About the Initiative:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulates that education should promote respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. In expanding on the right to education, other UN instruments specify that education should be directed to the full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity. Human rights education and training, specifically, can contribute to the promotion, protection and effective realization of all human rights.

The Carr Center's Human Rights in Education Initiative promotes policies, applied learning practices, and scholarship that support teaching and learning about human rights in the formal and nonformal education sectors, in the US and abroad.

We work with other institutions and organizations in promoting policies at the international, national and sub-national levels that endorse education in, for and through human rights with learners in the schooling sector and universities and with professional groups.

We carry out a range of applied learning practices - courses, workshops and events within the Harvard community and beyond - that engage learners in the dynamic process of learning about their human rights and applying them within their personal and professional lives.

Through scholarship, we explore the design and implementation of education and training programs and their impacts on learners and human rights change. The Initiative advises students in the Harvard community who are interested in examining in some way the intersection between human rights and education.

As a cross-cutting dimension of the Initiative's work, it is helping to shape and support a new network of educators in the United States: Human Rights Educators - USA, which evolved from a September 2011 conference co-sponsored by the Carr Center. This network will facilitate the engagement of educators in policy advocacy, scholarship and human rights practices in education throughout the country.