Suggested level: Senior Primary and Lower Secondary
Learning outcome: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the culmination of a debate that stretches back into antiquity about what it meant to be human, how humans should behave and what rights human should have. This lesson develops students’ ethical awareness by asking what it means to live a meaningful and virtuous life that is respectful of human rights in serving the common good. It then encourages them to think about the origins of the idea that there are universal human rights. (Australian Curriculum Cross
Curriculum Priorities – Sustainability: OI 4, OI 5, OI 6, OI 7, OI 8)
Materials and resources: paper and pens; PowerPoint or similar platforms.
Excerpt from BBC Radio 4 series about life’s big questions –https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_7deR0idvs
Suggested Activities
- Watch the video excerpt from the BBC program The History of Ideas and discuss the following questions.
- Identify behaviours that apply to the two extremes within each virtue.
- What are the attributes of the Golden Mean?
- How does the Golden Mean inform our understanding of how we might live our lives in a virtuous manner?
- How does the idea of the Golden Mean link to Human Rights? Why?
Mini Research Project
Students are to create a timeline of human rights milestones leading up to the creation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Some inclusions might be the First Geneva Convention, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the Magna Carta and the Cyrus Cylinder. They may write a commentary on the timeline explaining how a ‘big idea’ from ancient Persia evolved into a charter listing 30 rights to which every human is entitled, or they may create a digital timeline and present their finding verbally to an audience.