Human Rights Education: The 4th R, Human Rights Education
and the Arts, vol. 7 No. 1, Winter 1996.

Human Rights Education and the Arts: An Introduction

The “Youth Visions” article on page 10 includes a quote from Rollo May on creativity: “We are all struggling with the world—to make sense out of nonsense, meaning out of chaos, coherence out of conflict. We do it by imagination, by constructing new forms for a world in which we can survive and live with some meaning.” May has articulated a principal challenge of HRE; since human rights is not just factual information, but first and foremost a value system, we must address not only the mind, but also the heart and the imagination.

Many educators approach human rights principally from the perspective of abuses, recounting the atrocities of the past and present and admonishing students to take personal responsibility that such inhumanity will never happen again. While this focus has proven itself effective in many ways, it has the inherent liability of its negative point of departure in human depravity. Students are often left feeling overwhelmed and helpless before both history and the present, a passivity that each day’s news only reinforces.

Another approach to human rights education is to address the imagination, to engage students in considering what the world might be like if every human life was treated with equal dignity. Here the arts can serve to tap the rich resources of the heart and stimulate moral imagination, an essential for citizenship. What is it like to be a refugee? What is the nature of justice? How can I convey to others my understanding of human dignity? How can I live out human rights values in my own life? Music, poetry, drama, and the graphic arts can provide students with the means to formulate their own questions and explore their answers. In many cases, the creative expressions that result can serve as powerful tools to educate others about human rights.

Uninformed idealism, of course, is naive and ineffectual, and no education in human rights is complete without both a strong component of history and meaningful opportunities for activism. Kids need to know that their efforts can make a difference.

But before students can assimilate history or take meaningful action, the human rights value system must have touched their imaginations and offered them a vision of the world that “makes sense out of nonsense, meaning out of chaos, coherence out of conflict.” This is the powerful potential of the arts for human rights education.

Nancy Flowers, Member of the Editorial Board