sense of North American centrality in world affairs. To be clear, the United States has played a very significant role but so have many other countries.
High school Government classes discuss the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the structure of our government, but they rarely discuss international documents and how they impact the expectations of, and relations between, the U.S. and other governments. The UDHR could be used as a comparison document to the Declaration of Independence to show how basic ideas can be updated, made relevant, and expanded to fit the people and society of a new century.
After assigning students sections of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to read and showing how the language and issues were updated from documents like the Declaration of Independence to reflect a more inclusive century, teachers could have students design their own human rights declaration articles which would aim to meet the needs of the greatest world problems facing their generations — climate change, the epidemic of gun violence, LGBTQIA+ rights, student loan and medical debt, the rise of the automated workforce, nuclear proliferation, etc — and then work in groups to negotiate the final wording of those articles. This activity would not only teach students to understand and consider the current biggest issues and take leadership in finding solutions for them, but also it would teach them how to work together with their peers with different views and different perspectives to find common ground and work together in these highly polarized times.
I understand what I am asking. I know teachers already have too little time and too many expectations to teach everything they are expected to teach. But it is time to update those expectations. I think a standard History class could devote a lesson or two to teaching about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, chronologically post-World War II and at the cusp of the Cold War. A standard high school Government Class could provide a lesson or two on international organizations and specifically the United Nations and human rights. Perhaps advanced placement classes in either subject could teach an entire unit on the founding of the UN and the drafting of the UDHR. Every college-level survey course that covers the 20th century should be required to touch on it, and its relevancy to the subject of the course.
Eleanor Roosevelt understood the challenges and ineffectiveness of governing human rights from the top down. After the adoption of the UDHR, she spent the last fourteen years of her life advocating for comprehensive human rights education. She understood that human rights would only become viable when a grassroots movement of compassionate, concerned citizens protected and defended them in their own communities.
In remarks before the United Nations General Assembly, commemorating the tenth anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on March 27, 1958, Eleanor Roosevelt asked:
“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 map 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 concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
Universal human rights begin with us; concerned citizens and educators. The most effective “small places, close to home” to give human rights meaning are our nation’s schools. This is no easy task — there will be great political opposition to this; it is far too politically expedient for some in power to ignore human rights at best and violate them at worst — but it is the only path forward to creating a better society for all of us; a society where every one of our children and young leaders can thrive and contribute their best talents to the public good. We need to build a foundation of human rights in our school boards; we need to build a foundation of human rights in our classrooms; we need to build a foundation of human rights in our district administrations; we need to build a foundation of human rights in our teacher’s unions; we need to demand a foundation of human rights education in our textbooks. Only then will we build a foundation of human rights in our society.
Will you join me in concerted citizen action to uphold human rights now and build a foundation for the future?
Sources:
A. Glenn Mower, Jr., The United States, the United Nations, and Human Rights: The Eleanor Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter Eras (Studies in Human Rights) (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 1979).
Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992).
Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Drafting, Origins, and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1999).
Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. Website. Retrieved: 5 July 2019
