Protecting democracy, securing human rights starts with education
This past week, President Joe Biden marked International Human Rights
Day by convening leaders from the private sector, government and civil life to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing our democracy and those around the world. Authoritarianism and threats to democratic institutions are on the rise, and the next generation of civil and elected leaders must be prepared to defend and advance the cause of human rights and free societies.
By hosting the Summit for Democracy, President Biden was reinforcing the return of American global leadership at a time of unprecedented peril. Let this moment also remind us that the most significant resource for renewing democracy and securing human rights is civics education.
Throughout our friendship, including our time together on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, President Biden has long recognized that democracy and human rights are intertwined and that both require an unflagging commitment to working with partners across the globe to ensure peace and justice for all. As we face the most daunting challenge to democracy in a generation, I know he agrees that we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to create new civics educational approaches that support democracy and advance human rights.
Nine weeks ago, the president spoke on the Uconn campus to dedicate the Dodd Center for Human Rights, and sounded the alarm, noting that, “we see human rights and democratic principles increasingly under assault,” and calling on our students to “discover and defend human rights as the passion and purpose of our lives.”
“We need you,” he told students in attendance, “we need you badly.”
While the struggle for democracy and human rights will ultimately rest on the shoulders of the rising generation, it is the responsibility of leaders today to equip them with the knowledge, skills and values necessary for this great task. This is the fundamental purpose of the Dodd Center and I am proud that Uconn has become a leader in promoting human rights education. Others are doing so, but more of our colleges and universities need to embrace this responsibility to democracy, rather than shy away from the hard work of advancing equity and social justice for fear of political blowback.
As important as higher education is, the real hope for our democracy rests within our communities and our K-12 schools. That’s why I’m joining Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in a conversation, hosted by Uconn as part of the Summit for Democracy, about how our schools can, through civics and human rights education, become engines of our democracy. Young people are not just future citizens, they are citizens today and our schools must do more to ensure that they understand their rights and responsibilities in making our democracy work. We must begin by reversing the decadeslong trend of neglecting civics, but must also include new models for empowering students, teachers and families to build cultures of human rights in their schools and communities.
At the Dodd Center, the president connected the global struggle for human rights to our own democratic struggles at home. He echoed one of the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which we celebrate today, Eleanor Roosevelt. “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?” Mrs. Roosevelt asked. “In small places, close to home.” She continued, “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.” The president’s decision to convene this Summit for Democracy will serve as a catalyst to ensuring human rights at the center of our nation’s foreign policy. The next step will be to shore up the true foundations of our democracy by placing civics back at the center of our nation’s education policy.