Election year: tackling political apathy (Sep 2008)

Election year: tackling political apathy (Sep 2008)

Here's a topical issue during an election year: "Why do so few young people show interest in government and politics?" asks Rob McCrae, ICT Director at Diocesan School for Girls. "Because they experience no say in what affects them."

Rob came across this interesting US blog on the subject: http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2008/08/apathy-distrust.html

The Human Rights in Education Initiative offers a framework that helps to address so many of the challenges we face in educating young New Zealand citizens.

In their 2005 book, Empowering Children, Brian Howe and Katherine Covell explain convincingly why traditional approaches to citizenship fail and a human rights-based approach succeeds. Civic education tends to focus on the arcane mechanics of voting systems and parliamentary procedure to be used sometime in the future when young people attain voting age. For many students the content is dry and irrelevant.

There are compelling reasons to take a human rights-based approach to citizenship education, particularly in New Zealand:

• Citizenship is defined by rights and responsibilities.
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is the most authoritative statement of the rights and duties of citizens everywhere, providing a platform for non-partisan education in what it means to be a New Zealand and global citizen.
• The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child makes it clear that children are citizens, with rights and responsibilities that apply to them now, not in the future. The Convention gives students and teachers a coherent framework to practise active citizenship as part of school life. The immediate application of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to children's lives contributes to engaged and effective learning.
• Addressing elements of New Zealand's history from a human rights perspective - eg the Treaty of Waitangi, Parihaka, the 1940s campaign for human rights - helps build a sense of New Zealand citizenship.
• Using the human rights framework provides a link between New Zealand and global citizenship.

The emphasis on the right to participation (UNCRoC articles 12 and 13) in human rights-based education is the key to successful citizenship education.

If you're talking about the election with students, don't forget to tie the discussion to UDHR article 21, and Kate Sheppard's campaign and New Zealand's 1893 achievement in being the first nation state to give every adult the right to participate in choosing their government!