Publicada en diciembre del 2006

The matter of education arouses passions in every country of the world, including the democratic nations of the Americas. In Chile and Peru, in Panama and Honduras, in Mexico, and especially in Oaxaca, teachers’ associations and unions are squaring off against national authorities. Motivations abound: budget and salaries, criticism of the administration and regulation of classroom schedules, employment benefits: all these appear on the agenda when unions hit the streets to demonstrate. Significantly, values education and rights education are absent from the public budget and missing from union demands. Meanwhile, many countries are beginning to hear complaints of a frightening panorama in which the democratic values in our societies are losing ground.

At the end of the 1990s, the first human rights plans emerged, and little by little, mostly under pressure from the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education, 1995-2004 (United Nations Decade for HRE), the idea spread that it was time to make human rights education universal. Several countries made serious commitments. The IIHR has been right in the crosshairs of these many important efforts, and in 2000 we began to develop the system of Inter-American reports on human rights education. We have been able to identify and applaud a number of excellent initiatives; but all too often, they have not gone beyond good intentions.