A letter to my colleagues, students, and readers of Human Rights Quarterly

(March 2011)

Martin Luther King Day, 2011.

The closer one comes to life's end, the more obvious it appears that over the course of a career there is only so much one can do. If you have chosen a life devoted to the cause of human rights, there are two approaches you may wish to pursue. You would do well to choose a top-down approach, studying jurisprudence, advancing the causes associated with the accountability of human rights violators, and contributing to the construction of institutions. Alternatively, you could invest your efforts in bottom-up approaches embracing activism and community organizing, practicing the pedagogy of the oppressed, or advancing the locally based models such as those developed by Paulo Freire. Both the top-down and bottom-up approaches are admirable and altogether worthy of a life-time of commitment. If you are fortunate you may have the opportunity to do some of both. I found it best to choose activism and scholarship paying heed to the appropriate boundaries between the two.

Since August 1960 when, in violation of municipal law, I sat down with friends at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Tallahassee, I have been devoted to the bottom-up approach in terms of a career in human rights education. It has included presenting workshops on human rights education methodology from Ethiopia to Burma and formulating a training manual used by the Inter-American Human Rights Institute, as well as a comparable "training for trainers" manual used in Asia from Indonesia to China. Conventional classroom teaching of human rights at the University of Maryland has been satisfying, as has been the teaching of human rights for science majors at Princeton University, where the students inspired me to write Science in the Service of Human Rights. The rewards for teaching human rights derive from the satisfying experience of the teachers' learning along with the students.

Forty years of such work has prompted me to formulate in my own mind a rationale for human rights education "from the bottom up." Human rights education is implied by and embedded in the right to education. The reasons are fundamental. Education is humankind's most effective tool for personal empowerment and as such is essential to the enhancement of human dignity through its fruits of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. Moreover, education has the status of a multi-faceted social, economic, and cultural human right. It is a social right because in the context of the community it promotes the full development of the human personality. It is an economic right because it can lead to economic self-sufficiency through employment or self-employment. Because the international community has directed education toward the building of a universal culture of human rights, it is also a cultural right. In short, education is the necessary condition for the individual to function as a fully human being in modern society.

Richard Pierre Claude

Eric Stover and Richard Claude meet with Prison Camp Detainees in The Philippines to document human rights auses

Freedom from Torture

The Right to Peace

Everyone has the Right to

Dolley Madison Finding Refuge in Dumbarton House

Amsterdam Canal Bridge

The Right to Return to One,s Country

The Right to Food

From the Chesapeake to Three Sisters Islands