When to Teach Children’s Rights?

Human rights education is a lifelong process aiming at continuously building knowledge, skills, and attitudes & behaviours for all human beings to claim their rights and respect the rights of others. It is important that children are educated in children’s rights from an early age, throughout their education, and later in life. This is also the recommendation by the UN Declaration on Human Rights Education & Training adopted in 2011 to aid the increased roll out of human rights education worldwide.

Children’s rights education can be included and integrated in almost all subjects. Both as a knowledge component but also as a practise in terms of choosing to apply human rights supportive learning methodologies and creating a human rights based learning environment. 

Some subjects directly address human & children’s rights education. These may include Social Science, History, Religion and Philosophy classes. But other subjects will also form a good outset, e.g. Language classes, Biology, Math, Arts, and Community Lessons. Do not hesitate to try new ways of incorporating children’s rights in the subject you teach. You can also look into developing special extracurricular classes that focus on children’s rights. 

In the Table of Contents, you can find the learning objectives for the different themes addressed in the teaching manual. Some may relate directly to subject learning objectives.