To Prospective Teachers Getting Ready to Graduate,
I am sure you have heard of Sir Ken Robinson. If you have not, you have got to look him up. Since his first TED Talk, “How Schools Kill Creativity” was published over ten years ago, Robinson has been at the head of the education reform movement. He calls for immense changes to our “out of date” school system. I believe he is right. However, today I want to tell you about grass-root education reform. The kind of reform that doesn’t require legislation, but still makes a big difference. I’m talking about changing what you focus on in the classroom.
In our generation of iPods, iPhones, and iMessage, the most important change you teachers can give to students is teaching them to focus less on themselves and more on other people. We need to talk less about human rights, and more about human obligations.
(Design for Statue of Responsibility, photo credit: Responsibility Foundation)
“We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain, unalienable rights.” These historic words reflect the enlightenment era theme of human rights and they were really needed 200 years ago. In classrooms today though they are less needed. Calling to much attention to our rights turns us inward, on ourselves. Teachers have an obligation to teach their students more about obligations. That is the education reform we most need today.
Throughout history, mankind has struggled to strike the perfect balance between human rights and human obligations. The Renaissance sparked a new wave of humanism. This emphasis on the importance of the individual was a much-needed breakthrough in previous thought. Europe needed to shed its ideas about the deprivation of humans and humanism made it happen. However, focus on self went too far during The Enlightenment. The French Revolution showed that when world becomes overly focused on itself, men and women all over suffer. Contrast the French Revolution with the American Revolution. The latter was successful, at least in part, because it struck a near-perfect balance between “give ME liberty or give me death” and “I only regret, that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
Today the balance swings too much to rights and not enough to duties. Individuality is the order of the day. But history has shown us excessive focus on what the world owes us is detrimental. Simply talking about rights is passive and it takes power to change away from the individual and gives it to authority. A perfect balance between rights and obligations gives everyday people the power to act and bring about change.
Don’t get me wrong, you should teach students about their rights. We are blessed to have them. But along with discussion concerning human rights, please instill students with an understanding of human obligations. Gandhi summed it up well by saying, “I learnt from my illiterate but wise mother, that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done.” Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl understood this. He had a dream of building a sister-piece for the Statue of Liberty on the west coast. This statue would be the Statue of Responsibility. These two statues would represent ultimate human dignity. Rights + Responsibilities.
Education reform is very important and I applaud civic and government leaders who are pushing for effective changes. However, government turns on very slow wheels. The real, immediate difference will be made in your classrooms in the next several years. A peer of mine recently posted about the power of individual users in crowdsourcing projects. Individual teachers working together have that same power to accomplish incredible things. I invite incoming teachers to band together and teach your students the importance of rights AND obligations. That is a reform you can make happen without waiting on someone else.
Sincerely,
A Student
great post, Joe!!
ReplyDeletegood post bud
ReplyDeleteJoseph, your blog was well written and I can tell that you have put a lot of thought into what you were writing about. I haven’t ever thought about the fact that obligations can be as important as human rights. I really enjoyed the comment that you made about teachers crowd sourcing. Crowd sourcing is a powerful tool and it could be used to do a lot of good in the education system. Is there a way that you could tell us how you would implement the whole idea of human rights vs obligations. What specific obligations are you referring to when you want teachers to teach obligations? What made you think that we need to focus less on human rights and more than obligations? I have never thought about this so I am just curious to how you thought about this.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of teaching human obligations along with human rights, but I wish there was more perspective on what sort of difference this would cause in students’ lives. I feel like I understand the problem with only focusing on our lives, but what does success look like after teachers have implemented your suggestion?
Also, I wonder if you’re glossing over human rights too easily. Why do we teach about the history of human rights? I would say because it’s important to our history, because we want to repeat the past, and because we don’t we don’t want students to take what we have for granted. So instead of advocating for teaching one or the other, maybe we could advocate for always teaching human obligations in conjunction with human rights, so that we never talk about one without the other. Perhaps this would help us better understand how they influence each other, and why it’s important.