Coping with Perplexities: How to Make Human Rights Education Sustainable

Abstract

On 23 December 1994, the UN General Assembly adopted a plan of action for the United Nations decade for human rights education (HRE). 30 years later, this challenge is still increasing. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, human rights are valuable only as political rights, not for abstract individuals but for natural communities. While HRE in schools and classrooms is in focus, the context of adult education transfers philosophical and political thoughts into an educational context, particularly concerning biographical traumatic situations such as refuge and expulsion. Therefore, this paper presents and explains adult education approaches which facilitate coping strategies with ethical perplexities by evaluating the 30 Articles of the UNO Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

Keywords

• adults
• biography
• education
• human rights
• perplexity
• sustainability